Curse Of Enchantia

STORY / GAMEPLAY
The magical world of Enchantia is under the curse of a powerful albeit nameless witch. To satisfy her desire for eternal youth she requires a young boy as a final ingredient for a rejuvenating potion. Since she couldn't find any in Enchantia, she tricked her fellow witches helping her open a magical portal to Earth on a deserted field. Thus she waited until one day a boy named Brad was playing baseball there. It's no surprise that she zapped him to Enchantia, and imprison him in her dungeon. Now, Brad must battle through this mysterious and perilous land in order to free himself of this evil curse and return home safely.
In your travels through Enchantia to stop the evil witch, you'll visit over 150 locations, interact with offbeat characters and solve exciting puzzles. Its original and genuinely user interface is similar to the King Quest 5 game but more comprehensive. It consist of strips of up to ten icons across the top or bottom of the screen. From the menu, you can view your inventory, pick up objects, manipulate them, look around, talk to other characters, fight, jump over things, use disc functions, control the sound, and see ... your score. Choosing the manipulating icon brings up another set of icons for unlocking, inserting, throwing, pushing, pulling, giving and fastening. Though, when puzzles involve manipulating objects, this has to be done in a certain way, and that makes it too complicated a lot! In general, although Curse of Enchantia is a typical point-and-click adventure, the gameplay is very abnormal. Number of possibilities that you can do with an object does not correspond with logical solution that is really needed. Because of this the player is perplexed why things do not work and he resigns looking for another solution. Another problem here is that, you don't know what is on the screen until you get close to the object and only then it can be visible from the interface perspective and made possible to interact. Too bad some of the puzzles were almost impossible to solve, due to the lack of logic required for them and this challenging game-interface.
Although Curse of Enchantia is a pretty good looking game, great graphics and innovative user-interface icon system, cannot hide a gameplay devoid of logic, confusing and without the possibility of real reasoning on what to do. The difficulty curve is not set just right, as many puzzles are so obscure to solve due to the above (described) gameplay glitches, and thus easily to give up after a couple of hours. Fortunately, although its 6 discs space, you don't need to swap discs a lot (unless if you play the game via whdload set-up of course).

GRAPHICS / SOUND
Graphics are fine, and it is obvious that a great deal of care and attention has been taken over them. Characters are well animated (cartoon-like acts if Brad is shocked by electricity or crushed by a huge hammer) while the backgrounds are nicely animated giving a great sense of depth to name a few, reflections on the water surface, birds which fly far overhead. The several sceneries look wonderful, with plenty of colors on the Amiga version with up to 32 colors on screen in the gameplay scenes and another 20+ colors coming up in the user interface's icons when enabled. Compared to the PC version, of course its 256 colors on screen does look way better, but still the Amiga version is pretty good here.
Sound on the other hand is on the negative side. Some small samples of background sounds and stupid words "Hi" and "Help" spoken by Brad is all you will hear. Unfortunately there is absolutely no music during gameplay (except for the intro) which is awkward when it comes to adventure games I think.