Memento Mori is a Czech developed adventure game from the year 2008. It features two main characters, a Russian woman art police detective living in Paris and a former painting forger turned art professor who now cooperates with the police because they have a file on him. The game has gaps when it comes to voice acting and story scripting, a lot of dialogues are not only badly written, but also badly voiced. The puzzles are fairly easy and boring yet some of them include annoying pixel hunting. The game is worth around 3-4 mark and that’s what I was going to give it. However I gave it a 5 due to the very decent ending, which is a tad abrupt, but is a not-happy ending which surprises people and shows the good idea behind the game.
Graphics 6/10
Well for year 2008 the graphics are acceptable. Are they? Remember Crysis 1, the benchmark of graphics, came out in 2007. But no in all fairness the graphics are not good, but it is an adventure game from an East European developer so you get what you get. I was not particularly annoyed with them, the characters are easy enough to look at, though the environments where the game takes place (mostly cities) are boring and bland. It could have been more acceptable if the environments were at least somewhat interesting, yet every city (Lisbon, St.Petersburg, Paris) is just the same dreary boring old thing.
Sound 4/10
The voice acting is not really good. I can understand why, I come from the region where the developer is based and for a low budget you cannot really find that good English speaking people who do voiceovers. But when you realize the, a lot of times stupid, lines from the script that the people had to read, you come to understand why the voice acting is not that good. There are a lot of movies in the game with an unknown character doing the talking, which are also subpar. The only music I noticed was the main menu, otherwise all was pretty quiet.
Story 6/10 (4/10 if we don’t consider the ending)
So the basic of the story is that some rare paintings from the Hermitage in St. Petersburg got stolen and the two main heroes are out to find them. Very soon you will find out they were stolen by some kind of cult so things get interesting, yet are TOO slowly built up towards the very good not-happy ending. So what is the main problem here?
For once it is the slow built up, the only really interesting part of the game are last 2-3 chapters (from over 20 chapters!).
But more than that a lot of the chapters are littered with uninteresting clutter. You get an interesting chapter which ends in a cliffhanger. But then you get switched to a different character and you do tedious and boring things for another 4 chapters. Stuff like helping a fellow colleague at work with a new X-ray machine, etc. Seriously when I played through that loss of built-up atmosphere I was like wtf?
Third is the script itself, the characters a lot of times say stupid or pointless things. Or do not react properly to what has been said or to things going on around them or are overly dramatic.
The ending saves some part of the story, yet it is quite abrupt and leaves you wanting a sequel, so it’s not that awesome. Luckily there is a sequel, did not play it yet myself so don’t know if continues this storyline.
Gameplay 5/10
Basic point and click. Been there done that. Why rate so low then? Quite a few things wrong.
Most of the puzzles are too easy, unlike some adventure games where a character might have to solve puzzles within let’s say 15 screens. Here the actions are always limited to 3-5 screens. This means the puzzles are quite basic and most of the time the only problem are pixel hunts.
Sometimes the objects hidden are just too small and I have not found any way to show hotspots for interaction which is a shame as well. Pixel hunts do not make adventure games better in my opinion.
A plus is most puzzles are fairly logical, can’t really remember a highly illogical one. However sometimes you have to backtrack through 3-4 screens to find a new thing which randomly appeared there after a conversation.
Replay value 4/10
Well the big story surprise happens only towards the end. If you replay the game knowing the quite interesting things from the start you might get a few references you did not see before. However like any other adventure game replay value is not really high.
Overall there are a lot of better adventure games out there - older ones like Monkey island classics or newer ones like adventure games from Daedalic (Deponia). Yet there is also a slew of equally B-rated adventure games out there (Secret Files series, Art of Murder series, etc.). This is one of the B-rated adventure games which are not really bad, but unless you are a big player of adventures I wouldn’t go for it. Even me as a big adventure game player found it boring to play and it took me quite a few weeks to finish as I jumped to other games instead.