Yes and no. I picked this up on a deep discount - even though I still have the original four-CD disk set in the original box - just so that I could play on Windoze 11 without having to wonder if the ancient installer still works (and sometimes these old games wouldn't run unless you had the game CD in a drive, and my machine doesn't even have an optical drive), and to compare it with the up-and-coming new remaster.

A great trip down memory lane, seems to run just fine, but it really is an "olde skewl" point-n-click game, with some of the exasperating features of pre-rendered slide-show type games, so this is definitely not for everybody (especially you young'uns).

Navigation is often confusing (you're facing one way, click to move somewhere, and sometimes it's not immediately clear exactly which direction you're facing when you move, or exactly where you are in a 3D space), and there are some "spot the pixel" puzzles (i.e., you're in a room with some stuff in it, and if you casually move the cursor around the screen it looks like there is nothing with which to interact, but if you move it slowly, and stop at JUST the right place, you discover there's a switch or button or something).

Sokal is no longer with us, so I don't feel bad suggesting that you wait for a deep sale before buying this one - but I'll still give it a positive review because this is the game that started his video game career, and while it is definitely showing its age, it is a product of its time, and I still remember being wow-ed by it back when it first came out.

Edit: After having finished this game, I can no longer recommend it. WAY too many "find the exact pixel" issues, way too much trying to navigate through low-resolution jungles looking for some tiny tiny thing that you need, too much "need to see a detail in an extremely gloomy poor-lit crappy resolution room", etc... Sorry, Benoit ...

It should be illegal to sell games in this condition. I installed "Amerzone: The Explorer’s Legacy" to my Windows 10 machine and tried to run it. It basically locked me out of my machine. I had to hard reboot since I couldn't even quit or ALT-TAB out of the game. There are no options for anything like resolution or aspect ratio and everything was all stretched out and illegible. At one point, I was able to somehow actually enter the game, itself. But, couldn't control it at all. Do not buy it at any price.

Just finished this one.

It's an old port from PS1. Graphic is actually pretty good for a game that old.
The music and sound effect is pretty engaging.

The story is about a reporter went into an old explorer's home and accepted his dying wish to deliver/hatch a super bird egg from Amerzone....

It's actually got quite a bit of twist and turns in story.. (your multi-purpose ride ran out of fuel several times.)
You actually see death/desturction and a lot different exotic animals.

The bottom line however this is a simple Find and solve puzzle advanture which answers are always very linear. The puzzles are really easy but to find some of the items is a little bit hard. It's difficulty and enjoyment is only 1/3 of the original MYST.

Recommend to Buy? well no.. its really outdated. Even though there are no game breaking glich.. it's just not on par with most puzzle games like J.U.L.I.A and MYST. If you can get it real cheap and you want play one of the game that invented adventure puzzle game with least violece. You can give this one a try.

This one is really old and it doesn't offer trading card and achievements.

If you are a big fan of Sokal, you could find some joy in recognizing hints of his visual style in some of the machinery, but other than that, there's hardly anything worthwhile in this early work of his.

The story is minimal and absent for most parts of the game and there's no emotional attachment to what you do or any sort of "stakes". The puzzles regularly consist of running to and fro about twenty screens per area with nothing to do only to find that one hotspot to find that lets you proceed and not only is it boring, but often confusing to navigate, too, as everything looks the same.

For the most part, all you do is get your vehicle to move to the next area and you soon feel like you repeat the same few things. None of the puzzles require any thinking, just having found whatever hotspot you had to click on first. This makes the game tedious and unsatisfying with a lot of time wasting filler areas that just have you run around for the sake of it.

It's simply not a good game and even if you are only interested in it for Sokal's art, be warned the graphics aged very poorly. There's also not much sound or even music and it's pretty short. I was done in about four hours and that included a lot of getting stuck due to missing hotspots or glitches with the inventory. (Yes, save regularly. You will need it.)

Amerzone: The Explorer’s Legacy (1999) is an ancient game from 1999. It's a whopping 25 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.

One warning is that for many gamers the game doesn't load properly, it just changes your desktop resolution to a very low setting then shows the spinning mouse pointer on a white screen until you terminate the game. If developers want to keep selling old games, they have a responsibility to keep them running. It should work, or they should remove it if they are too lazy to fix/maintain their broken software.

This is an old Myst like point and click adventure where you move between different nodes as you progress through a simple Myst inspired storyline and a tropical jungle landscape (amongst other scenes), clicking through various puzzles in each 360 degree view fishbowl until it's over and you remember why they don't make games in this obsolete format anymore.

From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.

There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.

The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just point and click stuff like a browser/Flash game. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here.

These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.

Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a modest spike in player counts for the game. But this only happened once, around the same time that trading cards were applied to the game... so this is just card idlers getting their cards and moving on. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.

Because the game is broken and unplayable for me, it may also not work for other gamers. This is a solid reason to approach this game with some scepticism.

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

Amerzone: The Explorer’s Legacy (1999) is stupidly overpriced for an abandonware nostalgia gouge, at $13 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. For comparison, the $13 asking price for this game could get you games like "Alien: Isolation", "The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt" or "Final Fantasy XIV Online". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.

