The Mystery of the Druids Preview

It's been a long time since I played an old school point-and-click adventure game. Most now are all flashy and 3D with new interfaces that don't require the use of a mouse, they used to be so great and now with the 3D revolution a standard there seemed no hope left for the old point-and-click adventures.

This is where one German developer known as 'House of Tales' comes in, they are on a mission to revive the point-and-click adventure game with their upcoming title, Mystery of the Druids. Mystery of the Druids as the title suggests involves druids, these druids are seeking to complete an ancient ritual in order to summon incredible powers and your mission is to stop them.

You take on the role of Brent Halogen, a member of the famous detective agency, Scotland Yard. You start out trying to solve a few mysterious deaths, deaths which defy all convention and seem impossible but soon you discover the real truth behind these deaths, these deaths come in various guises such as human sacrifice and burning, which all seem to add to the already twisted story.

The press demo of the game was very impressive, the intro was very good and very scary with babies making an odd appearance at Stonehenge during one of the druids rituals. The rest of the introduction, which leads to the appearance of your character, was unfortunately in German so it made little sense to me but the rest of the game was in English for the most part and was very playable.

The game involves many real world locations such as Stonehenge and Scotland Yard itself, you also get a second character to play with, this is Dr Turner and she is very necessary for some of the quests where her scientific mind comes into good use.

The game is very detailed with over 54 different places, all pre-rendered background of the places you will visit around the UK and the game also features over 5 hours of speech and non-linear gameplay. The puzzles in the game are in true adventure style, while some of them are very easy to understand and are perfectly logical, some do tend to stretch the imagination just a bit.

The press disk was a preview of part one of the whole game, namely the present. The other part is the past but having not played this I cannot tell you what it is like, but if this is anything to go by that should be very good.

The game does have a few problems with it, the while the character animation is great and the 3D figure looks nice against the pre-rendered backdrops, the movement animation is a little odd at times. The main thing I found is that it is very easy to make the character slide along a bit or to spin around on one leg by clicking in one location then while the character is in mid stride clicking on another location. I know this is a rather small point and I expect its all to do with the engine so Ill leave it alone.

Overall this game looks to be very good and after the recent acclaim the game got over in Germany it is one game I look forward to playing again. Mystery of the Druids is scheduled for release on the 16th of September.