Adventure Gamers - Forums

Hello, I’m Arthur C. Clarke and welcome to Rama

Rama is first-person adventure game from 1996 based on the Arthur C Clarke’s books. A mysterious spaceship arrives at the Solar System. International Space Agency sends a 12 members team to explore and the captain dies days after arriving. Player is astronaut AFGNCAAP that is sent to replace him. Game start with the player arrival at Rama.

I’ve already started, basically just saw the intro and the videos from the crew. Video quality is pretty good, too bad it doesn’t have captions.
Game works great with SCUMMVM.

Advie - 15 January 2018 08:43 PM

here are my three tips wilco:

‘Puck’ is always a big use, nothing spoiling about, he is built as your verb system (if i remember…) among other things.

always make you first exploration casual, the 2nd you is when you start picking inventory items, that doesn’t mean you cannot do this from the beginning, but you rather have the first exploration without any searching makes collecting everything at the 2nd much more easier.

last you are good at mathematics i know, so enjoy this.

I can see what you mean about exploring first, I started picking up everything and my inventory was clogged fast, picked up a bunch of those small plaques. I did manage to open a first door to the city? Some simple mathemathical problems, that seemed like the Ramians(?!?) studying our numerical system or something and some human objects.  Interesting.

Died a couple of times and death screen is Arthur C Clark apologizing that had to happen and giving some tips.

Some pics:

Our good miniature friend Puck

One of the lazy members of team waiting for me to do everything

The killer mechanical crabs

And some simple math:

Solving this puzzle! What a rush!

Enjoying the game, even if I have no idea what Rama is about and there’s a little too much of gathering plaques and figuring out patterns.

Another one

After solving the first ones is this it becomes easier, kind of reminds of The Witness how the dificulty progresses.

I’ve arrived in the second part I think, inside de sea of ice. Not sure if this if the timed sequence. They said they are evacuating Rama in 2 hours but don’t see any indication of a countdown. Is this it?
Been exploring for some time, starting to figuring out how the mechanisms work here (but not much…).

So that wasn’t the section with the time limit and not I’m at the section with the countdown.
The worst thing about it is that I didn’t do a couple of things that I could have done before entering it and to go back but to do that I’ll have to replay a whole big section.
Such a nice game so far, why did they had to destroy it with a terrible design decision…

Anyway that section (that I’ll have to replay…) was very nice, learning about an alien species, how they communicate and solve a bunch a puzzles with that.

Finished it. Good thing about adventures is that is replaying sections that seemed like 3 hours usually only take 20 minutes knowing the answers.

Except for the what could be called a dead-end in this case that I talked earlier, if you’ve done everything possible before entering the timed section, it’s not so bad. It does give you plenty of time to explore and since it’s a small section doesn’t take long to get to the place you were before.
I did use the walkthrough but tried not to spoil too much, mainly tried to crack the codes and alien systems without help but went to look if I was missing any object before moving very far because there are a couple of pixel hunting places.

The death screen if the timer reaches zero is pretty amusing since Arthur C Clarke shows up basically motivating the player by telling him what happens if he manages to solve it and promising a secret at the end. No idea if it’s the same as the book but in my opinion the ending is weak after a promising mystery, in factm the whole scifi story was not that strong, I prefered Gateway in that aspect.

My overall opinion is that it’s a good game with some frustrating parts, namely the beginning that is very disjointed with the player left wandering arounf picking up lots of objects in seemingly random places. And of course the terrible design decision at the end. But when everything starts clicking it gets better and best parts are the puzzles that involve studying the alien systems.