A Grand Adventure... If You Already Know Who Perry Rhodan Is
If you live in America, you know about Star Trek. You may not be a fan, but you certainly have a good idea of what it is, and the impact it has had on your society. If you live in England, the same thing applies to Doctor Who. But in Germany, there is a science fiction franchise that has existed longer than either of these two storied universes - the story of Perry Rhodan. Beginning as a series of serial writings in 1961, the universe has expanded even to this day with the release of The Immortals of Terra: a Perry Rhodan Adventure (known in Europe as Rhodan: Myth of the Illochim).
The Immortals of Terra begins on Earth, but not the Earth we know. The story takes place more than 3,000 years in the future, and the main character, the titular Perry Rhodan, has seen every one of those years. According to the universe's storyline, Perry and his best friend Reginald Bull have "cell activators" that keep them looking the very picture of health and youth, despite their age. They've also set foot on exotic planets and met members of new and different races - such as Mondra Diamond. Mondra is a close friend of Perry's, and his erstwhile lover and mother of his son. This makes it a bit of a problem for Perry when Mondra is kidnapped in the game's opening cinematic.
The entirety of the game is played in an interface very similar to most two-dimensional point-and-click adventure games, but there's nothing two-dimensional about the look of the game. Both the cinematics and the in-game engine look slick, believable, and realistic. Well, mostly realistic, at least. All of the characters have a sheen and smoothness to them that makes them look like incredibly detailed animated Barbie dolls. The detailed lip movement doesn't synch up with the dialogue in the few places you'll see it in a cinematic - a reminder that although the game is being heard in English, it was likely written and animated in German. With that said, there are no noticable grammar missteps, no places where the dialogue sounds wrong, no lines in the subtitles that suffer from confused or awkward translation. Aside from the rare lip-sync issue, it's incredibly easy to forget this game was not written in English. Similarly, the voice acting is universally high quality, lines that seem out of place or oddly phrased are rare in the extreme.
The user interface is a slight variation on standard adventure game fare. At the top left of the screen is an icon that will bring up mission status statements when clicked, at the bottom of the screen is your inventory, which also works as the pool of subjects on which you can converse with the game's NPCs. The gameplay is also standard for adventure games - talk to everyone about everything, interact with everything in the environment, if you get stuck, interact with everything in the environment again, and try everything in your inventory on everything else you can get your hands on. The logic needed to negotiate the puzzles are mostly logical, although it is extremely frustrating when the logic breaks down. There is a fair amount of pixel-hunting in this game, but this is mostly mitigated by the included "scanner" mechanic, which will, when activated, show the player everything on the screen that is interactive, whether an object, an NPC, or an exit into another area.
The gameplay mechanics do an adequate job of moving the story along. Unfortunately, it is rather obvious that the story, and the game in general, was not terribly well designed for people who are not already familiar with the Perry Rhodan universe. Names of races and places and things are dropped with a minimum of explanation. While there does seem to have been an effort at acclimating the unfamiliar player to the game's universe, the effort is mostly ineffective, requiring a lot of reading and guessing to get anything but the most basic information about anything out of the game. Also unfortunate is the fact that the story is not a compelling one unless you already have something of an emotional investment in Perry, Mondra, Bully, and so on. It may well be that for a Perry Rhodan fan, the opportunity to walk the Residence or the Waringer Academy is something incredibly interesting, but for everyone else, it's just another building where the puzzles are.
Adventure games live and die on their two important aspects. The first is their gameplay, which in The Immortals of Terra is extremely average, with nothing to make it stand out as remarkably bad, but nothing to make it stand out as remarkably good, either. The other is the universe, the story and the characters. This is plainly the intended selling point of the game, but this falls flat with anyone not familiar with the Perry Rhodan universe. Although this game is a very solid effort from an independent developer, there is nothing aside from its setting that sets it apart from any other, and even that is only interesting to those who are already fans of the franchise.
