Post Description

Clandestiny

Dit spel is van dezelfde makers van 7th guest(heb ik inmiddels ook gepost) en the 11th hour(post ik morgen). Ondanks dat het spel uit het jaar 1996 komt ziet het er grafisch erg goed uit.

Voor de puzzel fans is dit een echte aanrader en een must have

In Trilobyte's Clandestiny, you control the fate of one Andrew MacPhiles, who has recently inherited a Scottish castle full of ghosts, and an earldom along with it. Along with his girlfriend Paula (who wants to be the next Countess MacPhiles) and a friendly handyman named Fergus, Andrew must solve the mystery of the MacPhiles curse. Clandestiny is the third installment in Trilobyte's series of puzzle games (after The Seventh Guest and The 11th Hour) and provides an interesting mix of first-person gameplay and third-person cartoon segments. Leaving behind the tired venue of the Stauf mansion used in the first two games, Clandestiny is much more interesting, absorbing and humorous with a well-written plot tying the abstract puzzles together. Generally, the cartoons in Clandestiny work better at immersing the player in the story than did the full-motion video (and marginal acting) used in The 11th Hour. As a result, Clandestiny comes across as a nice improvement in Trilobyte's lineage, and we hope this type of game design continues to be pursued. 

Clandestiny's gameplay is very light-hearted, if you can forgive the occasional pun. We particularly liked the joke (90 KB) by the Riddling Rat. Everything is given an authentic touch, even down to a blast of bagpipe music when starting the game and a real Scottish cookbook within the castle. Paula's appearance is very attractive - it's nice to see a good-looking cartoon for a change. Manipulation of inventory items is absent since all of the game's puzzles are stand-alone mental challenges. An online "Guidebook to Scotland" contains hints for puzzles and riddles, as well as educational background information. A few locations in the game provide additional information. Web-based anagram generators may be helpful in solving or shedding light on some of the riddles. 

The music in Clandestiny is quite good, usually with acoustic instrumentation and what sounds like authentic Scottish melodies. The organ music played in the castle's chapel is particularly moody. Although several dozen megabytes on the CD-ROM's are used to store background-music files in MPEG format, the segments ended up sounding rather short. 

Graphic backgrounds are rendered, with a cartoon overlay during the animation sequences. Many of the backgrounds are repeated on both CD-ROM's, which is a nicely-done way of reducing the amount of disk swapping required to play the game. In fact, only one CD-ROM change is necessary if the gameplay sequence in the following walkthrough is used. 

There are a few minor flaws in Clandestiny, but none of them show-stoppers. Only nine save-game slots are provided, far too few considering the number of rooms in the castle. As a workaround, separate sequences of SCLAN.* files can be maintained and copied to the installation directory as needed (for better results, do the copying after the game is exited). Flames and other live-action sprites appear motionless unless a cartoon segment is running; in other words, there are no incidental animations adding to the atmosphere. It would have been more interesting to be able to set the puzzle difficulty level on the fly (as in Jewels of the Oracle), instead of having to reinstall the whole game in order to change the level. Also, there is no way to tell what difficulty level you're currently playing at. In the door riddles, it would have been nice to be able to use the keyboard to enter letters, rather than having to carefully position a cursor with the mouse. Some of the display angles in the backgrounds are a bit tricky; for example, a door will be accessible in one view but inaccessible in another. Probably the most annoying thing about the game was the occasional "lying" cursor - situations in which a shaking-hand cursor indicated no path was available when one actually could be found by clicking anyway. Unless these occurrences (and there are several) are bugs, one wonders what the game designers had in mind in requiring a lot of extra pixel searching, defeating the idea of a smart cursor. 

But overall, Clandestiny is an enjoyable experience for players who like the challenge of puzzles and riddles. It is clearly an improvement over both of its predecessors, with a humorous and engrossing plot doing a much better than usual job of tying puzzles together. 

Veel plezier met deze game

Groetjes Razorblade1979

Bestandsnaam: Clandestiny of te downloaden via de NZB knop