Background to the story
The Egyptian Prophecy takes place during the reign of Ramses II. The
story is unrelated to that of the two other Egypt-themed games that
are published by The Adventure Company, so you can play the games in
any order. Historically, Ramses II had one of the longest reigns in
Egyptian history, from 1279 BC to 1212 BC (or thereabouts). He was
also one of the great builders. He built several temples, including
the famous temples at Abu-Simbel which he constructed for himself
and his favorite wife.
In The Egyptian Prophecy, Ramses II has fallen ill. In exchange for
having a temple built in his honor, the sun god Amon-Re will extend
the life of Ramses II. But there are problems. Several accidents
have occurred on the building site which have delayed construction.
In addition, the overseer in charge of building the temple is
injured and has mysteriously become victim to an unexplained illness
as well. If the temple is not finished in time, the Pharaoh will
die. Your character in The Egyptian Prophecy is a young priestess
named Maya. It is hoped that Maya's gift of clairvoyance will be of
service in uncovering the mystery of why the accidents are
occurring. Only if the source of the evil that is plaguing the
temple is uprooted can the temple be completed and the pharaoh
saved.
In the world of The Egyptian Prophecy, magic is real and the ancient
gods of Egypt actually exist. The visions Maya has, whether induced
by a preparation of mystical incense or some other means, allow Maya
to enter fantastic worlds where she can communicate directly with
the Egyptian gods. The gods cannot act directly on the physical
world of Egypt. But what Maya does in these dreamworlds will effect
what happens in Egypt. Sometimes the gods test her worthiness to
receive their assistance, which leads to some of the more unusual
puzzles in the game. They may reward her with information or by
causing some event to take place in the physical world.
Maya's occasional trips into the dreamworlds give The Egyptian
Prophecy more variety of locale than the previous Egypt games. Egypt
1156 B.C. and Egypt 2: The Heliopolis Prophecy both took place
entirely in desert areas and oases with a lot of sand and desert
foliage. But in The Egyptian Prophecy your visits to "real" places
like Memphis, Aswan, and Pi-Ramses are intermingled with visits to
imaginary places, such as the beautiful moonlit lake garden where
Isis appears, the lava-filled world of Ptah, god of the forge, and
the Book of the Dead, realm of Osiris, where the "floor" appears as
an enormous piece of parchment suspended in space, with narrow
strips of hieroglyphs moving vertically in the distance against a
starlit sky. Since Maya visits these imaginary places in visions,
the effect isn't wholly unrealistic. And these dreamworlds provide a
setting for puzzles that would not make sense in the physical world
of Egypt.
Installation
The Egyptian Prophecy has two install sizes, 1.3 GB and 1.9 GB. The
1.9 GB size is a complete install to the hard drive, but you will
need CD3 in the drive in order to start the game. The installation
gives you the option of installing DirectX 9 if you want it. But the
game worked fine for me in Win 2000 with DirectX 8.1.
Controls
The Egyptian Prophecy is mouse-controlled. Movement is node-based
point-and-click with panning available at the nodes. Panning is of
the edge-panning type, where your view doesn't start to pan until
you move the cursor close to the edge of the screen. There are three
panning speeds. On "normal" speed, panning was easy to control on
the 1533 MHz computer I tested the game on. This is an improvement
over the first two Egypt games, where the panning speed moves like
greased lightning if you play on a computer with much more than the
recommended specs.
Right-clicking toggles the appearance and disappearance of the
inventory bar at the bottom of the screen. In the center of the bar
is a group of four icons which allow you to access the zoom icon, a
list of your goals, the historical documentation, and the save/load
Menu. The list of your goals updates itself as you progress in the
game and keeps a record of what you've done. To use the zoom icon,
you click it, then click an item in your inventory in order to get
an enlarged view of it as well as a (usually) augmented description
of it. The Menu you access from the inventory bar has selections to
Save, Load, adjust Options, Return to the Game, and Exit (to the
Main Menu).
The Main Menu has selections for New Game, Resume Game, Load Game,
Options, Documentary Database, Credits, Victory Diary, and Exit.
Victory Diary does not become available until after you complete the
game and is the same as the list of "Goals" you can access while
playing the game.
To the left of the central group of four icons is your inventory. If
you run your cursor over an item in the inventory, a short text
description of the item will appear and identify it for you. Eight
inventory items can be displayed at a time. Small arrow icons will
allow you to scroll up and down if you get more than eight items,
but the inventory tends to be self-cleaning and you rarely have more
than eight items for very long. When you pick up an inventory item
from the gameworld, a little icon appears in the upper left of your
screen and you hear a little tinkle that lets you know you've picked
something up. Usually you know when you click on something, but the
icon and the tinkle will alert you if someone you are talking to
gives you an item.
