Memento Mori is a great-looking
third-person traditional point-and-click adventure game from Centauri
Production, a Czech production house who’s made a bunch of games
you may have never heard of.

The
title of the game comes from the famous Latin phrase which translates
as “remember that you will die.” Actually the phrase became
the label for an entire genre of art, which was a discipline of creating
images to remind us arrogant humans that we don’t have that
much time to enjoy the party down here. Yay, thanks, like I needed
reminding!

I fired up this game really
wanting to like it. Well, that’s true of every game I fire
up, but this one has a lovely opening cinematic, and the graphics
are quite nice.

Then, alas, the actual
game began.

The game follows the adventures
of a Russian Interpol agent and a reformed French forger working to
solve a mysterious series of art heists affecting the famed Hermitage
museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.

This
being a very cinematic adventure, the cop (Lara) and the forger (Max)
are both ridiculously cute, looking more like Gap models than seasoned
professionals. That’s okay. The action bounces back and forth
between them, which just goes to show that the makers of the game
were at least perceptive enough to steal from good games.

Sadly, Memento
Mori contains little of the snap which makes the games
in the Broken Sword series so fun to play.
Nico and George have nothing to worry about from Lara and Max.

Not only are the two leads
dull, but the major authority figure in the game, a nasty and vindictive
Russian Interpol official, is almost comically shrill and obtuse.
He’s so obstructionist in his orders to the main characters
that it actually skews your expectations of the plot. Evidently the
way Max is paying for his forgery crime is to be this unpleasant guy’s
slave for the rest of his life. (I guess I have a lot to learn about
the Russian justice system.) Most of the rest of the characters don’t
fare much better, with the possible exception of a sweet little sick
girl who pines for a pet.

All
of this is a shame, because the story deals with some potentially
interesting stuff: art thefts, forgeries, international espionage,
ancient conspiracies . . . but then makes the tragic mistake of only
letting the player deal with the most trivial tasks. Examples of the
thrilling puzzles you’ll need to solve to beat the game include
heating up some water for a nice face wash, dealing with government
bureaucracy in order to replace a cell phone battery, and finding
a book from a crowded bookshelf. Not exactly anything to get the pulse
racing. The single puzzle that deals with art forgery is done by the
wrong character (the cop, not the forger, duh?) and is an unimaginative
“circle the discrepancies” exercise.

There were so many places
in this story where the player characters could have really gotten
into some juicy puzzle-solving, but alas, it doesn’t happen.
Nowhere is this flaw more vividly illustrated than during a potentially
exciting sequence in which Max is exploring some creepy secret underground
levels of the Hermitage. When I got to the sequence, I really perked
up. “Hey, maybe things are going to finally get fun!”
I thought. But within seconds Max was taken out of the action and
the sequence was over. Yawn.

The
game’s glacial pace is further exacerbated by the fact that
it’s full of rote animations that take forever and can’t
be skipped. For example, every time Max goes to visit his boss at
Interpol, you have to suffer through an interminable animation of
him slooooooowly closing the door and entering the room. This type
of mistake simply shows an acute lack of sophistication on the part
of the game developers.

Another dumb decision is
the fact that when the character is thinking aloud (an adventure game
staple, which provides feedback and exposition to the player) . .
. his or her lips move. It’s just silly, and it makes the character
look demented.

[Speaking of mistakes,
one more small note: The game asserts that Finland is part of Scandinavia,
which is most definitely is not.]

It’s also not localized
well. Awkward translations abound. Here’s my favorite, from
a phone message: “We were sorry you didn’t attend the
barbeque of Bill.” Ouch.

The interface works reasonably
well. There’s a very handy feature which lets you press the
Tab button to reveal all of the hotspots in a scene, which streamlines
the tedium somewhat.

The puzzles are mostly
inventory-based, and it’s important to remember to look at everything
from all possible angles or you could miss an important clue.

You can’t die in
the game, so you don’t have to constantly save the game unless
you want to.

On
the plus side, this is one sweet-looking game. You get to
see a nice variety of locations and many of them are simply beautiful.
There’s a shot on a bridge in the Finnish woods that was so
beautiful it reminded me of the splendid art in The Longest
Journey. The designers are particularly strong when
it comes to lustrous floors and soft and atmospheric lighting effects.

Here’s what I think
the developers of Memento Mori should do.
They should contract a real game developer, like, say, Jane Jensen
or Charles Cecil, and have them come in and write a real game with
real puzzles, and then the talented artists at Centauri Productions
could produce it. That might be a game worth playing.

But this game does nothing
more than remind the adventure game lover of the malaise our beloved
genre currently finds itself in.

System Requirements:

• Windows XP/Vista
• Pentium 4
• 512 MB RAM
• 128MB Video Card
• 3 GB free hard disk space
• DirectX 9.0c

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.