Summary: 15/100

Introduction

This PC game takes place in an Aztec/Mayan/Art Deco world of the dead. You play Manny Calaveras, a dead soul who works as a travel agent in the Underworld, taking freshly-dead people and sending them on to their appropriate destinations. Something is corrupt in the Department of the Dead where you work, and you are launched into a process of discovering what's going on behind the scenes.

Technicially, the game is a 3D rendered environment with dynamic 3D characters. You control Manny directly from the keyboard. Your entire interface is based around directing Manny, having him pick up and put down things, and a generic "action" key. There's background music and sound effects galore, and a host of supporting characters with whom you talk through multiple-choice selections. You hear your character speak and hear them respond.

I hated this game. There are some things to like - I wasn't particularly drawn to the aesthetics, but the game definitely has its own look, and there's a lot to be said for that. The acting is above-average. The problem is that the game itself is a combination of the worst aspects of computer games - bizarre, improbable magic devices that have to be combined in eactly the right bizarre ways in order to cause other bizarre, unpredictable things to happen. There's virtually no feedback; if you don't know what to do, you're stuck. If you're even actually doing the right thing, but you haven't completed it, you don't know that you're even on the right track. Given that some of the necessary steps are pretty complicated and time-consuming, this lack of feedback is a real problem.

I eventually turned to the hint book from Prima, supplemented with a walkthrough from the net. And even then I couldn't get through the game! There are several places where you have to do things just so. For example, at one point you have to place a sign in the right place in a clearing. If your car is nearby, it won't work. Even knowing from the hint book exactly what I was supposed to do, I couldn't do it because the state of my screen didn't exactly match what the game designers demanded. It took me a half-hour to try every variation on the game state until I could get the necessary thing to happen. This is just terrible.

I played much less than a quarter of the way through, because it eventually got too painful to play. When you want to get into and out of your car, for example, there's a lengthy process where your character walks around to the door, opens it, climbs in, closes the door, and settles himself in. Then the engine roars for a bit, and only then are you back in control. It takes forever and quickly becomes boring and painful to endure.

Summary

This game seems to have had a very creative inspiration, and some good production values (though there are some terrible spots as well). But the way the game works, the nature of the puzzles, and the tedium of the interface are all awful, leading me to abandon the game only partway through, despite having the hint book by my side. This game was a terrible disappointment.

Gameplay: D
Design: B
Story: unknown
Overall score: D