City
Interactive: Prufe Reader Wanted by Greg Collins

City
Interactive’s Chronicles of Mystery: The Tree of Life
is the second in the Chronicles series for PC, following The
Scorpio Ritual. I haven’t played the first game, but
I know that, like Tree, it follows the exploits and travails of the
young modern Parisian archeologist, Sylvie Leroux. You can think of
her as Indiana Jones without the whip, though it’s more that Indy
combines archeology with the cliffhanger thriller genre while Ms.
Leroux mixes her grave digging with the mystery-occult genre. Sylvie
is not an especially strong character – she tends to be acted
upon more than active – but she is an appealing one, and even
believable. The Tree of Life has very much the feel
of a good commercial supernatural mystery novel. Despite its wanderings
into the eerie and the magical, the tale has a mature sense to it.
And how many things, especially adventure games, can one say that
about of late? Don’t get me wrong. I love a good cartoony romp as
much as anyone, but that style does tend to dominate. Tree
of Life harkens back, for me, to soberer, earlier graphic
adventures with strong stories, such as Riven
and Morpheus.
The game it most reminds me of, in atmosphere and graphics, is Nightlong:
Union City Conspiracy. A good, underrated noir thriller,
Nightlong favored the deep-focus perspective over
the close-up in its scenes. The main character was often seen as a
small figure wandering around varied and active environments. The
same is true of Tree. While the game has its fair
share of close-up encounters and dialogues, much of the action is
viewed at mid-distance.

In
her newest episode, Sylvie finds herself being roped deeper and deeper
into a shadowy conspiracy. She starts out being hired by a maritime
museum in Brittany to continue the research on an intriguing ancient
artifact. The previous expert died suddenly. And before long, his
is joined by a few more bodies, as Sylvie makes her way from France
to Venice, then on to Cairo, Gibraltar and an island in the less hospitable
regions of the Bermuda Triangle. The story, as pseudo-mystical as
it is, mostly makes sense as you’re meandering through it. Matters
move along briskly, except for an unfortunate tendency to get overly,
at times painfully, verbose in the dialogues with NPCs. The story
also goes to considerable lengths at times to introduce you to supporting
characters who disappear in the next scene. You will wait for them
to return and wrap up their subplots in vain, though I suppose that
they may indeed return in future episodes of the series. We’ll all
just have to wait and see. The worst offense of the dialogue is the
way every conversation must end with some pointless, and often incongruous,
exit line by Sylvie, along the lines of “I am now going to continue
looking around.” Perhaps these are offered as subtle hints to
the player, but they’re still awkward.

The
game is fully voiced and the actors do, to my ear, a more than credible
job. I was particularly impressed with the young Egyptian boy Ali.
Once again, Tree appears to be 3D sprites on rich
2D backgrounds. Every now and then I would load a saved game and find
that the characters’ bodies had disappeared, a la the Invisible Man.
Only their empty clothes could be seen wandering around. Rebooting
usually cleared this up. The only technical glitch I otherwise encountered
involved the opening of a wall safe. I spent a couple of hours devising
all sorts of clever ways of interpreting the given clues – to
no avail. Then, the next time I loaded the game, the obvious combination
that had failed earlier now worked. Oh well. For a while there I thought
I’d stumbled across a truly ingenious puzzle.

Which
is not to say that the puzzles in Tree of Life aren’t
good. In terms of difficulty they tend to fall into the mid range.
Largely, they’re inventory puzzles, with a fair number of standalone
or mini-game-type puzzles scattered about. You may be surprised to
realize that the stone-tile conundrum in that ancient palazzo which
has stumped all comers for centuries turns out to be a variation on
the 15 slider puzzle, but overall I do applaud the way the game designers
went to the trouble to camouflage their mostly familiar puzzles. What
I admired most about the puzzles in Tree was their variety. For instance,
at one point in the game, a weather map is turned into an intriguing
logic maze. A few hotspots are more than a bit elusive, but only if,
like me, you are too proud to click the interface button that places
a question mark over every available exit and item. The game’s
final stumper sequence, on that mysterious island, is also well designed
and orchestrated. It only looks like a goofy giant teapot. It’s really
a decent challenge, rather cleverly integrated with the surrounding
terrain. The final scene on the island with the eponymous Tree, in
fact, looks and feels like a long lost age from Cyan’s Uru.
If the rest of Tree of Life had played like this,
the game would have soared.

The
orchestral music is of movie-soundtrack quality – atmospheric,
lush and unobtrusive. The sound effects are also distinct and of professional
grade. At the top of the game screen is your familiar hidden menu
that allows you to access the main menu and save and load. There’s
also a section which includes transcripts of Sylvie’s past conversations
as well as an actual notebook in which Sylvie “writes”
her observations and paper clips important documents and photos she’s
run across. Inventory items are stored in one of those left-right
sliding trays at the bottom of the screen alongside that hotspot highlighter.
The game’s system requirements struck me as being commendably modest.
The game is not long, but neither is it short. I spent about twenty
hours completing it. Elsewhere on the web I’ve seen people claiming
to have finished it in about ten hours, but, frankly, I suspect they’re
bragging. And, if not, I don’t understand the point of rushing through
an adventure game, especially one as lovely to look at and listen
to as this one. It would be like traveling to Venice and touring the
whole city in half a day. All you’ve done is cheat yourself.

