Temujin: The Capricorn Collection (PC)

A perfect example lies in the game's pacing. Not only can it seem like an eternity elapses between major events, but your character shuffles along at roughly the speed of Karloff's Mummy, even when movement has been set to full speed: You could build a museum in the time it takes you just to walk around in this game. It's a problem exacerbated by the fact that gameplay is based almost exclusively on cruising the museum constantly searching for items, and the topper here is the game's tiny environment: You'll have seen 95 percent of the game before the first episode ends. Hey, it's nice to look around once or twice, but after seeing the same locations 20 times you'd be bored even if Dali did the interior design. This could have been remedied by letting you click on a location on the Stevenson Museum Guide (a map found early in the game) and be transported there instantly, but apparently SouthPeak didn't think it was a problem.

The puzzles in Temujin are decidedly on the tough side, but they're made even more difficult because the cumbersome movement process and blurry graphics make it all too easy to overlook a crucial object. The inventory system doesn't help either. Objects are kept in a display at the bottom of the screen, but you can only see six at any given time - and I mean groups of six because the inventory scrolls six items at a time. And some of the valuable audio clues are almost indecipherable, thanks to a double helping of reverb and echo designed to make everything sound more mystical.

But perhaps the game's biggest flaw is that if you don't count all the time spent shambling around the same old places looking for clues and objects, there isn't a whole lot to do here. Of the seven episodes, one is simply a scavenger hunt; another is a "remote control" puzzle (so typical of FMV games) where you sit at a monitoring screen and unlock doors so people inside rooms can get out to perform various tasks; and yet another consists almost entirely of assembling jigsaw puzzles and reading a comic book (the story can take different paths depending on how you read it).

There are some definite hair-pullers in Temujin, but to judge how good a game is based solely on the difficulty of its puzzles is to miss the forest for the trees, especially when the puzzles feel like they were crammed into the environment rather than being a natural part of it. Where Temujin really shines is in its plot and characters - and it's disappointing that you can only listen and watch, rather than interact with them.

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