Solstice

"*The hero arrives at the castle* "Okay, let's see. Potions? Check. Wizard hat? Check. Password feature?...Aaargh dammit!""

In the cold early '90:s, most adventure games were based upon an athletic warrior saving a princess, and puzzle games were all based upon guiding falling bricks into their specific slots. Three guys with a love for both tactical puzzles and horror tales about dark castles sat down to rewrite the rules of the puzzle genre. Thus, the gaming world was blessed with a creative and original puzzle adventure with the tasteful name "Solstice".

Though taking a clear step away from the traditional adventure games, Solstice does indeed start out just like anyone of them. One day, the beautiful princess Eleanor and the wizard Shadax meet in a garden. Then suddenly, the evil wizard Morbius appears and spirits away himself and Eleanor to his own castle of darkness. He tells Shadax that the only thing that will get her back is to gather the lost pieces of the legendary Staff of Ages, hidden deep in his castle, and give them to him as an exchange for the girl. Being the courageous hero that he is, Shadax directly heads for Morbius's castle.

Around here, the similarities stop. Solstice is no simple platformer or classic Japanese RPG. Solstice is instead a game seen in a diagonal 3D-view, similar to games like Shadowrun to the SNES. You search the castle one room at a time. The castle is not split into different levels with bosses, but is instead one huge building with different paths to take and objects to find to unlock other areas. There are gardens, deep dungeons and upper living quarters to explore, in a total of more than 300 rooms. There are keys to find, tools to use and monsters to avoid. Instead of being based on action sequences and battles, Solstice is a game that requires logical thinking and agile co-ordination to succeed. While monsters are present in the castle, they are in fact just pieces in big puzzles found in most rooms. There are tons of mysteries and tasks to solve, and you will have many routes and items to investigate before you can find all the pieces of the staff and face Morbius.

To spice up the entertainment and water the puzzles, Shadax comes equipped with four special potions that give him supernatural powers. The blue one makes him invincible against most threats, the purple one destroys all the blocks and enemies in a room, the yellow one freezes time for one room and the green one makes all hidden things appear. While the potions might seem to be just different sorts of smart bombs taken from any action game, they are in fact important pieces in solving the puzzles in the castle (yep! you guessed it!).

With the Orthodox perspective and the special design of the puzzles, Solstice truly doesn't look like anything else produced for the NES. While the graphics are a bit rusty, the castle is big, varied and nicely detailed. The gardens look green and healthy, the deep caverns are dark and cold, and the various rooms are of solid stone. There is only one tune playing in the background over and over again, but for once, this doesn't annoy you. Rather, the plain, solid graphics and the eerie song give a haunting feel as you proceed through the castle to avoid all its traps and find the clues. For anyone who loves to search through castles, mansions and caverns in the style of Maniac Mansion, Shadowgate and such games, this is your lucky day. Solstice makes it perfect on all the necessary parts, and if you are addicted to the three following things: atmospheric adventures; tricky puzzles of all sorts that challenge your intelligence as well as your timing; and big old castles to search through, then sign up today!

"..."

Hold it! There is one thing that just doesn't seem right here!

While most basic things have been put down nicely, the three programmers forgot something very important...

There is no password or save feature available in this game!

How can this be?? How can you make an adventure game with a long and challenging castle to explore, and then forget to implement a feature that lets you take off from where you ended? Solstice, which is a great adventure puzzle game in all other aspects, doesn't have such a feature! This is outrageous! How do you think we will be able to explore this whole castle in just a few lives, almost no continues and no password feature? You actually expect us to play this game for the first time, have a go at the difficult puzzles, die a few times, and then start over from the beginning, only to repeat the process again? I mean, come on! How many players will have the patience for this? Imagine that you have learned to play the game, and you get quite far in the castle. Then you die, and you know that you will have to play the whole first part you already did a million times once again just to continue from where you left of. Is this acceptable?

Now, I did actually enjoy this game quite much, and I got very far. So how could I do that? Am I such an excellent player and such a wiz (pun not intended) on solving puzzles? Certainly not. In fact, I didn't try hard on this game until I got hold of an emulator, where I could use the save state feature. Suddenly, the game was fair again, and I could enjoy a nice puzzle adventure game the way it was intended to be. Of course I didn't save my game with each step I took like some coward, but I could at least leave the computer for the night without having it on so I wouldn't lose my position.

Let's use some logic operations to test this case:

The first law: If GAME is ADVENTURE PUZZLE GAME, GAME must have PASSWORD FEATURE
The second law: If PASSWORD FEATURE is missing, GAME is BASICALLY MEANINGLESS

As we can see, the laws of Celtic Forest clearly states that Solstice violates the first law, and the second law proves to be true.

Stupid jokes aside, for a conclusion I would like to say that Solstice is basically a very great game. It has everything you need for a good atmospheric puzzle game. But the lack of a password feature is simply unacceptable. I suggest you get it in a special way that allows you to save your progress at times (Emulator, Game Genie etc.), so you can feel the true potential of this game. The final score is lowered because of the absence of the password feature, and is raised because of the true power it really has. While this review might have sounded very negative, I did not mean to cripple the game totally. I like Solstice and I have played it many times, and if you are a fan of games like these, you should definitely try it out. No matter what calculations you perform, you can't deny that Solstice is a good game.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 10/20/06