Chronicles of Mystery: The Scorpio Ritual

Chronicles of Mystery: The Scorpio Ritual is an adventure title developed by City Interactive and offers a mystery story rooted in archeological research, theology, and conspiracy. It has you playing Sylvie Leroux as she looks to unfold a strange disappearance of her uncle.

In typical adventure fashion, players will spend the majority of their time walking Sylvie around various locations, searching high and low for objects to collect. Often, there will be characters around who can give Sylvie needed information or who can help her in some other way. To help you make sense of the clues you find, Sylvie comments on everything you examine and the name of the highlighted item appears at the top of the screen. Useful objects automatically get added to your inventory, and just as slick they disappear when they are no longer useful. Like many adventures games of this type, you’ll sometimes have to combine objects to make something more useful to accomplish a given task. The puzzles are mostly inventory based ones that will require Sylvie to use inventory objects, either singly or combined together. These puzzles are well-integrated with the story and usually present no difficulty. However, sometimes new objects will appear in already visited locations, so watch out for those.

The game looks great, the detail in the settings being realistically elaborate. Light and shadow are top-notch, and some scenes in particular are very impressive. Water seems to be among the more difficult things to do well graphically. The cutscenes by contrast are a little less impressive, and the characters look a bit plastic as their motions are odd and awkward. Ambient sound is excellent and lifelike, and the musical score is never intrusive. The music went well enough to keep it suspenseful and entertaining.

In conclusion, Chronicles of Mystery is a typical third-person adventure game, which possesses features from both the good and the bad aspects of the genre. It can be recommended to any enthusiast who enjoys mainly casual games and doesn’t mind easy puzzles or an unbelievable plot. Also it is a nice lesson for a newcomer as there are no timed puzzles or intricate tasks.

24, November 2009