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Morpheus

There are a number of components to an adventure game; visuals, story, puzzles, acting. They don't all have to be good for the game to be good overall. A first rate example of this is "Morpheus", a game with excellent visuals, engaging puzzles, abysmal acting and a completely incoherent story. It's a whole lot of fun.

You play from a first person perspective as an arctic explorer on the trial of your father, who disappeared years before when he set out in search of a location described to him by a dying man. This turns out to be the ship Herculania, a luxurious art deco masterpiece lodged in the ice. The ship is gorgeous, and just wandering around exploring the myriad rooms is quite enjoyable. Periodically you see ghostly visions, and the story begins to take shape.

And what a shape. A bizarre machine based on a primitive tribal ritual that allows people to enter their personal dreamworlds and is supposed to have healing powers is hooked up to the ship's passengers. Where do these dream worlds come from? What is their purpose? Why does each dream world have exactly three puzzles and what do these puzzles have to do with anything? Why would this heal anyone? What is any of this supposed to mean? Was designer Glen Dean on drugs? What? Why? Where? How? Huh?

The story is filled in by old film reels and by ghostly visions. The ghostly visions are reminiscent of those in 7th Guest, both in look and in the abysmal quality of the acting, which we won't even bother to discuss. They are, however, more effective, and this is one of the few adventure games that has a few genuine scares in it. The game's also pleasantly dark, with hatred and revenge and suicide and nifty stuff like that.

In spite of its shortcomings, I loved this game. First off, the look is great. I love art deco, and this game has a sense of style and a fine attention to detail. And the puzzles -- and after all, what is an adventure game but puzzles, really -- have that quality I hold sacred above all else: They make sense. These are very, very logical puzzles.

They're also very, very similar to one another, and how much you enjoy the game will depend upon how much you like puzzles involving pattern recognition and correlating things. These are the sorts of puzzles where you will find a bunch of things and there will be some way to correlate them with a bunch of other things that will allow you to connect them with yet another bunch of things, and I seem to find these endlessly amusing. I mean, they're not all like that, but that's over half the puzzles, although they bring as much variety to this type of puzzle as one could hope for.

These puzzles are not in any way real-world puzzles. When you enter into a dream world you will have to perform several tasks that will allow you to exit the dream world (I have no idea why you want to enter into the world, or why it doesn't kill you the way it seems to everyone else). These tasks don't seem to relate to the world in any real way. This is not a game like Riven: The Sequel to Myst where you are working getting machines to work to cause specific things to happen. Like 7th Guest, these are just puzzles to solve, but with Morpheus (while playing the game I had no idea why it was called Morpheus, but a friend tells me he was the Greek god of dreams) there is a half-hearted attempt to make you think these puzzles are more than just a bunch of miscellaneous puzzles. A few, in fact, like some of the puzzles involving finding the combinations to guests rooms, actually have a real-world logic, but others are pure, non-real-world puzzles with numbers you would never see in real life. The game has elements of both 7th Guest and Zork Nemesis, and kept reminding me of one or the other.

I only had to cheat twice in this game, and once had to do with the greatest aggravation of the whole thing, the way the mouse works. It is very easy to accidentally move to a new location with the mouse (it's also tremendously difficult to control panning speed). In Morpheus you can look around 360 degrees, and quite often as I looked around I would suddenly move into another room. In the same way, if I pulled a lever the mouse might suddenly hit the "look away" part of the screen and I would be somewhere else. So at one point I never got a lever pulled all the way and never got to the point of being able to pull the ropes. The other place I cheated was near the end, and there was also a bit of a mouse issue with that. Generally speaking these puzzles are pretty easy: I was challenged, and occasionally frustrated, but there was always a rational answer if I kept working at it. And the sense that the puzzles were all fair and solvable kept me playing (and enjoying) the game without stop.

Towards the end of the game you find yourself on a verandah of a house. Why? Where is this? What's going on? But at that point the game's pretty much over so you just have to suffer the senseless ending and you're home free. Not a bit of it made sense, but I don't care. I had a great time.

-- Charles Herold -2000

Glitches:Dialogue was out of synch, which according to someone on a games newsgroup should not be the case. There were various weird little graphics glitches, and the sound would occasionally pop.

Related Links:
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