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Flight of the Amazon Queen

You're Joe King, Pilot for Hire, as you repeatedly introduce yourself, and you have to fly an actress into the jungle for reasons I've forgotten. But you crash in the Amazon and have to find your way out, Also, as it turns out, you have to save the world (and the local Amazon cuties) from a mad scientist bent on leading an army of genetically-altered Amazon dinosaur-women to world domination.

It's a cute enough premise, and it all makes a perfectly good excuse for wandering through jungles, caves and mysterious factories solving puzzles. And the puzzles are, all in all, pretty good. The early puzzles are the sort of very easy, just-getting-used-to-the-game puzzles that I always like to start out with. Once you're in the Amazon there is a long period of getting something for someone so they'll give you something you need to get something so you can give someone something in return for . . . you get the idea, right? Later in the game there's a series of puzzles in which you are basically trying to get further and further into an underground structure. It's all straightforward puzzles that require you to think and require a certain amount of ingenuity, but these aren't the kind of puzzles you'll get so excited about that you'll have to tell your friends who don't play adventure games about them (lucky for your friends). There was only one puzzle that I thought asked the player for a little ingenious thought, involving getting into a room with a big pit of lava, and I am sorry to say I did not measure up to this puzzle and cheated. But I admire it all the same. But if the puzzles aren't puzzle writing as high art, they were generally reasonable, fair (except, perhaps, for the conversation issues mentioned below) and there was nothing in it that seemed totally unreasonable.

For the most part I didn't have to cheat, but when I did I tended to blame the game rather than myself. Basically, I kept failing to talk enough. Flight of the Amazon Queen wants you to explore every possible conversational branch, and you'd better do it. Once I gave up talking to something because it seemed kind of pointless, and this was the first time I had to cheat, just to learn that I had to keep on talking. Another time I used up all the conversation branches, but then there was an incident and after that I was supposed to talk some more, although I fail to see why the character would have any information I didn't have. At this point you would have thought I'd learned my lesson, and perhaps I had, but there was this long, long period where I hadn't spoken with anyone, so by the time there was someone I'd forgotten this rule that every time something happens you have to start up a fresh conversation, and I had to cheat again. There was also one cheat involving not noticing something (the game is actually pretty good in terms of finding objects, this isn't a pixel hunting nightmare like Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers), and there was one point where I read something that gave me useful information, but when you read it a second time it won't repeat that information (which I was pretty annoyed by), so I had to read the walkthrough. It sounds like a lot of cheating, but there are quite a lot of puzzles in the game, so that's pretty good. There was also one puzzle that was very difficult that I was about to cheat on when I solved it by accident, so I actually have no idea what the solution to the puzzle is!

The interface is fair, the most bothersome thing being that you can't mouse over something to find out what it is when you're walking, which slows down gameplay. It's also a bit of a pain scrolling through the inventory list, which shows you five at a time of the 20 or 30 things you're holding. But you can't die, you won't hit a dead end (once I thought I'd hit a dead end, but I just hadn't conversed enough), and if this game doesn't do enough things right to make you love it, it avoids doing most of the wrong things that make you want to hunt down the game designer and break all his/her fingers with a hammer.

The dialogue is amusing, although not to the degree of Discworld or Sam & Max Hit the Road. It's the kind of game I'll forget I played within a year, but it's a pretty good time waster and if you've played all the really cool games this is a good second string item. It was designed by John Passfield and Steve Stamatiadus, and if their goals were modest then they have succeeded marvelously.

-- Charles Herold -1999

Related Links:
Official web site