LucasArts
1992
****

A SCUMM-based graphic adventure that was the brainchild of Hal Barwood, and concerning the famous whip-cracking archaeologist in a race against the Nazis to discover the lost city of Atlantis and its potentially catastrophic energy source (Orichalcum). Being an Indy game, it obviously involves a fair bit of flying around the globe (with red-line-on-map sequence) and acts of derring-do.

One of the major innovations of the game was that the story forked into three about halfway through - the three routes were* "Wits" (where more puzzles were encountered), "Fists" (which ditched some puzzles but had you squaring off with Nazi goons more frequently), and "Team" (where Indy would be accompanied by Sophia Hapgood, phony psychic and Atlantean expert). Another was that locations and puzzle elements (such as passwords and codes) were changed from game to game, making it impossible to create a move-by-move walkthrough, and adding some more replayability.

The (VGA) art and animation are of course top notch, and the iMuse music (with obligatory Indy Theme) works well. The game is quite long, and had I think the largest number of locations in any graphic adventure at the time. Excellently, some of the locations are quite accurate within the confines of the game (for instance the Palace of Knossos on Crete). And of course you get to be Indiana Jones. Cool.

Trivia point: There were, bizarrely enough, 2 games called "Indiana Jones and The Fate of Atlantis" - one of which - an isometric graphic adventure developed outside of LucasArts - has rightly slipped into obscurity. There was also a brief series of comics based on the story.

*props to Clone for correcting my error here.

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