Adventure at the Chateau d’Or
Karma Labs
W95/98/ME/2000
First person point and click adventure
Story
“A modern day princess finds herself caught up in a mysterious adventure
when she receives a cryptic letter summoning her to the palace of her
deceased uncle, the Duke. Your task is to help the princess unlock the
secrets of the Chateau d’Or and claim her inheritance”. (taken from the
manual)
Sounds interesting and intriguing doesn’t it? Well it should have been, but
truthfully, it wasn’t. It took me almost as long to write that first
paragraph as it did to play the entire game. At $5 that wouldn’t be a bad
deal but at $40+, let’s just say I didn’t feel I got my money’s worth.
Gameplay
Simple point and click fare with two levels of difficulty. I played on
Difficult and have no idea how the easy setting affected gameplay. I suspect
on easy, playing 20 questions with the Duke’s “spirit” would have been
easier –
There’s also a map feature, but it didn’t really help me all that much, but
then most maps don’t help me all that much <g>
Puzzles
Pretty much the standard inventory type, and some were rather fun I thought.
I liked coming up with the correct color combination in order to summon the
duke, the first couple of times that is, but after the 30 or 40th time I got
rather tired of it. What was worse is the patterns were random so each time
you answered a question wrong (I believe in difficult there were 30) you had
to start all over and re-guess the colors.
My game was also pretty buggy. At the end you have to place 4 or 5 artifacts
that you collected throughout the game in their proper order to free the
princess who is locked in this globe thing. Well in my game if you did not
place the artifact in the exact spot the developers wanted, it disappeared
from inventory and you had to traipse back to where you first found it and
pick it up again. Believe me, I learned to save a lot during the end
sequence.
And about the ending. Am I the only one who did not understand what it was
about? I’m not even sure I figured out what her inheritance was lol. For me
it was one of those “huh?” type of endings.
Conclusion
The story had a lot of promise but unfortunately nothing materialized. It
felt more like a French history lesson and less like a game. Which isn’t a
bad thing. It’s just not what I expected the game to be.
copyright © 2002
GameBoomers