To the right of the central group of four icons are your spells.
Before you acquire them, you'll see ghost images of them. You start
out with only the Wadjet Eye of Clairvoyance and acquire the others
as you progress in the game. To use the Eye, you open your
inventory, click on the Eye icon, then click on the object or person
you want to use your clairvoyance on.
Sometimes you can see things with the Eye that you can't see without
it. And sometimes the Eye gives you no information and Maya simply
says "I can't see anything." The Eye may reveal hidden objects or it
may tell you what kind of a person someone is. One of the more
amusing details of the game is that if you use the Eye on some
especially stubborn or stupid person, Maya will say, "I see a
donkey." This happened right after I was thinking what a jackass a
certain character was.
Maya receives new spells as the game progresses. You use other
spells in the same manner you do the Eye, by opening the inventory
bar, clicking on the spell, and then clicking on the object you wish
to use the spell on. In other words, you use the spells the same way
you use inventory - only the spells don't disappear when you use
them.
Conversations occur when you click on a character who has something
to say. For the most part, conversations are straightforward. You
are given anywhere up to five questions to ask at a time. Sometimes
a question will lead to a new group of questions, but you have ample
opportunity to ask things. The game never eliminates choices until
after relevant puzzles are solved. Usually you can repeat questions,
if you don't catch what was said the first time (a feature I
appreciate). Subtitles are optional.
Right-clicking or using the spacebar will skip cut scenes and
conversations.
Game Options
The Options menu includes settings for Video acceleration (hardware
or software), Color (32 bits or 16 bits), Speed of panning (fast,
slow, or normal), Volume, Subtitles (yes or no), and Return. In
hardware mode, only the 32 bit color option is available.
Graphics
Graphics are displayed full screen in 32-bit or 16-bit color in
800x600 resolution. They are very sharp and often colorful. The
Egyptian Prophecy uses a brighter palette than Egypt 2. Even in
locations like the inside of a hut, there was more color in the
objects placed around the rooms. Egypt 2 may have been more
"realistic," but The Egyptian Prophecy is more interesting to look
at. The Egyptian Prophecy also has more animations.
The cut scenes loaded quickly and ran smoothly on my test computer.
Unlike the rest of the game, the cut scenes are in a sort of
"widescreen" mode, with black areas above and below the image.
Voices, Music and Background
Sound
Voices are mostly good - competent, though not exceptional. They
tend to be a little cartoonish in the case of a few of the
characters.
Sound effects are excellent. Some sounds are emphasized or have
resonance enhanced to give the feel of a large interior space. Music
does not play all the time and is well integrated into the game.
Though I don't remember any particular theme, the music always
seemed appropriate. At times music will become more threatening or
more mysterious for dramatic effect. When you complete a puzzle, the
music will often change to signal your success. When there is no
music, there are usually background sounds. These are also very well
done on the whole, though in one area I wished someone would feed
the cat. It wasn't a very loud cat, but it was insistent.
Puzzles
Most of the puzzles are of the type where you know you need to do
something, so you look for an object to do it with or look for a
person to ask for information on how to do it. There is not a lot of
moving back and forth between game locations in order to complete
puzzles. Most inventory can be found not far from where you learn of
your need for it. When you have to travel to a different location in
order to talk to someone, there are usually several things to do in
that location before leaving. In fact, the game won't let you leave
the area until you've finished what you need to do. There are three
or four timed puzzles, none of which is particularly difficult once
you've discovered what you need to do. One of these puzzles involves
timing. Although you can be killed, the game immediately restores
you to the point before your big mistake. Load times for these
restores are very fast. Sometimes they were almost instantaneous on
the 1533 GHz computer I tested the game on.
In addition to the inventory and conversation-based puzzles, there
are a few mechanical types. There is one slider - not the type where
you move a tile around but the type where you move whole rows or
columns of tiles at once. In the realms that Maya visits in her
visions, there are other types of mechanical puzzles. Most of these
were interesting, fun, and not overly difficult. There is one very
easy sound puzzle, which can be solved by process of elimination if
you absolutely can't do sound puzzles because there are only six
configurations to test.
There is one puzzle near the end of the game which rivals the bridge
puzzle in Schizm: Mysterious Journey in difficulty level. Like the
puzzle in Mysterious Journey, it is more like a board game that you
play against the computer than a puzzle. Also like the puzzle in
Mysterious Journey, it takes a combination of strategy and luck to
win it. Unlike the puzzle in Mysterious Journey, there seems to be a
repeating solution for it, so those who cannot solve it on their own
will be able to find comfort in a walkthrough.
