Ankh: Heart of Osiris review (PC)

Last year, Deck 13 released Ankh on the PC. This game saw you cast as Assil helping him to defeat the death curse that he found placed on him, and win the heart of the Pharoah's daughter. He's back this year in Heart of Osiris. Once again, it's a puzzler, very much in the Monkey Island vein presenting lots of inventory based puzzles and tongue-in-cheek, cartoon action.

It seems that Osiris is trying to come back into the world and needs the Ankh back which Assil got at the end of the last game. The game opens with Assil being mugged and having the Ankh stolen. The game then takes place over 5 chapters guiding Assil and sometimes playing as other characters from the series, solving various puzzles as you go.

Riddle me this

The focus of Ankh Heart of Osiris is on puzzles. There's only really one type of puzzle through the whole game which is an inventory puzzle. This means that you have to combine items that you collect into your inventory with other items and with environmental items. Sometimes this might be combining items to make a meal to distract a guard in the palace in the right order or giving some wax to the fire breather to melt it so you can have your beard waxed off.

That's it really, some of the puzzles are a bit obscure but as long as you pick up everything you can on each screen you should never find yourself completely stuck. The cursor changes shape as you move it over items that you can interact with which helps when you do find yourself a bit stuck. Fortunately the puzzles never get too obscure or frustrating. There's always a certain amount of sense in the combinations and always enough clues from the dialogue sections to help you along.

Monkeying around

This game looks and feels a lot like the classic Monkey Island titles. Given the success of that franchise it seems like a good idea to try and replicate what it did right. Ankh manages to do a good job of replicating some of the successful parts of the Monkey Island games. Given that there's only the one type of puzzle, it could suffer from being a bit repetitive. The variety in the game is really in the set-up for each puzzle, the dialogue and the cut scenes. The set-ups are really helped along by good cut-scenes and pretty good voice acting.

The dialogue is read quite slowly which helps to make it easier to understand I suppose but it also makes the dialogue sections quite slow. At least they're subtitled and you can click through the speech once you've read it. The only real issue with the dialogue and cut-scenes is that when two characters speak over each other the subtitles tend to go a bit funny and render over each other. That's not a major problem as the speech is still clear.

Walk like an Egyptian

Ankh: Heart of Osiris uses cartoon style graphics which helps to keep the scenes colourful and fun. The scenes are viewed from a third person moving camera against a 2D backdrop. This limits the freedom that you have in moving around. That makes it a bit easier to find the items that you can interact with by just waving the cursor around the screen and watching where it changes and what the caption at the bottom of the screen changes to.

The 2D cartoon graphics also help the developer to keep the animation tidy since there's a limited amount of movement available. The gameplay is essentially non-linear. Some of the puzzles can be solved in any sequence and some of the items can be collected in any sequence but generally speaking, the puzzles have to be solved linearly to progress.

The beating of that infernal heart

The voice acting in Heart of Osiris is pretty decent and the other sound in the game matches up with it. The background music is reasonable and not intrusive. It seems to fit in with the action going on and doesn't become repetitive, which is a challenge given the pace of this kind of game and the amount of time that the music has to be playing for. The sound effects are also well chosen and fit the actions on screen some accurately and some humorously. All in all, Heart of Osiris is a well presented game.

We should expect a game with the simplicity in graphics and sound to be well presented but in many ways this game goes beyond what should be expected. The cut-scenes certainly out-do those seen in games that rely on presentation and flashy 3D graphics by having decent acting, a pretty good script and good animation. Also, having subtitles that actually match the dialogue is a really nice feature that so many games don't bother with, although it's very distracting especially when the subtitles are on by default.

The heart of the matter

Ankh Heart of Osiris is a pretty good game if you like puzzle games. If you're into the Monkey Island games then this should feel very familiar and should provide plenty of fun gameplay. It's difficult to say how long it will take to complete, I suppose it depends on how your mind works and how easy you personally find it to solve these sorts of inventory puzzles. The five chapters aren't that long but it will make you think and it is priced as a budget title.

The only other issue I found was that it caused my computer to hard reboot every 30 minutes of game time. I'm not sure how widespread this problem is or whether it's a hardware fault with my machine. Hopefully, if it is a bug then Deck 13 will have a fix ready soon as it's pretty rude for a game to behave like that! Ignoring the bugs for now, Ankh lacks any real innovation. It wears its heritage on its sleeve but I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with that in this case. It's not as though the market is saturated with this genre of games and Ankh certainly manages to provide some fun.