Against all odds, adventure
games seem to be evolving. Over the past few years, there have
been repeated attempts to move the classic
adventure game formula into new directions. Majestic and
Missing: Since January brought the online experience to the genre.
Indigo
Prophecy used the format of an interactive movie to generate the
adventure game experience. Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon reimagined
the
traditional point-and-click adventure in a true 3D setting.

Daemonica is the latest
of these brave attempts to push adventures beyond their ossifying
point-and-click roots. It doesn’t knock
the ball out of the park, but it’s nevertheless an admirable
attempt.

For an adventure game,
Daemonica is presented in an unusual format: It’s an isometric third person perspective in a true 3D environment.
In other words, it looks reminiscent of games like Neverwinter
Nights or the Baldur’s
Gate: Dark Alliance games. Yep, it looks for
all the world like an RPG. But don’t click your BACK button
just yet! Despite the format, this is an honest-to-goodness adventure
game.

You play a character with
a dark past and special power: The ability to go into a trance
and speak to the dead. The game takes place in
and around a small village where a gruesome murder has just taken
place, and it’s your job to get to the bottom of the mystery.

To be able to enjoy this
game the most by embracing its strengths and mitigating its shortcomings,
the player should approach Daemonica as a graphic mystery. The entire game takes place in a relatively
small area: A village and a few areas around it. This is the lab
for your detective work. To solve the mystery, you’ll have
to get to know this game world like the back of your hand.

You’re also going to have to like reading. There’s a
rich vein of storytelling in the game, but it’s mostly in text.
Lots of text. Lots and lots and lots and lots of text. And you can’t
just click past it, either, or you’ll not only miss valuable
clues, but you’ll pretty much miss the point of the game. So
patience and an eye for detail are the order of the day.

The murder you’re
called in to investigate at first seems open-and-shut. A young
woman is found dead, and her distraught lover
is found covered in her blood. The suspect is hanged before you even
get to town. You have to begin tugging at the various threads in
the story to unravel the actual truth.

One interesting aspect
of the game is that, despite its concerns with demons and spirits,
it takes place in the “real” world,
not a made-up fantasy setting. In other words, it’s not somewhere
that looks like England in the Middle Ages, it is England in the
Middle Ages. There’s a strong vein of Catholic church history
woven into the plot. And while its historical roots may not be as
dynamic and gripping as those in, say, Gabriel Knight: Blood
of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned, it’s still a treat for the player
with an interest in history.

Sound: The sound design
is minimal, but effective. The score is unobtrusive but helps create
a dramatic atmosphere. Except for the
narrator, there’s no voiceover acting, and alas, the performance
by the narrator is merely adequate. Okay, that’s being kind.
His accent sounds very phony and he sounds like he’s at breakfast
sleepily reading the back of a cereal box. Considering how much we
have to hear this guy, letting such a lame performance slide was
a pretty big mistake.

Graphics: The isometric
view and crisp graphics give the town a pleasing “dollhouse” feel. Animated details, like large
birds flying overhead and small rodents underfoot, add to the atmosphere,
as do the effective real-time shadows. Perhaps the worst thing that
can be said about he graphics is that there simply isn’t very
much of them, considering the size of the gameworld. But that’s
forgivable in a game with a modest budget.

Gameplay: Mixed bag here.
As stated earlier, you have to enjoy reading to make this game
work. At first you might not believe the long-windedness
of the characters. Even anonymous guards seem to have no “Off” switch
to their chatterboxes. The saving grace of this wordiness is that
the language isn’t boring.

The reading fest continues in the interface. Your character has
a diary that contains notes about all of the people you have encountered
or heard about, what steps are required to complete objectives, and
even instructions for the creation of potions. The player ignores
any of this information at her peril.

That having been said, it is satisfying to uncover that new conversation
topic that nudges a character to give you that important new clue.

