"Nikopol: Secrets of the Immortals" is an ancient game from 2008. It's a whopping 16 years old at the time of this review. The game lacks support for any modern gaming display resolutions (or widescreen monitors), hasn't been modernised or updated to run smoothly on modern gaming PCs. Despite this lack of modernisation, it carries a pretty high price tag for such an ancient game. This seems to have been put on Steam as a nostalgia gouge, or just a cash grab to try profit from abandonware.

This is a Myst clone, basically you're presented with a first person 3D scene that you can look around and interact with, but movement is a matter of "teleporting" between these static scenes. Not a true FPS game, which makes it again a little obsolete. The idea is that you're a nice guy in a dystopian alternative world/society, and egytpian aliens crash land with their space pyramid so you need go to sort all that out, I guess. Hey, even terrible game concepts can work if the gameplay and technical execution are good enough. Just look at Helldivers 2. Anyway, it's worth mentioning the graphics here are kind of okay for a 2008 game... but that's just about all this has going for it.

On the upside, the game does feature customisable controls and resolution, so at least some of the basic, minimum requirements have been met. Unfortunately there's a number of other technical defects and shortcomings which contribute to the game being difficult to recommend to gamers.

The game only displays in 4:3 pillarboxed aspect ratio, due to the age of the game, it predates the 16:9 widescreen gaming standard established back in 2006 (2 years before this launched, so there's really no excuse for not being aware of the gaming environment at the time). It's possible they're marketing this towards people using an old CRT they found in a dumpster, or this game is being specifically marketed towards people gaming on PC's from 1995... either way, this isn't really acceptable in the modern era of PC gaming. It's obviously not going to look right on a modern 16:9 gaming display.

The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.

The game never really caught on with the millions of gamers on Steam, with a very low peak player count close to launch, and then just a handful of players launching this game every couple of days. This is undoubtedly caused by factors such as those raised in this review. It's always helpful with buying decisions to consider how popular and successful the product is, and unfortunately while this did accumulate a few participation trophy reviews, overall, people just aren't using it.

So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?

"Nikopol: Secrets of the Immortals" is relatively expensive for an abandonware nostalgia gouge, at $5 USD, and it's not worth it. The game is just too old, hasn't been modernised. And as the old saying goes, you can't go home again.

2023 was crazy.

There's a reason the last time I played this was 2013, and it's now 2024.

For the most part this is a standard "point and click" adventure game. If you don't like that kind of game, you won't like this game.

However, even if you like point and click adventure games, I still can't recommend it. That's because of the timed puzzle sections. There's one right at the beginning that was a pure exercise in frustration. I hadn't even gotten out of the first room before needing a walkthrough guide.

I will note that it's funny that this "sci-fi dystopian future" is set in 2023 and I'm writing this review in 2024.

Listen, if you're into this type of game then more power to you. As someone who actually does enjoy this genre? Even I couldn't get behind it. I played this in a call with a couple of friends (one of which is a fan of the books) and by the end we all hated this. It's a quite pretty game and the setting it chose to use for it is an intriguing one, I'm sure.

Yet it's very insufferable, to be frank. A lot of questions go unanswered, the plot seemed so wild that most of it could have been solved without the protagonist even being there, and everything seemed like a contrived way to shove the plot along.

There's a lot of ways to get killed in this game and, more often than not, dying will push you back to a state where you have to watch a cutscene or complete an earlier puzzle just to get back to where you were. This would be fine if it weren't for the tedium of some puzzles and the natural state of trying to run old games on new hardware they never designed it for (aka it breaking a few times), which ultimately led to it being an experience I wish I could take back.

It was short. You could really finish this in an hour if you knew what you were doing, if not quicker if you avoided reading all the lore snippets.

I want to give this game a non positive/negative review, but since i can't, I'll have to stick to where I more closer lean: Not Recommending it.

Not a very good adventure game unfortunately. I rarely write reviews, but this game is very frustrating, puzzles aren't very logical. The graphics are nice though, but that's basically it!

A point and click game with a really weird story and weird movement. You get used to the movement quite easily but there is other issues with the game like: multiple timed sequences that get you killed if you don't figure out what to do fast enough and bad puzzles to solve. Needless to say I am not a fan of the game.

Works more of less fine (freezes for a second from time to time) on Linux with Proton (7.0-4).

Most of the puzzles I played in this game are more tedious than challenging. They require patience over insight, so it becomes frustrating very quickly. Also the pacing of the game is disjointed and off-putting. I found myself frustrated with trying to puzzle out situations with short time limits one too many times.

I hope the story makes more sense to people who read the comic this is based on. I did not read it and the story made no sense to me.

Game does not work with Windows 10. It gives a screen resolution error even when your screen resolution is set to what it says it should be.