Chronomaster Review

Intracorp's Chronomaster is a fantastic adventure game with one of the most innovative plots ever conceived. As Korda, the chronomaster, it is your job to find out who is putting the man-made universes into stasis. To do this you must visit each universe, find its specific world key, use it to reactivate the pocket universe, and find clues that lead you to the saboteur. Each pocket universe has its own laws of physics that you must come to understand if you're going to be effective, making your strange dimension-hopping a little more difficult in the long run. The only way for you to avoid the stasis effect and accomplish your goals is to use the most bizarre and wonderful of substances: bottled time. Once you've invoked its effects, you bring a small circle of animation to the otherwise static universe around you, creating some rather unusual visual effects. (Don't get close to anyone whose just fired a gun.) The plot uses all of these twisted time effects to their greatest advantage, making for a tale that is unlike any other ever conceived in a computer game. Chronomaster is filled with incredibly beautiful scenes, and boasts music and sound effects strong enough to back them up. The voice acting is fairly good, but is often muffled enough to make understanding the details very difficult. This is a very slow moving game that encourages you to explore everything. Puzzles are difficult, not the type you will most likely solve in one sitting. In the end, this is one for action fans to avoid; fans of Myst or other puzzle games will be most pleased.