I’m really concerned about the Daydream Software team. I’m afraid they
are all going to be slapped with a vicious lawsuit when Traitors Gate is
released in these litigious United States. Why? Because someone is going to be
so absorbed in this game that he’ll lose his job. I don’t know, maybe it’s something
in the water over there in Sweden, but this creative team has an uncanny sense
of what makes an adventure game fun. Their previous game, Safecracker, had
the slimmest of premises: you have to break into a safe manufacturing company
and crack all the safes–and it was one of the most irresistibly entertaining
games I’d ever played.

Their new game, Traitors Gate, is pretty much
an expansion of the Safecracker concept. The setup is ingenious: you have
to sneak into the Tower of London and steal the Crown Jewels, replacing them with
decoys that contain tracking devices (the idea is to thwart a real thief
whose plans you’ve uncovered).

Since, even though you’re a good guy, your
mission has to be kept utterly secret from the British government, you have to
behave with absolute stealth. If at any time a guard sees you, game over. Plus
you cannot hurt any guard or permanently break or alter anything that you come
across.

What follows is a breathlessly exciting “Mission Impossible”
sort of adventure. You begin by taking the tour of the Tower and then hiding in
a broom closet until after hours. When the time is right, you step out and begin
your tasks.

And such tasks they are! The Tower of London is a huge complex
of buildings, connected by walkways, parapets, sewers, and even a secret tunnel
or two. You have to gather the equipment you need and get it and yourself to the
correct place and then out again.

To help you on your mission, you have
a bunch of fun gadgets: an automatic key turner, a bomb, ice darts, a crossbow,
video and audio monitoring devices, a sort of skeleton computer door lock access
card, and other fun toys. The game comes with an effective manual that sorts all
of this apparatus out.

This is one of the only games I’ve ever played in
which a maze-like element plays a major role in the game without being utterly
obnoxious. The maze in question is the sewer system, and the concept works because
it’s so utterly logical. You literally have to spend some time mapping this extensive
system of tunnels, because you will use it for transportation over and over throughout
the game.

Graphically, the game is excellent, if not ground-breaking. What’s
uncanny is the sense of accurately recreated real places. I toured the Tower of
London fairly recently, and it was an amazing experience to find myself in many
of the exact same places in the game that I have been to in real life. Only Golden
Gate has ever given me this same experience, and it’s a real thrill. I want
to see more games that do this! How about games with settings like Grand Central
Terminal, Central Park, Seattle’s Space Needle, or the Louvre?

The cinematics
in Traitors Gate are fairly sparse, but all are pleasing and full of very
nice touches, such as a rat scuttling across the foreground in a panning shot
late in the story.

During the game, you have to find a way to play connect-the-dots
with various bits of equipment and information–find a computer code here, find
a key there, find a map to an ancient tunnel, look for the tunnel, etc. The gameplay
was smooth and utterly engaging.

I should say the game is timed (you have
twelve hours to accomplish your goals), but don’t let this put you off. Unless
you simply leave your game running for hours without playing, you will not run
out of time.

This is the kind of game that will have you showing up a bit
bleary-eyed at work, because you couldn’t quite bring yourself to stop playing
late into the night.

Traitors Gate is indecently fun.

Final
Grade: A

System Requirements:

PC:
Pentium 100 MHz
100 MB free hard drive space

32 MB RAM
8X CD ROM drive
SVGA video card
Thousands of colors

Mac:
133 MHz Power PC
32 MB
RAM
100 MB free hard drive space
Thousands of colors