Beautiful graphics, and interesting premise but the game itself is extremely frustrating. The puzzles themselves are pretty simple, but in addition to the old pixel hunt style, the game doesn't enable the hotspots for items or usable scenery until specific times. Then, just to ramp up the frustration, there are timed puzzles, with the same constraints. Suddenly scenery and items become arbitrarily active or inactive, with little time to experiment and search. Feels like a serving of frustration with a side of screw you from the author. Having a walkthrough helps, but it'll just piss you off when you see that your solution was correct -- you just weren't doing it the way the designer wanted you to, and at the right time that the designer wanted you to.

This game is based on a graphic novel, or a series of 3 graphic novels that later got compiled into one book called "The Nikopol Trilogy" written and illiustrated by a great French author named Enki Bilal. The art in the novel is what stands out the most and is a very dark, gritty, and , industrial, steam-punk(architectural not the lame club scene), and is set in an alternate dystopian future where religions are now all powerful government parties and the ancient Egyptian gods themselves have returned to earth from space in a hovering pyramid spaceship. Despite being gods, with powers seemingly limited only by the imagination, they are still quite flawed sentient beings, who aregue and bicker and play board games to pass the time. They also require fossil fuels to power their spaceship and are stuck hovering over Paris. That is a basic run down of the story line for all you haters out there who "don't get the story line."
Secondly, there is also a pretty popular Sci-Fi film based on the Nikopol story called "Immortal" that came out in 2004. I remember watching it on the Sci-Fi channel a couple times and you can currently watch the full movie on YouTube. I highly recommend it. The movie was directed by the author of the graphic novel Enki Bilal and is actually quite a ground breaking movie in its own right. It revolutionized the art of mixing computer animation with live action. In this dystopian future there is heavy polution, and many people have become sick and prosthetic artificial body parts are not only required for most people, but it is a huge fad like plastic surgery gone haywire, and has become all the rage. So you see these real actors with computer generated parts and they had to film every scene twice exactly the same way. There are also aliens, who are ironically enough, treated just like illegal aliens and have to go through customs and immigration lol.
OK, so , on to the game. This was the first "point and click adventure" game I've ever really played, so it took some getting used to. The fact that this game is pretty closley based on the book and not the movie kept me pretty interested the whole time as it is stuff that happens to Nikopol inbetween the books. Yes the game is hard as hell and I did need a walkthrough on certain puzzles, but honestly, in a world where half the modern games are designed so that a baboon could beat it on hard, it was a welcomed challenge. If you are used to point and click than you know what to expect. This game actually got me into more point and click adventure games such as Myst and a few others. If you are a fan of the movie Immortal(ad vitam) or the Nikopol Trilogy books than this game will blow your shorts off. If not and you kinda liked the crazy dark sci fi storyline, I highly recommend you check out all three.

Well, Nikopol: Secrets of the Immortals is a short adventure game based on The Carnival of Immortals - or La Foire aux immortels, the first book of Enki Bilal's Nikopol Trilogy, a series of graphics novels that illustrates 2023 Paris as an incredibly dark political dystopia with science fiction elements. Aside Enki Bilal's genius in depicting the surreal and the grotesque in Nikopol series, this game is a heavily watered down version of the first book, from Nikopol Jr.'s perspective.

It's year 2023. After two nuclear wars, countless political confrontations and casual genetic mutations, the world has become disease-ridden and post-apocalyptic. We take the silent, oblivious artist Nikopol Jr.'s perspective as puppeteered elections for the nation of Paris approaches. He is a silent romantic in a degenerate era. With the appearance of an odd spaceship in the form of an Egyptian pyramid on Paris astroport, Alcide Nikopol's life is about to change drastically.

Before continuing with my review, I have to warn you: if you are to only play this game, without reading comics first, I suspect that you would be capable of understanding anything. As a stand-alone game, story presentation is mismatched and rushed. It is more than likely to complete the whole game without understanding anything about the affairs going around. The setting is not well-presented enough to capture the grotesque genius of the series and a great amount of characters, events, explanations are completely skipped in this bland interpretation. So if you've found the concept to your liking and got curious, drop the game and get yourself Nikopol Trilogy to enjoy an A+ quality creepy dystopia.

