News flash--if you haven't ever played Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, drop what you're doing and go get it. This is one of the best GAGs I have played to date, and those who have been keeping up with all my reviews of GAGs know I wouldn't make such a claim lightly. The game is well-paced, dramatic, hilarious, and clever. The main characters are well developed and believable--and very likable. I am stunned at the high quality and shiny polish of this outstanding game. I at first assumed this game would be a let-down because of the tie-in with the movie franchise, but I was dead wrong. The LucasArts team really took the licensed content and ran with it. The result is a highly innovative GAG that is rewarding and enjoyable.
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Note the LucasArts logo on the rock.
I've been reading the essays in First Person lately, and one argument that I've seen raised a few times is that games can benefit from movie tie-ins (or, more generally, "convergence") because players will bring their knowledge of the movie's characters, story, and universe to the game, thus saving the developers the task of building all of these things themselves. This really isn't the case with FoA. Players familiar with the films might like the few elements copied here (such as the theme music and the fact that Indy always carries a whip), but such knowledge isn't necessary. We get a pretty good dose of character development (and style) during the opening scenes, when Indy plummets through floor after floor of his college's library. The Indy here is somewhat pitiable, but resilient. He's not some Rambo bad-ass type, but a hero that has to "try harder" and deal with frustration. In short, things often don't go his way, but he's good natured about it.
At various points, the game displays this map to show where the avatar is headed. GAGs are about exploring virtual spaces, and the graphics serve as maps--this time explicitly.
What's really fun, though, is Indy's "side kick," a young archaeologist-turned pyschic named Sophia. Sophia is a sharp-tongued and somewhat contentious woman that despises Indy so much she can't help but love him. The banter between Indy and Sophia is quite entertaining, at least as good as the "love interest" in the movies. Indeed, this is the first game I have ever played that really seemed to handle an avatar's love interest in a convincing and graceful way. When the inevitable "kiss" scene occurs, it caught me by complete surprise--though afterwards I realized how appropriate it was and how perfectly it had been timed. Indy and Sophia seem like real people rather than the cardboard cutouts we're used to seeing in GAGs. Perhaps the only other GAG character I can remember that even comes close is April Ryan from The Longest Journey.
I have been developing a theory of GAG development based in part on an essay by Henry Jenkins called "Game Design as Narrative Architecture." Jenkins talks about the importance of space in games, and I quite agree. I've been working with the idea that GAGs are first and foremost games about exploring and navigating virtual spaces. The best GAGs, therefore, are the ones with the most interesting and compelling virtual worlds. FoA has some wonderful spaces to explore--ancient ruins, pyramids, 1940s-era cities, digs, and, ultimately, the lost city of Atlantis. Though these worlds are perhaps not as well developed as those of Cyan's Myst series (which truly have a "lived in" feel), FoA gives us fun places to explore.
The next important aspect of any GAG is, of course, the way it handles aporias--that is, the puzzles that punctuate the gameplay. I've been gaining oodles of insight into good puzzle design by reading Don Norman's The Psychology of Everyday Things. Though I will not go into my thoughts on this now, suffice it to say that Norman's book can help critics understand what makes good puzzles work and bad puzzles fail. Perhaps most significantly, Norman offers the terms affordances and constraints to help us talk about design. The affordances are stuff that you can do (or think you can do) with an object. The constraints are those things that limit what you can do. A good GAG developer will balance these carefully, so that thoughtful players can discover the affordances and constraints in a painless way (i.e., without the need for tedious trial-and-error and resorting to a walkthrough). For instance, in many early Sierra games, the avatar will find lots of rocks. You can do so many different things with a rock in real life, but it's not clear at all what you're actually supposed to do with it in the game. In other words, it's impossible for the player to tell what actions the rock affords and what limitations constrain those actions. End result? Try every verb you can think of on the rock (throw rock, break rock, use rock) and do it on every possible object (at snake, at window). Bad design. Finally, the worst GAGs delight in inflicting severe punishment on players for slips and mistakes, while the best GAGs encourage players to experiment and reward them for taking risks.
FoA is full of examples of good puzzle design. For instance, the player learns early on what kind of actions are possible with the whip. It can be used to knock down certain objects or grab objects that are out of reach. It soon becomes obvious which situations call for the whip and which don't (thus saving the player the necessity of trying out the whip on everything he encounters). Most of the objects the avatar collects have a clearly-defined purpose. The three discs are good for putting on spindles, rotating, and thereby opening secret passages. Rods are good for sticking in shafts and pulling or pushing as levers. Certain objects (the busts above) are good for putting on weighted shelves and raising gates. One particularly good example involves a pump over a lava flow. The player notices a "pedestal" and a "plaque." Examining the plaque causes Indy to speculate that something is missing. The shape of the plaque matches up with the head of a statue the player finds elsewhere--thus, the shapes here constrain the possibilities and make it easier to determine what should happen. The statue's head turns out to be a spigot for the lava. Indy lets it run for awhile, then takes it off and shrugs--suggesting to the player that something is still not right. Eventually, the player learns to put a stony cup on the pedestal to catch the lava. When this is done successfully, Indy yells, "Aha!", thus signalling the player that he did the right thing. Feedback is so important in GAGs, and FoA hits just the right balance between reassuring the player that his actions were desirable and giving away too much. Games like Myst are notorious for providing little to no feedback--or even deliberately misleading feedback--to players. This leads to the legendary difficulty of many of Cyan's puzzles. I much prefer the "easier" puzzles of FoA.
FoA's interface is exactly what you might expect from a game created with the ScummVM. The controls are reminiscent of The Secret of Monkey Island. which was released two years earlier. I've already discussed that interface at length elsewhere, so I won't recap it here. It's a simple, straight-forward interface that is perhaps a bit less transparent than modern players might like (we could compare it to Loom's elegant and simplistic interface, which hid the "verb buttons"). The big question seems to be whether it is desirable to have the "verb buttons" visible on the screen, or whether they should be tucked behind a right-click mouse menu. Obviously, there is some redundancy here--perhaps OPEN, CLOSE, PULL, PUSH, and TALK TO could all be subsumed under USE. Games like Beneath a Steel Sky take this route--the left mouse button looks, the right mouse button "operates." There are a few moments in FoA where there is a difference between "push" and "pull," but these are probably not necessary (at any rate, they could have been handled differently).
During the "labyrinth" part of the game, the perspective shifts to top-down, making the game feel like a remediation of a paper-based maze. Not particularly enjoyable, but thankfully it's not too difficult.
FoA is also guilty of the "action infraction." There are a few action scenes sprinkled in--especially lots of fist-fighting matches with Nazi guards in the labyrinth. Thankfully, these segments can be avoided (Indy can just run away and try to avoid them), but if he fights, the action ends up being as simplistic as that experienced in the combat segments of Lure of the Temptress. They are not my favorite part of the game. Two other scenes involve piloting a hot-air balloon and a submarine. Neither are particularly enjoyable.
The best parts of FoA are undoubtedly the rich interactions between Indy and Sophia and the excellent writing. There are many decisions the player can make at various points that affect the narrative (including three multiple endings), so it's fun to save the game and see what happens each time. I appreciate when a game offers this kind of branching, even if it is pretty clear which ending is the "right one."
Many of the reviews I read of this game stressed the longevity of its popularity. I quite agree. I soon forgot that this game was made in 1992 and was limited to the technology of that time. Instead, I found myself completely immersed, and spent all day today playing (and finally beating)this game.
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