Hexuma: Das Auge des Kal

The Good
What can I say - graphics? After all, it's a text adventure with some illustrations. But those are nicely done and add to the overall atmosphere of the game. The sound is done by the grandmaster Chris Huelsbeck - surely not his best work (can you say Turrican II? :) but mood-enhancing alright. The seven different input methods were ignored by me - I always used typing because all other methods were crap.

Best of it is the tight, suspenseful story - the diary which is included in the box tells the dark and sinister events which occur before the player gets involved. I loved this diary - it's so scary and really well written, Stephen King couldn't do it better! This writing continues in the game text, which is always descriptive, interesting and sometimes really funny.

Ah by the way, the parser is really good and even recognizes malformed syntax.

The Bad
Well... it was so damn hard I never finished it. To get into the other worlds from the house, you didn't need to do much - but the things you had to do were beyond my intelligence! I mean, the author surely was brilliant in expression and building suspense - but who the bloody hell should guess his thoughts so he gets on the right way? I hat a complete solution once and worked my way through the house and half of the robot world - but even with the printed solution, I got stuck, simply because the text was so interpretable I never got a clue :(

The Bottom Line
The game is definitely not straightforward - it's one of the hardest adventure games I've ever seen and involves - you guess - a lot of typing. Nothing for the casual gamer, and absolutely nothing for the Windows addict (e.g. point-and-click gamer :) But if you are a mastermind and solved every puzzle on every adventure (even on the Infocom ones) and you speak German - get Hexuma, it's worth it!