Sights and Sounds of Multimedia
By George Harding
Keepsake …
This Adventure Company game puts you in the character of Lydia, who is trying to find her friend Celeste at Dragonvale Academy. Lydia will try to become a wizard, but the first step is finding Celeste. Not only can’t she find her friend, there’s nobody around.
Dragonvale Academy is unbelievably huge. It must have been built when materials and labor were very cheap! The staircases are long and wide, but there are only a few places to go on them. It’s a little tricky to find where you must go to accomplish a task, and it takes a fair amount of walking around to get there.
The game finds you at the entrance to the Academy and you have to find Zak, currently a wolf, but who was transformed from a dragon. He’s been locked in a cabinet and you must find him and release him. This is the first of many puzzles, some simple, some quite complex.
The Academy has a few problems. The water doesn’t flow, for example. You must find the pump and fix it, not a simple task, I guarantee you!
Zak has a problem, too. He wants to go back to being a dragon, which requires a transformation potion. You must collect the ingredients and create the potion. This takes quite a few steps, moving around the Academy collecting stuff.
You have some interaction with an Italian guy who says he sells stuff to the students at the Academy. You have to help him, too.
The movement methods is similar to may other games. You move the mouse to the point you want your character to go and click. The cursor symbol changes from time to time. An arrow simply moves your character in that direction. A white ball means that you move to that point and get a different viewpoint. To pick up items, the cursor changes to a hand. To talk with someone, the cursor changes to a question mark in a balloon.
Zak trails you without any work on your part. His movement, as well as Lydia’s is not very smooth. It’s kind of a gliding walk. Zak moves in unpredictable ways, but almost always accompanies you wherever you go.
When you have the ingredients for Zak’s transformation potion, he changes not to a dragon, but to a cat! This means yet more searching.
The scenery is eyepopping! The Academy is marvelous, built of stone with many colored windows. The furniture, too, is finely crafted. The authors have clearly spent much time perfecting the environment.
In the first part of the game, you must complete a number of tasks, and then take an examination. There are three of these examinations. When you have completed all of them successfully, you move on to the upper floors of the Academy. Here you move from place to place by transporters and transmitter gates. This simplifies movement considerably.
The game saving methodology is somewhat different, although it appears that you can save an indefinite number of times. To save, you click on a button in the lower left of the screen, click again on one of the listed items, then click on Save, Quit or Save and Quit. There is no way to go back to a previous save other than quitting, then choosing a previous saved screen.
The communications are a bit different, too. Whenever talking starts, a section at the bottom of the screen shows the written version of the script along with the speaking character’s picture. Communication proceeds without intervention from you, most of the time. Sometimes, you are presented with several choices of talk; you usually have to select the first one and then each of the others in order. You can pause the talking or cause it to proceed without waiting for the entire spoken message.
When you confront a puzzle and don’t know what to do, there is a built-in hint system. Each time you click, the hint becomes more specific until finally, Zak offers to solve the puzzle himself. This is a unique feature of games!
For those that like puzzles, this may be your game! The last third of the game is one puzzle after another and each gets more complex than the previous one. The telescope puzzle is particularly vexing!
This was an interesting game, with elements I had not seen in other games of this type. The conversation methodology was cumbersome and the trekking from one part of the Academy to another was tiresome. It’s was easy for me to get lost and have to return to a previous save and try again. The Academy layout is fairly complex and a wrong turn will either take you to a cul-de-sac or lead you somewhere you don’t presently want to go.
Keepsake by The Adventure Company www.adventurecompanygames.com
Requires WIN ME or higher, 1 GHz P3 or Athlon processor, 512 MB RAM, 1.4 GB hard disk, 32 MB 3D video card
Price about $30
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