Adventure Gamers - Forums

The rest of the game runs reasonably well, but the “sand dabs” (flat things swimming through the quicksand below the angler platform) fishing puzzle slows down the mouse cursor so bad, it’s unplayable.

I already have the US patch v1.1 installed. I have a Nvidia video card.

I did & failed to solve the problem by
* lower process priority
* setting maximum pre-rendered frames to 1 (Nvidia control panel)
* enable/disable anti-aliasing (game)

If anyone remembers his/her working solution for this, please post it here.

For me that patch also didn’t do much. I managed to catch a sand dab by putting the cursor somewhere and just waiting for one to show up where my cursor was. I didn’t finish the game though because on a lucky day Anne decided to walk out of the screen and not come back. I was relieved because I still have nightmares about Paradise. One of the worst games I’ve ever played.

Thanks for sharing your nightmare, tsa. Through sheer dumb luck(?) I avoided becoming stuck with the sand dabs forever. I happened to click on my fishing rod the moment my character had climbed into the chair. By chance or default, there was a hookable sand dab right below me - cutscene, minigame over, problem solved.

I think I finished the game the same day (remembering just enough from ages ago). Aiming the turret on the Black Vault was another case of playing at ~1/2 fps at times, but the last major obstacle. Unfortunately I couldn’t remember just where I was supposed to aim… so it took some time. A LOT OF TIME. The explosions look so nice in ultra slow motion.

Anyway, reading all the old troubleshooting guides wasn’t useless. One takeaway for anyone reading this, you can’t make enough savegames with this game, just to be on the safe side. I didn’t encounter any of the real bugs. Also be aware that animated characters may occasionally obscure hotspots, especially towards the end when you’re performing magic rituals.

It’s a pity, really, the game does look gorgeous and the endling is very, uhm, “emotional”, but the gameplay is effed up. Like some kids hacked into Mr Sokal’s computer and decided to make an adventure game with what they found. Besides the unpolished interface and the gameplay issues, there are the leopard parts in realtime-3D… they look & feel worse than Tomb Raider 2 (1997) without textures. Oh well, after I had figured out how to play them, they were fun.

So I say this game is definitely worth playing when you’ve run through Sokal’s oeuvre ad nauseum. The story is interesting, and the ending is great.