Ceville Review

It seems that point and click adventures have become more what you'd find down the back of a sofa, than an entry into the mainstream games line up. With so much emphasis on more immersive games things like first person shooters, sports simulations and massively multiplayer online games, amongst others you'd be forgiven for thinking that point and click just couldn't hold its own against the big guns.

However, that's where Realmforge Studios have decided to step up to the table with the intention of creating something to fill the void. Ceville drops you straight into the action with you taking part as Ceville, evil ruler of the fantasy realm of Faeryanis. Held against your will by two guards of somewhat questionable intelligence, you have to make your way out of this predicament and onto other more pressing issues.

The puzzles in Ceville offer enough variety and challenge to keep the game from feeling too easy over the time you're playing, and getting toward the end of the game, the links you have to make can become quite tricky indeed. Thankfully, things don't seem to get as strange as adventure games like Discworld, but will certainly have hardened adventure gamers scratching their heads for a while. Adding to this complexity are the sections of controlling two characters, which adds a multitude of ‘who does what' situations. Sometimes finding key items to storyline progression can become a bit irksome, namely because the item hasn't been hinted at clearly enough, it's too small and nestled away into the backdrop or the chance is that one character has to take the item in order to pass it onto another.

On the humour side of things, Ceville has enough quips and quirks to keep a smile on your face whilst you're playing, which is nice for a game of this calibre given the length and sometimes infuriating periods where you are left asking yourself over and over, ‘what on Earth do I do now?' The humour just keeps you going. There are also plenty of stabs at modern day affairs, which again, left me chuckling away adding some much needed wit and humour to a game that could be left feeling a bit dry and lifeless at times without.

The voice acting is to be praised, for a game to use such a lot of dialog the need for good voice narration is essential. It pulls this off very well and the voice actors have managed to fill the role of the characters exceptionally, which adds to their believability and overall immersion in the title. This all coming from a small 10 man German company makes me wonder why others have struggled to do the same thing.

There are a few gripes to the game, mostly nothing too major that will detract from the experience enough to be troublesome, but firstly, the least problematic was the lack of a tutorial mode, or step through, to initiate the player into the game. While this is a point and click adventure, it took me a brief while to figure out the controls which led to me not being able to move around and interact with objects as efficiently as I should have. The controls are all detailed in the manual, but for the current generation of gamers who feel that they need to be guided through in game, the manual just doesn't cut it at times.

Second on the list of gripes are the loading times. The in game tips that display while the game is loading even mention that they are only there while the game is loading as it has long wait times to get all of its thinking done. Which is a shame, as loading in the middle of a story can remove the feeling of immersion within the world and its characters. Again, this isn't a major concern, more something that would have been nice to have been without whilst playing.

Lastly, however, is the Big One. Whilst playing Ceville, the game dropped me out to the desktop on more than one occasion. If this had only happened once, then I could have put it down to sheer bad luck, but since it had happened on a few occasions, I deemed this to be a problem with the game's code somewhere. This is most likely something a patch would fix, and I wouldn't be too surprised to see Realmforge making headway for the fix as soon as they can pinpoint what it is.

The graphics fit the bill well, remaining somewhat comical as many point and click adventures are, but yet serious enough for it to look very impressive with the locations that have been created. Cut scenes also add to the story line, helping it to progress evenly, rather than removing you completely from the game play and having you watch the game roll by. It's nice to see a game getting the balance between too much story line, and not enough game play just right.

In summary to the game, it's a pleasing point and clicker, and a welcome return to the genre that has seen more than its fair share of dust on the shelf. If anything, I'd have liked to have seen this game be a little bit longer, but that's merely my own opinion. If you want to recommend someone to a point and click, then Ceville is a good direction to point. Being more of a welcome nod back to the genre rather than trying to invent anything new really works at Realmforge. If episodic adventures aren't your thing, then Ceville looks like it could be the answer you are looking for.