Review: Adam’s Venture Chronicles
Posted by Curtis H on January 28th, 2014 | 2 Comments | Tags: Adam's Venture Chronicles
Adam’s Venture: Chronicles is a compilation of an episodic adventure game series released on PC from 2009 through 2012. The three episodes in the game follow Adam Venture as he discovers the Garden of Eden, the treasure inside of Solomon’s tomb, and unravels a global conspiracy. The puzzles throughout the game are similar to the kind you’ll find in games like Puzzle Agent or Jacob Jones but without any sort of difficulty. Due to the themes throughout the game Adam’s Venture: Chronicles is clearly made to serve as educational material regarding certain Biblical stories. This is likely something you’d find the PC version of if you walked into a Family Christian Book Store. Scriptures, proverbs, and numerous other references to the Old Testament of the Bible are there but the game doesn’t feel preachy. For the most part everything at least fits in with the context of the game in the same way similar themes work with Indiana Jones. Adam’s Venture is just way less subtle about it.
While many of the puzzles you’ll come across require some simple logic you’ll also need a bit of knowledge about the Old Testament. You might be asked to put a specific scripture in order or split electrical currents correctly to fix a battery. There’s a decent variety of puzzles but they’re all very easy and a handful repeat over and over again throughout an episode. (Of course if you don’t know much about Genesis or Solomon you’d probably need to guess with the scripture puzzles.) Between puzzles you’ll progress through tombs, ancient tunnels, and shimmy across ledges in ways that will remind you of Uncharted. (Uncharted with poor controls and laughably bad animation.) You’ll also discover treasure chests that contain a special code that you can enter on the Adam Venture website to unlock bonus content. That bonus content is concept art and the first code the game gave me didn’t work.
Adam’s Venture begins with Adam, his companion Evelyn, and the professor exploring what they believe to be the gate that guards the Garden of Eden. In these opening hours of the game you’ll discover a black fog that chases after you shouting something about the forbidden fruit and trying to kill you. This is never brought up as being weird or abnormal it just happens and is kind of shrugged off. From there the story jumps all over the place, loose ends are never tied up, random dogs decide to join your quest, a few weirdly specific references to the Illuminati are made and then it all ends with Adam teasing more games.
I’m disappointed. Not because the game is bad, which it is, but because there was a real opportunity here to tell an insane story that I should be telling everyone about. What is the fog monster? Where did that dog come from? What does ‘kill two stones with one bird’ mean? Why is there a stealth sequence with no enemies to sneak past? Why can’t I stop playing this game? I don’t think I’ll ever get answers to these questions. Adam’s Venture at the very least isn’t a terrible game and I did get some form of enjoyment out of it. It’s just not something I could ever recommend.
A copy of this game was provided by the publisher for review purposes. For more info on our review policy click here.
General Info
- Developer: Vertigo Games
- Publisher: Playlogic Games
- Platforms: PS3 (Reviewed)
- Release Date: February 2014
- Price: £11.99, €11.99
- Genre: Puzzle Adventure
Score:
What I Like:
- Most of the writing/animation fits into "so bad it's good" territory
- Some of the puzzles are pretty interesting.
What I Dislike:
- Puzzles are easy or make no logical sense
- Confusing story that goes nowhere and answers no questions
- Many puzzles repeat numerous times
- One of the codes I found for entering on the official website was the wrong code