Edutainment features
The encyclopedia that comes with The Egyptian Prophecy is
attractively laid out and intuitively organized. I found it much
easier to navigate than the one in Egypt 2 because the headings
stayed at the top of the page even when I clicked on a connecting
link within the description. Having the headings always available
made it easier to get back to the subject I was reading before I
checked out the link.
The encyclopedia can be accessed through either the Main Menu or the
inventory bar. It is easily navigated through tabs at the top of the
screen. You can read about the construction of temples and how
symbolism was important in their layout. The role of the
priest-architect and other people who worked on temple construction
is explained. There is information about how obelisks were quarried,
transported, carved, and erected. Other subjects include details of
the life of the pharaoh Ramses II and some of the monuments he
constructed. There are brief descriptions of the Egyptian gods that
are seen in the game. Rituals used in healing and magic are
described. The text in the encyclopedia is accompanied by pictures
that relate to the descriptions. I would have preferred that the
font were a little larger, but that may be just me. On a 19" CRT
monitor it was legible, but I think I'd have had trouble reading it
on a 17" monitor.
For the most part it is not necessary to consult the encyclopedia to
play the game, though there is one puzzle for which it seems to pop
open automatically to give you a clue. The Egyptian Prophecy is more
an adventure game with an encyclopedia available if you want it than
it is an edutainment game. Probably the only thing I will remember
from the encyclopedia is that Amon and Re were originally separate
gods, Amon being "the hidden god" and Re the sun god. Later they
were combined into one god, Amon-Re. And that's why he has a
hyphenated name.
Minimum specs
Windows 98/ME/2000/XP
Pentium III 600 MHz or
equivalent (800 MHz recommended)
64 MB RAM (128 MB RAM
recommended)
DirectX compatible video card
with 32 MB video RAM
DirectX 7 compatible sound card
16X CD drive (24X recommended)
Tested computer
Windows 2000 SP2
AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (~1533 MHz)
512 MB RAM
Matrox G550 video card with 32 MB
video RAM
SBLive 5.1 Value
DirectX 8.1
Toshiba combo drive SD-R1202
16x/10x/12x/40x
Bugs and Potential Problems
The game froze during a reloading of the puzzle near the end of the
game - the one I previously mentioned as being particularly
difficult. I shut down the game using Alt-F4 and immediately
reloaded. I had no further problems with the game. Considering that
this was the only real tech problem I had with it, and how many
times I reloaded the puzzle without incident, I'd say the game was
very stable.
My Unsolicited Opinion
I
was surprised by how much I enjoyed The Egyptian Prophecy. I'd been
expecting "another Egypt game" that was very similar to the previous
ones I've played. But The Egyptian Prophecy was more fun to play
than any of them. Having the heroine occasionally enter dreamworlds
to solve puzzles made the gameworld more varied than having her
confined exclusively to the arid world of Egypt. And some of the
more interesting puzzles were in the dreamworlds. I was also
impressed by how the game contrived to make magic seem believable.
Maya's interactions with the gods in the imaginary realms had real
consequences in the physical world of Egypt. Yet the magic was not
so overtly fanciful as to make the game seem unrealistic.
The game seemed to do a good job of avoiding dead ends. The game is
linear in that it won't let you leave an area until you have all you
need. It does not force the gamer to do a lot of back-and-forthing
across the gameworld. This is part of the reason the playing time is
not as long as in some other games. My brother and I finished the
game in 3 days, averaging between 2 and 3½ hours a day. The only
time we were really stuck for very long was when we neglected to
look upward when searching for hotspots. One of the frustrations we
encountered was searching for inventory and finding we could not
interact with things. For example, we needed a bowl, we could see a
bowl, but we could not pick it up. Or a stick. Or a ladder. There
was a lot of detail in the game screens that could not be interacted
with. There were a lot of interesting things we'd have liked to do
in the game environment, but our actions were limited to a few
hotspots. This made the game easier in that there were fewer wrong
solutions to test. But it also made for a shorter game.
Recommendations
The Egyptian Prophecy isn't a very long or difficult game, but there
is much to enjoy about it. Part of the reason for its relative
shortness is that it avoids having the gamer traipse back and forth
across the gameworld in order to solve puzzles. I'd recommend it to
new adventure gamers or to more experienced gamers who want an
easier game after completing a hard one. However it isn't for those
who want a deep story or challenging puzzles throughout. It's just a
fun game.
