| Celtica | Artech Studios / H+A Entertainment | 1998 | |
|---|---|---|---|
 |
When released, Celtica received some of the worst reviews of any game since Of Light and Darkness. Is Celtica an innovative, breakthrough game that pushes the envelope of what an adventure game can do? Of course not. Did it deserve the eyebrow-singeing reviews it received? Absolutely not. It's a first-person point-and-click adventure set on a tiny, mysterious, beautiful and extremely green island off the west Irish coast. The game begins with your character on a small hill near the tip of the island. Several exploratory paths are available to you, including a lighthouse, an abandoned church, and a cemetery. The most intriguing spot to begin, however, is a tiny gazebo on a tiny spit of land accessible by a way cool wooden footbridge and contains a lovely windchime puzzle and a handy telescope that gives an important clue. It has a reasonably intriguing backstory about various groups of people in the past who have come to the island and attempted to piece together and then use some ancient Celtic magic. This includes a turn-of-the-century group of utopians led by a charismatic young madman, and (more interestingly) a couple of WWII Nazis secretly stationed on the island. The Celtic theme is perfect for this type of game, and Celtica shamelessly panders to the Enya-lover in all of us. You can't take two steps in this game without tripping over a stone circle, crucifix or Celtic knot. The gameplay includes reading the inevitable discovered journal, fixing intriguing broken mechanisms of all sorts, deciphering symbols, finding keys, and gradually opening more and more of the island up for exploration. This Myst copy is a game is full of absolutely beautiful graphics work. It's in slideshow format, which is a bit retro for a game released in 1998, but the slides are gorgeous. In addition to the stunning greenscapes, the game contains a beautiful, eerily pristine mansion to explore, and perhaps most unexpectedly, a very creepy Nazi bunker, complete with a crippled but still sinister U-boat. | ||
|
|
|
||
|
1 2 |
|
||
