Visionary author Jules Verne would seem to be the perfect source for good adventure games. His stories of exploration and discovery perfectly lend themselves to the genre. I'd love to see The Mysterious Island, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and Around the World in Eighty Days turned into games. A few years ago adventure game fans (this one, anyway) were crushed to learn that SouthPeak's much-ballyhooed Verne game, an update of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, had been cancelled.

Well, adventure-gaming Jules Verne lovers are in luck, sort of. Dreamcatcher has released its own riff on the story of mad genius Captain Nemo. The bad news is that the game isn't nearly as ambitious as SouthPeak's was.

The good news is that, unlike SouthPeak's costly fiasco, this game was actually finished and released!

Dreamcatcher's The Mystery of the Nautilus is, like Captain Nemo's famed U-boat itself, sturdily constructed. In this traditional first-person adventure you play a modern sailor who stumbles across the fabled submarine quite by accident. You decide to take a look inside (weirdly, alone) and promptly get stuck in the mysterious craft. The rest of the game chronicles your attempts to escape from the Nautilus.

The game is presented with smoothly-panning 360 degree visibility. The interface is full of helpful little touches that aren't really helpful. For instance, there's an area of the interface where you can see "sketches" of the various rooms and compartments in the sub. However, these are nothing more than small directly-overhead screenshots of the rooms. I never found a use for them. However, the various icon incarnations of the pointer are consistent and clear.

At first, you are only able to enter a few compartments of the puzzling submarine, but as you solve more puzzles, you're able to open up more and more areas of the ship. Early on you stumble across a video diary made by Captain Nemo himself, and throughout the game he helps fill in details on the mysterious goings on aboard.

Though you get to see and hear the good Captain throughout the proceedings, there is no character interaction in the game (unless you count a certain spectacular denizen of the deep).

Graphically, the game is a disappointment. While the cut scenes look terrific, the gameplay screens are woefully low-resolution, giving a muddy look to the entire game. (This is the exact same problem Dreamcatcher's recent The Cameron Files had.) For years, adventure games had a visual edge on games in many other genres, because graphics in most adventure games were pre-rendered. Real-time-rendered graphics just could not compete with the lush and realistic vistas we enjoyed in games like Riven, Morpheus, and Timelapse. However, the times they are a-changin', and we live in an era of dazzlingly improving real-time-rendered images in games. Check out Max Payne. Check out Dungeon Siege. It's a very bad time for an adventure game to come up short in the looks department.

In Mystery of the Nautilus, this graphics failing makes the inventory puzzles much more challenging than they should be. The puzzles generally consist of the "pick up everything you see, it'll eventually be used somewhere" variety. And considering many of the environments are a fuzzy, flat near-monotone, it can be quite difficult to find all of the objects you need. Once you find the objects, the puzzles generally make sense, with a couple of troubling exceptions. The biggest howler involves a rope and a periodic table. Honestly, would it ever occur to you to "use" a rope on a periodic table? Me, neither.

However, the various rooms and compartments on the mysterious vessel are, in general, attractive and interesting. There are lovely staterooms, a library, parlors, and other fun areas to explore. Throughout the adventure your character's biggest challenge will be overcoming Captain Nemo's well-meaning but overreaching security system. The heart of the puzzles in the game deal with overcoming this challenging obstacle.

In fact, you'll have the most fun with The Mystery of the Nautilus if you look at it as one big escape puzzle, because that's basically what it is. To successfully crack the various puzzles required for escape, you'll need to pay close attention as you gradually open up the various diverse areas of the boat. You'll need to think of the entire vessel as a whole, remember what's come before and continue to ask yourself, "Okay, now what might be possible?"

If you're willing to be patient with the tricky exploration due to muddy graphics, you can have a lot of fun with The Mystery of the Nautilus.

Final Grade: C

System Requirements:

WINDOWS® 98/ME/XP
Pentium® II 300 MHz
64 Mb RAM
12 x CD-ROM Drive
DirectX® 8.0 Compatible Video Card
DirectX® 8.0 Compatible Sound Card