Mystery of the Druids Review

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The Mystery of the Druids

Review by Old RoosterMay 2002

“Halligan, We’ve Got a Bit of a Problem!” —Chief Inspector Miller; Seconded by Old Rooster

I admit to initially being rather puzzled that none of our three “pure adventure” reviewers grabbed the opportunity to appraise what appears to be a classic detective game—in the mold of Broken Sword or Gabriel Knight. They left it to the Rooster, one who specializes in action/adventures but has high interest in this kind of effort. How nice of them. They now owe me—big time!

The Mystery of the Druids is frustrating, almost infuriating.  This isn’t because it’s a bad game (although it flirts dangerously close to that characterization). It arises mostly because MOTD has the potential and framework to be a very fine game but fails badly in terms of execution and some design decisions.

“Human Sacrifices Are a Thing of the Past” —Melanie

What’s it all about, Alfie? MOTD attempts to place story first, much in the way we might expect from Broken Sword, and puzzles second—within the context of the overarching narrative; as opposed to a Myst style of game—puzzles first, story second, if at all. And what is that story? Let’s take it from the game box.

“In this classic adventure, you will take on the role of young Scotland Yard Detective Brent Halligan, assigned to solve the puzzle surrounding a mysterious order of Druids and a series of gruesome murders. In the course of their investigations, the engaging anti-hero and his ally, a young scientist, delve into almost forgotten secrets of the past. Aided by an expert on Druids, they will travel back in time. Only in the past will they be able to find the key in order to save the world. But, will they succeed?”

Promising 50 locations, 360 interactive scenes and 20 speaking characters, MOTD almost seems like a “can’t miss” adventure.

“I Can’t See it Properly” —Melanie

How is the game set up and managed? Aside from the encouraging box, we find a quite good 17-page manual and a case notes/correspondence log, with interesting background. Installation size is as little as 150 MB, and the game will play on a P200, with or without a 3D card. There are three CDs—one for installation, another for “The Present,” and the last for “The Past” (a bit of a story giveaway!).

Control is completely mouse-driven, using point-and-click arrows for movement and an “intelligent” cursor to indicate direction, possible interactive object or person, and something that can be magnified for closer examination. You move from generally static scene to scene, with 360-degree rotation not in the works. Inventory items are stored at the bottom of the screen and are easily chosen and activated. Once the needed item is in the inventory, it becomes a simple process of elimination and logic to deduce the correct selection for the task at hand. You’ll often experience Halligan saying, “No, that doesn’t work,” or “Hmm, that can’t be it.” Finding the needed item in the world around you is another matter, however. This exercise all too often deteriorates into a tedious pixel hunt unaccompanied by logic.

It is in this arena of setup and execution that we find one of our major gripes. The Druids have bugs—not in their ragged cloaks, but in the ragged game! Over the course of 35 hours of play, I had eleven crashes to the desktop—all of these, unfortunately, without the game autosaving (a nice feature when it works) at the point of the crash. This necessitated going back to a previous save and starting that sequence again, with fingers crossed. I looked, in vain, for a patch at CDV but found instead the classic “update your drivers” kind of excuse. Support from the publisher is minimal, at best, and online bulletin boards indicate my experience isn’t unique.

“It’s Pretty Creepy out There!” —Fisherman

Although dated, by comparison with today’s action titles especially, MOTD’s graphics are attractive, particularly the backgrounds.  Care and detail have gone into Blake’s home, other offices, and many of the settings, such as the graveyard at Castle de Carmors.  The 3D character depictions and animations (especially facial) are not as appealing. Further, there is a major collision detection problem that has Halligan walking on and through furniture. This does take something away from the game and provides CDV with yet another occasion for a fancy excuse—in this case, look for a “hardware compatibility problem.” Of course, being able to run the likes of Gothic and Dungeon Siege doesn’t seem to faze them. “It can’t be our game; it must be your system.”

Speaking of that castle cemetery, though, reminds me of the often creepy and appropriate background music. Unfortunately, another bug rears its head, this time one causing the game music volume setting to sometimes not lock and come blasting on unexpectedly.

Perhaps the most pleasant surprise was the voice acting. Halligan, the Inspector, Melanie, and the others do an excellent and professional job—almost at a “books on tape” level. In addition, text of all conversations is shown.

