Based on my previous misfortune to be assigned games to review that I found to be about as enthralling - and challenging - as a debate with Sarah Palin (The Experiment, Cleopatra), Randy surely suppressed a smug chuckle or two upon being informed of my initial impressions after playing through the first ten minutes of Everlight of Magic & Power: there is a goofy shopkeeper with over-exaggerated buck teeth and the main character seems to be some smart-ass teen who will be guided through the game by a Tinkerbell wannabe.

Furthermore, this is one of those annoying games where, when you click on an object for a description, you character will walk - slowly, mind you - all the way across the screen before describing it. Look, if he can see it from across the room, then he can describe it from across the room. Who does this in real life? If you’re standing at the top of the stairs and want your husband to bring up the comforter that is at the bottom of the stairs, would you point at the comforter and then walk down the stairs and say “please bring me the comforter and then walk back up the stairs and wait for him to bring it?” (Not that my husband would bring me anything anyhow).

Well, buckle your seat belts fellow adventure gamers for after having completed Everlight of Magic & Power, the above paragraph is really my only major complaint (well, maybe the lame title could use some tweaking, but other than that…)! Now that you’ve picked yourself up off the floor….

The ‘smart-ass’ teen is named Melvin and he is actually just a pretty normal kid who enters a shop to escape the rain and discovers he may have latent magical powers. Despite the negative first impression, he, thankfully, never veers into the smarmy territory occupied by Simon the Sorcerer. He is, in fact, an interesting character in that he must undertake a journey to conquer man’s most common fears – Failure, Loneliness, Disappointment, Fear Itself & Death - and unlike most games of this sort, he has somewhat matured by the end of the game.

Fiona is the Tinkerbell wannabe and while she is not as well-rounded a character as Melvin, she does have her charms and faults, one of which is to repeat nasty gossip. She basically though serves as an interactive help feature throughout your journey. As for Mr. Teeth, the goofy shopkeeper, well, maybe he’ll come off better in the sequel.

Melvin is magically transported to the cursed village of Tallen. By day, Tallen’s inhabitants go about their business and live their lives. But by night, they become their polar opposite personality - the mousey post office clerk becomes a serial killer scouring the Town Square for victims, the soft spoken smithy morphs into a belligerent town drunk and the richest man in town, a beggar. It’s an interesting concept to be sure, but the game then takes it one step further by providing the player with the ability to switch between daytime and nighttime. So maybe information that couldn’t be pried from the closed lip librarian during afternoon hours is easily obtained from his braggadocio alter ego after closing time.

Everlight is spread over five chapters and is played from the third person point-of-view. The detailed 2D backgrounds and animation have a nice, fantasy feel to them, but there were also moments when my computer seemed to kick into slo-motion and characters crawled across the screen. Thankfully, these moments are few and seemed to be limited to specific processor hogging areas. The voice-acting is well-done. No one person stands out as being exceptional, but neither are there any clunkers in the lot which is a good thing as there is lots and lots of dialogue. Travel between areas of the village is expedited by clicking on a most welcome map

The puzzles are of the type where simple problems have very complicated solutions that only become apparent after much conversation and skullduggery. Sure, some of them may seem nonsensical, but that is a large part of the fun in a game like Everlight. I will say this though, even though some of the puzzle solutions may have seemed absurd, they were always logical and clues were always available somewhere in the game. Inventory items can also be combined to create new items

Speaking of which, there is a multi-level help system within the game that masquerades as Fiona’s Notes. It is a magical book that not only provides a helpful list of Unfinished and Completed Tasks, but also offers hints when you are stuck on a puzzle or on how to next proceed. And in what may be a first in any game, if you find a puzzle to be too difficult, the difficulty level can be adjusted anytime during gameplay in the options menu. You can also, as is typical in many of today’s games, press the letter ‘H’ on your keyboard to highlight all of the active objects in an area. If you don’t like this type of feature, then don’t use it, but I often found it helpful when I was deciding what to do next and wondered if maybe I had overlooked an item.

Another plus is that it has a deliciously dry sense of humor. A list of banned items confiscated by the town councilors includes a shelf of first-person-shooter games. A magic closet is accorded the proper deference and a staid, elderly woman becomes at night, what else, but an octogenarian dominatrix. While some of the humor does at time veer towards lewd, it never really crosses that boundary.

There are some minor, niggling problems that are eating away at me. There is a lot of switching between am/pm which can really play havoc with certain aspects of the game, such as when you need to obtain some objects for a picnic later that evening, but must perform multiple daytime/nighttime changes beforehand. So if you have already changed the village to nighttime and back half a dozen times before the evening picnic, then how is it still that same evening? Well, the game is meant to be fun so unless you’re Stephen Hawking, this is something you probably shouldn’t let interfere with your enjoyment.

There is also at times a lack of continuity. Early in the game when Melvin encounters a talking mouse, he never seems to give it a second thought, but when he later encounters a talking stag, he is aghast, “What, you can talk!” he exclaims. Now let me ask you, how is it that someone can believe that a rodent can speak, but is shocked by a hoofed mammal doing the same? This pales in comparison though to the ‘how come Goofy can talk but Pluto can’t?’ heated discussion that has plagued Disney scholars for decades.

Finally, the ending begs some further resolution, but it could also be that the developers wanted to save some storyline to carry over into a possible sequel.

But none of these problems are deal breakers. So if you like a fanciful game, with meaty puzzles, a fun cast of characters and a playing time that is easily 15+ hours - if you don’t cheat and consult a walkthrough - then Everlight of Magic and Power should be just your cup of tea.

System Requirements:

• OS: Windows® 2000/XP/Vista
• CPU: 2.6 GHz Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon
• RAM: 1 GB
• Disk Space: 4 GB Available
• Video Card: DirectX® 9.0 Compatible (Radeon x800, GeForce 6800)
• Sound: DirectX® 9.0 Compatible
• DVD-ROM: 4x
• DirectX: 9.0c
• Input: Keyboard, Mouse and 5.1 Speakers