Nikopol: The Carnival of Immortals, or, Why Adventure Games are Dead
Adventure games are largely considered dead. Many avid gamers still sit glued to their screens mournfully clicking away at lovingly worn copy of Grim Fandango. Telltale Games has been feeding the addiction with their episodic Sam and Max series, but did you know that other companies are actually still releasing games in this genre? Amazing, I know! While searching through Adventure Gamers today, I stumbled upon some screenshots that piqued my interest. The game is called Nikopol: The Carnival of Immortals and seems to feature a typical Myst style of exploration with pre-rendered rooms of which to explore with your obsessive clicks. The first screen (shown above) felt altogether new and refreshing to me, with interesting paintings in an artist loft. Then I continued to click through and saw a man with an eagle head and it all went downhill from there.
A couple years ago, a friend of mine recommended an Italian movie to me called "Immortel". He claimed it was horrible. Abysmally horrible yet the art style was so unique and interesting it bore viewing. I rented it and was impressed by the visual mashups of live action humans and CG cyber-augmented humans in a future-Paris, but the plot read like an adolescent fantasy. Egyptian gods coming to the future to have sex with blue-haired cyber-women? No, thanks.
This game is part of a book series by author Enki Bilal, is being developed by a Paris based developer named White Birds Productions and is set for a mid-2008 launch. By the looks of the source material, it seems adventure games aren't really going to be coming back any time soon. I wonder if they ever will.