During the heyday of Broadway
theater, in the Thirties and Forties, there was such a thing as the
“well-made play.” What this meant is that the drama, while
not exceptional, was nonetheless expertly crafted and staged, making
for a thoroughly enjoyable evening at the theater. Chronicles
of Mystery: The Tree of Life has that same quality about
it. It’s unlikely to win any awards, but it is fun and satisfying
to play. The prospect of further installments in the series is a pleasant
one.

System Requirements:

• Windows XP/Vista, DirectX
  9
• CPU 2 GHz (Dual Core
  1.6 Ghz), 512 RAM
• NVIDIA GeForce or ATI
  Radeon 64 MB RAM, compatible with DirectX 9
• 4 GB of free HDD space
• DVD-ROM, mouse, keyboard,
  sound card compatible with DirectX

Okay, now that everyone
who’s solely interested in the game review has migrated to other web
pages, we can get down to addressing a few extracurricular issues
swirling about this game and, in particular, its publisher City Interactive.

We have not been excessively
laudatory of City’s adventure games here at JA. Tree of Life
is the publisher’s fourth adventure game for PC – the two Art
of Murders:
FBI Confidential and Hunt
for the Puppeteer, and the two Chronicles of Mystery:

Scorpio Ritual and now Tree of Life.
Randy, Bobbi Carlini and I have all graded these efforts somewhere
in the C minus to C plus range. Surely, City Interactive can not be
overjoyed by such average scores.

First of all, a C rating
at JA really is “average” and not “poor.”
But I wouldn’t feel a need to address this at all if it weren’t for
the great respect I still have for the efforts of some of the City
folks when they were at the now defunct Polish game developer Detalion.
In its regrettably short existence that house turned out some spectacular
games, including Schizm,
Mysterious
Journey II (the Schizm sequel), and Sentinel.
They also produced a game I haven’t played but someday still hope
to, Reah.
In my mind, these few games alone make Detalion minor royalty in the
adventure game world. All are beautiful, ingenious, challenging, and
sophisticated – one might even apply the term “art.”

I think, however, that
might be part of the problem the talented folks who migrated to City
Interactive are now having. I suspect they may feel they deserve the
same sort of praise for these new adventure games with the two perky
heroines. They probably feel these new games are of the same quality
as those Detalion classics. Well, yes and no. It’s true that the graphics
are generally of the same high quality. It’s true that they’re still,
admirably as I said above, producing games for those of us who like
more sophisticated content. It’s true that these new games have clever,
well-integrated puzzles. I grant them all that.

However, these new games
from City also have a few irritating qualities that the Detalion games
lacked. I am not going to go through the whole list of missteps. You
can read the other JA reviews for that. But it is sadly true that
the user interface of FBI Confidential was a disaster. The dialogue
in the two games I’ve played has been clumsy, at best. The translations
are often surreal, and the “help” these games dole out
can be infuriating. All things which were not true of the Detalion
games. I will say that Tree of Life plays much cleaner
than FBI Confidential, with far fewer “interruptions.”
Playing Confidential was like watching a good detective
movie with the guy sitting behind you whispering to you every twist
and turn on screen before it happens. With a user interface that annoying,
it doesn’t matter how great the graphics or puzzles are. The game
is ruined.

The verbiage in these games
has also been at times infuriating. But typos in games now are sadly
all too commonplace. I think the greater sin of these City games has
been the almost astounding clunkiness of the dialogue. Perhaps it
is simply the change of idiom from Polish, or German, or whatever
the original language is, to English. But if you’re going to produce
a game for native English speakers you have to do a bit better. At
times, these games sound like they’ve been translated by one of those
“translator” web pages. Paste in your foreign text, hit
return and presto – English-sounding gobbledygook. The worst
offender at City, however, is whoever is writing the game box copy.
Even with Tree of Life, which has done a better job
on policing its typos and mistranslations (though they did miss “wicket”
for “fence”), the copy on the box is hilarious: “Who
is the enigmatic Count of St. Germain? And why some people are ready
to kill for informations about the Tree of Life?” (My spelling-and-grammar
checker is lighting up like a pinball machine.) Turn the box over
and it gets better: “Young archaeologist Sylvie Leroux sets
on a journey to find the legendary Tree of Life. It’s [sic] trails
will lead her across the channels of Venice . . .” Ah, yes,
those mysterious channels of Venice – channels 13 and 27, depending
on your cable service.

I am not pointing out these
howlers simply to ridicule City’s box-copy writer(s). Rather, I am
making the obvious point that in an adventure game, everything counts.
The whole package has to be smooth, not just the graphics and the
puzzles.

I have no idea how close
the connection between City and Detalion is, or still is, but the
comparison of the two developers is instructive nonetheless. Detalion
produced gorgeous graphic adventures with challenging and inventive
puzzles and near-literary-quality scenarios. Sentinel,
for instance, was courageously based on a story by the renowned Australian
science-fiction writer Terry Dowling. If Detalion’s games had a fault
it’s that they were perhaps too coldly “logical.” Playing
them at times felt more like tackling some problem in higher math
than experiencing a story. City has clearly been trying to inject
more warmth, personality, and even humor into their games. But that
is indeed like switching college departments from Engineering to Humanities.
You’re talking different hemispheres of the brain. Based on what I
saw in Tree of Life, I’d say that City is making rapid progress in
this transition, but they’ve still got a ways to go.

I do appreciate and admire
what City Interactive has been producing. I am grateful that they’re
still making adventure games, when the easy thing for any game developer
these days is simply to churn out FPSs or casual games. The adventure
game community sadly lost Detalion. Despite their obvious growing
pains, I would be disappointed to also see City Interactive vanish.

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