Point and click adventures have always been the best way to get humour into the life of a gamer. Think of Sam & Max, Monkey Island or the hilarious but ever so disturbing Leisure Suit Larry; each has the potential to keep reducing you to tears of laughter, but then there were those time when you just could not work out how to make a voodoo doll of an evil governor... even after six weeks of trying, and the purchase of a really rather poor game guide. The creators of Ankh: Heart of Osiris tried to produce an equally hilarious and deranged game - let's see how they did.

The plot in Ankh is simple; our young hero Assil, who is actually a rather lazy slob and not too bright (I mean, how could a game be funny if the characters aren't at least a few bananas short of a bunch?) but somehow irresistible to women gets caught up in a potentially world-destroying chain of events. Assil is the guardian of the Ankh - a mystical artefact he stole at a party - but Assil lost the Ankh during a two-week bender and cannot work out where it's gone! The Ankh in question is a mythical device with the power necessary to resurrect the dead god Osiris and allow him to wreak havoc across the world - well, Egypt at least. Assil has also lost his gorgeous girlfriend by showing her a love letter that he received from another woman. It's all pretty standard fare for a point and click adventure - in theory a plot that could lend itself to hours of endless gags.

The game mechanics are as you would expect for a point and click adventure game, although for once the inventory has not been made into a separate screen, leaving all your items readily available for frequent use in a bar that's displayed at the top of the screen. The game is entirely based around simple mouse clicks, the objects you have to interact with are suitably large so that you can easily negotiate the environment, and the controls are simple and never irritating. There is no action involved and there are no time-critical sequences, making the game relaxing to play and helping to keep up the fun atmosphere.

You wander around cartoony environments in what is made to feel like ancient slums. Everything has a rather distinctive and slightly comical style, with large eyes and heads for the good guys and small squinty eyes and long, drawn out faces for the bad ones. The protagonist is intended to be a full adult but is drawn in a way to look like a young teenager in a manner that befits his immature nature. It's all bright colours and nauseating levels of contrast, and it's well drawn and appealing. Ankh won't win any awards for its graphics, but it certainly fits the game's style and storyline well. Personally I feel that the hand-drawn look of the likes of Sam & Max is best for a game of this nature, simply because it shows a complete disregard for technical achievement over style. Still I do like the look of Ankh, but I would have been more impressed if more effort had been put into the lesser characters.

The game is broken down into short segments, at times played with different characters. This has the benefit of allowing you to drop your entire inventory between each segment, so you don't have to wander around carrying four hundred things that you found earlier. It also gives a narrative structure. Unfortunately, these segments are short and played in small areas, which become restrictive. You have few places to look for solutions and little wandering to do while you think. By restricting the possible areas to visit, the variety of solutions to any problem is limited, as all must lie literally at your feet. As a result, there are odd sequences that are completely nonsensical rather than funny, and most puzzles are sequential. For example, you have to impress a group of people in a bar early on. Impressing the first leaves a new item in front of you that is clearly for the next person, and using it smashes something into fragments that solves the next puzzle. So rather than thinking about what to do, you just need to find the first step.

On top of this, most puzzles attempt to be comical and so there is often not a logical progression. Realising that you need to get a bird's cage to hang on a hook to get some wax to give to a barber so that you can get into a nightclub for example does not come about through planning, but merely because you happen to click on the cage and discover you can pick it up, thus determining that there must be something you have to do with it. There are also actions that have no affect but seem to be part of the puzzles, which can sidetrack you into endless experimentation for no benefit. To be fair, after a short while you begin to get a hang of what the developer expects and it becomes easier. The random nature of puzzles is clearly intended to add more humour, but it's a hit and miss affair; some jokes are immature, some are badly timed and others just miss the mark entirely. Still, the game does make you grin and once or twice laugh; it's just not as funny as you feel it was intended to be.

The music is ever present and the voice acting is good - perhaps the actors could have milked the jokes a little more, but they never take it to mediocrity. In all the audio side of the game is fine, but rarely exceptional.

The problem with Ankh: Heart of Osiris is that it never stands out. It has its moments, but they are interrupted by periods of mind-numbing irrelevance and some infuriatingly illogical puzzles. This makes the game hard work and discourages you from playing to completion. This is a shame, because the developers have clearly tried hard and similar titles show how well things can go when the mix is just right. However, it's just a little too far away from the best that this genre has to offer; it's a fun adventure with a few good laughs that's worth a look, but sadly it's not the next Sam & Max.

Reviewed by Gavin Udall for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).