Nikopol: Secrets of the Immortals - Review

As you can tell from my recent reviews that I have been on an adventurer game kick recently. While Back to the Future: The Game and Ceville have held my attention there is one game that I got a while back as part of an indie bundle. That game was, Nikopol: Secrets of the Immortals. Nikopol is a game based off of a trilogy of graphic novels released as far back as 1993. Also, in french. Which makes this review really hard as I have no frame of reference. Does the game hold up on it's own? Let's find out.

No. I spoiled it for you. You can stop reading now. But if I must continue I would say that characters have to personality, world has no value to it, and the story holds no weight. The "story" is that your dad is frozen as a for of imprisonment. His ship crashes and he escapes with the help of the Egyptian god, Horus. You are then told by Anubis to stop them. Oh, and space jellyfish. I'm sure your thinking, "But there's more than that right?", and to you I say, maybe. I wouldn't know. I'm sure that if I had a deeper understanding of the movie and the series it would all make sense.

As my last review was less about the game and more about the story this is the reverse. The puzzles in this game are good. None of the, "Lets put random pieces on the ground and see if they can go all MacGyver on it". No. It's about reasonable thinking in a world where reasonable thing does not exist. I would say that the first 10 minutes of the game would have to be the highlight of the whole experience. You are being chased by a monster and you must hurry to solve puzzles to escape and trap it. It's a well done form of motivation. Nothing say, "Move you ass!", quite like a 400p monster. And may I say that the game does look pretty good, and the sound design is also noteworthy.

As much as I say that the puzzles are better in this game, they do have their problems. At one point I solved a puzzle just by randomly hitting switches an turning nodes. I wasn't even trying to look for a pattern.

Most the problems I have are mainly that it's based off of those damn graphic novels. If they had at least tried to make it a little more independent it could have been and interesting experience, but all the gaps in the story it really wants you to read around and watch the movie to really get it. This is a shame as the world is unique and you wish you had time to explore it but you are never in one place for long and there is never any diversity in environments. I game that leads heavily on it's story but doesn't tell you a story. Odd.

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