Artifex Mundi: it’s been too long. We’ve missed you.
There was a time when you could set your watch by Artifex Mundi-published releases. They’d arrive on Xbox every month, and we’d get a little shot of puzzling to keep us going. But that’s changed in recent months. We’ve been starved of their campy joys, and the itch has had to be scratched by some (really rather lovely) hidden cat games instead. As someone once said, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.
Hopefully you can excuse us for a little jolt of excitement when we opened the Xbox Store and saw The Myth Seekers: The Legacy of Vulkan. Artifex Mundi and their hidden object games were back, and, not only that, they’d returned with a whole new series.
Going by Artifex’s track record, we can expect roughly a dozen Myth Seekers games in the future. The niche this time round is Roman gods and myths. You play as Amelia, an expert in Roman mythology, who is roped in by the police to find a missing professor. He was on the trail of the Vesuvian Codex which, in turn, could help locate Vulcan’s hammer (we’re not entirely sure why the title spells it ‘Vulkan’ when the rest of the game uses the more widespread ‘c’). The hammer, you see, was used to make Vesuvius erupt and overrun Pompeii, so it’s rather powerful.
Also on the trail of the hammer is a hilarious-looking woman called Bella, who is the missing link between Cruella Deville and a lampshade. She wants the hammer for nefarious purposes, and Pompeii may well be getting a sequel.
Meanwhile, the Roman gods haven’t gone away. They’ve merely gone into hiding. They turn up periodically to egg you on or get in your way. Running in parallel is some dense backstory, as the tragedy of Vulcan, the god of blacksmithing, is laid bare. He’s accused of causing the fall of Pompeii, and has been locked up in an underground prison for being a part of it.
Ah, it feels good to be playing an Artifex Mundi game that doesn’t have a damsel to save (unless you count Vulcan) and a necromancer bad guy to dispel. Even better, the storytelling is actually coherent, with a plot that develops rather than stays in the same place throughout the entire runtime. Sure, it’s on the predictable side and the character animations are barely adequate, but there’s some juicy mythologising here, and you might even come away with some newfound knowledge of Roman gods. When viewed in its totality, it’s probably the tightest plot that we’ve seen in an Artifex Mundi game.
We get some Indiana Jones-style maps as Amelia moves from location to location in the search for Vulcan and his hammer. There’s even some time travel. What this means is that the gameplay is neatly broken down into chapters, as you use all feasible items in one location before you move onto the next. That gives The Myth Seekers: The Legacy of Vulkan some structure. Each sequence sees you amassing a huge number of items, only to chip away at them as you brush away spiderwebs, dunk phoenix eggs into fires, and reseal broken clamshells. That loop of being overwhelmed with point-and-click inventory, only to reduce them to a manageable number feels great.
The three ingredients of an Artifex Mundi adventure are present and correct here. There’s the hidden object scenes, some minigames, and some point-and-click adventuring.
We would have taken more hidden object dioramas, if we’re honest. They are scarce in The Myth Seekers: The Legacy of Vulkan, and the ones that are here are determined to deviate from the norm. Very rarely did we just get a list of items and a scene to find them in. The game loves to mix things up with more interactive scenes (everything seems to be locked in boxes or hidden behind muck), or pictures where multiples of one thing is required. It’s not a big issue, but we did occasionally wish that The Myth Seekers: The Legacy of Vulkan kept things simple.
The minigames, though, are smack on the money. We have a hidden-object theory: if we reach the end of the game having used zero, one or two hints, then that’s the sweet spot. It generally means that we wanted to complete its many sliding puzzles and memory games, and that they were neither too difficult nor too easy. We used a hint once, and that was only because we were getting tired. While the puzzles are familiar in The Myth Seekers: The Legacy of Vulkan, they are still well-pitched, and they have a satisfying habit of progressing the narrative. The story of Vulcan comes through in the games themselves.
Equally familiar but engaging is the graphic adventure stuff. The Myth Seekers: The Legacy of Vulkan doesn’t put a foot wrong here. Often, these adventures can give you items that clearly would solve a given problem – a sword can’t be used to cut some roots, but a dagger can, for example – but The Myth Seekers: The Legacy of Vulkan rarely gave us these double-take moments. Even better, it’s leveled up the tools that you’re given. It might not sound like much, but being told why an item isn’t suitable for a given task is a big improvement, while a map that clearly highlights active puzzles is also a boon.
We’re unlikely to remember much of The Myth Seekers: The Legacy of Vulkan in a week or two’s time (outside of Bella’s haircut), but that’s fine with us. Because while it is throwaway, it is one of Artifex Mundi’s most accomplished hidden object games, arriving at a time when we were getting withdrawal symptoms.
If you’re a sucker for these puzzle games, or you’re one of those people who supposedly thinks about the Roman Empire four times a day, then buy The Myth Seekers: The Legacy of Vulkan. It will get you ordering a toga before the week’s out.
