Mystery of the Druids is one of the latest additions to the adventure genre, created by German company House of Tales and only very recently released in the Britian.
Mystery of the Druids comes on 3 CDs, labeled "Installation", "The Present" and "The Past". This already gives you some hints about the game (yes, time travel plays an important role in the game). The installation CD isn't even half full and contains files that need to be copied to your hard drive. The other two are the actual game CDs - no annoying CD swapping is involved by the way. But here we come to the first problem with the game. If you have a modern CD-ROM or DVD-ROM, you know that playing CD- based games is not much fun due to the drive constantly spinning up and down. But that's not the game's fault, right? Well, no. But the game's big fault is that it doesn't offer installation to harddrive, even if that is possible! The installer doesn't give the slightest hint about this option and there is no readme file.
I found the information neatly tucked away in a FAQ on the game's web site. But naturally I only went looking for a FAQ when I was in trouble, not before installing the game.
But on to the actual game. The introduction scene shows some sort of mysterious ritual taking place at druids' favorite meeting place, Stonehenge. When the intro is over, you find yourself in the Scotland Yard, London, present time. You are detective Brent Halligan, member of the glorious murder squad. Your boss calls you to his office and explains the precarious situation the department is in: there has been a series of strange killings, so called "skeleton murders" where only skeletons of the victims have been found. A man has been convicted and sentenced to jail - and killed by a cellmate. Nothing too unusual so far. Unfortunately, another skeleton perfectly matching the previous ones has been found which means the man had been innocent and the real murderer is on the loose (and the press wants someone's head on the platter).
Your task now is to find the true murderer. This of course won't be easy as your only clue is the skeleton. I don't think I'll spoil the game for anyone when I say that ancient and modern druids will soon be involved in the investigation. Unfortunately your boss doesn't want to hear about druids so you're pretty much on your own - although you will meet a few people prepared to help you.
In the first part of the game you'll spend a lot of time around Scotland Yard offices, fighting bureaucracy and wonderfully unhelpful co-workers as well as learning useful information in the forensics lab. And there's another of my gripes. It is possible to partially solve several puzzles before you can actually complete them. It is often quite clear what the objective is - but there is no way to tell that something entirely unrelated has to happen first (as opposed to you simply missing some important clue). This is rather confusing to say the least. Talk about non- linear.
There is a lot of dialogue at the beginning of the game and that could be improved too. Not that I mind long dialogues, but I didn't much like those in Mystery of the Druids. In many cases there were lots of options and perhaps one of them would lead you further. Unfortunately the topics you already discussed often don't disappear and aren't marked in any way. As a result, you have to listen to some sentences ten or fifteen times before you've mined all the information you have to, and sometimes it's hard to tell whether you've exhausted all options or not. This doesn't improve the gameplay much.
Speaking of dialogues, there's one other nit, not specific to Mystery of the Druids in any way: in many cases the captions are slightly (actually sometimes almost completely) different from what the people actually say. I assume in this case this is mostly due to the translation from German.
The investigation will lead you to several places around England and even France. One of those places is Oxford where you'll meet a handsome young anthropologist, Dr Melanie Turner. Yes, there is some romance involved. You'll even get to play Melanie on several occasions although most of the time she's just a passive sidekick giving you potentially useful bits of information about druids, their beliefs and their rituals.
Now is a good time for a warning. If you are squeamish, avoid Mystery of the Druids. There are a few rather bloody scenes and one of them is pretty revolting. Nothing that would turn off a hardened adventurer like me, but don't say I didn't warn you.
And here we come to the puzzles. Most of them are inventory based and not overly difficult. Oh, the inventory - there's another gripe. Even at the end of the game our hero Brent is still lugging around items found at the beginning and now completely useless. That means the inventory is rather large and this in my opinion does not add to playability at all. It would be much better if the game "flushed" the inventory from time to time and removed the useless items. It would be logical too - it's rather surprising that Brent doesn't lose any of the junk considering what he has to go through. And while I'm complaining let me tell you that there's some pixel hunting too. Several objects are very hard to find. This wouldn't be so much of a problem if you sometimes didn't have access to perhaps 30 screens at a time containing a total of four or five objects. That makes finding them really difficult.
There are a few non-inventory based puzzles too (even one nice labyrinth) and again, most of them are not difficult or can be solved with pencil and paper and a bit of time. But one of those puzzles was pretty hellish and I'm sure I'd never get past it without a walkthrough. It's not that it was completely illogical, there were just too many possibilities and far too few clues.But on the whole, the game is pretty playable and I enjoyed it.
I had some gripes with the game's story too, although those might not be shared by other players. I just have trouble accepting certain things in games (and movies too). I have no problem accepting time travel for some odd reason. But I have a problem with far more mundane (in a manner of speaking) things like present day druids conducting their rituals at Stonehenge. I mean, have you ever been there? I have and let me tell you that there's no way that would happen. The whole place is fenced and you're not allowed inside the inner stone circle at all. Plus Stonehenge is swamped with tourists. If you wanted a realistic scene of druidic rituals at Stonehenge, you'd have to add lots of tourists and probably some TV too. Yes, I know that would spoil the game. Forget I said anything.
And here we come to the game art. Let me tell you that the artists working on the game were better than the programmers - that so much reminds me of many Sierra games with stunning graphics and music and sometimes buggy to the point of being unplayable. Anyway the graphics in Mystery of the Druids are really pretty. The game uses the 2 1/2 D style previously seen in popular titles like Grim Fandango or The Longest Journey. That is, there are 3D animated characters on a 2D background. Only the character animation in the FMV sequences could be better (but there isn't that much FMV). Some of the game locations are modeled after real places (Stonehenge comes to mind) while others are entirely imaginary. All of them look pretty good on the screen.
The sound isn't bad either. The music is very pleasant and the voiceovers are good. The characters speak with markedly British accents. I've actually heard some complaints that the accents of the main characters were too "posh". While I agree that a Scotland Yard detective probably doesn't speak exactly Queen's English, I certainly expect an Oxford anthropologist to have a posh accent. This was not one of my gripes.
The two halves of the game - present and past - seemed noticeably different to me (which is not a negative). In the first part there is a great deal of talking and traveling with new locations opening and most of the previously visited still being accessible. In the other half there are far fewer people to meet and much less traveling (but the locations are larger). Also the progress is more linear with no going back - instead, there are more puzzles to solve.
Just for the sake of completeness I should probably mention that there are one or two moments where it is possible to die - so don't attempt to win the entire game without saving. But as far as I could tell there are no dead ends and the game can always be finished (provided that you don't get killed of course).
And now it's time for me to weigh the pros and cons of Mystery of the Druids. I had hard time deciding whether I actually liked this game or not. It is certainly mysterious and there are druids too. The game boasts quality artwork. I liked the story which kept me glued to the screen for longer than is good for me. There is enough blood and gore to keep me interested. But some of the puzzles are just plain frustrating and there are bugs too.