Cassandra Galleries, albeit a dated title by today’s gaming
standards, is a fun, puzzle-driven, solidly designed game. Published in 1996 by
Corel, it is a first-person, prerendered scene, point-and-click fest (right up
my alley), and although it’s an older title, the design holds the game in good
stead.

The plot is minimal and mostly unnecessary. You have come to the
Cassandra Gallery to discover the truth behind what happened to the Cassandra
family, and why the mother died, and where the patriarch and his daughter have
disappeared to. The intro to the game is brief, which was certainly fine with
me, with an overview given by a character who will reappear to move the story
forward as segments are completed. In doing so, the player travels to seven separate
worlds, all very cleverly designed to give the gamer the sensation of being dropped
into a strange place, wildly different than the last, and the game very much succeeds
at this strategy.

The game itself is designed cleanly, each world in a stylized
minimalist fashion, to give the impression of an entirely new world, while coaxing
the player into focusing on the puzzles in each area. There is, however, a magnitude
of art on all of the walls, in every locale. Part of the fun of the game is that
it really does provide an atmosphere of a gallery, from the polished floors and
long expanses of covered walls, to the various places to land, pausing to enjoy
a particular piece of art and lose oneself in thought, or just sit down and rub
feet tired from all the walking.

The puzzles are very clever and fun, and
the designs are original (for the most part) and never get redundant. The game,
in an unusual move, has puzzle solutions built in, and one of the things so appealing
about this title is that thorough exploration and note-taking is required right
from the get-go to be able to move through the various worlds. Trying to find
what all the puzzle clues are actually becomes a puzzle unto itself. The puzzles
themselves are designed to either allow the player to wallow in his or her own
wonderful smartness or just click like a nut until dumb luck comes to the forefront
and plays a hand. Name that composer, who wrote The Scarlet Pimpernel, and
fun with periodic tables–these subjects are certainly not an idiot’s delight.
And I am embarrassed to admit to knowing the answers to the majority of the TV
quiz puzzles on the first try.

The music is pretty, holds the interest,
and fits well with the scenery to create moods and never becomes redundant. The
actors, what few there are, aren’t horrible and the segments are short. The game
overall is frighteningly easy to maneuver, with a large pointer that is simple
to understand immediately without having to refer to a manual for a translation.
It also allows for error, and you can try things over as many times as you like
without retribution, a nice touch for novice players.

The game did have
a few shortcomings. The endgame sequence is quite obtuse and short–basically
just bad. This is most likely because the story is negligible to start with, so
there was probably no way to roll up a decent ending without changing the whole
character of the game. Also, my Power Mac was just a little too hoity-toity for
the game to tolerate, and I had to turn off virtual memory and all my beloved
hoggy extensions to make it fly like an ace. It had no other bugs, however; it
ran very solidly, with only one disk swap, although it had to be started from
the first disk throughout.

Cassandra Galleries is just a great old-fashioned
puzzle game that I had a lot of fun playing, and it is designed to be playable
by players with varying degrees of experience.. I gave a bit of a point off for
the expert’s score because, truthfully, most experts will attempt a random click-through
of a puzzle on occasion (you know who you are) rather than methodically using
notes or figuring out the solution, and this sort of conduct here can shorten
the game considerably and is hard to not fall into (okay, I’m not admitting to
anything here).

Novice: A
Intermediate: A
Expert: B+

System
Requirements:

Mac:

System 7.1
68040
8 MB RAM
26 MB free hard drive space
640×480,
256 colors
2X CD-ROM drive

PC:
Win
3.1, Win 95, DOS 5.0
486/Pentium
8 MB RAM
26 MB free hard drive space

640×480, 256 colors
2X CD-ROM drive
8-bit SoundBlaster or 100% compatible