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The scenery is the best part

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 8 / 8
Date: January 23, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I was sucked into this game by the gorgeous setting; it takes place inside a small, posh art museum where you spend most of your time wandering around and looking at the sumptuous objets d'art collected there. You're looking for clues to a mystery involving relics of Genghis Khan and a modern cult wishing to use those relics for a sinister purpose. Sounds good, but it lost something in the actual execution. First of all, the puzzles are exceedingly contrived. At one point, to progress in the game, you have to brew a cup of tea. Do you do this the normal way? Oh no. You have to rig up this complicated device involving a toilet paper roll, toothpicks, and I can't even remember what else. Why??? I also hated the ending. The "winning" ending is only slightly less depressing than the "losing" ending. I finished the game only to wonder why I'd spent so much time on it.

First-person puzzle-solving in a museum

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: June 08, 2003
Author: Amazon User

System on which this was tried out: Pentium III 733 MHz, nVidia TNT 2 Pro, 128 MB RAM, Win98, with a monitor with 1024 x 768 resolution. However, the game can run just fine on a 500 MHz laptop without hardware acceleration, since it was developed before hardware acceleration was a common requirement.

This first-person game opens with a cutscene from the burial of Genghis Khan - birthname, Temujin - introducing us to the two women from his life who we'll be meeting as ghosts later on: Mei, a shaman whose efforts to protect the Khan's soul were thwarted by Xiao, the priestess of the cult of Wah-jin who sought to bind him so that he would one day return to rule the world, and be ruled in turn by her. Mei's ghost is to be your help/hint system.

Moving to the present day and the beginning of the game, the player is trapped in the Stevenson Museum, which houses the artefacts found in Temujin's tomb. The centerpiece of 'the Capricorn collection' from which it takes its name is the mysterious Wah-jin symbol (the elaborate goat-skull seen on the box art - it's based on a real artefact). Temujin's coffin is also on display, although nobody ever found his body - but it's not empty, as you'll find out if you look inside when a shaken art expert stumbles out of the exhibit area at the beginning of the game.

The museum's actually pretty small, without any visitors on the day the game takes place, but you've got the restoration studio, the break room, the storeroom, the gift shop, and the offices of all the employees to explore as well as the exhibit areas. The owner, Matthew Stevenson, uses his office in the museum to run his Wall Street empire, since he likes having a few artefacts sitting around his office. (Incidentally, all the artwork in the museum really exists, though spread out across many collections in real life.)

The player character, like the player, begins the game with a blank slate, suffering from amnesia and unable to speak. The other characters - mostly museum employees - seem to know who you are and to know what's wrong with you, so an atmosphere of conspiracy builds up fast. (It's good to play the game a second time, in fact, once you know what's behind it all.)

This was the first Southpeak game to use the Video Reality engine, so the setting and all the other characters are played by live actors, so much of what you see is photo-realistic. (In some places, this helps you identify objects in the environment that you're supposed to interact with - one artefact that you're supposed to pick up early in the game looks very unrealistic in its original setting, since it's represented by an artificial graphic that wasn't very well done - but most of the things you interact with are in fact represented by real photographed things.) The downside to this, despite the game's claims to the contrary, is a certain limitation on how much you can interact with the other characters. You can't speak at all - there are plot-driven reasons for this, though - so whenever you meet another character, you go through a cutscene rather than an interaction you could control.

The puzzles you need to solve are a mix of pretty logical actions - swipe some batteries from something else if the tape player you need to listen to has dead batteries, for instance - and a few really contrived puzzles. (For instance, when you need to break off a piece of one item, you don't hit it yourself like a normal person - you're required to ricochet a rock off something else to hit it.) Some of this can be justified in plot terms as the ghosts 'testing' you to see if you're worthy of what they eventually have in mind, but in that case, they're valuing puzzle-solving over common sense. :)

On the whole, I like this game - the story is cool and the museum is beautiful, and while there aren't many surprises on replay, you'll have a new perspective on what the other characters are doing. The standard complaint about the movement system used to be that despite having a map of the museum, there isn't any quick way to 'jump' from point A to point B, but given modern graphic cards' performance that's not really much of a problem; besides, the player needs to search the whole place for clues. Some trigger flashbacks of memory, while others just provide atmosphere and help the player figure out what's going on. The game is somewhat linear, divided into several 'acts' in terms of the goals you need to achieve, but you have a respectable amount of freedom as to how you go about it.

