If
you are a Myst-hater,
then you do not want to play this game. Might as well move along right
now. If, however, like the industrious, talented and somewhat mischievous
amateur creative team of Amertis, you love most things
Myst, and games like it, then the strange lands of
Amertis are just where you want to spend the next week.

Eight years ago the same
members of this team (give or take a few), released an online adventure
game called Atlantzone.
The laid-back hero of that game, Rodrigue Grandcœur, a solicitor
in the fictional sleepy French town of Atlantzone, got caught up in
an intrigue that, while occultish in nature, remained in real world
locations — as depicted by the game’s photos of (I presume)
actual exteriors and interiors in the South of France. Now, M. Grandcœur
is back, as is the young woman he met in his previous adventure, Petronille.
This time, however, Petronille has asked Rodrigue to help her sell
her uncle’s dilapidated, abandoned house — a rambling
old pile emptied of almost everything except for one fabulous secret.

Well, it isn’t long
before Petronille disappears into thin air up in the attic and it
is up to you, as Rodrigue, to track her down and bring her back. To
do this, you will have to discover and then learn how to use a strange
jeweled metal icon to take you to the even stranger lands of Amertis.
There you will at last leave the world of photo realism and enter
the fantastic realm of whatever 3D software app the team used to render
the backgrounds. You see, Petronille’s uncle was an inventor
(are there uncles in games who are not?) and he concocted that jeweled
icon to transport people to worlds of his own making where toy figures
come to life.

It’s
a good thing Petronille’s uncle didn’t charge anyone to
travel to Amertis because he would have run into serious copyright
trouble. Not only is the basic premise of Myst’s ages borrowed,
but so is the plot of Myst
3: Exile, and even some of the furniture. In your travels
throughout Amertis you will run across a tree house from Channelwood
and even that manhole cover from Riven.
And yet, as is true of so many of the supposed Myst
clones, Amertis still manages to be its own game.
One aspect that strongly sets it apart from Myst (and

Amerzone and Rhem
and all the other games which the creative team here duly pay homage
to) is its extreme Frenchness. While the English version of the game
has subtitles, the “character” of the game still strongly
comes through the French mp3 dialogues. Even if you don’t speak
a word of French, you will get the “sense” of most of
the characters from their expression and tone of voice.

There’s a microphone
on the upper part of the game’s screen that you can click to
turn off the voices, but you will miss a lot. The oddly flirty Barbie
dolls inhabiting the South Seas volcanic island, for instance, are
the most amusing collection of coquettes you’ve ever run across.
On the island inhabited by ceramic garden gnomes, you will meet some
extremely bourgeois French blowhards. The other two islands have been
populated by battery-powered metal robots and plastic figure Native
American Indians. They too, are all quite French. What’s a French
robot or French Indian chief sound like? Well, you’ll have to
play the game.

Atlantzone
could be downloaded or played online (and still can be), but Amertis
is a 200 megabyte download only. The game runs full screen or in a
standalone Adobe Flash Player 9 screen. I’m taking the full
screen thing on faith, because all I ever got when I launched the
Amertis.exe was a black screen. One tap of the escape key, however,
brought me to the Flash Player window. That, as far as I could tell,
was not resizable, and on my widescreen laptop it didn’t quite
all fit. Otherwise, the game ran without difficulty on Windows 7.
Just remember that the space bar calls up the menu where you can save,
load and quit.

Although the first-person-perspective
experience of wandering around the various locations of Amertis
will be the closest you’ve come in a long time to meandering
around the ages of Myst, there are differences. Amertis
relies much more on traditional puzzles than Myst,
shoehorned into the story sometimes cleanly and sometimes without
apology. There is, of course, a generous supply of the usual point-and-click
inventory puzzles — finding items, combining items, handing
over items, etc. Like Myst, though, the puzzles give
no quarter. You are going to have to observe and think your way through.
Some of the puzzles are even multilayered — just when you think
you’ve got that combination right, you learn there’s another
twist to incorporate. The puzzles, in fact, are the best part of Amertis.
If you don’t enjoy solving, even sweating, over puzzles you
will not enjoy Amertis.

The game had been available
only for a few months when I played it (March), but already the bombardment
had begun on the
official website for easier puzzles. The English walkthrough had
finally been posted, however, so that may quell the uprising. Though
the game’s creators had already relented and reworked the early
part of the game to make a road maze easier. (Here is a reverse spoiler
— if you want to play the game as originally intended, don’t
consult that map you find on Rodrigue’s desk.)

Speaking
of mazes, the one thing likely to drive you batty about the game is
its navigation. Like Myst, it uses a slide-show format with little
hand icons to move around. But finding all the areas you can visit
and figuring out where you’ve landed after you’ve clicked
is often a Mystery.

Amertis
is offered as freeware with the usual postscript plea for donations.
One of the things that struck me while playing Amertis
was the realization that “free” games have a lot of freedoms
that commercial games can’t afford. When you produce and distribute
a game for your own amusement, you don’t have to worry about
complaints — it’s too this, it’s too that. You can
include challenging puzzles and not have to apologize for it. Early
on, in the uncle’s house, you run across a classic wood-block
version of Klotski. As always, this puzzle takes a long time to solve,
even when you’ve done it a dozen times before (the best and
most maddening version is the piano-mover puzzle in The
11th Hour). The kicker, though, is that when you finally
solve it, you learn it has nothing to do with advancing in the game.
It was just for fun. Whee! Can you imagine the howls if a commercial
game maker ever tried that?

Amertis,
despite its undeniable amateurism in many areas, feels and plays like
one of the more original games you’ve run across in a long time.
Yes, even despite the massive aping of other adventures. From what
I glean from the game’s website, the creators of Amertis
aren’t even overly experienced artists or coders. They’re
just enthusiastic adventure gamers who love to cobble together fun
adventures of their own. This is undoubtedly why the visuals in the
game vary widely. Some of the 3D environments (the South Seas isle)
look quite competent, while others (the plastic Indians island) look
like they were created by someone who just got Photoshop for Christmas.
And yet, unlike most modern commercial adventures, Amertis
has a soul, the way Myst had. When you played Myst
you got the feeling the game’s creators were as wide-eyed about
it all as you were.

As with the artwork, the
music, sound effects and the translation can get a bit uneven, or
even screwy. You can almost see the game’s creators pasting
it all together on their home desktops. You can’t really compare
Amertis to a multi-million-dollar product from a
big gaming publisher. But Amertis is more than just
an admirable amateur effort. In many ways, it is better than many
commercial efforts. More genuine. It took me over a week of serious
playing to get to the end of the game, but by then even its shortcomings
had turned endearing. Overall, I give Amertis a final
grade of A minus.