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As a fan of Point and Click adventure games I really had high expectations about Armaeth: The Lost Kingdom. These were mostly based on the screenshots I'd seen on other sites and the King's Quest/Kyrandia type of setting. Having enjoyed both series a lot I got ready for a healthy dose of adventuring. The title screen looked promising: nice colors and an enjoyable tune in the background. The story unfolds, concerning a young lad on a quest of finding a lost kingdom named Armaeth (obviously) Supposedly the dwarves founded it back in the day, but somewhere in history it got lost... Anyway, a good place to look for treasure! All pretty straight forward though rather cliché.
The graphics are done with a very good eye for detail and animation. The sound is all right I guess although the background-tunes tend to get a little boring after a while. The interface, however, is a complete mess. There's a gazillion buttons on top of the screen with obscure icons that could mean anything... Then, there's also the parser, which you can use (should use, perhaps?) that will let you enter commands by typing them as well. I found this easier, since I really couldn't figure out the meaning of all the buttons... Saving and loading games is a nightmare, since you have to remember all the details about the save game yourself. There's no file-browser option or anything.
The game play is what you would expect from an adventure, but I didn't get very far into the game, because I totally got stuck and couldn't figure out what to do anymore. I even resorted to -I really hate to admit this- the walkthrough (which is conveniently supplied with the game: just run the help.bat file) but alas, this got me no further. Maybe I'm a bad puzzler or I just didn't get it, but if suffices to say that I did not find Armaeth... Weighing all pros and cons I really want to give this game a 2.5 or something like that, since it's not all bad, but certainly not all good. In order to give other a chance to solve the quest -and help me out in the process- I'm going to set the mark to 3. A mediocre, yet not all too shabby adventure game.
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