Dagger of Amon Ra features a nice period setup, but despite promising to be a murder mystery, borderlines on splatter and pulp entertainment in the end. In it's heart it's a rather solid action game, which relies a bit too much on pixel hunting puzzles. Despite being a relatively late Sierra game, it still features situations which can be made unwinnable by failing to do something easily missable earlier on, a sign of bad game design. Progress in the game often relies on invisible triggers, like talking to a character about an unimportant topic somewhere makes a key character appear elsewhere. Progress thus seems tied to "fate", not player's own actions. The graphics, music and general atmosphere are good, but programming and scriptwriting are not up to par, leaving the game with a general feeling of unfinishedness. This leads to illogical situations where Laura can refer to things that have not been said yet, and characters otherwise acting illogically. This is especially problematic because the player is supposed to solve a murder mystery through logic! The sometimes fuzzy design tends to leave players at a loss as to whether their inability to progress in the plot is their own fault, or a result of a bug or weak design. The characters are charming in their own pulp-esque manner, but are rather one-dimensional stereotypes that do not lend depth into the credibility of the plot. In general, many plot elements seem rather haphazardly thrown together. The weak writing makes the mystery near-impossible to solve completely no matter how thoroughly the player combs the setting, which the game nonetheless expects the player to do, and this seriously detracts from the overall experience. A more consistent writing would have produced a true game, now we only got imitation pearls.
