Road to India
| Road to India | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Studio | Microids | ||
| Publisher | Microids | ||
| Senior Developer | Stéphane Brochu | ||
| composer | Robert Marchand | ||
| Erstveröffent- lichung |
 May 23, 2001 September 19, 2001 |
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| platform | iOS , macOS , Windows | ||
| Game engine | Virtools Dev | ||
| genre | Adventure | ||
| medium | CD-ROM, download | ||
| language | German English French | ||
| Age rating |
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Road to India or Road to India: Between Hell and Nirvana is an adventure game by the French-Canadian developer Microïds . The crime thriller set in India was released in 2001 for Windows PCs.
About eleven years later, Anuman Interactive , now the owner of the original development studio, brought a revised version of the game for iOS and the following year also for macOS onto the market.
action
The player takes on the role of the American student Fred Reynolds, whose friend Anusha of Indian descent is visiting her family in Delhi . After a week, Fred receives a letter from her in which she tells him that she is leaving him and that he should not pursue her. He immediately flies to Delhi to investigate Anusha's whereabouts. On the spot he finds out that his girlfriend was kidnapped by Thuggee , a member of a sect believed to be dissolved and dedicated to the worship of the Kali . The Thuggee plan to sacrifice Anusha Kali to give their sect new meaning through the favor of the goddess. At the last minute, Fred manages to save his girlfriend from sacrificial death and thwart the Thuggee's plans.
Game principle and technology
Road to India is a 1st-person adventure, which means that what is happening is shown from the perspective of the player. The camera is stationary, but can be rotated freely using the mouse. It is a point-and-click adventure; the mouse pointer is always in the middle of the screen and changes its appearance when it is positioned over objects in the game world with which an interaction is possible. The interaction can then be initiated using the mouse buttons. If the cursor is over an exit, for example to an adjoining room, the camera is repositioned there and the new surroundings are displayed. The player can therefore not move freely in the game world, but only along a network of predefined locations. A digital diary records the game events in writing and gives the player the opportunity to recapitulate what happened and draw conclusions for further progress. Dialogues are based on a multiple choice procedure.
In his search, Fred drifts off again and again into playable dreams that show an idealized, exotic India and form a contrast to the noisy, dirty and sometimes very poor Delhi, where his search mainly takes place. The game's soundtrack is based on traditional Indian music, backed by contemporary beats.
production
Road to India was developed by the Canadian subsidiary Microïds Canada Inc. in Montreal . The engine on which the game is based was a version of the Virtools from the French manufacturer of 3D development environments of the same name, adapted and expanded by Microïds , which has been part of Dassault Systèmes since 2005 .
Regarding the strong linearity of the plot in Road to India , which has been criticized in some media reports , the author Stéphane Brochu said in an interview that Microïds in Canada had no experience in developing adventure games with such a tight schedule of only nine months of development time had. For Art Director Maxime Villandré, who later worked for Codemasters on games such as Colin McRae: Dirt or Race Driver: GRID , Road to India was the first computer game he was responsible for. The streets in Delhi, described in reviews as deserted, were due to a technical limitation of the game to 2500 polygons per screen, which were not enough to display a large number of people at the same time.
Despite the great financial success of the studio with Syberia , which had already been developed in Montreal in 2002 with the Virtools Development Environment Version 2.1, it was decided to use the older Road to India engine for the subsequent adventure, Post Mortem . The development team had good experience with this engine and was therefore able to save some development time.
In 2012, an adaptation of Road to India for mobile devices with an iOS operating system was published. A version for macOS followed in 2013 .
reception
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Road to India achieved a score of 61 from 14 aggregated ratings on Metacritic . GameSpot noted that the game focuses more on exploring the game world than on complex puzzles, and that this game world did not win an originality award. The magazine positively highlighted the storytelling, the interface and the graphics of the game. On the negative side, it was noted that some of the items required for puzzles are unfairly hidden in the game world and that no information on individual items is available, so that one sometimes wonders what one has just picked up. GameSpot assessed that Road to India interweaves "facts and fiction into a colorful patchwork that offers solid entertainment" and is an "old-school adventure with a modern presentation". The PC Games praised a "solid story", but criticized the fuzzy and low-resolution graphics and a low level of difficulty and assessed: "Fans can access it without hesitation, the rest are bored". The specialist magazine Adventure Gamers commented positively on the setting, which is unusual for adventure games, as well as the "wonderful" cutscenes and the "captivating" story, whereby the magazine emphasized that the creative trick of using an alternative design of the game world in the dream sequences saved the story to become "stale" after a while. Reviewer Tom Arbor noted negatively that the low number of NPCs was in stark contrast to the actual population density of India. He also criticized Road to India for having an extremely short playing time and for competing with Full Throttle for the title of "world's shortest adventure".
Web links
- Road to India at MobyGames (English)
- Trailer on YouTube
Individual evidence
- ^ A b c AdventureGamers.com: Road to India Review. Retrieved April 1, 2017 .
- ↑ Gamatomic.com: Microïds Canada: Interview Exclusive. Retrieved April 1, 2017 .
- ↑ AventurayCia.com: Interview with Stéphane Brochu. Retrieved April 1, 2017 .
- ↑ a b Gamespot.com: Road to India Review. Retrieved April 1, 2017 .
- ^ IGN.com: Road to India. Retrieved April 1, 2017 .
- ↑ a b PCGames.de: Solid render adventure. Retrieved April 1, 2017 .
- ^ A b Metacritic.com: Road to India: Between Hell and Nirvana. Retrieved April 1, 2017 .