Index strikes again! This French game company, which has been wowing
me all summer with their superb historical adventure games, has once again provided
this history buff an absolute love-letter of a game.

Created by a few xenophobic
Popes and a social system that left way too many disenfranchised sons with nothing
better to do, the Crusades were one of the biggest catastrophes in the history
of Christian civilization, and the bitter legacy of them lives on today in the
strained relations between the Christian West and the peoples of the Middle East.
It’s also a completely fascinating period of medieval history.

Crusader
takes place during the 12th Century, and it’s the story of Arthaud, a disgraced
and irreverent French knight who has really gotten on the bad side of the French
king Philippe-August. The king offers Arthaud one slim chance to get back into
the royal good graces–a wildly ambitious crusade to Jerusalem. The mission? Nothing
less than to steal the Holy Relics from the royal Frankish court in the Holy City
and return them to France.

Easy, right? Right. The story begins in southern
France and follows Arthaud’s adventures (and misadventures) through the Mediterranean
and to Palestine. First he has to outfit his ship, deal with pirates, and finally
try to survive a dizzyingly complicated situation in Jerusalem. He finds himself
caught up in a struggle for power between various branches of the royal family,
as well as several factions of local Muslim strong men. Never the sharpest crayon
in the box to begin with, it’s not at all clear whether Arthaud will be able to
survive this nest of human vipers.

An intriguing narrative element is the
game’s narrator himself. For the first few chapters of the game, you think he’s
just a disinterested, faceless voice. But soon he reveals himself as Al Harawi,
an Arab who becomes an active character in the story. Far from being a passive
commentator, he’s an active participant in the story, and he even turns out to
have a few surprises up his sleeve.

Index continues to play with interface
and structural game conventions and amazingly seems able to do this without annoying
the living daylights out of the player. The gameplay format of Crusader is
a series of twenty-six riddles, all of which have to do with the lives and times
of the characters. Since it’s based on actual historical events, these riddles
cover some very interesting territory indeed, from the dynastic struggles in the
Frankish Jerusalem court to magic squares to the medieval arts of war on land
and sea.

Visually, the game is presented in a series of tableaux consisting
of beautifully rendered scenes punctuated by effective animations and populated
by costumed video characters. The actors are very solid, and the overall effect
is quite nice, especially considering the picaresque nature of the story. One
of the scenes (the port of Acre at night) was so lovely that I copied it and placed
it on my computer desktop!

To solve the riddles, you make use of the in-game
encyclopedia, as well as many visual clues and character dialog in the scenes.
As you find the answers, you actually help build the current tableau. In other
words, each new element you discover gets added as a visual component of the scene.
Whenever you complete a riddle, the story then moves forward. The overall effect
feels like the most fun history report you’ve ever had to work on.

How
good is the story of Crusader? Well, it’s one of the few games I’ve played
where I kept thinking as I played, “This would be a killer movie!” Plus
it’s such an intriguing story that the game left me wanting to head off to the
library and read more about the medieval Latin kingdoms of Jerusalem. How many
games have that effect on the player?

This is the fourth Index game I’ve
played (after Paris 1313, Louvre: The Final Curse, and Dracula Resurrection),
and with each one I’m more impressed by this team. They have an ability to create
historical dramas that have all of the zing any good adventure game needs. I can’t
wait to get my hands on their Vikings. They give the terms “edutainment”
and “infotainment” a very good name indeed.

Final Grade: A

If you liked Crusader:
Watch: The Crusades
Play:
Paris 1313
Read: Eaters of the Dead by Michael Crichton

Minimum
System Requirements:

PC:

Pentium 100
16 MB RAM
256 colors
16-bit sound card
4X CD-ROM

Windows 95

Mac:
Power PC
16 MB RAM

256 colors
16-bit sound card
4X CD-ROM
System 7