Journey to the Center of the Earth

Creative story sketch, many horrible design choices. Environments are fairly creative and nice graphics. Somebody had a good idea for a story, which could be an interesting adventure with some political undertones. Unhappily, such ideas are not fleshed out at all. What we are left with is a skeleton of a story, where characters tell you stuff or ask you to do tasks for no reason. Some elements of the story feel like a Syberia copy (minor spoiler: in Syberia, a cell phone served as a excellent contrast between the mundane world and increasingly fantastic scenes the main character was going through -- here, E-mails from the surface feel random, superficial and annoying). But even with shortcomings, the story is par for the course (of adventure games). The main problem is the awful gameplay! Some objects are un-pickable until some obscure programming flag allows otherwise; some actions can only be done if the character puts gloves on -- for no discernible reason, and with no feedback about this. Some places feel unfinished (many machines could be very interesting puzzles, but, alas, are just scenery). In many places, pathfinding was horrible with the character getting stuck. And later I found out that some puzzles are cut from this version (which, according to the walkthroughs I have seen, was a good thing, since it seems they made no sense). And, really, a Tower of Hanoi puzzle? With SEVEN rings??? Thank you for wasting 127 mouse clicks just right there!

As far as gameplay goes poor design choices in navigation, interaction and feedback kills what could have been pretty decent adventure game. Most of the time you solve puzzles by accident, as the game doesn't give that many pointers of what you should be doing. This also leads into situations, where you need to run from one place to an another, which is annoying especially because navigating from location to an another is rather clunky, thanks to bad hotspot system. This is only for harcore adventurers, I can't see other people enjoying this because of the bad design it has.

I enjoyed this game. I don't understand the low ratings. I have played adventure games since their infancy and I like this one.

Like most other adaptations of Jules Verne's books, Journey to the Center of the Earth doesn't go beyond the synopsis. Luckily the dart throws landed on some interesting concepts, which although don't fit together, would have made for an enjoyable budget title game. Sadly, the technical side is so badly put together, that I doubt anyone would want to complete this game, even with a walkthrough in hand. It seems you're a photographer who crashlands on a mysterious island housing overgrown plants, giants, dinosaurs, mammoths, and a century old technology stretched to its limits, yet somehow more advanced than ours. Exploring this world, you come across some nice wallpaper quality screens, which make for lousy level layouts, but they make you want to explore as much as possible. Sadly, the game is plagued with every point & click problem ever imagined, making this game almost the cliched old point & click game. Early on you'll discover that although the scenery is pretty, mainly due to the artsy angles chosen to display everything, it makes some areas of the level appear hidden, or unreachable. From the very start you'll get stuck not realizing that there's an entire section of the level you can explore. Coming across the first puzzles, you'll discover that everything you need to collect either looks like part of the scenery, or is so incredibly small, that it takes a magnifying glass to even spot it. Unfortunately, in order to maintain the artsy feel of the game, a lot of screens are empty, and only serve as transitions between points of interest. Meaning that if you get stuck and start frantically moving from screen to screen, you'll have more screens than usual to do that in. Hotspots are also incredibly small, so much so that putting the cursor on an item you can interact with and clicking on it won't always work - you need to place the cursor at just the right place. But my biggest gripe is the rigid path selection - you need to constantly herd your character.