The gaming industry has seen a lot of point-and-click adventure games recently - Sam & Max, Sherlock Holmes: Nemesis and Overclocked: A History of Violence are a few of the better examples. Now we can add Nostradamus: The Last Prophecy to that list, a game based on the work of Nostradamus, where a curse he predicted would fall upon the royal family appears to be coming true. Wandering the streets of France in 1566, solving puzzles involving astronomy, alchemy, apothecary and ancient runes (that's a whole bunch of words beginning with 'a') suggests an A-grade title, but can the game actually be that good? Sadly it is more of an average C+ than a perfect A, but it's still a decent effort.

To try and achieve that perfect grade, the story, providing the main draw of the game, starts slowly and gradually unfolds into something more menacing - your classic whodunit approach. The first elements of mystery come from the opening cut scene where Catherine de Medicis, the mother of King Charles IX, arrives at the house of Nostradamus - the names of people are hard to remember, so thankfully they don't really matter to the bigger picture. Things soon get even more nasty than the horribly hard to pronounce names when Catherine informs Nostradamus that a curse he predicted has come true and people are dying. Numerous fatal accidents suggest that a killer is on the loose but then Catherine storms out without any further explanation, refusing arguments that Nostradamus is too old to help - those ungrateful and ever mysterious royals! With the royalty gone, Nostradamus decides to send his daughter in his stead, but because a woman attempting such complex tasks as crime scene investigation would be an abomination (or so people believed back then), she must take on the appearance of her brother, finding her brother's clothes (handily the perfect size for her) and putting them on for the unmistakably odd task of making herself look like a member of the opposite sex!

There is no denying that the opening sections of the story and the required cross-dressing are a bit odd but - in a slightly perverse way - it's actually quite comical dressing up your heroine as a man. The gameplay isn't strange at all though; forming the basis of all first person point-and-click games such as Darkness Within are the colourful (or horribly bland) vistas that you can traverse at lighting speed simply by clicking your mouse and there is no change to the standard method here. This supposedly normal formula for moving around is actually quite absurd; clicking the left mouse button when the mouse cursor becomes an animated forward arrow instantly teleports you to a new fixed location - a wait while your character walked to the new position would make things more believable! In an effort to make things a bit more immersing, the developers have added the noteworthy ability to interact with the environment in an unusual way.

This control over your surroundings includes picking up spoons in an area (a room or part of a corridor, for example), taking spoonfuls of chemicals from jars, putting them in cooking pots and placing those pots over a fire to produce all manner of culinary delights. Some more complex tasks than simple Cooking Mama style alchemy require items to be gathered from different areas and brought to a specific place to use - oddly you cannot combine items with one another, only use them with bits of the game world. To round up wayward items, you simply need to left click on them and they are transferred to your inventory, although the larger area-specific items such as a blacksmith's metal tongs and the spoons mentioned earlier are always placed neatly back in position when leaving the area where they were found. However, a large number of smaller items are collectible and, for easier management, the inventory is very similar to backpacks in RPGs such as Diablo and World of Warcraft; you have square slots to store the items you pick up and a picture of your character so you can change clothes - you can't completely undress her, for obvious reasons! This surprisingly well-crafted inventory, opened with a mere right click, is an excellent feature and an invaluable tool for making progress, as it also contains details of discovered alchemy recipes, gathered clues and the ability to replay cut scenes.

The inventory automatically maintains a list of the objectives you need to complete in order to solve puzzles and it's the success of these puzzles that forms the backbone of the game. Quality puzzles in a point-and-click game must balance their difficulty carefully, requiring more than just going to a different place and finding the answer immediately but not leaving you totally stumped. The puzzles in The Last Prophecy are often satisfying; the alchemy tasks involving mixing ingredients and crime scene investigations are very enjoyable too, but also confusing, presenting you with a stream of strange astrological symbols and letters, leaving you to wonder what to do next. When you have figured out how to solve the problem - either through the brainpower of a far more cunning mind than mine or through using a walkthrough (guilty) - you still may not be able to complete the task if you haven't completed an unrelated earlier objective. This order of completion problem becomes apparent in the first task, requiring you to find all of your brother's clothes and mix together a pot of coloured cream. When you make the cream you discover that your father needs to apply it to you, but it's impossible to give him the pot until you have every bit of clothing. Unfortunately, there's nothing to tell you why he won't accept the cream, nor does the game give you a list of the clothing you must find - very frustrating! Also frustrating is that there is no real difficulty progression to puzzles as you advance through the game - some of the later tasks to solve are so much easier than ones near the start.

