Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis

I have a great nostalgic attachment to those Scumm games and this one in particular but even if I still believe its importance and the genre history, man this was a tedious game to beat at points. There are many things designed to be hostile, like object to be reused that you specifically need to take back after the interaction, with the 9 verbs system sometimes not telling you you're in right direction. Some interactions do not make sense to me still, like getting the ticket from the beggar (I cannot recall any hint that he had it, apart from him being one of the few npcs around and being physically close to the target), and I don't like things like the scientist progressing without telling you (just because you acquired an object elsewhere). The art backgrounds are still gorgeous and unforgettable (the first half of the game really shining with all the different world location), the sense of adventure is there and some bits of dialogue between Indy and Sophia remains charming, too bad for the large amount of backtracking in the final sections. Those labyrinth sections are what is keeping me from replaying the alternate route.

The introduction to a game should be a tutorial to explain the mechanics. In this, you are just clicking on a specific object to make Indiana comedically fall to the floor below. When the game properly starts, you have a verb list because it is a SCUMM engine game. To interact with an object, you have to click a verb from the list of words, then click the object.

The gameplay has the flaws that these old point-and-click adventure games have. "Use" lever makes sense to me, but the game wouldn't want you to use that command in this situation. Instead, it will want "push" or "pull" depending on the position of the lever. When you are unsuccessful, you may assume you have the wrong solution, but it might just be that you used the wrong verb.

I'm not sure if it is a problem more to do with the Wii, but it was very easy to mis-click, which again, means you may think it's not the correct action, but you may just have missed by a few pixels.

Many people seem to regard this as a classic in the genre but I'm not sure why. There's plenty of times where it is not clear what you have to do, especially when it tries to mix up the gameplay like flying a hot air balloon, or following/avoiding people on a zoomed out aerial view.

There's also loads of puzzles with randomisation which can be just turning a dial to a different position, or doing more trial-and-error searching.

Some types of puzzle require you to get hints from a book Indy has in his possession, others can be diagrams found on the walls. There were definitely a few where I had do idea how to work it out other than using a walkthrough.

There's plenty of times where you need to reuse items, especially the stone disks. You need to pick them back up after you use them. If you forget, this can be extremely tedious to backtrack, especially in the final part of the game which is really long and tedious anyway.

The areas at the start of the game are quite small. You often get the chance to jump between different countries but when you get there, there might just be 3 screens to an area. This doesn't really give the scale of a grand adventure when you have brief stops in new locations.

The game has some replay value since it has branching paths at a certain point of the story. You can choose between "Fists", "Wits", "Team" which will present you with different puzzles and dialogue during the mid-section of the game.

There's voice acting for all characters but Indy is not Harrison Ford. The graphics hold up well, because it uses highly detailed pixel art. There's some cool effects like when Indy is in pitch black areas, and his eyes slowly adjust to the dark - slowly increasing visibility. In this situation, you can just about make out where objects are, but mainly just pixel hunt to find the interactable objects.

Since this is my first time playing, I don't have any kind of nostalgia for this. It's better than certain point-and-click games but has too much tedium and unclear objectives for my liking.