Review Memento Mori Developer: Centauri Production Publisher: Got Game (N. America) Genre: Mystery/Adventure Release Date: July 29, 2009 (N. America) Platform: Review by Ray Ivey September 21, 2009		Buy this game at Trade for this game at:

Memento Mori is a great-looking third-person traditional point-and-click adventure game from Centauri Production, a Czech production house who’s made a bunch of games you may have never heard of.

The title of the game comes from the famous Latin phrase which translates as “remember that you will die.” Actually the phrase became the label for an entire genre of art, which was a discipline of creating images to remind us arrogant humans that we don’t have that much time to enjoy the party down here. Yay, thanks, like I needed reminding!

I fired up this game really wanting to like it. Well, that’s true of every game I fire up, but this one has a lovely opening cinematic, and the graphics are quite nice.

Then, alas, the actual game began.

The game follows the adventures of a Russian Interpol agent and a reformed French forger working to solve a mysterious series of art heists affecting the famed Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.

This being a very cinematic adventure, the cop (Lara) and the forger (Max) are both ridiculously cute, looking more like Gap models than seasoned professionals. That’s okay. The action bounces back and forth between them, which just goes to show that the makers of the game were at least perceptive enough to steal from good games.

Sadly, Memento Mori contains little of the snap which makes the games in the Broken Sword series so fun to play. Nico and George have nothing to worry about from Lara and Max.

Not only are the two leads dull, but the major authority figure in the game, a nasty and vindictive Russian Interpol official, is almost comically shrill and obtuse. He’s so obstructionist in his orders to the main characters that it actually skews your expectations of the plot. Evidently the way Max is paying for his forgery crime is to be this unpleasant guy’s slave for the rest of his life. (I guess I have a lot to learn about the Russian justice system.) Most of the rest of the characters don’t fare much better, with the possible exception of a sweet little sick girl who pines for a pet.

All of this is a shame, because the story deals with some potentially interesting stuff: art thefts, forgeries, international espionage, ancient conspiracies . . . but then makes the tragic mistake of only letting the player deal with the most trivial tasks. Examples of the thrilling puzzles you’ll need to solve to beat the game include heating up some water for a nice face wash, dealing with government bureaucracy in order to replace a cell phone battery, and finding a book from a crowded bookshelf. Not exactly anything to get the pulse racing. The single puzzle that deals with art forgery is done by the wrong character (the cop, not the forger, duh?) and is an unimaginative “circle the discrepancies” exercise.

There were so many places in this story where the player characters could have really gotten into some juicy puzzle-solving, but alas, it doesn’t happen. Nowhere is this flaw more vividly illustrated than during a potentially exciting sequence in which Max is exploring some creepy secret underground levels of the Hermitage. When I got to the sequence, I really perked up. “Hey, maybe things are going to finally get fun!” I thought. But within seconds Max was taken out of the action and the sequence was over. Yawn.

The game’s glacial pace is further exacerbated by the fact that it’s full of rote animations that take forever and can’t be skipped. For example, every time Max goes to visit his boss at Interpol, you have to suffer through an interminable animation of him slooooooowly closing the door and entering the room. This type of mistake simply shows an acute lack of sophistication on the part of the game developers.

Another dumb decision is the fact that when the character is thinking aloud (an adventure game staple, which provides feedback and exposition to the player) . . . his or her lips move. It’s just silly, and it makes the character look demented.

[Speaking of mistakes, one more small note: The game asserts that Finland is part of Scandinavia, which is most definitely is not.]

It’s also not localized well. Awkward translations abound. Here’s my favorite, from a phone message: “We were sorry you didn’t attend the barbeque of Bill.” Ouch.

The interface works reasonably well. There’s a very handy feature which lets you press the Tab button to reveal all of the hotspots in a scene, which streamlines the tedium somewhat.

The puzzles are mostly inventory-based, and it’s important to remember to look at everything from all possible angles or you could miss an important clue.

You can’t die in the game, so you don’t have to constantly save the game unless you want to.

On the plus side, this is one sweet-looking game. You get to see a nice variety of locations and many of them are simply beautiful. There’s a shot on a bridge in the Finnish woods that was so beautiful it reminded me of the splendid art in The Longest Journey. The designers are particularly strong when it comes to lustrous floors and soft and atmospheric lighting effects.

Here’s what I think the developers of Memento Mori should do. They should contract a real game developer, like, say, Jane Jensen or Charles Cecil, and have them come in and write a real game with real puzzles, and then the talented artists at Centauri Productions could produce it. That might be a game worth playing.

But this game does nothing more than remind the adventure game lover of the malaise our beloved genre currently finds itself in.

Final Grade: C- (find out more about our grading system)

If you liked this game, then Play: Masterpiece (yeah, the board game, it’s great) Watch: The Good Thief (2002) Read: The Forgery of Venus by Michael Gruber

System Requirements:

• Windows XP/Vista
• Pentium 4
• 512 MB RAM
• 128MB Video Card
• 3 GB free hard disk space
• DirectX 9.0c

This review is copyright Ray Ivey and Just Adventure and may not be republished elsewhere without the express written consent of the author. Republication of said review must also contain a link back to Just Adventure.