Okay, now we've established the quality difference between graphic novels and the game, I'll focus on the game. Graphics might be considered beautiful in their own displays, and character animations are quite elegant. I especially liked the character designs for Egyptian characters - Horus and Anubis. Voice acting isn't marvelous, and the subtitles being nonexistent doesn't stand in the favor of the game either though.

Well, when we talk about the gameplay, Nikopol has its list of downsides. Without the usage of a walkthrough, it is possible to miss an item and keep playing only to find that you cannot progress anymore due to the item not being available for you to grab anymore. On that department, I suggest saving a lot - which is another issue, with only 10 save slots given. Also, you are capable of dying in a handful of imaginative ways, considering that you are treated as a terrorist by the government from the start of your game. In that sense, no, this is not your casual point and click adventure. Puzzles are usually interesting and imaginative, and they demand prior attention to the storyline, so you have to keep certain facts at mind before trying to handle a puzzle. With the slightest mistake, you are prone to alarming security and getting shot down. Luckily, game restores your position before being shut down every time.

As an adventure game, Nikopol: Secrets of the Immortals isn't anything unique or even interesting, with its grander equivalents around. As an Enki Bilal interpretation, it could present you a brief smile if you are already familiar with his work. If not, go fetch the comic book. Only after reading the original work, if you could say that you are still curious, yeah, go ahead. Otherwise, the game won't mean anything to you.

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Nikopol has never had a very good reputation on Steam, stretching all the way back to its launch. I've always been curious about it, what with its futuristic stylings and rad floating pyramid. Honestly, starting it up it felt no worse than a lot of indie adventures, and the sharp pre-rendered backgrounds and interesting setting did a lot to get me in the mood for some weirdness. But the weirdness was quickly drowned out by some unexpected pixel hunts, some aggravatingly complex puzzles, and a general lack of polish and important details.

Based on the works of a French graphic novelist (whom I am definitely going to check out now), Nikopol is the story of a guy named Nikopol, strangely enough. He lives in a dystopian Paris ruled by a theological dictatorship in the year 2023, which I just realized is a scant six years from now. Le Pen's Paris is a gray and decaying place, full of armored soldiers and what I can only assume are genetically-engineered creatures dedicated to enforcing their laws. Nikopol, an artist and member of the resistance, gets chased out of his apartment by one of these beasts and into the jaws of a conspiracy involving the church, his father, Egyptian gods, and... wait, what?

The moment Anubis himself meets you in a slummy urban graveyard is probably the moment that what weak grasp you have on the plot is lost. There's clearly a LOT going on here with the different shades of religion and many factions vying for power in the shadow of the enigmatic floating pyramid, and you're going to get approximately none of it here. Monsters and cyborgs and spirits will appear to give their little spiels and then vanish back to wherever the hell they came from, leaving you to toil through the puzzles and reach your goal with little rhyme or reason to guide you.

And those puzzles, Jesus Cyberchrist those puzzles. So in one scene, there's a vending machine holding funerary urns full of ashes and you need the one your mom is in. You need coins from an offering box next to you but the cyborg priest is using a wall-mounted mirror to make sure you don't dip into his tithes. The solution is to pick up a nearly-invisible rock from the ground, chuck it at the mirror to break it, and then use the coins to sort through the machine one urn at a time in search of your mom. This, of course, is used to set up a ritual room of stone plates and chalk drawings using "A is next to B, B can't be across from C" puzzle clues, and then later using that room to solve a secret message substitution code.

That's Nikopol in a nutshell, a mess of confusing and frustrating puzzles carrying along a hopelessly incomprehensible plot. So many of the items you need are nearly invisible both because they blend perfectly into the detailed scenes and because you won't even realize you need them in the first place. To clear the debris from one doorway you have to (a) pick up a brick from the debris, (b) clear a specific spot on the floor, (c) place the brick, (d) pick up and place a tall board to prop the ceiling, and then (e) use a hammer to knock away the rest of the debris. The only clue you're going to get to ANY of this is a line about the ceiling being unstable. And this is going to be every chapter, with the puzzles getting worse and worse.

It's a real shame too, because with a little more focus and polish and, um, story this could have been quite good. The static scenes you explore are well-detailed, a few of the puzzles early on aren't too terrible, the voice acting is... passable... Okay, maybe this one was doomed regardless but it still could have been better than this. At the very least they could have hired a real translator instead of transcribing dialogue with hilariously obvious misspellings. Really though that's just one more annoyance to add to a veritable mountain of troubles. Nikopol's reputation for being frustrating and incomprehensible precedes it for good reason, and it's bad enough that there's no chance I'll ever see its end.



