Reviewed: February 1, 2004
Reviewed by: Carl Seward
Publisher
The Adventure Company
Developer
Detalion
Released: November 25, 2003
Genre: Adventure
Players: 1
ESRB: Everyone
7
9
8
6
7.5
System Requirements
Recommended System
Mysterious Journey II: Chameleon is the sequel to the wildly popular Schizm adventure game boasts stunningly beautiful 360-degree panoramic views, challenging puzzles throughout and a rich and evolving storyline.
You wake up in a derelict space station with a bad headache and no idea who you are or why the heck you’re on a derelict space station with a headache to begin with. A jerk of a hologram shows up and explains you are Sen Geder and are charged with nearly destroying the planet that lies below. For your crimes against humanity you are sentenced to join the dead space station as it descends from orbit and crashes back to the planet. This leaves you no choice but to explore the ship to find a way out. After solving an array of puzzles you are able to fly an escape pod down to the planet. Now the real fun begins! (kind of)...
You explore the world and interact with puzzles through a first-person point of view using an interface that’s extremely simple. If you can point and click, then you can play this game. If you can’t point and click, don’t panic, you always have the old standby WADS keyboard option to bail you out.
I don’t know if the game designers had a bridge fetish or what but out of the first five or six puzzles the majority of them are “bridge” puzzles. There are so many bridge puzzles that I thought I was playing Bridges over Mysterious Journey. Where’s the imagination in that? You’ve been plopped into a truly fantastic alien environment and the best kind of interactive brainteasers involve such basic and mundane tasks getting from point A to point B via a bridge? Not the most exciting way to play an adventure game.
The actual puzzles themselves range in difficulty and are fun to solve which is really why anybody would play the game anyway. The puzzles do provide a good backbone for the gameplay I just wish there was a bit more imagination in how they were implemented with the storyline.
Speaking of the storylines, I didn’t have the opportunity to play Schizm so I don’t know how strong it was then but this time around there’s something lacking. The plot is kind of just thrown at you by the jerk hologram and then through various cut scenes you’re supposed to get an idea about the truth concerning what happened to planet. There’s the old clichéd story of two different races, one being more inclined to use machines and the second more involved with nature. They don’t like each other and are out to destroy one another. You’re character is given the ability to have his true identity hidden and the other characters see him as someone else, hence the “chameleon” effect.
There’s no tension or real drama. The cut scenes provide more comedy than anything. The dialogue with other characters is stilted and the inner dialogue is corny and unnecessary.
If I had a choice between playing the game with the silly storyline and the cut scenes or just kind of wandering around to solve the puzzles in peace and quiet, I’d choose the latter. The storyline just isn't that interesting enough to get me pumped up to spend time solving some of the more difficult puzzles. This is a case where I think a lot more mystery and a less complicated storyline would have worked great.
The graphics are as good as you can get. There’s a lot of detail and I was really impressed with the reality of the environment on the space ship and on the planet. The characters are rendered adequately enough although I think they tended to be a bit generic in the faces.
I highly recommend that you have 256 megs of RAM and 128 megs on your video card. The basic system requirements ain’t going to cut it and you’ll get frustrated by the choppiness of the cut scenes.
The environmental sounds are first class. The score is definitely one of the best things about the game. It’s kind of creepy but almost meditative. It’s not overbearing but still adds a nice element that goes well with the highly rendered landscapes. The voice acting tends to be melodramatic but it comes through clear as a bell.
Depending on how motivated you are to solve the puzzles there’s easily twenty-plus hours of game play. They replay value is absolutely nil but I think most people understand that going in anyway. One aspect that makes me a little more lenient in the ratings is the price tag. For only twenty bucks you get to solve some puzzles, wander around some cool places and generally have a good time.
Mysterious Journey II: Chameleon is a lot like a mediocre sci-fi novel. It has a great atmosphere, some fascinating and innovative tech stuff but flat characters and a mundane storyline that ultimately kill its potential. But for twenty bucks you could do a lot worse. It sounds like a back-handed compliment and maybe it is. The bottom line is that if you enjoy solving puzzles then you won’t ever be completely disappointed with MJ2. You might’ve hoped for more, but that’s not to say you won’t have any fun.