Liath is definitely one of those good news/bad news titles.
Whether or not it’s for you will depend on how important the areas of strengths
and weakness are.

First
things first. Liath is (superficially at least) a fairly traditional third-person
point and click adventure. The most unusual thing about it is that it was developed
in Russia. Cool, right? Well …

The story is a lot of hooey about magic
spells, ancient curses, sleeping spirits, and enchanted lands. You play a pretty
young man who has to sort all of this out and put everything right. If this sounds
extremely familiar … well, that’s because it’s extremely familiar. I’ve just
described the plot of many, many adventure titles, and it’s either your thing
or it’s not.

The
best thing about the game is the visuals. Designed and illustrated by Timon Shi
and Alex Cheprackov, the game has some of the most arresting images I’ve seen
in a long time. Weirdly, it’s the first game I’ve ever seen in which the gameplay
screens are actually more attractive than the cutscenes. That’s because in Liath
the cutscenes are muddy collages of still images, not real animation at all.
Very strange indeed.

The gameplay screens, however, are a series of small
masterpieces. The game takes place in a highly idiosyncratic and playfully imagined
world that’s a real pleasure to look at.

An
extremely Way Cool (yes, that’s a technical reviewer’s term) addition to Liath’s
visual delights is the way the camera moves between screens. In most third-person
games, when you “leave” the scene, the screen cuts to the new frame,
into which your character walks. In Liath, here’s what frequently happens
instead: when you click to move to the new location, the camera literally changes
position and swoops over to the new perspective as your character moves. This
dizzying effect adds a great sense of reality to the “sets” in the game,
and I found myself going through these movements over and over just to watch this
fun effect. Unfortunately, these soaring camera movements were more compelling
than the story.

This is a game about magic, in the old-fashioned hocus-pocus,
double double toil and trouble sense of the word. I thought that would be a real
problem for me; it’s just not my cup of tea. Surprisingly, though, I found the
magic-building to be, for the most part, entertaining and fun.

However,
this game has a lot of problems. It’s translated into several languages, and the
English translation is just not good. The manual and the game are rife with misspellings
and mispronunciations. I know, I know, I’m an ignorant American monolingual boor,
but if I was having a game translated I would give high priority to getting it
translated impeccably. You could argue that this is a minor problem. I disagree.
Why? Because every time I saw a misused or misspelled word, it pulled me out of
the reality of the game.

Even worse, the story and puzzles seemed very illogical
and arbitrary to me. I admit I find this to be true of a lot of third-person games.
They frequently simply degenerate into random inventory hunting and manipulating.
Liath suffers greatly in this department. Without hints I don’t think I
could have finished the game at all. Lots and lots of wandering around and looking
at pretty pictures.

Fortunately,
there is a pretty nifty hint feature built right into the game. Thank goodness.

Conclusion

Liath
is very pretty, with fun gameplay involving magic spells. The translations
are terrible, the puzzles and plot are arbitrary, and the dialogue is wooden.
Liath is a game for adventure completists, those curious about a Russian
game, and those who can’t get enough of magic. Others beware!

Final Grade:
C

System Requirements:
IBM or compatible
PC
Pentium 133 MHz or faster (166 MHz recommended)
16 MB RAM
CD-ROM
drive
SVGA 2 MB RAM video card
40 MB free space on the hard drive

Windows 95
DirectX driver
Any Windows 95-compatible sound card