Review

Nostradamus: The Last Prophecy

Nostradamus: The Last Prophecy is a PC game based on the prophecies of the French astrologer/apothecary Nostre Dame, or Nostradamus, as he is often called. Like me, Nostradamus probably rings a bell in the back of your mind from somewhere during grade school, but beyond that, you probably can’t assimilate who this man is. So, to make this a bit more relevant, Nostradamus was a French apothecary, who later tended more towards astrology. Based on astrology and the like, he wrote a number of quatrains as prophecies about the future.

The game centers on about three or four of these quatrains. You play as Madeleine, the daughter of Nostradamus, when Catherine de Medici, the queen mother of the time, comes to Nostradamus seeking his help in averting a curse that he has written of in one of his quatrains. Being the 16th century, Madeleine cannot investigate the murders foretold in the curse herself, so you disguise yourself as her brother, Cesar. As you try to prove that the curse is the work of man and not fate, you must interview suspects or friends of the victims for more information about possible motives for their murder. The quatrains speak of twelve people with a connection to the queen who will die before the curse targets the royal family next. There have already been about six murders when you begin the game, so you are given information on the victims and the circumstances of their death.

The setting of the game is Salon de Provence, France and there are three main areas of the game: the castle, your house, and the town. The town, in comparison to your house and the castle, is the most bereft area in terms of clues and interaction. Your house and the castle probably have not more than eight accessible rooms each, but they contain so many clues and materials that the game seems bigger than it is.

This game is extremely simple being a point and click adventure. There are two or three areas per room and you move around by clicking once the mouse turns into the movement icon, otherwise you rotate the camera to look around the rooms just by moving the mouse. Left-clicking allows you to interact with objects or collect items. By right-clicking, you can get to your inventory screen which contains your equipable items, ingredients, usable items, tools, journal and castle map. Your journal has sections for notes on the day’s events, your current objectives, clues you’ve discovered, obituaries, recipes, and the castle map, once you acquire it. All of these items will become necessary as clues or references to your investigation.

In addition to your items and journal, on the left side of your item menu you also have tools that Nostradamus gives you at the beginning of the game. These tools include a magnifying glass, a compass, a feather quill, scissors, tweezers, and a scalpel. (If the scalpel seems a little out of place for an astrologers son to be using, then you’re quite right, but there will be no dissecting in this game. The scalpel is just used to move things around or scrape things rather than to cut open bodies.) The tools are specialty items and normally can’t be used in the normal course of the game, however at key points a tool symbol appears that, if you click it, puts the screen into a fixed view where you can use your tools on the scenes contents.

Inside the item menu screen, you can use the magnifying glass on any item in your inventory, and once zoomed in, some items allow you to use the other tools to manipulate the item. If you have an item selected in the menu screen and then right-click to return to the game, you will have the item you selected in your hand to use in whatever context best fits.

There are also points in the game where you will be asked questions, or have to participate in a conversation. By clicking the most appropriate answer for a given person, you will affect your ability to progress through the game. The notebook stores notes on clues and contains valuable information to completing the game. You’ll have to decipher things or solve puzzles in it throughout the game. Let it be known now: if you don’t know the zodiac, then you WILL be screwed in this game. If you’re not a zodiac and astrology buff, then you had better have some notes on the symbols that represent the zodiac as well as the planetary bodies. Without this knowledge, it becomes almost impossible to progress, unless you want to try the guess and check method for hours.

It is imperative to be obsessively observant in Nostradamus. There are so many places where I got stuck because I didn’t pay enough attention to everything that was in the scene. To be honest, being observant and applying what you learn from the clues is the most difficult part of the game. There are so many things lying almost in plain sight and you will have the tendency to look right over them. In contrast, some answers are so simple that after the more complicated solutions, you tend to look for almost every other answer before arriving at the simplest, most sensible one.

The sounds in Nostradamus are well implemented. This game makes excellent use of silence, and the silence makes the tense moments of the game that much better. Music is used rather sparingly but when it is, it tends to be instrumentals, or rather dynamic, sometimes haunting choir vocals mixed in with the instruments. The ambience contributes a lot to the authenticity of the setting, and the music sounds like period music. The vocal talent pool must have been full when this game was made because the voicework is spot on. All of the voices seem to fit the characters even down to the accents.

The excellent voice work is marred only by the across the board lack of facial expression in the characters. The lip-syncing is pretty good but smite me if anyone did more than blink and continue through their idle animation as they spoke. This stands out all the more because most of this game is pretty clean on the rest of the technical attributes. The character design is good, the maps are excellent, the lighting is dynamic, but everyone could have been wearing masks for all that their faces did. Actually, that would have been an interesting alternative! Let everyone have their one expression but then they could wear a mask for another expression like the comedy and tragedy masks…or Hexadecimal.