“That’s Just It, Mr. Halligan, I Haven’t Told You the Whole Story Yet” —Blake

My first few hours with MOTD, precrashes, were entertaining.  I was quite pleased to be playing, taking notes, preparing for a review. Unfortunately, the last 30 hours were boring, tedious, confusing, sometimes excruciating. They were enlivened by occasional glimpses of an interesting yarn but ruined by illogical puzzles, burdensome conversation trees, vision-ruining pixel hunts, and game lockups.

Although the narrative generally has linearity, forcing you along a certain path (one can’t go to the next level until X, Y, and Z are done), you often go bonkers, for example, trying to figure out how to make a simple phone call (the first illogical puzzle) or secure conversational information. In that regard, your exchanges with NPCs may seem complete but often aren’t, and you don’t know that! Evidencing poor design decision, as far as I’m concerned, you often have to return again and again to the same character to get that critical response you need in order to solve the current problem. This may even involve retracing steps quite a bit in the several locations open to you. What is particularly exasperating is that you may never realize you’ve missed a vital clue. I was ashamed to finally have to consult a walkthrough while in Carmoors and was subsequently shocked at what I was supposed to do, since there hadn’t been a hint in all the exchanges I’d had with the fellows on the pier. Even with that, the “answer” was most difficult to pull off. That just isn’t fun.

“Hey, Don’t Despair; Everybody Has a Hard Time Now and Then” —Halligan

If the narrative of Mystery of the Druids were a book, I might well enjoy the read. As a game, I’m afraid, it simply doesn’t succeed. Conversational trees are confounding, puzzles are often absurdly illogical, needed inventory items are sometime impossible to locate, and crashes become numbingly disheartening. It could have been, should have been, a more than satisfactory game, but it fails badly.

In a current FFC review of another adventure title, Bioscopia, the writer reflects on the attributes of a good game. These include being “clever, original and just a plain old good time,” not “freezing or quitting to the desktop,” and not being given “a bunch of goofy, time-consuming design filler, such as a maze or some horrible-to-find hotspot.” A good game “also does not give the player dead ends or misleading clues.”

Unfortunately, Mystery of the Druids falls at the opposite end of this spectrum. It’s not a “plain old good time.”  It often freezes and quits to the desktop. There are design fillers, hard-to-find hot spots, dead ends, and misleading clues (or no clues!).  It’s really too bad, given the potential.

Even with the price now $10 at some stores, I cannot recommend Mystery of the Druids for your purchase. After all, our time is also valuable, and there are too many fine and enjoyable titles available without engaging in the often-maddening frustration it takes to enter this world of the Druids.

What I Liked the Most

The underlying story is interesting; voice acting is quite good; background graphics are attractive.

What I Liked the Least

Bugs and crashes spoil any potential; puzzles are too often illogical and confounding; return trips to conversations are exasperating. The End

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: House of Tales Publisher: CDV Release Date: 2001

Available for: Windows

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Screenshots

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System Requirements

P200 (PII 400 recommended) 32 MB RAM 2 MB video card 150 MB free hard disk space

Where to Find It

Links provided for informational purposes only.  FFC makes no warranty with regard to any transaction entered into by any party(ies).

      Copyright © Electric Eye Productions.  All rights reserved.  No reproduction in whole or in part without express written permission.

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13 Responses to Porn is Awesome, Games Not So Much

  • Meho

    Ahahaha, funny quote there.

    Also, daymn, that’s RJ right there and I really can not feel any kind of negativity for the man. I mean he taught me so much about life that I’d be a bigot to pretend I’m above him in any way, you know.

    But of course, he’s using a completely flawed argument in his editorial. Porn does not equal sex. Porn is about spectacle (of sex or… other things), not about sex. Much of the porn I watch doesn’t really involve sex, it’s about spectacle and power and roles in the human society, but mostly about spectacle. Baudrillard once defined porn as a media where you see genitals bigger than you would ever see them in real life. Because porn is about augmenation and hyperbole.

    So are games. Neither are natural. Neither want to show us normal people doing normal things. We wouldn’t want them any other way.

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    Exactly! And we wouldn’t want to watch normal people doing normal things!

    That’s WHY we play games… to be extraordinary people doing extraordinary things. Violence is inconsequential.

