The Chronicles of Mystery: The Scorpio Ritual

Name: The Chronicles of Mystery: The Scorpio Ritual

Publisher: City Interactive

Released: November 10, 2008

Rating: E10+

Not Scary      Mild      Bit Intense      Scary      
               ^           
Plot

Sylvie Leroux, a bumbling young archaeologist is living by herself in an apartment in Paris. When she gets a call from her uncle concerning an important discovery, Sylvie ventures off to Malta to see what the matter is.
However, when Sylvie arrives, she finds that Uncle is gone without a trace, and all of sudden, Sylvie is wrapped into an adventure full of strange visions, interesting places, hidden secrets...

And some really weird people.

The Main Characters
I won't speak of the other characters directly as there are just way too many and I don't want to give anything away...

Sylvie Leroux - Being an archaeologist, Sylvie is naturally curious regarding the world around her. Her curiosity, unfortunately, gets the best of her most of the time.

James Anderson - James is linguist that lives right next to Sylvie's uncle. He is a major help to Sylvie throughout the mystery, and a handy decipherer.

These characters (and the others too,) were all somewhat interesting. However, some of them were just not developed enough. The other characters that tie some way into the story barely even make sense half of the time.

Animation

This was a key feature I was looking at while purchasing. The animation is truly amazing, and there are beautiful places to explore, but the game would have been much better as an open world game, with more places to explore, more things to do, more excitement. Yes, the animation was good, but often I found myself doing almost nothing in some of the scenes.

While the backgrounds are splendid, the character animation... wasn't so hot. At first glance, the characters seemed fine, but once their movements were robotic, and when speaking, and their words didn't line up with their mouths, which especially applied to the cutscenes. Also, Sylvie, the only playable character in the game moves very slow. Even while running, at average it takes her 7 or more seconds to get from one side of the screen to another.

Violence

This is really one key factor that throws many people off. Let me just say, this game has almost no violence. At one point Sylvie is hit over the head, but we all know she's not in any REAL danger, right?

Puzzles

Puzzles were mostly good, not too easy and not too hard. I actually enjoyed some of them while others were tiring and boring.

Bugs

I found in one part of the game a character(who doesn't play any significant role in the story) to be a glitch. Every time I talked to that character, the game crashed, shut down, and deleted all progress. To avoid this annoyance, I suggest avoiding talking to the female tourist on Gozo island. You will find her standing around in the grass.

Ending

Ah, the ending, one of the best parts of a mystery game.

Not this one.
This ending was half-baked, and I was very disappointed. I won't say more, in case I give any spoilers away, but let me just say this:

I was so unsatisfied by the ending, that as soon as the game ended, I was all like:

"That's it?"

Don't get me wrong, it wasn't a horrible ending. It was... just not not satisfying.


But, I do believe there's sequel, with Sylvie in it.

Conclusion

As much as I wanted to love this game, I couldn't. I guess you could say I liked it. It just didn't live up to my expectation. Gameplay was slow, and hidden-object format became tiring after awhile. Scenes were awesome, and so were puzzles. There were a LOT of characters, something that I'm not used to. While some droned on and on about their lives and jazz and peanuts, others were intriguing and interesting.

Overall, I'd give this game a 3 out of 5. I didn't love it, but I didn't hate it either.