Amazon: Guardians of Eden

Moby ID: 3287
DOS Specs

Description official description

Amazon: Guardians of Eden is an adventure which tries to capture the feel of a "B series" set in 1957 - complete with cliffhanger endings at the end of each chapter. The plot follows the adventure of Jason Roberts, whose brother was attacked during an expedition into the Amazon. Now Roberts starts his own expedition to help his brother and eventually race for a lost treasure.

Jason is moved with the keyboard, while actions are performed with a point & click interface, which means that the player combines a symbol from the command line or the inventory with another object or person in the game world. Most puzzles are inventory-based or multiple-choice dialogues, but there are also some action-based mini games, e.g. a canoe ride. Many puzzles require quick thinking (player character is killed if it takes the player too long to figure out the solution) and "pixel hunting" for small hot spots on the screen. During some sequences the player has to switch between Jason and the female lead character to progress.

An in-game hint system is available, but nevertheless it is possible to get stuck in a dead end, having missed an important item from a previous chapter.

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Credits (DOS version)

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Story
Programming
Art Direction
Additional Programming
Sound
Cinematography
Imaging
Artists
Original Score
On-line Hints
Produced by
The Cast
[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 71% (based on 10 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.5 out of 5 (based on 22 ratings with 1 reviews)

An 'attempt' at making a game in the style of old movie serials.

The Good
The games story may be pretty terrible and the acting poor (the next bit will divulge more) but the interface and puzzle management work quite well. Controlling the main character with the keyboard makes the boring motion of watching a character cross the screen more fun, though this was necessary as using the mouse to control your character is very frustrating. The puzzles are logically thought out and when you've cracked them you can see the point to them, there's no real random combining of objects here. The game comes with a built in hint system, which is absolutely invaluable to get around any leaps of logic there are, or unusual ways of interacting with objects.

The Bad
Hmm, where to begin? The story is terrible, it tries to follow in the vein of 1940's movie serials and this seems to be an excuse for terrible writing and hammy acting. The story is divided up into serial chapters with cliff hanger endings, except these chapters aren't evenly spaced so you might be playing for half an hour in one chapter, five minutes in the next. The cliff hanger endings are a joke, they're often no more than someone suddenly asking a question, and they come at strange moments making it difficult to save, which then means you have to watch them over and over. The game actually takes about five times as long as the story is to play, as it's easy to get caught in a dead end which it points out to you, except it sometimes means you have to go back four or five episodes to pick up the necessary one pixel graphic you missed. Many of the sequences were timed, which meant playing the same thing over and over many times. The acting was terrible and the graphic do a ham job trying to blend digitised actors into hand drawn backgrounds, resulting in real actors standing next to cartoon characters. There is a small smattering of digitised speech, but this is so low quality it might have well been missed out, the story plays well enough without it.

The Bottom Line
I would have thought something better could come from Chris Jones, before going on to make the classic Under a Killing Moon, but alas this isn't it. At least there are no bugs and you can play the game through, but it doesn't deliver a good, or funny story, doesn't make you feel like you're in any of the locales, and comes across as someone trying to copy a bad format, and making it worse. Sorry.

DOS · by RussS (807) · 2009

Trivia

References

At one point in the game, when you reach the secret vault, if you look at the machine on the right it will say that it is an "Interociter" which was found in the labs of "Dr. Meecham". This is a reference to the old film This Island Earth where Dr. Cal Meacham constructs the mysterious device called Interocitor, guided by aliens.

Speech

The game features fully digitized speech using Access' Real Sound technology - even on the PC speaker.

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  • MobyGames ID: 3287
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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Istari.

Linux, Windows, Macintosh added by MAT.

Additional contributors: Jeanne, phlux, Boston Low, Patrick Bregger.

Game added February 7, 2001. Last modified January 5, 2024.