The puzzles are frankly all over the place in terms of quality, so you'll be pleased to hear that the music remains above average throughout; it is faint and in the background so as not to distract you, but it's suitably quizzical - there is a crime to be solved here - and has a subtle beat to imply haste - the killer must be caught quickly before he strikes again! The music fits the game very well and the sound is nigh on fantastic; fires crackle, characters speak clearly - although without French accents, which is surely not right for a game sent in France - and in outdoor areas birds can be heard singing in a shockingly realistic manner. Adding to the quality of the sound is the fact that it is actually important for the game; unless you can prove to your father that you can master your brother's voice, you can't progress - a very commendable feature considering that most games see audio as an afterthought.

The audio in The Last Prophecy wasn't something tacked on at the end and neither were the visuals, being eye-shatteringly good and above average for a puzzle game of its type, with fixed areas containing very few animations and moving objects - getting something to look pretty when it cannot move is reasonably straightforward but getting something to look amazing and have the ability to move in multiple directions is extremely hard. Proving how difficult it is to make complex moving objects dazzling is the shameful lip-synching when characters speak. The animation of the characters isn't all bad though, as they move extremely well during the high quality cut scenes that feature everything from flickering shadows to amazingly detailed expressions on their faces, but this quality doesn't extend to the in-game sections, which is a major disappointment. High quality cut scenes that blend well with the game engine are a definite benefit but, aside from these moments of movie, there just aren't enough moving objects to bring the game to life and make you feel part of a real world - wandering through the small French village is more like moving through a scene from a inanimate painting than a bustling town!

It really should seem like a busy, hard-working community, since the entirety of the game takes place in the village, creating a relatively open game world, something that's extremely unusual for a point-and-click adventure game instead of the more normal sequence of levels for this game type. This world provides a roughly square group of fixed areas that you can traverse between with the click of a mouse - there's no exploration involved as you are channelled past streets and areas that you think you ought to be able to reach but aren't accessible because they've been roped off by the developers (with invisible rope). However, you will need to travel around the area frequently to advance the plot, and the developers have opted to ditch the standard level structure in favour of a time-based system. Using the end of each day to mark the end of each level does make the game fairly short, spanning only four or five days, and the puzzles contained within, although too hard for me - a relative newcomer to the genre - would, I imagine, be fairly easy to solve by hardened adventure game veterans. With a reasonable but not huge gameplay time, no multiplayer and a story that is exactly the same on every play through, things are not looking good for a lifespan score, as is the case with most adventure games. However, The Last Prophecy has one more trick up its sleeve that saves it from early retirement - the optional tasks.

To add replayablity, a few side quests have been included, things that are beneficial if completed but have no affect on the overall story, such as cooking something you don't need later on. You do not need to complete these tasks at all, but doing so earns you points and the mandatory tasks also offer a few points, so telling an optional side quest apart from a mandatory main quest can be difficult. Getting a higher than usual score at the end of the game is something that every gamer has been brought up to do - you can't really do anything in-game with the points but they do give you bragging rights!

Nostradamus: The Last Prophecy is enjoyable but flawed; it's too short, with little reason to play it again (beyond seeking a higher score), the game world isn't lively or well populated enough to be convincing and the puzzles are of mixed quality, making it a pretty standard point-and-click game. Pulling no punches and sticking to a tried and tested formula can still produce a surprisingly enjoyable game, but the few new additions like the inventory system fail to raise the game above the competition. With the lack of anything new and often complex puzzles, I decree that this is one for dedicated adventure game players only - newcomers to the genre will quickly find themselves out of their depth.

Reviewed by Tom Clark for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).