
"Adventure"
games - really, immersive puzzle games - have been around since the days of
Zork. The first revolution came with the use of graphics instead of text,
though "interactive fiction" games are still made today; the second
when the mouse supplanted the keyword parser as the input method of choice.
With
Aura, The Adventure Company took things a step further. While all the scenes
are prerendered, gamers can turn their view pretty much 360 degrees at each
step. Mouse icons indicate usable points, of course, and the puzzles are
fairly complex. While Adventure titles tend to have low replay value (hey,
once you solve a puzzle, you've solved it) they manage to make the game quite
rewarding in its own right.
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