  • Meho

    Or at least not not natural. Super Mario Bros. has it stylised down to cutesy jumps on your enemies’ heads. Shadow of the Colossus has it turned into a pornographic spectacle of giant killing. GTA turns it into a videogame aping life aping videogame.

    Violence is deeply connected to games (of any kind) for reasons I think obvious, but NATURALISTIC violence is absent from videogames most of the time. Games that make it look naturalistic, like Manhunt are games that shock us. Games that make it easy and quick, like Call of Duty do not shock us. Therefore, Vivid is Call of Duty of porn while Devicebondage or Public Disgrace is Manhunt and GTA of porn. It’s really all about being staged, unnatural, overexposed and heavily stylised in either of these cases.

  • Lewis B

    Perhaps the answer lye’s in combining the two.  Mario Porn anyone? (oh thats probably already been done 🙁 )

    Oh boy what a surreal article to read at 7:38 am 🙂

  • Lewis B

    Ahahaha no but I have now! Cover your eyes children, cover your eyes!!

  • ajax19

    “Jeremy said sex is natural and beautiful.”

    While that can be true.  I have seen enough porn in my day to know that a LOT of the sex in that, uh, genre is neither “natural” nor “beautiful”.  It’s often just incredibly degrading.

    While I agree with the simpler premise that, particularly in the US, the disparity between how much violence is deemed acceptable compared to how much nudity is deemed acceptable is incredibly out of whack and patently ridiculous, I don’t think trying to elevate porn over video games is the best way to go about expressing it.

  • Gregg B

    Erm, I think a very important distinction should be made here: porn involves real people doing very real things to each other, games do not.

    Now I’m no prude but the sex in porn is usually as cosmetically distorted, unreal and oftentimes as grotesque as the violence featured in many games but the former will always be more affecting because it’s real, in the same way as a snuff movie would be more affecting than the many brutal deaths in say, Manhunt or Postal. There are a lot of perceptual and subjective variables here but I’d wager that virtual reality will always be overshadowed by reality.

    Also, what sort of porn do you watch Meho?? Roles in human society?!! There’s me thinking it was just pounds of processed meat slamming into each other…

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    I’ve always been hesitant to ask Meho that question, for fear that he might tell me. Or worse, show me.

    Many anti-gamers state that gaming is “worse” because it’s interactive, while a passive activity like watching porn or violence is not. Of course, in my view, passive voyeurism is far worse than active involvement because you’re sitting there doing nothing. What’s worse, a violent video game or one of those Hostel films? For me, at least, it’s the latter.

  • Gregg B

    I haven’t seen the Hostel films, not least because they’re apparently shit, but mainly because, er, torture doesn’t agree with me, naturally. I know it’s not real but obviously when my suspension of disbelief is tight and all I can do is watch I can find it really unsettling, as a sort of bystander.

    Conversely, however, I do think by taking control of a virtual character you’re sort of, by default, disconnected from the virtual realness of their situation. Even as videogames become verisimilarly better, short of having a brain plug or something, I don’t believe they will really ever get to the primal core of violence while an interface is distancing you from it. Context and representation will be the key until then.

    Lewis will confirm this, but when we were younger we spent a good half an hour once in the original Half-Life, with a crowbar and a wounded but invincible Barney, splattering as much blood on the walls in that particular area as humanely possible. We thought it was fun back then, sort of like painting by numbers, only without paint. Or numbers. I wish we had the screenshot. Anyway, we knew it wasn’t real so it didn’t matter in the slightest.

  • xtal

    Stomping corpses to a pulp in Dead Space is way healthier than watching Ron Jeremy porn. Come to think of it, I would reverse their labels and call Dead Space “explicit adult content” and Ron Jeremy porn flicks would get the “survival horror” rating.

  • Lewis B

    @Xtal, oh how I laughed 🙂 very good mon frère, very good 🙂

  • Irony

    How is porn not interactive? The idea that because in a videogame you choose to act violently within the context of the game, rather than passively identifying with a character on the screen acting violently, is ridiculous, because it goes both ways. Sure, you’re free to enact whatever scenarios you wish, but you can also choose not to maim or kill in situations where the game itself allows you or even encourages you to do just that (porn v. the Fallout series, maybe?). But the idea that porn itself is less interactive, and less about choices, than videogames are is just nonsensical.

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