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Comer

Comer apparently wants to pay homage to Myst, and in certain ways it does, mainly in the beautiful visuals. The puzzles also strain toward a Myst-like sense of mystery, but for the most part do not have the internal logic of Comer's model game. The game is also kind of in love with itself...there's a pointless "preview" on the first disk of the worlds you'll eventually visit, disk three starts out with a too-long slide show of various screen shots of that disk's setting, and the final cut scene just keeps showing the same (admittedly pretty cool-looking) event from different angles.

There are some problems with the interface as well. It's not always clear when you can interact with something -- since the "move forward" arrow looks the same as the "fiddle with something" arrow, if you try moving something that can't be moved, you might end up just walking past it instead, sending you somewhere you didn't intend to go. Navigation in general is also a bit confusing. It's also a hard to ignore that the texts interspersed throughout the adventure have been written by someone whose first language isn't English. This doesn't really make the game any worse, though, since the back story is generally the most superfluous part of any adventure game. Oh, yes, and one more weird glitch: when you restore a saved game, you'll revert to the correct game state, but you probably won't be in the same physical position you were when you saved. Odd.

The first disk of the game doesn't hold many challenges besides figuring out where to move the cursor so you'll realize you can actually move somewhere. There's really only one thing I'd go so far as to call a puzzle here, and it's clever, but none too involved. In the second area of the game, five huts each offer a little puzzle to solve. One pretty much solves itself (the projector); one is actually rather good (the one involving six buttons on a big panel); one is easy but not annoyingly so (the three numbered buttons); one is utterly inscrutable, at least to me...I solved it by trial and error, though I assume that wasn't the intended method (the bubbling water thingy); and the last one is easy in concept and very tedious in practice (the chimes). Not a good ratio of hits to misses so far.

The next section also features some interesting puzzles thwarted by poor execution -- the kind of puzzles where you think you've figured out a clever way to solve it, you try it, it doesn't work, then later you discover you actually had the correct solution, you were just clicking one pixel too far to the right. In another puzzle, there are pictures on a wall with something that looks like a button under each one. I thought I'd have to get closer to push the button, so I moved closer...and was transported somewhere else, so I had to trudge all the way back. A clearer cursor interface would have cleared this problem up. Yet another puzzle was designed intelligently enough that you could see what was intended, but exactly why it should have worked was still opaque.

The fourth and final section, which you reach via blimp (note to game designers: I do not know how to fly a blimp. Why would I ever get on a blimp and propel it into the air? It would crash, I would die. This sort of thing doesn't really affect gameplay, but it certainly affects believability. Games like, say, Riven take this into account by transporting you via things that amount to public transportation), is actually the most solvable and enjoyable part of the game. Mind you, the very ending makes no freaking sense at all. I wasn't even sure the game was over. This might have been because, due to technical trouble, I couldn't hear all the audio for the game. The music played, but none of the recorded voices. After finishing the game, I read the missing dialogue in a walk-through...the story still makes no sense. Anyway, if you have the same technical trouble I do: you can tell it's over because you get a film from the projector downstairs instead of a still picture. That's it.

So anyway, I'd recommend getting a walk-through for this game and using it indiscriminately throughout the first three disks (except for the two decent hut puzzles and the pictures-and-buttons puzzle, and perhaps the dove puzzle, on disk three). As a super-short stand-alone game, ignoring the stupid ending, I'd probably give the fourth disk 3.5 stars.

There's certainly talent behind this game, and good ideas as well. But please, sir, don't do it all by yourself next time.

-- Francis Heaney -1999