Trivia: Southpeak invented Virtual Jigsaw as a side effect of this game; the puzzles in the museum gift shop can be worked by the player, and each provides a little information about the museum and its contents when completed.

_Dark Side of the Moon_, a later Video Reality-based game, addressed the dialogue issues, if you like the basic look of Temujin but are bothered by the passive role; a comic book you'll find in the later stages of Temujin has an advertisement for its sibling across the back cover. :)

Engaging and exciting

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 6 / 9
Date: May 25, 2001
Author: Amazon User

A fine adventure game, with lots of interaction, good puzzles, an engaging and well-written plot, and an impressive 3D engine to boot. One of my favorites that I play over and over again and never seem to get tired of.

Incidently, this is one of those rare games from the golden era that plays just as happily on Windows XP as on 95, 98, and ME. Marvelous!

Okay, but not my favorite

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 9 / 19
Date: November 20, 2000
Author: Amazon User

I bought this game because it looked like a mystery, and i love mystery and adventure games. It was really cool, actually, but it got old after a while, and I didn't really get it.It was really weird. I didn't know who I was, and I couldn't talk to anyone. The graphics are really really good. The only way I solved it was through a walkthrough on the Internet. So it was hard. But it was an okay game, i guess.

Great Game!!!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: November 05, 2002
Author: Amazon User

This is game is so cool! If you get into it the game goes by really fast , but there is so much to do, it reminds me of the 7th guest. You get to walk around the muesum sneaking into offices and poking around looking for clues. I love the interaction it felt so real and the timeing was perfect. The puzzles are really fun and sometimes out there and the conversations you overhear and people you bump into are so wierd! It's definally one of those games for rainy nights, a great buy!

Temujin. A fantastic mystery!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: March 14, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I loved this game. The video clips and story line were superb. Interesting and challenging puzzles. Graphics were wonderful. Smooth play without computer glitches. I could play this one again.

A bit disappointing.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 3 / 7
Date: April 13, 2001
Author: Amazon User

The concept seemed so cool. I loved the Ghenghis Kahn tie-in. However, the game itself proved disappointing. I saw the ending coming way before it happened, so there wasn't really any surprise. Fun in all, but could have been better. The graphics were excellent, though.

A Dismal Failure

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: June 26, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I had read a number of reviews of "Temujin," and I was intrigued. The game seemed to be cut from a different mold than the usual PC game, and I thought that I would have a go.

At the end of the first episode, there was the glimmer of an idea in the back of my head that I could not bring forward. Near the end of the second episode, I began to develop a suspicion. Aware of the famous tea puzzle, I consulted a walkthrough to see what the puzzle was like. Then it clicked. "Temujin" is not intended to be taken seriously. It is a sendup. It is a pathetically failed attempt at humor. If taken seriously, the tea puzzle is an insult to the intelligence of even the most forgiving gameplayer. As a failed attempt at humor, the game is comprehensible. The three nonsense plots are explained. The atrocious acting is explained. It is deliberate. The key puzzle in which you destroy a key in order to make a duplicate is supposed to be funny. The room in which you must go all the way to the back in order to find the front door through which you entered is more of the same. Then there is the useless "mystic camera" and the largely cryptic and mostly unintelligble memory book.

We have all watched movies that are supposed to be funny but just fall flat. They make us feel rather sad. So it is with "Temujin." Incidentally, I am certain that nine out of ten players of the game never discovered the "triggers" for the second level videos. These are funny. Not nearly enough to save the game though.

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