(Before you enjoy our
review of Opera Fatal, we would like to thank the numerous readers
who pointed out that indeed this game is available in English and
can be ordered via the following link: http://www.klett-verlag.de/heureka/produkte/opera/operafatal.htm)

Over
the years we have whole-heartedly recommended many adventure games
that would have otherwise been unavailable in North America. Some,
but not many, of our suggestions have fallen on deaf ears. More often
then not though, our recommendations have been influential as said
game has either found a willing distributor or our readers have provided
a rash of overseas orders that breathed new life into the game. Sorry
to say, that ain’t gonna happen this time.

Considering that you have
already limited your potential purchasers by developing an adventure
game and then must limit it even further by choosing a subgenre such
as humor, mystery, science fiction, etc., why then reduce it to the
lowest audience imaginable by then building a game around one particular
subject? In the case of Opera Fatal it is classical music.
Music, music and more music. More than I personally ever wanted to
know about musical instruments, composers and classical minutiae.
Before this game is over you will have visited every room imaginable
in an opera house and you will have absorbed scads of volumes on the
history of classical music.

Opera
Fatal had a European release in 1998. The version I played was
entirely in French and, as far as I have been able to find out, it
has never been localized into any other language. With the aid of
a French/English dictionary, a walkthrough and my limited French vocabulary
my front row seat at this opera was reserved and I was about to be
lulled into a deep, deep sleep. Consider this last sentence a bit
of foreshadowing.

The game is played from
a first-person perspective and takes place entirely within – get this
– an opera house. You are the maestro, or conductor, who is about
to premiere a new composition to the classical aficionados of Europe,
but alas and alack, some devious perpetrator has stolen the musical
score and hidden it throughout
the nooks and crannies of the opera house (don’t you hate it when
that happens). Since Scooby and the gang are currently on tour with
the Harlem Globetrotters, it is up to you to find the missing pages
before the grand opening or the only music heard will be Simon &
Garfunkle’s Sounds of Silence. Where to begin you wonder? Well, as
you open the front door of the opera house, like the duck from Groucho
Marx’s You Bet Your Life, a clue (yoiks! a clue Scooby) drops
from the ceiling. If you think this is strange, then ladies and gentlemen,
you ain’t seen nothing yet.

As you proceed through
these Myst-like
graphics, hints will appear in the strangest places, but the clues
are actually trivia questions that you must later answer in a notebook.
Most, but not all, of the answers can be found by old-fashioned observation
or solving puzzles that are typical to this type of game (open a safe,
turn on the electricity, find a key to unlock a door), but some answers
can only be found by searching through volumes
and volumes of musical encyclopedias that are readily available for
easy reference. And why must you find the answers to these riddles
and then enter them in a notebook? To open up otherwise inaccessible
areas of the opera house or else you cannot progress in the game.
Since the game is broken into six linear sections, and since you cannot
progress until you have solved all of the riddles in a section, this
can make for a very discordant gaming experience.

These riddles are not your
average stumpers either. Lest you think I am exaggerating, try some
of these:

– What is the name of the
priest who robbed Pamina?
– What is the 5th step of the scale in harmony theory?
– Where did the composer of the correctly selected piece of music
live?

For this last question
you must then deduce from other clues in the room, the correct key
to press on a vending machine so that you will hear an extract from
Debussy’s string quartette and on top of that you must be able to
identify Debussy’s music. This is too much even for a hardcore adventure
gamer like myself. Just as annoying is there are many, many drawers,
chests and doors that must be opened and explored, but you can never
leave a scene or a room until you have first closed the object you
left open.

This
is a lonely game. The only other living creature you will run across
is a mouse trapped in a drawer that is later used to solve a puzzle.
On the positive side, there are small touches of Peter & the Wolf
as specific musical themes are used to represent footsteps, creaking
doors and other sounds. Anyone who truly has a love for classical
music would most likely adore Opera Fatal, but what are the
odds of finding someone who not only loves classical music, but also
adventure games?

Now I am about to do something
that I have never, ever even thought of doing before and reveal the
ending of Opera Fatal. For after struggling for weeks to get
through this game and after translating endless text, you solve the
final puzzle only to have (SPOILER ALERT!) your character awakened
by an alarm clock and you find out that the entire stolen musical
score scenario was only a bad dream caused by nervous tension surrounding
the opening. If only I could say the same about the hours I wasted
on this game.

Final Grade Opera
Fatal – D.

System Requirements:

PC:
Pentium 166
Windows 98
32 MB RAM
8X CDROM
Sound Card
Mouse

MAC:
Power PC
12 MB RAM
8X CDROM
System 7.0