REVIEW: CrazySoft releases puzzle adventure game “Lost in the Pyramid” for PPC / Smartphone / Palm

CrazySoft may not be unknown to many Pocket PC and, particularly, Palm OS gamers. They have released four Pocket PC (and several Palm) games so far.

Up to now, I haven’t reviewed their titles because I’ve found them all pretty mediocre (at most) with a very high price tag and, therefore, didn’t want to even waste time on writing a word on them. Here’s a quick list of these games:

The Bejeweled-clone (with some twists – you can only destroy rows next to pipes) Paintball II. However, it’s in no way so good as Bejeweled and can’t even beat freeware (!) titles like Snowed In 5 - Flaked Out.

Snake Deluxe: a typical Snake clone. This is probably one of the best (and considerably more expensive than the rest of earlier titles) CrazySoft titles.

Frutakia: a casino slot-based puzzle game. Nothing really interesting in here either.

Personality Psychology Pro: too bad this yes/no/maybe game doesn’t contain any “filtering logic” to filter out contradicting responses. With that, it would be interesting and usable (particularly because it has a lot of subgames); in its present form, there isn’t much point in paying big bucks for it. The “Fun game” tests are simply bad (especially the fill-in tests) and has a very bad GUI; for example, the animal preference input fields, instead of having some kind of intelligent, mutually self-resetting radio buttons a lot of other titles use, numbers must be manually filled in.

Best Tarot Pro: I didn’t find this game pretty interesting either.

Now that they have released an “adventure” game, “Lost in the Pyramid”, I’ve decided to, finally, publish a review, which not only reviews their latest release, but also the earlier titles.

Availability, compatibility

It’s available here. There is a pretty usable trial version available.

Unlike with the earlier titles, which are between 12,95$ and 16,95$; this one costs 19,95$, that is, it’s pretty expensive, taken into account that REAL Pocket PC adventure games (Fade, Broken Sword etc, not to mention MS-DOS emulation of, say, Legend Entertainment titles, which are freely accessible on the Web) don’t cost (much) more.

Compatibility-wise, I haven’t encountered any problems on my WM2003+ (no pre-WM2003 support, sorry) devices (iPAQ 2210, WM5 hx4700 (!), PL720, x51v, Wizard, Universal). It is indeed compatible with all screen resolutions (including square screen devices) / orientations and even ran in left-handed landscape mode on my Universal and didn’t even have problems with dynamic screen orientation changing while running.

Gameplay

In a word: it’s very weak. The biggest problems:

1. the program doesn’t even try to communicate with the user through static text dialogs but through a scrolling status line. It’s not only slow (setting the “game” speed to “Highest” in Settings (see this) only makes the problem even worse because, then, the scrolling becomes unbearably fast and you can’t scroll back), but also very awkward and by itself can render a game hard to please the player. (I wish this were the only serious drawback of the title…) Switching into Landscape mode on WM2003SE+ models alleviates the problem a bit as can be seen in here; still, the way the game displays messages remains really awkward.

   Note that none of the "classic" adventures had such an awkward interface. Even with graphics-packed for example Magnetic Scrolls titles (example screenshot here) leave at least 2-3 static rows at the bottom of the screen to display descriptions / messages and, when you wanted to "scroll back", you could easily do that. Here, it's impossible.

2. it’s VERY linear. Give a try to any “decent” game (those of Legend Entertainment or the Fade Team) to see how a real adventure game should look like.
3. The ways you can die are pretty silly. No decent adventure game should use such silly ways of killing the player (unless this is an adventure parody, that is).
4. The graphics are not only functional but, in cases, don't show objects; see the case of the metal plate half-buried in the ground in front of the pyramid.

Other problems

1. As with all the other CrazySoft games, the game only consist of a big EXE file. On most Pocket PC’s, it takes the operating system at least 1-2 seconds (on pre-WM5 devices when it’s installed to the RAM, about a second; on WM5 devices, 3-4 seconds) to read up the game icon from the EXE file. This is plain unacceptable if you have a WM5 device because you will for example encounter big slowdowns even when opening the Start menu after a reset when the start menu history still contains the game icon.
2. As with all the other CrazySoft games, there is no music at all.
3. The sound setting in the game overrides the system setting. For example, when you switch sound off on the system level but start the game, the sound will be restored. This isn't what you'll prefer when, for example, you would like to kill some time during the meeting and you forget beforehand to disable sounds in the game itself ;)
4. As with all the other CrazySoft games, while the text / GUI widgets, the title logo (screenshot here) and hand-drawn graphics are rendered in high-resolution, some of the pre-rendered graphics are low-resolution only; an example of this is here.

Pros

1. As with all the other CrazySoft games, is the support for all kinds of screen resolutions. In addition, this title supports five languages. The English / German of the title aren’t bad: I’ve already seen games of foreign origin with even worse English (see for example the soon-to-be-mentioned Nuclear Winter) There are, however, big mistakes like “no respond” instead of “no response” in the English.
2. The questions / answers can be pretty funny. I only wish you didn't die because of giving the wrong answer to these questions.

Sound

Not many sounds (and the existing ones can easily get on your nerves (as with some of their other titles; for example, Paintball II); for example, the one when you die); no music at all. All in all, very weak.

Graphics

The graphics is, for the most part (except for some digitized pictures), very simple (let’s say “functional”). It indeed brings back the C64 times, in, unfortunately, the bad sense of the word – remember the “functional” graphics of, say, Maniac Mansion? Pyramids is even worse and can’t even be compared to other static titles like Mallocware’s great RPG Nuclear Time.

Compared to classic adventure games like Fade / Legend Entertainment’s (emulated) games / the Palm OS-only Acedior / Broken Sword / Gilbert Goodmate / Myst / Myst 2 / Tetraedge Games' titles,

there isn’t much comparison. Lost in the Pyramid is incomparably weaker.

Verdict

Unfortunately, while earlier titles of the developer were passable to mediocre (but, as has already been stated, in no way recommended), this title is probably one of the worst adventure games ever released for the Pocket PC. If you want to play a silly game with illogical yes/no questions suddenly leading to death, you may want to give it a try. Otherwise, if you're a more serious adventure player, I don’t even tell you to give it a try because it’s simply not worth wasting any time on it. As I've already pointed out, this game doesn't have much to do with "real" adventures like the Zork, the Legend Entertainment or the Magnetic Scrolls games. Those games, albeit, in cases, 25 years old, were much-much better in almost every respect.

The only upside of the game, in my opinion, is the funny approach it uses (if you can stand getting killed because you give the wrong answer in a completely illogical situation). The above-explained GUI shortages (most importantly, the, for finding some objects, useless graphics and the complete lack of static message dialogs), however, really make playing this game awkward. Also, the high price tag ($20!) is againts getting the title.

Other reviews worth checking out

PocketPlayers.de (Babelfish “translation” here)

UPDATE (04/06/2007): Eric's review