The adventure game genre progresses slowly, but recent games like Syberia and Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon have been helping it catch up with the times and attract new fans by offering deeper storytelling, richer settings, more logical puzzles, and added immersion. From that perspective, Detalion's latest game, Mysterious Journey II, is a step backward for the genre. This game is just another Myst clone, but without the saving graces of the Myst series. Mysterious Journey II lacks the artistic finesse of the best Myst games and suffers from a weak story and setting. It's filled with lots of arbitrary, convoluted, brutally tough puzzles, though. In fact, you could say this is really a puzzle game masquerading as an adventure game.

Puzzles, such as this bridge, tend to reappear in different forms.

In this sequel to 2001's Schizm, your character, Sen, awakens from cryogenic stasis aboard a dilapidated space station. A holographic recording reveals to the amnesiac Sen that he has been in a deep sleep for 214 years as punishment for supposedly betraying his people and destroying most of his world. Sen also learns that it's only a matter of days before the station's orbit decays, sending it crashing to the planet below. With that out of the way, the adventure--using the term loosely--begins. Sen heads down to the planet to find out just what he supposedly did to cause so much trouble.

From the get-go, you know this game is going to be problematic. The improbably bland, generic title says a lot: You'll indeed spend time journeying about the game's 3D world, but why you'd want to do that remains mysterious. Good adventure games immerse you in richly imagined settings and make you feel like you're really getting somewhere as you explore them. They let you unravel intriguing stories and meet memorable characters. Mysterious Journey II offers almost none of that. Using a first-person perspective, you wander through deserted, lonely locales, just like in the Myst games. The story is told only by occasionally switching to clumsy third-person cutscenes. You don't fully take part in the story but merely watch bits of it from time to time.

The story isn't worth your time, anyway. Unlike in so many games, the story here was penned by a professional author, science fiction writer Terry Dowling. Ironically enough, you wouldn't guess that by playing the game. If Mysterious Journey II were a movie, it would be right at home on Mystery Science Theater 3000. The game's story is filled with clichés, clumsy transitions and explanations, and general nonsense--not to mention a laughable, trite ending. For example, the whole game is centered on the idea of two warring factions, one that puts its stock in high technology and futuristic weapons and another that puts its faith in nature and advanced mental powers. Could a science fiction premise be more threadbare? An author could make something of that tired idea, but with such weak, perfunctory stabs at character building and dialogue here, things never gel. In fact, the dialogue can be a hoot, like when a young man named Jimi from the technological faction announces to Sen in a gee-whiz tone that he's been promoted to team leader (whatever that is). It sounds for all the world like your cousin Jimmy announcing he's been promoted to assistant manager at Wal-Mart. Middling to awful voice acting makes it all worse.

You want complexity? You got it.

Despite fumbled attempts at storytelling during the cutscenes, the real raison d'être of Mysterious Journey II is merely to pit you against a demoralizing string of puzzles. These puzzles reveal a laundry list of game design flaws. They tend to be arbitrary, gratuitous, and overly elaborate. Rube Goldberg would beam with admiration--and then throw himself off a bridge in despair if he actually tried the puzzles himself. Early on, for example, you need to open a door to get to a shuttle. Nearby, you find a huge hall filled with things that look something like giant alien asparagus tips. What on earth are they? Why are they even there? What do you do with them? As you twirl them around to make laser beams reorient themselves (again, you have to ask why), you get no feedback on whether your manipulations are helping or hindering.

On top of that, the puzzles don't help flesh out or reveal the gameworld and characters enough; rather, it feels like the world was built around the puzzles. The puzzles can require you to make tedious treks back and forth to see what effect all your lever-pulling and button-pressing are having. They tend to repeat themselves, too: How many times should anyone have to align bridge segments by pressing a slew of buttons? (Plus, one puzzle, where you move a boat through a water maze using the equivalent of giant fans, is nearly identical to a puzzle in the recent Traitors Gate 2.) The puzzles don't make you feel like you're getting anywhere or accomplishing anything important, but rather they make you feel like you're on some punishing puzzle treadmill lifted from Dante's Inferno.