Odyssey: The Search for Ulysses

The Good
Graphics: The mainly dark colours add to the games atmosphere. Gameplay: There are some interesting puzzles.

The Bad
Graphics: Everything is dark and pixelated and it's extremely hard to find any kind of useful clues or objects. Changing the games resolution doesn't help at all. The characters are all blocky, with ugly textures. The character's animation is awful as well which makes them move like puppets or robots without any facial expressions.

Interface: This game has probably the worst interface I ever saw. Instead of using a clean and useful mouse interface the game designers decided to use the worst keyboard control I ever met in a game. You spend most of your game time trying to prevent your character from bumping into objects, going around in circles or just dying. The inventory is handled in a similarly unusable way.

Gameplay: The gameplay consist of painstakingly trying to move your character the way you want, trying to find out what the whole thing is about (even if you read Homer's "Iliad" or "Odyssey"), trying to find anything useful while going through endless and sometimes deadly dialog lines, trying to find any useful clue on the ugly and blurred background.

Sound/Music: I suppose they used their kitchen utilities to produce the sounds for this game.

The Bottom Line
This game is a shame for both Cryo and the wonderful tales of Homer. It does have some nice puzzles but it drove me mad because of the absolutely useless, awkward and painstaking keyboard control, the indiscernible clues and items and the almost endless and senseless dialogs. There is nothing about this game to make it worth spending any of your precious game time on it.

The Good
The mythological setting of the game is different and the story moves along as you talk to non-player characters, whose voiceovers in the English version are good, for the most part. It also has a nice musical soundtrack.

Odyssey is shipped with 2 CD-Roms. The first is used solely for installation while the second is for gameplay. Therefore, no disk swapping is necessary. Having 30 game save slots was plenty for my needs, and the Load/Save interface was easy to use. A good thing, too, because I was reloading saved games often!

The Bad
This game should have been a “point-and-click” mouse-driven adventure, but the designers opted for the keyboard, supposedly to give us “more control” over character movement. While that is not usually a bad thing and has been a good choice in many role-playing and action games, it is ridiculous in Odyssey. Using the keyboard actually hinders movement as your character clumsily moves around bumping into things. Many times you cannot see your character on screen, very disturbing especially when you’re trying to avoid the monster of the moment.

Although it’s nice to be able to change the resolution within the game itself, the characters are still blocky in appearance, as are their surroundings. They tried adding color to some of the graphic screens for variety, it seems, but most of the scenery is drab beige with little diversity. None of the characters’ features are very interesting and their facial expressions display no emotion, nor do their mouths move when they speak.

Conversations are basically text menus on a silly moving pop-up display containing general topics. No clue is given what you will ask, so if you happen to pick the wrong topic, you can die without warning.

Non-existent puzzle clues, when there are puzzles at all, means you spend most of your time guessing. In one instance, the clues for an upcoming puzzle are given in a long dissertation in a remote location. You have no opportunity to have them repeated and you’re not given enough time to write down anything but the basics. Almost useless, but better than nothing, I suppose. In addition, there are no “hot spots” nor descriptions as you approach a possible usable item.

The Bottom Line
The reason I got this game in the first place was because it was based on Mythology, which I thought would be a whimsical diversion from the norm. I finished it only because I had heard it had a good ending. Otherwise, it would have been trashed after the first hour.

Although you do have the chance to be a part mythological events and confront monsters and characters from those stories, the game doesn’t do them justice. This should have been an action game, but even then, it would have needed a much better interface and graphical atmosphere to make it in today’s marketplace. Overall, I found Odyssey a big disappointment.