Having missed Secret Files: Tunguska, I was looking forward to playing Secret Files 2: Puritas Cordis, given the glowing reviews received for the previous game from the Fushionsphere Systems stable. The reception given to Tunguska applauded a classic point-and-click adventure game, engaging main protagonists and an element of narrative sophistication combined with some knotty puzzles to solve. In Puritas Cordis I found some of that.
The storyline may have its own quirks but somehow seems familiar. When Nina Kalenkov boards a cruise ship, she has no idea that she is about to embark on a journey that will involve the machinations of a secret society and culminate in a race against time to rescue the world from the brink of global catastrophe. Not quite what she had in mind when she packed her bikini. A variety of attractive locations are visited, from Hamburg to Paris (I was glad to get off the cruise ship and into the Indonesian jungle), and whether your are playing as Tina or her ex-boyfriend Max, the puzzles veer from the quaint (a can of peanuts and a monkey in a zoo) to the head-bangingly protracted (the immovable model UFO). Whenever I play adventure games, they can be relied upon to reaffirm how stupid I am. The combination of items required to get past an obstacle at times make the tortuous devilry of the Jigsaw Killer in the Saw films seem like the naïve belief in invisibility under a table by a toddler in a game of hide-and-seek. The visual puzzles, variously involving the shifting of letters and symbols to spell out solutions or the moving of chess pieces on a grid, are kinder to one’s patience and nerves.
Too much can be made of the bizarre combination of items in adventure games in order to solve puzzles and the nonsense of huge objects being stored in a character’s backpack or pockets. It is a curious characteristic that goes with the territory of the genre. That Nina can hide a large lifeboat oar about her person is not something that should concern any adventure gamer unless they are insistent on abnormal levels of realism in a virtual world. It doesn’t seem to concern Nina. Comparisons are unavoidable with what you might expect in a Dan Brown-like novel, but such material was being explored in adventure games long before a whole industry of sub-genre secret society pulp fiction was spawned.
The cutaways are nicely done and the environments are crisp and colourful; the interface is intuitive and uncluttered (no surprise that the game is available in handheld format) and the dialogue delivered with some vigour. Although one of the key obstacles to my enjoyment of the game was not the actress playing the voice of Nina but the painfully slow way the dialogue is delivered when she is thinking aloud. While it’s true that I’m being treated like the idiot I am, with heavy pointers on what I should do next to solve a particular problem, it did begin to wear me down. Perhaps something was lost in translation from the German original.
My main quibble is that in a gaming genre which often relies heavily for its effect on lateral thinking and an element of revelation in fantastical storylines, what it perhaps needs now is some revelation in the inventiveness of the game play. Simply ramping up the level of difficulty and obscurity in the puzzles does not necessarily indicate the same level of lateral thinking from designers that is yet required by the gamers in solving them. Adding another element of gaming ingenuity surely would. True, I don’t quite know what that would be. I have faith that at some point adventure game designers will. That quibble aside, as an example of the genre the game lives up to its name: Puritas Cordis, roughly ‘purity of heart’. Because for good solid traditional adventure-gaming fare you need look no further.
MORE REVIEWS
Bookmark this post with: