Funny thing about
Cracking the Conspiracy. Many critics have raved about it as being a superior independent adventure game. In fact, you will find few negative reviews of it.
I hated it. One of the few AG's I never finished.
And while it is node-based, it is certainly not a Myst-clone. In the section that I played, it had character interaction (with a belligerent ghost) and the typical amount of inventory collecting. Mostly, it seemed completely maze-based. First was a cave maze, then a maze through the outer area of some secret government complex. Once you penetrate that outer level, you find that you have merely made your way into another mazelike area of the complex, etc. I, at least, got absolutely none of the
Myst feeling from the game and can't consider it even remotely a Myst-clone, despite it's node-based slideshow presentation.
That being said, let's look at that list again:
Quote:
Crystal Key
TimeLapse
Cracking the Conspiracy
Egypt
Egypt II
Schizm
Traitors Gate
Starship Titanic
Aztec
Lighthouse
Qin
Rama
|
Virtually every AG critic includes
Timelapse among the best games in the genre. Opinions were wildly split on
Schizm. (Personally, I found the puzzling too obscurely clued for the most part, but can't fault the game's presentation.)
Qin has been quite well reviewed by most sites, though I found it lacking... mostly in the graphics department. It was certainly original and interesting. And
Lighthouse is quite well-loved by a huge section of the AG public. Since we have dismissed most of the others as not being actual "Myst-clones," and many of those dismissed games have been positively reviewd by a number of critics (
Rama, Traitor's Gate, Starship Titanic), that leaves only the horrid
Crystal Key to support the argument that "there has been a whole slew of terrible Myst-clones."
(I
do agree that the two
Egypt games were vomitous.)
