Chronicles of Mystery:
The Scorpio Ritual is the second adventure title from the
Polish based City
Interactive and while it is not a true sequel to their first game,

Art of Murder: FBI Confidential, it easily could
have been with just a few changes here and there.

It
basically follows the same blueprint – a female protagonist
embroiled in a globe-trotting quasi-religious mystery set-off by some
beautifully rendered graphics. The only divergence is that Sylvie
Leroux, the female lead, is an archeologist and not an agent of the
FBI.

Sylvie has been contacted
by her Uncle Oliver who demands she immediately drop everything in
her life and fly to Malta to see his new discovery – which he
dare not describe over the telephone – unearthed in the ruins on the
Island of Gozo. Upon her arrival she, of course, discovers that Uncle
Ollie has gone missing and immediately adding two-and-two together
deduces that his disappearance can be linked to his discovery. Ya
think?!

What
follows is a watered-down version of The
DaVinci Code and innumerable copycat adventure titles.
Throw in a plot that revolves around the Knights Hospitaller – a Christian
organization with ties to the Knights Templar and still in existence
today as the Military Order of Malta – and you’ve now reached
the nadir of unoriginality for as Gertrude Stein wrote, ‘A rose
is a rose is a rose,’ or in this case, the Knights Templar,
are the Knights Templar are the Knights Templar, even if you are trying
to trick us by using the Knights Hospitaller. This plotline has been
done to death in other adventure games, in books and in movies. It
is readily appearant just from the above short desciption that the
mystery will involve mystical and religious ramifications as well
as clandestine involvement by an unamed organization whose leader
wears a big, pointy hat. Give us something new to hang our pointy
hats on.

The
game is third person point-and-click. The puzzles are never too difficult
though they are sometimes cumbersome to solve due to a failure to
‘Americanize’ the names of a few items such as calling
a fish net a ladle and a watering can lid a rose. I’m not trying
to sound llike the Ugly American here, but if you’re going to
go through the trouble of localizing your product and, if you want
your product to succeed in North America, then it helps to have inventory
items be identifiable. There is also one puzzle involving a light
switch that stretches the limits of believability, but just about
every adventure game ever developed is guilty of the same. The music
could best be described as non-instrusive, nothing here that will
have you tapping your toes after your monitor has dimmed for the evening.

Much like Art of
Murder, the highlight of Chronicles of Mystery
are the highly detailed graphics. The pre-rendered backgrounds are
often quite striking and impressive and the fluidity of the characters
seems to have improved somewhat, but it seems somewhat a waste that
attention should be lavished on mostly mundane backdrops such as bookcase
dominated studies and overgrown ivy gardens.

All
of this could have been bearable were it not for a few glaring problems:
Sylvie Leroux is not as likeable a personality as Art of Murder’s
Nicole Bonnet. While Nicole had some idiosyncrancies that humanized
the character, Sylvie has none. But even if she did, they would have
been diminished by the emotionless voice-acting which can be directly
attributible to the flat and stilted dialogue.

Look, I don’t know
of any adult who would ever approach another adult and say, ‘Let’s
be friends,” as linguist James Anderson says to Sylvie upon
first meeting her. Are you kidding me? It sounds like something two
five-year olds at the playground would say to each other. City Interactive
dearly needs to hire someone to polish the English dialogue in their
games after it has been translated from its original language. Especially
as even minor attempts at humor – such as one running gag involving
a rotten fish – stink like day-old fish.

City
Interactive’s talent – as well as an appreciation for
the genre – is evident in the graphics, in the structure of
the game and in the attention paid to puzzle construction, but it
is lacking in the attention to small details that most often separate
the ‘must play’ adventure titles from those soon to be
languishing in the bargain bin.

But if you can’t
get enough of the Knights Templar – er Hospitaller -if a visit to
the Vatican is on your virtual agenda and if you don’t mind
a sense of déjà vu while adventuring, then grab yourself
a copy of Chronicles of Mystery and hunker down for
an evening of entertainment that will feel like a blast from the past.

System Requirements:

• Windows 98/ME/2000/XP
• DirectX 9.0
• Pentium III 500 MHz
• 128 MB RAM
• DirectX 8.1 compatible video card with 32 MB RAM
• DirectX 8.1 compatible sound card
• 1 GB free hard drive space
• DVD-ROM drive