When SouthPeak Interactive first started publicizing Temujin last spring, the company made it clear that it wanted to prove a game could be based on full motion video (FMV) and still provide the level of interaction demanded by serious gamers. How successful was SouthPeak? Well, as far as upping the level of interaction in FMV games goes, I'd have to say the effort was pretty much a wash.
Using a proprietary technology called Video Reality, Temujin gives you the greatest freedom of movement I've seen in an FMV-based game. Playing from a first-person perspective, you're able to move through a video-rendered environment - you can change directions on the fly, look around, pick up objects, and examine them in detail. Sounds OK, but the truth is that the Video Reality engine still has plenty of shortcomings: You have a limited number of directions you can take, you can only look up or down in special circumstances, you can't talk to the characters you encounter, and the quality of the graphics (except for expository video clips where there's no option for interaction) is best likened to what things would look like if you were in the early stages of glaucoma.
And what exactly are you looking at through that mild haze? Temujin revolves around a collection of Mongolian artifacts found in Genghis Khan's burial chamber (Temujin was Khan's real name) and being displayed at the Stevenson Museum, location unknown. When the game opens, you're standing in the lobby of the museum - with no clue as to your identity or what you should do next. The people you meet aren't much help, either: Their behavior ranges from mildly curious to downright hostile, and it doesn't help that for some reason you aren't able to speak. Even so, you'll quickly suss out that something fishy is going on at the museum - and at its center is an evil force locked away in one of the artifacts. Over the course of seven "episodes," you've got to discover your true identity and, much more importantly, find a way to thwart that evil.
Truth be told, it's a really great plot - as good or better than a lot of movies I've rented - and with only a few exceptions the acting is very good. And there's the rub: Due to the problems of the Video Reality engine, Temujin would work much better as a movie than it does as a game.
A perfect example lies in the game's pacing. Not only can it seem like an eternity elapses between major events, but your character shuffles along at roughly the speed of Karloff's Mummy, even when movement has been set to full speed: You could build a museum in the time it takes you just to walk around in this game. It's a problem exacerbated by the fact that gameplay is based almost exclusively on cruising the museum constantly searching for items, and the topper here is the game's tiny environment: You'll have seen 95 percent of the game before the first episode ends. Hey, it's nice to look around once or twice, but after seeing the same locations 20 times you'd be bored even if Dali did the interior design. This could have been remedied by letting you click on a location on the Stevenson Museum Guide (a map found early in the game) and be transported there instantly, but apparently SouthPeak didn't think it was a problem.
The puzzles in Temujin are decidedly on the tough side, but they're made even more difficult because the cumbersome movement process and blurry graphics make it all too easy to overlook a crucial object. The inventory system doesn't help either. Objects are kept in a display at the bottom of the screen, but you can only see six at any given time - and I mean groups of six because the inventory scrolls six items at a time. And some of the valuable audio clues are almost indecipherable, thanks to a double helping of reverb and echo designed to make everything sound more mystical.
But perhaps the game's biggest flaw is that if you don't count all the time spent shambling around the same old places looking for clues and objects, there isn't a whole lot to do here. Of the seven episodes, one is simply a scavenger hunt; another is a "remote control" puzzle (so typical of FMV games) where you sit at a monitoring screen and unlock doors so people inside rooms can get out to perform various tasks; and yet another consists almost entirely of assembling jigsaw puzzles and reading a comic book (the story can take different paths depending on how you read it).
There are some definite hair-pullers in Temujin, but to judge how good a game is based solely on the difficulty of its puzzles is to miss the forest for the trees, especially when the puzzles feel like they were crammed into the environment rather than being a natural part of it. Where Temujin really shines is in its plot and characters - and it's disappointing that you can only listen and watch, rather than interact with them.
