Sentinel: Descendants in Time

The Good
I felt this game to be a mind-bending experience of puzzles mixed with some of the best graphics an Adventure title has to offer! My favorite level was Maru because of its use of sound, colored lamps and rotating mazes.

The Bad
What i didn't like was that it wasn't longer! He he...

The Bottom Line
Compared to Mysterious Journey - the story line and ideas seemed to make more sense and have cohesion as opposed to previous games. The storyline was very intriguing! I recommend this game to anyone!

The Good
This game is similar to other first person adventures in many respects. Puzzles must be solved to gain access to areas which are locked, blocked or otherwise impeded - and lead to more puzzles. Work through all of the problems to obtain the important objects which are needed to progress to the ending. And, learn more about what's going on by talking to other characters you meet along the way.

Beautiful graphics make Sentinel visually pleasing, and being able to view the world all around you in 3D is nice. Even though this is all about caves and tombs, there are outdoor places too. Each location is completely different than the others with detailed graphics and atmospheric sounds and movement.

This is definitely a puzzler's game. The puzzles are very unique and creatively designed. They are all challenging and the clues for them are well-hidden. Since there's virtually no inventory, your time is not spent looking at every pixel for that illusive object but, rather, in finding the puzzles themselves. They involve logic, memory and, at times, trial and error to solve. Most of them are what I call layered - several puzzles linked together to get a final result. There are color and sound puzzles as well as those that are mechanical and motion in nature. Because many are "random" (different for each game), the use of a hint file or walkthrough cannot give you the exact answer. You'll still need to work out the solutions for your particular game.

The music is lovely and nicely orchestrated. Sound effects are wonderful with water sounds, birds, creaks and clangs of machinery, squeaks of swinging rope etc.

As an attractive young woman, the characterization of the "dormeuse" is very good - her face, physique and clothing - and her hair sways realistically as she moves (almost fluidly). Her voice matches her persona, and her scripts are well written with fairly good lip synchronization.

The game has a decent length mainly due to the sheer number and complexity of the puzzles. Because of the way in which the areas are divided, you can spend several days away from it and pick it up later easily.

The Bad
Sentinel: Descendants in Time isn't without its technical problems and design flaws. None of those problems are terminal, luckily.

I played Sentinel on a Dell Inspiron Laptop computer (Pentium III, 1000MHz, 256 RAM) using Windows XP Home Edition (Service Pack 2) and DirectX 9.0c. This meets the "recommended" system requirements, which the exception of the MHz. It is possible that the graphics card on my laptop was not tested and/or supported by this game, although no mention of this is given in the documentation. In any case, the quirks I experienced may not happen on other systems.

Installation is extra long .. from the 2 CD-ROMs. A different installation program is used, called "Ghost", and it needs improvement. Guesswork and trial and error should not be part of a game's installation routine. For example, rather than asking you to insert Disc 2, an error message pops up asking for a specific file's location. Of course, that is the only file on Disc 2, but you don't know that. Once installed, though, you can put the CDs away since they are never accessed during start-up or play.

Awkward gameplay ..
It can be compared to that of URU (ie no inventory, and keyboard keys used in addition to the mouse). Totally a waste of energy in my opinion. In this game it just wasn't necessary to have keyboard controls at all. The more traditional "point-and-click" interface would have been perfectly adequate. Mouse panning almost made me intoxicated as I clumsily staggered around (like a drunk trying to find home). The itsy-bitsy "dot" cursor was difficult to see, and the minute change for "actioning" a puzzle was almost indistinguishable.

Lengthy location loads ...
You can walk away for 5 minutes or more and not miss a thing. Also, sometimes selecting "Continue" from the menu dumped me back to my desktop.

Huge saved game files .. take up a lot of hard disk space. There is also no option to delete games from within the game itself.

Skipping music and stuttering speech .. happened often - mostly immediately after a new location loaded. In several instances the 2 characters (Beni and Tamara) talked at once so I couldn't understand either. (Is this why they included a readable transcript?)

Other weirdness .. included dumps to desktop when selecting to "Continue" or "Load" (with an error message connected to the "Jupiter" engine); and funky, incomplete (or missing) graphics.

Limited exploration ..
If one wants to mimic Myst, all locations should be fully explorable - and important to advancing the story. Places and things inserted merely as "eye candy" make the player feel cheated.

An immature main character ..
I didn't particularly like Beni's naivete - especially considering the difficulty of the puzzles he had to solve. Some of the dialog scripts written for him were uninteresting, witless and could even be described as absurd.

Story lacks depth ..
The story in Sentinel unfolds during triggered automatic narratives and dialogs with the dormeuse. Those conversations give you a hint of a deeper meaning which you are supposed to eventually discover at the end. But, unfortunately, the ending doesn't conclude it very well and you are left wondering what actually happened.

The Bottom Line
Don't get me wrong .. I liked the game .. I just didn't love it. I'm not that fond of analytical puzzles, and need a more interesting storyline to give a game my highest marks. Still, the graphics are beautiful and the music is well orchestrated, so it was a pleasure travelling around in the Dormeuse's world.

Stay away from this title if you are hearing impaired. There are no work-arounds for the sound puzzles.