Well, it's time for my first review and rating! As a general structure for these going forth, I plan on rating games based on a few different categories. What is different from other reviewers is that I'm going to tailor my categories to the genre of game I am playing. For example, it is not fair to judge a text adventure on its graphics (as they generally don't have any). Enchanted Scepters is a point-and-click adventure game. The elements I would look for in a game from this genre are: story, art direction, audio, gameplay, and puzzles. All categories will be out of then points. Some genres may be evaluated on a different amount of criteria, so scores will be turned into a percent to make this fair.
Story: Enchanted Scepters, like many games from its era, is weak in the story department. There is a bit of exposition at the beginning, which serves to justify the quest we are about to embark on, but everything that happens beyond that point feels very isolated from each other. Their are hardly any characters in the game. There's the king, a couple guards, the court wizard, the Queen of Atlantis, a bartender, and a robot. Fewer than half of them have more than two lines of dialogue. Rating: 1/10
Art Direction: The games that I play on this blog are played from a contemporary perspective. That means I will not be adjusting scores to take into account the age of the games I play. ES has impressive graphics for its age, but ultimately come off as strange and eerie today. It strove for a more realistic look. As a result, it's human-like characters ranged from uncanny, to goofy, and even sometimes creepy. The environment design is decent and has lots of variety considering it's a black-and-white game. It might have worked well if it was a horror game, but as a point-and-click adventure game, it's a bit lacking. Rating: 3/10
Audio: While the game is notable for its early use of digitized audio, most of the sound effects have aged poorly. The snippets we do get are generally sporadic, of low quality, and are distracting. When entire minutes can go by without a sound, the digitized shout of a troll can be quite surprising. There are a few areas of the game where the audio is not sporadic, and those areas are even worse. The sounds get mind numbingly repetitive. Audio is treated like a novelty here, but it unfortunately never justifies its own inclusion. Rating: 0/10
Gameplay: This is a game that doesn't fully know what genre it wants to belong to. On one hand, 80% of my time with this game was spent as if this was a text adventure. I typed commands into a parser and (generally) read the results of my actions (as opposed to seeing those results). The problem with this is that the text parser was garbage. Its vocabulary was limited and it did not support any shortcuts. Zork, a game that was commercially released six years before this game, (and was developed nine years before) has a much better text parser than this game does.
But, of course, this is not a text adventure. This has a graphical element too, alongside mouse controls. The mouse controls were underutilized. Outside of a handful of puzzles, all the mouse was good for was shortcuts. It was faster to use the toolbar command to attack something rather than spam typing "swing sword." The best use of the mouse was for triggering traps or secret doors in the game's few temples. The game feels like a tech demo meant to show off the possibility of mice in gaming.
Moving through the world worked well enough, even though continually having to re-open doors was annoying. Interaction with the world was generally limited. It was rare that I found any "flavor" text in this game. Many set-pieces in the world ultimately were non-interactable (as far as I could tell). This made the world feel flat and boring. I believe something like 75% of rooms in this game serve no purpose, which is simply a shame. The world should have been half its size and filled with twice as much content. Combat was much too frequent, the mechanics behind it obscure, and never served a purpose. I got EXP for killing thing, but it did nothing. I got tons of different weapons, but I could never tell if they did different damages. Rating: 2/10
Puzzles: Puzzles are the heart and soul of point-and-click adventure games. This is the category ES does the best on. After playing a few Infocom games, I have gotten used to vague and frustrating puzzles (and not to mention dead-ends). This game generally avoided that. I only encountered one dead-end, and it only set me back a few minutes. The puzzles were generally logical, or at least were obvious and/or had direct hints through the gameplay. I used a walkthrough three times, which is low compared to previous games I have played. The game world itself was also easy to map, as it had a consistent internal logical. Games like Zork were much more frustrating to map than this was. My biggest complaint is the simplicity of the puzzles. Most of them are simple "find the right item for the lock" puzzles. So even though I rarely used a walkthrough, I don't feel particularly accomplished in that achievement. Puzzles are also relatively sparse considering how many screens this game has. Rating: 5/10
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| Page one of my completed map |
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| Page two and three. For fun, here's a link to a much better map. |
Final Thoughts and Score: Enchanted Scepters is a glorified tech demo. It is a showcase of what was possible with Silicon Beach's new game engine (and perhaps a marketing tool for it). It straddles the line between text adventure and point-and-click adventure without fully committing to one or the other. The rich worlds of text adventures are replace with drab and primitive drawings, but without the ease of use that mouse controls would eventually give us. Other than for its historical value, there is little reason for a modern gamer to play this. Final Rating: 11/50 or 22%
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