Also, a word on the technology behind the game: the core of Alida is heavily dependent on Quicktime. The engine is used for everything from displaying screens to integrating FMV to cross fading effects. It is absolutely imperative, if you have installed Quicktime on your own, to go into your options and let Quicktime download everything it possibly can. I am not joking here. When the game reminded me that it was built with Quicktime 6, I scoffed, knowing that my personal install of Quicktime 6.5 was perfectly set up to run videos. As it turns out, running Alida with a basic or customized version of Quicktime will have a huge number of problems. Image transitions won’t fade into one another and movies displayed will have noticeable white flashes. It wasn't until I let the Quicktime auto-updater run wild that Alida ran much smoother on my PC.

While letting Quicktime install literally everything it wishes on your computer is an unsavory necessity, it does fix the majority of problems users will probably experience with the game. Note that I said "majority"; Alida does have bugs. I encountered a frequent exception with ntdll.dll, especially towards the end of the game. While the solution at this point is as simple as saving often, I was fairly disappointed with the technical core behind Alida. When you're worried about transition lag or crashing to desktop, the pleasure of solving many of Alida's puzzles is drastically reduced.

And Alida does have many of them— puzzles, that is. The entire island, guitar and all, is built around them. While it is pretty ludicrous for a band of musicians to have the technical prowess to develop complex puzzles having to do with light, sound and astronomy, they constitute the primary game experience. After exploring the world of Alida for the first time, your goal is obvious: get the guitar to play again. This simple-sounding task is extraordinarily complex and involves gallivanting around the island solving a variety of puzzles to get different pieces of machinery to work. Although the puzzles are not nearly as connected to one another as with the puzzles of Riven, Alida does have a diverse variety and most are quite enjoyable. The difficulty is moderate, with most puzzles requiring at least good note-taking skills to solve.

Despite their difficulty, these are not puzzles for the casual adventure gamer. Alida's puzzles are extremely time-consuming and are definitely the sort you have to tell yourself, "Okay, Self. Today, I am going to mow the lawn, do the dishes, and map out how to solve Puzzle XX in Alida." While gamers who enjoy complex first-person adventures may appreciate these puzzles, most gamers will not. What cements this statement is the fact that at least 70% of the puzzles in Alida offer *no* immediate aural or visual confirmation of a successful solution. So the player might spent his entire afternoon working out the puzzle to access a bit of machinery and then find out that he actually solved it three hours earlier without realizing he had actually solved anything. The "try and check" philosophy completely fails in Alida, so most gamers will either be walking away or hitting walkthroughs after struggling with the puzzles.

I should also make note of Alida's atmosphere. Although the world doesn't overwhelm you with interactivity, the background music and sound effects do wonders towards making the game experience come alive. There are a plethora of sound effects in the game, with every lever and knob having a unique sound effect. I was considerably surprised by the raw diversity of the effects in the game. The background music is more ambient than orchestrated, but it does complement the puzzles and sound effects very well. This combination, of soothing background music and varied, if somewhat muted, sound effects, makes the experience of playing Alida quite leisurely.

As a seasoned gamer, I spent approximately 13 hours finishing the game and although I did have to consult a walkthrough for a number of puzzles, Alida succeeds at providing a developed world to explore. It is nice to find a lower-budget game that has enough "meat" to justify its commercial release. If I was truly taking my time, I might have spent a good 15-20 hours to finish Alida, choosing to explore the island more fully and work out some of the tougher puzzles on my own. Considering its $30 price tag ($10 cheaper than the original Macintosh version), Alida does indeed deliver a complete adventure experience.

Despite the failings I have noted in Alida’s puzzle design, installation process, and maximum resolution, Alida is still (by most definitions of the phrase) a good game. With its beautiful, crisp visuals and at least 10-15 hours of gameplay, Alida comes across as a multi-platform labor of love. Indeed, it warms my heart to see such games still being produced by the Macintosh gaming community. But please remember—if the thought of working out puzzles like I have described brings out the onion in you, there are easily much better choices in first-person adventures to chose from. While the problems that exist in Alida are unfortunate, the game is still recommendable to die-hard first-person adventure devotees, especially those who don’t mind rolling up their sleeves and getting down and dirty with puzzles.