Puzzles: Wish I had better
news here. Aside from the fun of teasing-out new conversational
topics from the townspeople, the puzzles aren’t
particularly impressive. Much of any given “puzzle” you’ll
be facing is wondering which person or place you need to go to next.
You’ll end up doing a lot of running around the small gameworld
trying to trip the next plot point. Worse, the solutions to several
of the puzzles feels arbitrary and non-intuitive. Finally, the game
doesn’t escape that old chestnut that has plagued adventure
games since Maniac Mansion: The pixel hunt. There are several times
when the game stops dead until you can find a needle in a graphical
haystack. Good times!

Combat: Ouch. No, that’s not a misprint. There is a bit of
combat in the game. However, much of it is optional and once you
understand the controls it’s quite easy. In fact, in all of
Act I (of 5) there’s only one time you have to pull out your
sword. Those players who dislike the combat may be further put off
by the shaky support it gets from the game’s documentation.
The game’s Option screen allows you to toggle something called “Simplified
Combat,” but after comparing this condition being turned on
and off in the same fight, I could discern no difference. Worse,
the manual claims that when you use the spacebar to block, that you
cannot be hit. This turns out to not be true, as some of the more
powerful enemies in the game can occasionally strike through your
defense. All that being said, while this gameplay element might not
please the hardcore adventure game purists, it truly is a minor aspect
of the game.

Interface and
Controls: The player controls the character and navigates the menus with
the mouse. There are various keyboard commands to
bring up the interface, diary, inventory, etc. The mouse can be used
to zoom the view in and out, and the directional keys are used to
rotate the camera angle. This method of camera movement isn’t
as elegant or intuitive as the traditional right-mouse button method
of camera movement in 3D environments, but it works serviceably well.

Harshing the Mellow. It’s time to talk about the game’s
two biggest problems. Two elements stand out as roadblocks between
the player and a good time in Daemonica.

First, the loading screens.
In this post-Dungeon Siege world, it’s
just difficult to accept so many loading screens that take so long.
I played this game on a very peppy computer, and the constant intrusion
of loading screens consistently brought me out of the experience.
And while I understand that the game is in 3D, it’s still hard
to imagine that all of these small environments needed to be loaded
separately.

Second, flower-picking.
You spend a great deal of time in this game searching for and picking
herbs which you use to make special potions.
These potions are used for various purposes in the game, from restoring
your health after a fight or other misadventure to putting you in
a trance that allows you to speak to the dead. And while flower-picking
is not a particularly terrible idea, what is unfortunate is the paucity
of these herbs on the landscape. As with the aforementioned pixel
hunts, there are times when the game comes to a screeching halt while
you comb the country side for one more sample of a particular herb.
It beggars belief that anyone who made this game actually believed
that this sort of desperate scavenger hunt would fall under the heading
of “fun.”

The developers have informed me that a patch is being prepared to
address this problem. I have not seen or tested the patch, but if
it successfully makes the population of herbs more generous, I would
highly recommend players avail themselves of it.

Verdict: I admire the
literary (if not the technical) ambitions of Daemonica. There’s
a good story to be told here, even if the package is a bit rough
around the edges. And while the gameplay
is somewhat static, you could really say the same thing about Myst.
For those looking for perky puzzles and an array of dazzling environments,
look elsewhere. But for the player with the patience to explore a
rich story and meet lots of shady characters, Daemonica can be a
dark, creepy pleasure.

Final Grade: C+
(find out more about our
grading system)

System Requirements:

• Windows® 2000 / ME
  / XP
• 1GHz Pentium® III
• 256 MB RAM
• DirectX® 9.0 compliant 64 MB video card
• DirectX® 9.0 compliant sound card
• 4x CD-ROM
• 900MB hard disk space
• Mouse & Keyboard

This
review is copyright Ray Ivey and Just Adventure and
may not be republished elsewhere without the express written consent
of the author. Republication of said review must also contain a link
back to Just Adventure.