Memento Mori (computer game)

reviews
Adventure meeting	83%
GBase	8.5
PC Games	74%
Meta-ratings
Metacritic	66/100

Memento Mori

Studio

Centauri Production

Publisher

Dtp entertainment Got Game Entertainment

Senior Developer

Karel Matějka

Erstveröffent-
lichung

October 31, 2008

CPAL3D

Point-and-click adventure

Game mode

Single player

control

mouse

medium

DVD, download

language

German, English, French, Spanish

Age rating

USK

PEGI

Memento Mori is a point-and-click adventure from the Czech development studio Centauri Production from 2008.

action

One night the security systems in the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg fail . The next morning a painting shows signs of damage, but nothing appears to have been stolen. Colonel Ostankovich, who is responsible for the security of the museum, will shortly be honored for his services, which is why he on the one hand wants to get to the bottom of the incidents, but on the other hand does not want to generate media coverage. Ostankovitch believes that former art forger Maxim "Max" Durand is the right man to investigate the case. Since Ostankovich does not speak well, he persuades his former employee and current Interpol agent Larisa "Lara" Svetlova to win Durand over for the task, which she succeeds. The player now controls Durand and Svetlova alternately in order to determine the background of the events in the Hermitage, and travels to five European countries. The two uncover a series of art thefts in which paintings were stolen from artists who died shortly after their work was completed. All of the paintings show a mysterious angel of death, partly covered by other layers of paint. Behind the thefts is the Ikuinen Nukkuja sect, in whose Finnish headquarters Durand and Svetlova finally face the Angel of Death himself.

Game principle and technology

Memento Mori is a 3D point-and-click adventure . For polygons composite, three-dimensional figures act against pre-rendered scenes. The player can use the mouse to move his character through the locations and use the mouse buttons to initiate actions that allow the character to interact with his environment. Maxim and Lara can find objects, apply them to the environment or other objects and communicate with NPCs . As the story progresses, more locations will be unlocked. The camera shows what is happening from a fixed perspective; If the player leaves the field of vision within a room, the camera switches to another position.

Dialogues run according to a greatly simplified system. While in comparable games the player can often choose between different sentences that the character should say, in Memento Mori he can choose between moods that influence the character of the character's statements; As a rule these are only the options "positive" (motivating, affirmative) or "negative" (defensive, negative).

Production notes

With Gooka and The Fifth Disciple , the development studio Centauri Production had previously produced adventures, but it failed both critics and audiences. For Memento Mori , a new engine called CPAL3D has been developed from scratch. The Latin title Memento Mori means in German something like "Remember that you are dying". In the German dubbing, the two protagonists are voiced by Nana Spier and Sascha Draeger , Durand's brother by Dero Goi , whose band mates called for smaller roles. The soundtrack of the game was created by the Czech composer Lumír Hrma and published separately at the same time as the game was released. In 2012 Centauri Production completed the follow-up game Memento Mori 2 .

reception

On the rating aggregation website Metacritic , Memento Mori scored 66 points out of 12 ratings. The Swiss game magazine GBase praised the successful use of communication media such as e-mail or mobile phone, the technically “remarkable” interaction of the game character with objects in the game environment and the German synchronization. The magazine, on the other hand, criticized the fact that the dialog options had almost no influence on the game and that repetitive animation sequences could not be interrupted. The specialist magazine Adventure-Treff positively highlighted the "sensational" light, mirror and shadow effects and the puzzle design, but criticized the performance of the spokespersons for the supporting characters (especially von Goi) and the suspense - the story only takes off from about halfway through The game is clearly picking up speed. The PC Games praised the suspense of the game and that one "seldom (...) have seen such splendid locations", but criticized the poor synchronization and the fact that the story was stolen from bits and pieces of well-known game stories.