Genre: Adventure
Publisher: Got Game Entertainment
Developer: Knut Mueller
Release Date: February 25, 2008

Who here has played the original Myst? If you passed this certification of longtime gaming, then who here actually liked Myst? The franchise represents some of the more difficult logically built puzzle adventures of its time, and notes en masse represent a critical portion of the game-solving technique. Good copies of the original Myst and its remake, Real Myst, came with dedicated notebooks, fully anticipating that players were going to need them. (I hope that Myst DS includes them or a decent internalized notebook functionality, or it's going to be the most frustrating portable game ever made.)

While the adventure genre is currently most known and loved for simpler, more entertainment-oriented puzzlers such as Sam and Max, the puzzle-based adventure subgenre is the lineage of Knut Mueller's Rhem series, which resembles Myst by design, goal and intent. Now up to the third iteration in the series, Rhem 3: The Secret Library handles a few critical differences differently from Myst but unfortunately, the results don't manage to capture the magic of the classics.

The city of Rhem is a very large high-tech ruin. You play as an aide to brothers Zetais and Kales, who are investigating these ruins through you. In true Myst style, you will encounter no one; Zetais is only mentioned in a letter that you deliver from him to Kales, and Kales only speaks to you by videophone a few times during the game. There are hints that there are — or were? — people in Rhem, but you certainly won't encounter any.

The only real wrinkle to Rhem 3's storyline is its title, "The Secret Library." Kales suspects that there are relics of interest hidden here, but to get to them, you'll need to fulfill the secret library's 85 (?) main puzzles, which don't include the many puzzles you'll have to solve again and again just to get around the ruins. To make things just a tad easier for you, solving some puzzles will render others moot, but some will require you to repeat the task each time you encounter it in the game.

Rhem 3's first issue is in the spotty quality of its puzzles. You'll quickly learn to participate in activities that are the bane of casual adventure fans everywhere: pixel-hunting and reading the author's mind. These are the only ways to advance without the hint book. Is the screen a solid black color? You'd better look up, just in case there's a hidden hatch. Is that wall meant to look like a door, or is it just a weird graphical artifact? Better click around and find out, unless the key's somewhere else. You really can't be sure here. Want to keep a map? The game punishes this heavily by throwing variable vertical distance into the equation, so one trip-up might look as if it takes you up three floors when it's actually only one. Leaves? Not only do you need to find them all, but also, each inexplicably makes sounds in perfect Morse code for no apparent reason. Better write down the signals, just in case.

There is a specific sort of puzzle fan, however, who will love Rhem 3, and more power to them because this game really is tailor-made for them. Unfortunately, other elements that this sort of fan tends to enjoy are not very well handled here. In games like this, presentation is half of the battle and half of the fun, and here is where Rhem 3 drops the ball on almost every front, to the point where only a truly hardcore puzzle fan will enjoy it.

You see, the game is coded in Flash. You know, that language that powers all of those little games and annoying ads on the Internet? For an example of what Flash was made for, look at the top of this page. For an example of what Flash was not made for, load up Rhem 3 and marvel over just how poor the game's interface is. Most adventure games, for very good reason, provide both keyboard and mouse control, allowing you to quickly pull out an item using the keyboard and test it on a location where you've left your mouse hovering. No luck in Rhem 3, where the game takes no keyboard input, ever, except for the "Escape" key. Nope, not even Alt+F4, and only grudgingly Alt+Tab and Ctrl+Alt+Delete. Quick inventory access? Nope! The Options menu is handled with a pure mouse interface, and you can't name your save games, either, in order to more easily identify them.

On top of this, Rhem 3 doesn't even take advantage of Flash's robust vector graphics, instead insisting on using solely prerendered work. First of all, the quality of the renders is generally quite low. Picture the cliffs in old 3-D animations trying to look realistic by getting airbrushed; most people can tell fairly easily that it's been faked. As a result, the outdoor areas are consistently ugly. Secondly, the game is on one CD, and is thus so highly compressed that it gets extremely ugly whenever it decides to render any motion other than the classic fade effect — which is all too often. It would look OK on an older Windows 95 machine, but the static graphics would be ugly for just about any era.

If that isn't frustrating enough to a player who would otherwise be interested in this title, then there's the sound presentation to consider, which is a handy excuse for introducing the concept of quality. There's plenty of it here in Rhem 3 — just don't expect most of it to be good. Leaves manage to make perfect ocarina tones in Morse code, and the voice acting makes Sonic the Hedgehog's newer voice actors compare favorably to David Hayter (AKA Solid Snake). For that matter, one of the (two) characters gets physical while acting, which makes his voice acting only seem much, much worse.

In short, Rhem 3: The Secret Library has one audience, and that is truly hardcore Myst-style adventure/puzzle fanatics. This isn't a bad thing, as niche games can be quite enjoyable. Unfortunately, the game's lack of presentational quality weakens it to the point that it has no ability to pull in a larger audience. It may even go so far as to alienate existing fans of this niche subgenre. This is unfortunate because if you can get past this factor, the puzzles can be sincerely interesting. While Knut Mueller has great potential in puzzle design, they should look into getting more and/or better artists to match that potential.

Score: 6.0/10