The Name Of The Rose, anyone? No? It's a book by Umberto Eco. A particularly entertaining one, too. The Abbey reminds me of it. A lot.
Oh, you've read The Name Of The Rose, and you enjoyed it? And you like point-and-click adventure games with murder mysteries? Well then, this game has your name written all over it. Buy it. Buy it now.
The Abbey is basically a religious-themed whodunnit mystery. I think it's a pretty good one, too. The storyline in particular was well done, and the characterisation is superb; by the end I was starting to get a good feel of the personalities of all the characters inhabiting the place, and really got into the mystery as it unfolded. There was even a particularly tense scene that had me a little anxious. Pretty surprising for a point-and-click game!
The main criticism I had was the puzzles; some of them were a little illogical, and when the dialogue doesn't prompt you with clues it occasionally starts to descend into that point-and-click hell, where you just wander around clicking things randomly and trying your items on every active node until you accidentally stumble on the right thing to do. Didn't happen too often, but it happened enough to get a little annoying.
Otherwise, 'twas fun! I'm glad I don't live in an abbey in the Middle Ages, though. People apparently get murdered.
Anna's Quest is okay. It doesn't have the comedy or personality of the Deponia series in my opinion, but it's certainly a nice little story that starts to gain some depth by the final chapter. It definitely held my interest, but I'm a fan of these point-and-click adventure games. The telekinesis bit is a nice twist, too.
The visuals look quite cartoony, which I guess matches the style of the game, but are nothing too spectacular. Some games I occasionally find myself sitting back and enjoying the beauty and/or originality of the illustrations. Not this one. It's pretty much stock standard stuff.
Depending on how puzzle-adept you are, you're probably looking at a lifespan of maybe 5-8 hours of gameplay. I got stuck once, but most things are generally pretty logical. I finished the game in a weekend of sporadic playing (a couple of hours here and there over two days).
The voice of Anna was a little irritating to me, which is a pity because, as the main character, she has most of the dialogue. I also note some of the more unusual words in the game were mispronounced a lot depending on which actors were hired. For example "wyrd" was pronounced either like "word" or "weird". Not a big issue, but distracting.
All in all, Anna's Quest won't win the adventure game of the year award, but it definitely falls squarely within that nice safe mid-range area of quality. And that's ok by me. Because I bought it on discount.
If you like the basic dungeons 2 and want more, you can savely grab this one. One new faction (UNDEAD) and a campain that is more or less even longer then the core game.
So far I've only quit games with technical issues. This game isn't only bad, it's frustrating. It came in a bundle and I played the games in order. When I came to this one I gave up quite quickly and decided to continue later. Now that I've played all 9, I had to give this one another try. It was just as terrible as I remembered. After 15 minutes I decided to stop tormenting myself.
Some characters sounded awful, kind of disgusting. The developers probably wanted them to sound mysterious or something, but in my opinion it failed. I can't say that the graphics were bad, but the hidden objects scenes were grainy. Sometimes it was hard to see the objects. The map shows available tasks, at least I think so. It was sparkling in some places, but it was hard to know in which area it sparkled. The hint is annoying, because it told me to do something somewhere. The problem was that I had no idea where that place was. The building and surroundings where so confusing to me. When I finally got to the right place and tried to do the thing it didn't work. I didn't feel like I was making progress, only walking around trying to understand what I was doing and what I was supposed to do. At the moment, I can't come up with anything positive.
I am very disappointed that I couldn't finish this game. I know that there are people who like this game, but I don't understand why. After my experience I can't recommend it.
The only bad thing about this game is sometimes the music (too loud and... meh), and the technical aspect (not the artistic). The game itself is pretty good, and the history is interesting if you like detectives, mediums, and that kind of things.
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