Screenshots
In
Frogware's new graphical adventure game The Mystery of the Mummy, you
play as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's renowned inspector Sherlock Holmes, and
you must investigate the mysteriously abandoned mansion of a British
archeologist. But the setting is basically an excuse to send you through
a series of enclosed areas, solving some pretty unoriginal puzzles
along the way, because Mystery of the Mummy is fundamentally a pretty
unoriginal adventure game--the kind that essentially consists of several
puzzles separated by some brief cinematic cutscenes and a whole lot of
backtracking. As such, you might find it hard to appreciate Mystery of
the Mummy unless you already consider yourself to be a great fan of
adventure games.
Yeah. No shinola, Sherlock.
Mystery
of the Mummy is played from a first-person view in pseudo-3D
environments that you can look through and pan about as you go.
Occasionally, you'll happen upon an item that you can pick up and add to
your inventory, then later use to solve one of the game's puzzles. The
game's story--that Holmes is on a case to investigate the spooky home of
an Egyptologist who has mysteriously vanished--unfolds in cinematic
cutscenes that play each time you solve major puzzles. Unfortunately,
like with so many adventure games in the past few years, Mystery of the
Mummy's puzzles are often unintuitive and even nonsensical; it makes no
sense at all that the world's greatest sleuth would be spending his time
using a fork on a painting to reveal a scepter to use on a fan to
shatter a vase to recover an ankh, or that he'd be trying to complete a
slider puzzle with a picture of a sarcophagus on it. These puzzles
generally aren't too challenging, either; you can actually solve most of
them by experimenting with every item in your inventory, though you
occasionally have to perform the traditional adventure-game pixel hunt
by carefully moving your pointer across the screen until you find the
hidden piece of the next puzzle.
The
puzzles might seem appealing to longtime fans of traditional adventure
games, but unfortunately, the game's graphics probably won't seem
appealing to anyone other than adventure-game die-hards. Mystery of the
Mummy runs at a fixed resolution of 640x480, though from the looks of
it, the game itself was designed at an even lower resolution, because
nearly everything in Mystery of the Mummy looks blurry and unfocused. It
doesn't help matters that Mystery of the Mummy's color palette is
generally dark and drab--especially when some of the game's puzzles
require you to hunt for hidden items and switches. Considering that most
modern computer games have begun to use 3D graphics, it's safe to say
that Mystery of the Mummy would have, and should have, looked better
with a fully 3D graphics engine.
How about a scepter behind a painting you have to use a fork on?
Mystery
of the Mummy also doesn't really sound like much--Sherlock Holmes
himself often makes loud remarks that serve as hints when you uncover
clues and important items, and while Holmes' lines sometimes seem as
though they're delivered a bit too enthusiastically, his dialogue is
appropriate enough. Other than a few canned sound effects that signal a
completed puzzle, Mystery of the Mummy has no other sound besides its
subdued music soundtrack, which isn't all that great but really isn't
especially noticeable. Strangely, the game has absolutely no music when
you first start the game, and no title screen either--you just end up
staring at a menu screen full of icons in complete silence.
The
opening menu serves as a good indication of how substandard Mystery of
the Mummy's production values are and how stripped-down the entire game
seems as a result. The game's blurry graphics, sparse sound, and
unimaginative puzzles probably won't impress anyone, though true-blue
adventure-game fans will at least appreciate the fact that Mystery of
the Mummy is a fairly lengthy game that sells for a budget price of just
$20 at retail. Unfortunately, it's also completely linear and offers no
real replay value. While it's true that new PC adventure games are
getting more and more scarce, it's also true that much better adventure
games than this have come along in recent years.
System Requirements
Processor= 1.0GHz
RAM= 256MB
Graphics= 32MB
