Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis



This is the game that is hailed by many as the absolute best SCUMM game ever; I have to agree with them. Fate of Atlantis presents its own story rather than plucking one from the movies. While Indiana Jones is still fighting against the Nazis, this time he teams up with his ex-colleague-now-turned psychic, Sophia Hapgood, as they try to stop Klaus Kerner and the Nazis from getting to the lost city of Atlantis and harboring the power of the Orichalcum, a mysterious mineral. Nazis, lost cities, ancient and powerful artifacts, sounds like an Indiana Jones tale to me!

Once again, the game was a point-and-click adventure game based on a much improved upon SCUMM engine and also brought back the IQ system. What made this game so popular was that there were three paths players could choose to play down: a Wits path, a Fists path, and a Team path. Depending on which path you took little changes in dialogue and how things played out would occur throughout the game.

There was even an alternate ending that would depend on a certain choice you made during the playthrough. But as always, to get the maximum 1000 IQ score, you would have to do everything in the game, which there was plenty to do. You could also die which was much easier to avoid in this game than in Last Crusade.

The game was even re-released with full-voice over but I have to admit after playing it, the voices just aren’t that great especially if you want to compare it toEscape from Monkey Island . However, even with bad voicing, the game is still really worth playing through and for some people, worth creating their own prequel using an emulated form of the SCUMM engine. This fan-made project was titled,Indiana Jones and the Fountain Youth . Progress is coming along slowly with only a demo available for download as of now. However, an official sequel to the game was titled, Indiana Jones and the Iron Phoenix but was subsequently cancelled to the dismay of many fans.

Fate of Atlantis packs in an Indian Jones worthy tale with plenty of adventure game puzzles and of course, the SCUMM humor. Now if LEGO: Indiana Jones can only follow the same formula these two games did, everything will be alight.