Macintosh

Santa Fe Mysteries: The Elk Moon Murder

Elk Moon is not intended to keep an audience of hardcore gaming detectives enthralled for weeks on end. Rather, it is meant to be played through, in a relatively brief amount of time, by a more general audience looking for a good story with some mild brain teasers - a task it accomplishes quite nicely.

I was expecting to find a murder mystery designed and executed like Spycraft, but The Elk Moon Murder falls short of the standard set by Activision's earlier game: disappointingly short duration of gameplay, limited range of tasks and possible interactions, and surprisingly open-ended, trial-and-error endgame seriously compromise the game's value. If you like fast-paced interactive movies, you won't be disappointed; but pacing itself is not enough to redeem this game. Sierra's spanking new Urban Runner looks very much like a competitor in this field (assuming it will be released for the Mac); perhaps it will be the one to deliver the goods.

The Elk Moon Murder is a race against time and nasty surprises set up to trip up unsuspecting adventurers by the game's creators. The game is technically very well made but calling it an adventure game is probably not appropriate due to the lack of puzzles. The game's story is not uninteresting, although it is perhaps a little too complex and it's not easy to keep track of who's who, especially at the beginning.