Unfortunately this game didn't age well and I do not recommend it unless you can get it for under a dollar and know three things going in.
1. The graphics make it difficult to identify objects you can interact with. Make sure to scan each "step" thoroughly.
2. There are no subtitles and is probably the reason I do not recommend it. Sparsely through the game there will be dialogue that cannot be repeated. You must listen closely to get all of the story.
3. There is an area where you must use a grappling hook. Your cursor will turn into a grappling hook but this only sets where it will shoot when you pull the lever.

I think for the time it was created it was an immersive game and offered a simple but intriguing story. Playing the game isn't a waste of time by any means and if the above isn't enough to steer someone away, you will have properly managed your expectations.

I played on the playstation, so at that time the locations looked beautiful and the story seems interesting, but its presentation, dialog, quests are made boring, in the end every time threw not even reaching the middle of the game.

I don't think Amerzone has held up well. Maybe I should have played the Syberia games first to better understand Benoit Sokal as an artist.

Amerzone is a very old first person perspective point & click adventure game, as such, I didn't have high expectations when it comes to visuals but even so, I was still dissapointed with it's visual presentation.

But I'll be back to that later on, Amerzone have a story that is difficult to understand, to contibuting factors to that are the lack of subtitles and very low quality of voice overs, not the actint itself mind you, just the quality of the voice files, it made it really hard to understand the story.

On the visual side, Amerzone is badly optimized for modern comptuers, it's very low resolution videos and graphics result in a highly pixelated experience and the fact that videos such as intro company logos and credits cannot be skipped did not help.

That said, it's not all bad, if you're running in on an older computer with a much lower resolution that game will most likely look pretty good and not at all as pixelated as I experienced it and if crank the volume up you may even understand most of the very few voiced, oned sided conversations that exist in the game.

But Amerzone isn't about the conversation, it's main focus is the exploration and story, in that regard, Amerzone delivers a decent experience, though I've seen better stories in other Benoit Sokal games.

Though the puzzles in the game are somewhat ambiguous or just plain hard, sometime just due to resolution & pixelation problems, I personally resulted to using a walkthrough throughout most of the game.

Overall, Amerzone is not a bad game but not a very good either, if you're hardcore adventure gamers, you may want to give it a try, otherwise, just skip it, you won't miss anything.

PROS:

• Decent story
  
• Decent voice acting
  
• It's an oldie

CONS:

• Very little conversations and one sided
  
• Badly optimized for newer machines
  
• Pixel Galore
  
• Seen better from Benoit Sokal
  
• Unclear or too difficult puzzles
  
• No Subtitles
  
• Low quality sound

Overall Rating: 5/10

Released five years after the groundbreaking "Myst", Amerzone pays a huge homage to this classic adventure puzzler but ultimately ends up disappointing expectations.

There is none of the suspense and great puzzles of Myst in Amerzone. One essentially just clicks through a story which, unfortunately, is already laid out in great detail from the very beginning. The idea of using a journal to "bury" hints to the player, thus allowing the player to retrace the steps of the former explorer is neat, but as there are no real puzzles to solve, no hints (with one exception) are needed. The journal essentially just gives away the journey and the encounters one is going to have.

Amerzone could still work as an experience that the imaginative world and story plus the great artwork surely would carry. Unfortunately, the quality of the graphics are so bad that one not only misses out on the experience factor but also has trouble finding important items. A 640x480 resolution is just too small when displayed using 1:1 pixel mapping (smaller objects are not identifiable anymore) and, when zoomed in to fill a modern screen, just look way too grainy and pixelated to create any immersion or enjoyment. The in-game graphics often look considerably worse than the previews on Steam, potentially some good filtering has been done on the latter.

Due to the bad graphics, another downside of the game -- a reliance on creating challenges by letting the player find almost camouflaged items/targets within busy backgrounds -- becomes aggravated. Having to spot a brown stick on a brownish background, without knowing that you'll need it, is bad enough when the graphics are nice, but becomes a chore when facing a 640x480 pixel mess that only looks somewhat acceptable when one permanently squints one's eyes.

Sometimes this kind of pixel hunting can stop one in one's track until one finally figures out where to click. There is one stage in the gamewhen using the grapnel modewhen one has to figure out the playing mechanics with the game showing entirely misleading animations-- the grapnel always flies forward to the same spot no matter where one clicks, unless one figures out the correct target.

This is frustrating just like the audio loops to create ambient sounds become rather irritating after a short while. The loops are so short that their repetitive nature becomes apparent very quickly and their quality is (unsurprisingly) not that great either.

Towards the end I noticed inconsistent rendering of in-game objects; depending on the view angle, an apparatus was either shown in the correct or an outdated state. I furthermore wasn't able to put down an item before I had found another item (the latter not being a logical prerequisite for the former item dropping action). Finally, it took me five attempts to initiate an action with my last item. Had I not been stubborn (having guessed that there would be no other option) I'd still be running round the area looking for further objects.


I don't want to be too harsh on a game that must have been quite exciting in 1999. I liked the Myst-style navigation mechanics that support quick movement and the 360° views per location were great. Again, the whole game is a great testament to the creativity and imagination of its designers but in 2019 it doesn't have an "experience" factor anymore. With the latter missing, one is left with quite a bit of pixel hunting, occasionally disorienting movement (which made the maze-like segments even less enjoyable), and no interesting puzzles to speak of.

If you want to relive the imaginative story, Amerzone could still be for you, but in this case I guess you better get yourself an old 13" CRT monitor so that the graphics still have a chance of working to some extent.