Being with the Dark Being

A Review of Lighthouse

by Edmond Meinfelder

Myst. The mere mention of the name brings instant recognition. As this is a game review of Sierra's latest adventure, Lighthouse, you might think you know where we are headed. However, rather than walk through the tired hall of also-rans, Sierra manages to create an evocative world holding an interesting adventure within.

It is curious. Lighthouse has the same quality of art as Myst. In fact, Lighthouse goes one step farther with animations on many screens, but I never felt I was anywhere but behind my keyboard. I blame the interface for dragging me down to a tedious reality. Perhaps I am old and set in my small ways, but I firmly believe none of the puzzles in an adventure should exist with in the adventure game interface. Sadly, Lighthouse tritely attempts to hide puzzles behind the game’s interface.

Stretch your wrists and clean your mouse, we are in for a pixel hunt. How does one locate all the interactive objects in Lighthouse? Why, by moving and clicking the mouse over the entire screen. You see, by having contextual hotspots lighting up as done in Legend’s Mission Critical or Lucas Arts’ Day of the tentacle, players can not experience the true challenge (tedium, really) of an exhaustive pixel hunt. By having the items not explicitly denoted by the game, players get to solve the "find the interactive item" puzzle repeatedly. This is what I mean by having the puzzle in the game interface. User interfaces should never be puzzles. Game designers resorting to interface puzzles are either lazy, uninspired or sadistic. I suspect all three.

Adventure games, dating back to the 1977 original eponymously titled "Advent" (the DEC PDP-10 had 6-letter filenames), have a sense of location. Because of the impact Will Crother’s Advent exerted on a generation of gamers, for years we went north, south, east, west and sometimes up and down (often referred to as NEWS directions). Rooms were easily mappable and simply arranged and navigated. Usually, though, some credit was due to the reduced memory limitations of the day. Years ago, games could not afford to have empty rooms hogging precious memory space.

As adventure games became more graphic, this simple NEWS system often conflicted with the graphic effects game designers wished to include in their games. In what direction does the player travel if he/she crawls in a hole sloping down and to the right and does it matter? With all the visual cues, many gamers decided exact directions did not matter. What did matter, however, was easy navigation. Sadly, Lighthouse lacks an easy navigation interface.

In the small picture, Lighthouse is easily navigable. Again, you slide the cursor about invisible regions of the screen and the cursor changes into a directional cursor, indication a possible direction for the player to travel. This system fails in the grand scheme of things. Some directions players travel are irregular and unintuitive. For example, in Dr. Krick’s Lighthouse, players can walk out of the study and to the left or out of the study and to the right, never just out of the study.

Skipping empty areas where no gameplay exists makes sense, but this is not what Lighthouse does. In several parts of the game, player’s make tedious step-like movements through empty areas. Combine the high number of empty areas with irregular connections and you have an annoying navigation interface. This is, I admit, a minor nit to pick. An almost unworthy nit, but I found getting about Lighthouse tedious.

When I play adventure games, I wish to take part in story, doing impressive acts requiring great leaps of intuition. Sadly, these days, solving adventure games become more a crawling into the mind of the game designer rather than taking part in the story. Lighthouse is an exception. Many puzzles make sense: use keys on the car to travel to the Lighthouse, search about the doorstep for a key to the locked house. Unfortunately, when I saw the Chinese sliding puzzle in the puzzle box, I took ill.

Sliding puzzles and mazes stink of filler. I do not wish to solve Chinese puzzles, mazes, or the classic N-queens problem. I do not want to solve any of the long list of tired old mental teasers. I can solve them whenever I wish. I do not want to pay $50 simply to solve canned puzzles on my computer. However, if you can manage the trying 4x5 Chinese sliding puzzle in Lighthouse, the worst is past.

Lighthouse uses quality digital music and 3d-rendered art to set the mood. Sadly, the mood is shallow and hardly immersive. Myst often had a single looping sound, like crashing waves or wind. This simple use of sound in Myst heightened the experience, creating a sense of isolation supported by the game’s plot.

Technically, Lighthouse's effort is better, but artistically the entire package lacks the creative presentation found in Myst. Why? Myst was seamless. The story starts with a found book. You, the player, stumble across the book and find yourself in a world of adventure. Myst's interface was utterly transparent. The world of Myst is lonely yet strangely beautiful in an alien but familiar sense. Lighthouse tries to recapture Mysts' different but similar look with its exotic technology in the parallel world. While the art is often thrills in many areas, it bores. The empty areas with beach or Dr. Crick's house can be only so stunning; this is say, not very exciting at all.

Lighthouse, with one awful exception, possesses good puzzles, but its presentation of the story and use of music and sound pale when compared to the game Lighthouse aspires to be. Ironically, I felt Myst had consistently tedious puzzles. If you can get by the tedium of the Lighthouse's Chinese puzzle, you will find Lighthouse a grand adventure, despite a complete lack of innovation. True, Lighthouse fails to exceed Myst's multimedia highwater mark in telling a story with mood, but as adventure games go, this effort is good, but hardly epic.

486 DX2-66, Windows 3.1 or '95,
8 megabytes of memory, 2x CD ROM,
soundcard

Overall Score:

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