The Scroll

ALEXANDRIA THE NOT-SO-GREAT

A Review of The Scroll

A cruise ship arrives in an Egyptian port and a scholarly-looking man in a

red fez disembarks, only to be brutally slain by a knife-wielding maniac. A

single shot splits the stiflingly hot air and the assassin falls dead, shot

in the back. And you, fellow traveler, stand transfixed with horror,

watching as the killer’s corpse writhes on the dock, transforming into a

hideous green-scaled lizardman. It’s a heck of a way to start a trip.

So begins THE SCROLL, the latest adventure game from Vic Tokai. The player

arrives in circa 1940 Alexandria, Egypt, a city where every day is hot and

dusty, every artifact is shrouded in mystery, and you know, you just know,

that your unseen character is wearing khaki. Yet, after such a promising

start, THE SCROLL goes disappointingly downhill. In an earnest but

ill-conceived effort to be a compelling supernatural mystery like GABRIEL

KNIGHT: SINS OF THE FATHERS, THE SCROLL fails to achieve such a goal,

crippled chiefly by its gameplay and story.

The game installed easily and smoothly. THE SCROLL uses a standard point-and-click interface, with the cursor changing over various “hot spots” to indicate what actions are

available to the gamer. Clicking at various places on a map takes the

character to a new location. Anyone with even the least gaming experience should have no

trouble operating it.

The game begins by offering the player a choice of playing as one of two

characters; Matthew Faulkner, an Egyptologist, or occultist George Stanhope.

Both characters have separate if somewhat similar storylines, arriving at

more or less the same conclusion but through different routes. This is an interesting

idea and one I’d like to see more of. The player guides both men as

they find a mysterious ancient scroll leading to an evil cult.

Now, I’d like to tell you more of the plot,

but here’s where the first big problem rears it’s ugly head. I played first as Stanhope, and just as I’m thinking, “Now it’s getting interesting”, BOOM, the game is over. I played for half an hour, and

came to an screeching halt as “THE END” abruptly flashed on my monitor.

To be fair, the game plays longer as Faulkner, but not by much – I finished

in a little under 2 hours and that’s because I spent a lot of time

desperately looking for more to do. And here is where THE SCROLL lets you

down again, for not only is there little to do in the game, but what the

player faces in that short time offers little or nothing in the way of

obstacles or puzzles. The game is concerned with

an awful lot of boring errand running; for example, to buy the scroll the

character needs money to pay for it. You just go to the travel office, ask

for a traveler’s check, you get it, go back and buy the scroll. Not much

challenge there. And where the player is faced with a choice as to do

something or not, the game more or less spells it out for you, as when a

guard is blatantly hinting for the obligatory adventure game bribe and the

player’s character muses aloud “He’s probably after money. Should I grease

his palm?”. Well, duh, what do you think? In fact, the only time I had any

trouble figuring out anything in THE SCROLL was when I was doing too much,

placing various figurines in a mystic gateway to open it and not getting it

to open. It seems the game didn’t want me to figure this out on my own – as

long as I had the figurines I just needed to click on the gateway and the

game would do the rest. And forget about creative problem-solving….there is none.

This is all so aggravating because THE SCROLL does a number of things right.

The voice actors playing Stanhope and Faulkner do a great job, really

enhancing that 40′s adventure movie feel and drawing me into the game. The

music and first-person graphics, while not spectacular, look and sound right

and establish an appropriate mood. THE SCROLL does a good job capturing the

feel of the places the player visits, particularly the well-appointed Savoy

hotel with its’ swing orchestra and the bazaar which features some nice

atmospheric touches like animated characters hanging out rugs and suspicious

shop owners peeking at you. And yet….a few of the voice actors are

flat-out unintelligible, some of the graphics astonishingly ugly (the garish

hideout of one character stands out in particular), and I can’t understand

why all character animation stopped whenever they spoke to you. The game is

user friendly is so far as it won’t let you leave a room until you’ve

accomplished all you need to do there, but it will let you irretrievably

give away essential items to other characters. It seem that for

every thing it gets right, THE SCROLL gets another wrong.

I would have liked to have seen a list of my saved games whenever I saved

one, and the save game feature could be a little more accessible (as it is

the gamer has to go into his inventory, select a book, make another

selection, save, then back out the way he got in) but these are just

quibbles. Plagued by inconsistencies and lack of gameplay, THE SCROLL just

doesn’t have enough going for it to recommend it. It’s replay value is negligible for even with two stories to play through, both are extremely short and unchallenging. Children or

novice players who might be skittish of more demanding games might get some

enjoyment out of it, but selling for at least $40 a pop I’d suggest they

look elsewhere.

Copyright © 1995 Robert Coffey for infoMedia. All rights reserved worldwide.