Armaeth: The Lost Kingdom is a very straightforward point and click style adventure game released in the early nineties by Real World Multimedia. It is superbly colorful, with excellent innovative and interesting graphics for its day, and offers great sound effects to accompany the visuals and set the mood. The look and feel of the game is not unlike Sierra’s Kings Quest series.
The story of Armaeth: The Lost Kingdom involves the young hero Killian attempting to locate the lost city of Armaeth, which was built by dwarves in ancient time but lost somehow in later years.
Armaeth: The Lost Kingdom is a very straightforward point and click style adventure game released in the early nineties by Real World Multimedia. It is superbly colorful, with excellent innovative and interesting graphics for its day, and offers great sound effects to accompany the visuals and set the mood. The look and feel of the game is not unlike Sierra’s Kings Quest series.
The story of Armaeth: The Lost Kingdom involves the young hero Killian attempting to locate the lost city of Armaeth, which was built by dwarves in ancient time but lost somehow in later years. To do this, he must overcome obstacles, talk to people he meets and solve simplistic puzzles and challenges in order to advance the story and continue on his quest.
While all of this
sounds entertaining and wonderful, Armaeth: The Lost Kingdom does have one very obvious drawback, the interface. It is unhandy, if not completely clumsy. The screenshots will show a series of icons along the top of the screen, each with a different function. The icons do not seem to be reflective of their duties and take a lot of trial and error to sort out. There is a way to circumvent this by using the parser and issuing commands via text, but that sort of defeats the point of a point and click adventure. The puzzles become harder than they should be (for the most part they are pretty simple) because the gamer has to fumble around so much to get to what he is looking to do. However, the game does feature a walk through for those people who become too frustrated with the interface to continue in good humor.
It is also somewhat difficult to save and reload games, as those icons are part of the above mentioned clunky user interface. But on the flip side, the plot is clear cut, interesting and easy to follow, and there are not a lot of characters to keep track of that can confuse the puzzler. There are some open-ended areas that create different possible endings, which makes for a more interesting gaming experience, and the puzzles are pretty logical. By easily solving a few puzzles, the game moves along a good pace that will not frustrate the gamer nearly as much as the interface itself.
