As
the legendary Yogi Berra once said, “It was like déjà
vu all over again.” Had I previously played this game, this
Chronicles of Mystery: Curse of the Ancient Temple?
It sure seemed familiar. Or have I become so old and feeble minded
that the hundreds and hundreds of adventure games I’ve played
over the past twenty-five years have all blended together into an
unrecognizable conglomeration of crowbar slide the key under the door
puzzles?

Well, you know the old
saying, trick me once, shame on you, trick me twice, shame on me and
it seems I’ve already played this game in a previous incarnation
on the pc, only then it was titled Chronicles of Mystery:
The Scorpio Ritual and was reviewed
for JA by Bobbi Carlini.

It
seems that, for reasons that are unfathomable, Polish based developer/publisher
City Interactive decided upon changing the game’s title while
adapting it to handheld Nintendo DS. Sure, the storyline and key elements
of the plot have been greatly diminished in scope, but that is understandable
given the limitations of the DS in comparison to a pc. But what is
not understandable is why would you change protagonist Sylvie’s
relationship with one of the main characters? In the pc version, the
professor responsible for initiating the mystery is also Sylvie’s
uncle. In the DS version he is just ‘the professor.’ There
are other small inconsistencies from the first game that really have
no effect on the story, but are just bothersome in a petty way.

JA reviewers have been
pretty hard on City Interactive in the past and it looks as though
we shall again be in attack mode, but only briefly for this time there
are some silver linings. Our first small beef is actually not a complaint
at all, but rather a backhanded compliment as we are pleased to report
that the voice acting in Curse of the Ancient Temple
is not as atrocious as in previous City Interactive games. This can
be directly attributably to the fact that there is not voice acting
in the game at all.

Our
second beef is quite large and has to do, once again, with poor grammar
and misspelled words. While we understand that the European spelling
of the word ‘color is ‘colour’, we know of no country
that spells ‘unfortunately’ as ‘unfortunatelly’
or ‘labyrinth as ‘labirinth’. Nor do we understand
the meaning of ‘clean the surface off the dirt.’ The days
of ‘All your base are belong to us’ are long gone and
it is inexcusable and unprofessional for such errors to be included
in the final product.

As for the game itself,
City Interactive has done a commendable job of transferring it to
the DS. They have successfully mixed traditional adventure game elements,
mini games and casual game standards into an enjoyable product. It
is – as it was in The Scorpio Ritual –
a quasi-religious mystery featuring Sylvie Leroux as an archeologist
in search of her professor who has disappeared after unearthing some
mysterious artifacts.

To unravel the mystery,
you will need to – while playing in Story Mode – use inventory
items to solve puzzles, but the catch is that you must first find
the inventory items in Hidden Object rooms common to casual games.
This is a nice twist to what is usually a tedious waste of time. Besides
the inventory based puzzles there are also a variety of mini-games,
many of which relate directly to the story.

Once
you have completed the game, there is available in true console tradition
an Awards screen that allows you to check your accomplishments, a
Mini-games section to replay any of your favorites from the story
and a Hidden World option that presents new areas for Hidden Object
gameplay.

Overall, I found Curse
of the Ancient Temple to be somewhat easy, but novice or
younger gamers should find it challenging. But this could also be
because I had played basically the same game on the pc. Its extreme
linearity lessens some of the adventure element and a somewhat abrupt
ending cheapened any satisfaction gained from completing the game,
but it seems as though City Interactive may finally be taking a step
in the right direction.

System Requirements:

• Nintendo DS