STEVE MILES·TUESDAY, 19 FEBRUARY 2019
If you ever fancy yourself as a Lara Croft/Indiana Jones but without the running and jumping and element of possibly being squashed by a large rolling boulder or a trap full of deadly poisonous darts then this game is probably right up your street.
The story starts off by telling us that Aliens once landed many centuries ago, integrated with human life but the exact reason why and how is kept concealed in various clues and artifacts, that just happen to be scattered in the areas in front of you.
Its evident from the start that something in the stories has a rather more dark and sinister tone , the Aliens did not came here to sit in the front basket no, whilst american youngsters flew their bicycles or remain hidden and camouflaged in the jungle they were hunting soldiers and civilians alike!
You have to explore every inch of the rooms you enter. Movement is done from the arrows on the bottom left, while the screen prompts you to investigate with a magnifying glass icon. You can pull items into other items like a key into a lock or an artifact into a relevant socket etc.. and rotate discs and pull levers with the screen prompting the instructions/directions.
Graphics are excellent, with everything running on the “Unreal Engine”, progress can only be made by solving puzzles that will reveal even more puzzles, in order to unlock giant doors into other areas and rooms to find the answers you seek. Every so often,you will collect a special artifact and be taken into a museum room and the artifact will unlock a giant drawn picture with a piece of historical information about the aliens on Earth.
Gameplay in this “3D Puzzle Adventure”,is all about searching everything, items collected in the immediate area will solve puzzles in that area. There is a lot of solving to do,and only the very patient gamers among us, who like their games at a very leisurely pace or just hard puzzles to solve one after the other, will enjoy solving and unlocking to move onward with this game, exposing further pieces of story line and it’s 3 chapters to solve the whole mystery…
I found certain puzzles to be very “hit and miss”,in that there was no clues, other than rotate puzzle pieces and just hope that something would eventually unlock. At times, I had one key in my inventory but had to drag it into the key lock 4 or 5 times before the game registered that it was the right key for that same lock. Where a good deal of these puzzles are carefully constructed and well thought out, I found that in certain areas,you were left confused and bewildered on what to do next or what you might have done wrong. Maybe a hint button could have remedied things a little here…
Overall, RELIC SEEKER is a very pretty and complex game. You may find that the difficulty curve is too big sometimes and the constant amount of puzzles thrown at you, to be too much with very little room for “adventure”,and longing for a bit more adrenaline and danger behind its puzzle filled rooms….
Thanks to MASSIVE WHEEL for the game and code..
