1931: Scheherazade at the Library of Pergamum seemed like an interesting game. It was the graphics and the possibilities of the story that attracted me to install and play it, and I honestly thought that in some wat this may be linked with the 1001 Nights story. Unfortunately for me, it didn’t take long for me to become annoyed by just about everything in the game.
A title that is quite the mouthful, Scheherazade (for short) is pretty steep on the learning curve. The story begins as the main character Scheherazade “Sadie” Keating graduates from high school and dreams of adventures in exotic locales. However, her wealthy aunt has other plans and would rather see Sadie settle down and married.
The game is basically a text adventure, with little to the gameplay other than clicking and watching still artwork on the screen. Behind the simplistic approach in presentation there is quite a bit of learning to be done before you get the hang of what this adventure is all about. In fact, it’s a bit like role-playing too, since you take on the role of Sadie and whatever choices you make supposedly affect the outcome of the story. Sounds interesting? Well, it sort of is, but the process made me want to bang my head against the wall more than anything else. I’ll try to explain as best as I can what I got myself into.
Sadie has several attributes that will form her personality and dictate the success of her choices. Wits relates to her reaction time and reflexes. Knowledge is directly related to her general understanding of facts and how well she learns something new. Athletics is of course what influences physical tasks. Charm is used for social skills and persuasion. Dream affects the number of inspirations you can get and the ending you receive (more about that later). Relationship represents the strength of your connection to other characters, which is developed by succeeding at Capers. Stress adds to obstacles, and is the result of failures or traumatic moments.
Failing to overcome obstacles may cause stress, prevent you from obtaining certain Inspirations, and completely remove branching paths from the story. Are you lost yet? Cause I kinda am! Earlier in the story, you are told that you can choose one of three difficulties to progress, with the Obstacles become more complex with Easy, Normal or Hard. Regardless of what you pick, Stress will always play a factor in the game and affect Sadie. And apparently, it was affecting me too.
Exploring is done via a map with different locations, with each location showing you the actions available there. The day/night cycle is separated into morning, afternoon and evening. Sadie can only do three actions per day. On school days, two of the actions take place in school, leaving only one free action to spend wherever you choose after class. You can use an action to enter a Caper, train attributes or collect Inspirations. Inspirations are cards that you can collect at the different locations, and each is associated with a specific skill or attribute, and has numeric value. You can use Inspirations to overcome obstacles by adding their values to your skill value. Having a higher Dream attribute will allow you to store more Inspirations.
Exotic locales become available to visit at certain times of the year, offering Sadie the opportunity to travel around the world. Capers will show you the skills needed to perform well before you accept them.
Now, this would all be fine and dandy if it wasn’t for the lack of in-game help. You are initially given a tutorial, but this is basically thrown at you all at once in text, without giving you the chance to experience it for yourself before being thrown back into the game with little clue as to what to do next. Then you scramble trying to remember what was said to you, and off you go on your own attempting to do something with what you remember.
Personally, I was completely lost. I roamed around the map doing a few actions to collect cards, but at some point, I was faced with three “keep” cards and a number of others marked “discard”. I tried clicking one of the discard cards, and it instantly was remove. So I figured now I had a free slot there, maybe I could exchange a discard card with one of the others and swap for what I really wanted to keep. Nope! That didn’t work either, and clicking a “keep” card would put it in the discard pile. No ability to swap the cards in each pile whatsoever! Or maybe I just didn’t see how that was even possible.
At some point, and after clicking just about everything on the map, I did find the Caper that would advance the story and managed to pick one of my cards to use according to the situation, but I was still way in over my head.
I didn’t care about Sadie’s Destiny anymore. Supposedly, she has one year to complete the main story or pursue a Romance Dream, so basically you choose to go career or family. Dream and Relationship scores affect the ending you get. But I honestly didn’t care about moving on, let alone the ending. I completely lost interest in the story and in the characters (I can’t begin to tell you how much everyone got on my nerves) fairly early in the game, and couldn’t care less if Sadie went to college or got married or became a lonely old maid.
While there are some interesting and original concepts, I expected a lot more from this “game”, both in terms of aesthethics and gameplay. The backgrounds barely change at all, which completely defeats the purpose of the exploration of exotic places, and any action that may take place is only represented in text and character art standing there. The freedom of choice when picking responses in dialog options is “blurry” at best, as many times I felt that what I was choosing had hardly anything to do with what Sadie was saying.
In the end, I feel that all I did was read speech after speech and still get completely disoriented throughout by the lack of instructions. I’d rather go pick up a “choose your own adventure” book instead of giving Scheherazade a second try. At least I know how exactly how those play.