Review: Ankh - Curse of the Scarab King |
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| Written by Sam Bridgett | ||||
| Monday, 22 September 2008 | ||||
Page 1 of 2 Ah, the point-and-click adventure. Look at PC gaming 15 years ago and you’d have seen an improbable amount of the beggars (Full Throttle, Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max, and of course the legendary Monkey Island series) flowing out of LucasArts’ studios. But then games started gettin’ all fancy, and it looked like the point-and-clicker, with its simple interface, heavy reliance on sharp scripts, and baffling “use baby on chainsaw” logic, was dead. Then came the DS, and people realised the genre could live again...
Ankh actually started out on PC a couple of years ago, winning several awards in its native Germany and spawning a series. The developers, Deck13 Interactive, were so determined to bring back that classic LucasArts feel that near the beginning of the game a character actually says, “The developers wanted to bring back that classic LucasArts feel.” So you point, you click, you combine things with things, you use the ol’ noodle, you laugh at the jokes. Sounds just the thing for a 10-minute head-scratcher on the bus to work, right? Well… Ankh is not a great game. An agreeable one, certainly. The puzzles are fairly well thought out, using a mix of the genre’s typical weird logic and, more pleasingly, some actual smarts. The script isn’t hilarious – in some places it’s downright cringeworthy – but it has its moments (usually when cheerfully demolishing the fourth wall, as in the above-mentioned conversation with a pair of rubbish assassins who take the time to explain the game’s mechanics). The world is quite pretty and detailed to look at, although the character design has a rounded, rather ugly look. If this is your sort of thing, then the PC version’s probably worth a punt. (Continued on next page)
![]() Here’s Assil, looking a bit lost. Get used to this |
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