You just can’t keep these French adventure game designers down. One
after another, we’re seeing a steady stream of traditional point-and-click adventures
from our cousins in France.

Ah, the Joys of Folksy, Scenic New England

The
latest is Necronomicon, and it’s based on the very gloomy Cthulu stories
by H.P. Lovecraft. The story takes place in and around Pawtuxet, Rhode Island,
which will be a familiar setting to fans of Lovecraft’s fiction (or the game Shadow
of the Comet).

In this first-person adventure, your character is a young
man whose old friend shows up at his doorstep in a very agitated state. He hands
you a strange little contraption and says to not give it to anyone–even to him
if he should come asking for it.

Your character heads to Pawtuxet and begins
an investigation into what has gone wrong with your friend. The first part of
the game is very much like a detective story, as you scour the bleak seaside town
for anyone who will give you a shred of information on your friend. As you learn
more, new areas on the map open up for you to explore.

So far, so good.

Much
of the graphic design of the game is beautifully done, creating the almost oppressively
bleak town of Pawtuxet. Like the recent Dracula Resurrection II, the one
thing you can’t fault about this game is its creepy atmosphere. Even hanging around
in the main character’s home is a bit unsettling.

Honey, Can You Check
on My Heart? I Think it Just Stopped

About midway through the game,
after you’ve done a great deal of sleuthing around town, you explore an old abandoned
bungalow that was reportedly the site of some unseemly experiments. In the bungalow,
you discover an entrance to a hidden warren of tunnels and chambers. This sequence
is the best in the game, as it’s truly frightening. The dim lighting (bolstered
by wall torches that you nervously light, one by one), the sound effects, and
the simple dread of the unknown is almost overpowering.

Alas, the game goes
downhill sharply from there. Once inside a hidden underground lab, your faced
with a series of alchemical puzzles that make very little sense. When you finally
manage to get the combination of ingredients correct, you’re rewarded with a cutscene
of a long-dead specter who gives you a very explicit series of directions on how
to dispatch the Big Evil Bad Guy. I took notes frantically during this sequence.
“Okay, okay … dissolve the body in acid … only way to make sure he’s
really vanquished …”

Stupefyingly, these instructions never
pay off! But more on that in a moment.

After the underground sequence,
your character goes and performs an act of such stunningly questionable moral
character that it pretty much stopped the game cold for me. The game deals with
the act as if it were completely acceptable. Instead, with the story’s moral compass
wrenched out of place, I felt alienated from the game from that point on.

Excuse
Me, but Wasn’t That a Giant Portal to the Evil Underworld We Just Passed?

To
make matters worse, the final third of the game involves the discovery of the
portal to the evil spirit underworld. Hilariously, this portal sits out in the
middle of an empty field in rural Rhode Island looking like a bad Alexander Calder
imitation. The game expects you to believe this huge, totally visible gateway
has stood unmolested for uncounted centuries? In the tiny, densely populated state
of Rhode Island? Yeah, right.

And still worse: Guess what you’re in store
for once you solve the frustrating puzzles that open the gateway? A dramatic confrontation
with the Big Evil Bad Guy? Wrong! Get ready for … a series of mazes!
Whoopee!

Maze-o-Rama

Yep, that’s the diabolical secret
hidden just below the New England barley fields: a series of ugly, depressing,
baffling, difficult-to-navigate mazes. Maze after maze.

When you finally
reach the end of the last maze, do you then get to have a dramatic confrontation
with the Big Evil Bad Guy? No! You get to frantically try to solve a completely
arbitrary timed puzzle! Yes, a puzzle that can only be solved with trial and error,
because there are absolutely no contextual clues as to the solution.

This
one will take you many, many tries to get right. And you’ll have to deal with
the death cutscene, and then reload the game over and over again, until you finally,
accidentally, get the correct solution in time.

Ah, but now you get
to have the big dramatic confrontation, right? No! Those important instructions
you received earlier in the game for this specific moment are simply forgotten.
There’s a quick cutscene, virtually no interactivity on the part of the player,
and the whole thing is over.

This game literally feels unfinished. Adding
to the frustration is the highly questionable practice of having the game run
almost entirely from the CD, making gameplay excruciatingly sluggish. It’s like
trying to jog through Jell-o.

Feel like you’re spending too much of your
life playing adventure games? Pick up Necronomicon. It just might cure
you.

Final Grade: D

If you liked Necronomicon:
Play:
Alone in the Dark
Watch: Evil Dead 2: Dead by
Dawn
Read: Strange Eons by Robert Bloch

System
Requirements:

PC:
Pentium
166 (200 recommended)
16 MB RAM (32 MB with Windows 98)
Video card–thousands
of colors
16-bit sound card
4x CD-ROM (8x recommended)
Windows 95 or
98

Mac:
G3 or iMac
32 MB RAM
3D card
8x
CD-ROM drive
System 8 or greater

DVD:
Pentium
233
16 MB RAM (32 MB with Windows 98)
Video card–thousands of colors
16-bit
sound card
DVD-ROM drive
Windows 95 or 98