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The game was... interesting. The story wasn't exactly bad, but i think you need to read the trilogy to fully understand it. I personally haven't and the story didn't make any sense at the start. The game has quite a lot of action for a point & click adventure game. With action i mean that someone might be following you etc. and you need to do bunch of puzzles or move around really quickly so they won't catch you. Puzzles were quite easy and the game was pretty short (Around 4-5 hours, probably a bit longer if you're new to the genre).

First of all, you need to understand; this is addition to novel or movie. So first of all go and read\watch 'em. Only then consider to play this game. Overall? it is a great adventure, not a best out there but decent.

Recommended for fans of this genre, but not for the typical gamer.
It's a short, weird, artsy game with both easy and annyoingly hard puzzles. Play if for the atmosphere, the (weird) story and the rather varied and imaginative puzzles. If you are openminded you can experience a relly unique story and a very immersive game that keeps on giving you another surprise. The game and story is weird but I think it acutually makes sense within its own parameters.

NEGATIVE
- Short game (4 hours unless you get stuck)
- Possibility of getting stuck if you can't figure out one clue or if you miss a clickable pixel
- A little bit dated on the vide side (but still looks good)
- Too weird for most gamers

POSITIVE
- Very unique game and story
- Immersive and almost interfaceless
- Inventive and surprising tasks
- Some puzzles are unique and really makes you think
- Nice shifts between puzzles, storytelling and short action sequences
- Artistic visuals and sound
- You've never seen anything like this before

The secret is you need to read the comic or see the movie to have a clue what is going on. The story in the game is not well told on its own, leaving a lot of questions and confusion by the end with half-told tales and rushed through reveals. This isn't helped by the brevity of the game, which is going to be 4-5 hours for the average gamer. For the gameplay itself, the core is made up around point-and-click puzzles to solve. Some of these puzzles are frustrating pixel hunts that may depend on mousing over something near a corner of the floor rather than on being cleverly designed.

However, it isn't all bad. Some of the puzzles do work well and make sense, even if they are overshadowed by the more frustrating experiences. Also, the game looks great (for its time) and I especially appreciated the style of the cinematics which emulated the graphic novel (comic book) origins of the story / game. On that note, while the game almost requires you to have read the comic or seen the movie to really understand everything going on, it does work well if you do have that knowledge and, especially, if you were a fan of that source material.

Overall, I would say that this game should be skipped by most, but if you are a diehard fan of point-and-clicks...especially futuristic, dystopian ones...or if you really enjoyed the source material (The Carnival of Immortals comic, or Immortal the movie) and wanted to play a sort of video game companion, then this actually may do just fine for you.

It's unclear whether something important is either lost in translation, or just expected to be found in sources outside of the content of the game, but either way, the events in Nikopol feel like a drug trip; nothing that happens ever seems to make much sense, and everybody who inhabits its world operates on some inscrutible, Lynchian-esque, fever-dream logic that never reveals itself to the player over the course of the game.

To further complicate things, the game's frequently frustrating and obtuse puzzles are presented—visually and mechanically—in a manner that would have seemed quaint in a game 10 years its senior; as difficult as it may be to tell at face value, Nikopol was released contemporaneously with titles like Dead Space, Fallout 3, Far Cry 2 and Mirror's Edge, just to name a few.

While it manages to use what modest technical grunt it has to establish the look and mood of the world fairly well, it's by-and-large a clunky and awkward experience that runs the gamut of insulting your intelligence, completely ignoring logic and physics, assuming you're a member of Mensa, and occasionally giving you clues to puzzles that almost seem designed to mislead you.

I admit that, as someone who isn't French and hadn't read Enki Bilal's Nikopol Trilogy (upon which this game is based), perhaps I'm simply not the target audience of this game. That said, as someone who had watched the movie adaptation (Immortel Ad Vitam), and bought this game shortly after only to finally finish it like a long list of Sunday chores with the help of walkthroughs some seven years later, I still don't feel any closer to understanding what, exactly, the Secrets of the Immortals were, or why anyone should care to find out.

ENG:

Successful on the click & point type of puzzle and adventure game 3D dimensional. Referral!


FIN:

Onnistunut klick & point tyyppinen puzzle ja seikkailupeli 3d ulotteisena. Suositteluni!