Aura: Fate of Ages and Sherlock Holmes

Andrea, Given, and I surprisingly finished Aura: Fate of Ages last week. By "surprisingly", I mean it took us by surprise: We finished one world and expected to head to the next, only to find there was a sequel (Aura: The Sacred Rings). My thoughts: The game started with some real quality puzzles that I truly enjoyed, but the quality steadily declined until we got to the end of the game, where the only puzzle was hitting some drums in the right order. There were some pixel hunting problems we ran into (such as picking up a single leaf in a rain forest) that soured our view of the game. I don't know that we'll try the sequel.

Ending early, we tried to find another game to play. Andrea recommended Schizm/Mysterious Journey since she had played it before, had fun, but couldn't remember a single thing about it. It's gotten great reviews and I'm sure it'll be a fun game, but as we started playing, I realized it that it was another "empty landscape" game, and I just wasn't in the mood for another one.

This week I tried to install Tex Murphy: Overseer since I've played it, had a good time, and can't remember a thing (except that there's a cliff-hanger ending that never got resolved in another game). Unfortunately, there's a bunch of hoops needed to go through in order to install it and I haven't been able to find some of the software needed to make this Win95 game work on an WinXP system. So we played Sherlock Holmes: The Silver Earring instead.

It's an interesting game. It brings the idea of pixel hunting to a new level, but since that's your job as a detective, it's not as bad as the leaf example. It starts out with a long exposition ("We're not playing a game, we're watching a movie!" quipped Given), but once gameplay commences it's the standard "ask questions and collect evidence" that I've seen in other mystery games. The level of detail in the graphics, though, was impressive to me. Some things looked like photograph, instead of rendered detail. This didn't stop us, though, from missing a scrap of cloth.

One thing different from standard mystery games is the quiz at the end of each day. Not only do you have to answer questions such as "Can you tell what type of weapon was used in the murder?", you have to back it up with evidence from details in your notebook or evidence collected. It was late when we stumbled across this, so there was some grumbling as I insisted we finish it before heading home. But eventually we got it right, and as we dispersed for the night, the general consensus was it was fun... so far.