Review for Ryte: The Eye of Atlantis
Here is a pop quiz for you: how many adventure games have been based on the lost city of Atlantis? If you guessed at least thirty, you would be right! Some have been truly great, such as Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, while many others have not. With all these past journeys to the same overused location, why should you bother taking another in Ryte: The Eye of Atlantis? Because if you have the supported hardware, the virtual reality implementation provides a fresh gaming experience that breathes new life into this old chestnut. While not without its flaws, it’s worth recommending for its fun-to-solve puzzles and interesting locations on the scenic but inevitably doomed Greek isle.
A female voice first welcomes you to Historia Time Travel and explains that you have chosen the Atlantis Discovery Pack with a robot tour guide option. This involves transferring your consciousness into a local Atlantean fisherman in order to blend in with the locals, and you are warned to keep a low profile and not interact with the inhabitants so as not to affect the timeline. First, though, you’ll push a button to teleport to a Mediterranean island called Thoros to learn the basic mechanics of the game. There a hovering robot greets you and the voice of your tour guide provides a basic tutorial accompanied by minimal animations of a white 2D figure using the hand controls. The environmental graphics here – and indeed through the entire game – are very well done. The scenery is breathtaking and immersive, with realistic waves lapping on the shore, cawing birds flying overhead, and tree leaves and shrubs swaying in the background.
On my Oculus Rift S, movement was done using a combination of the trigger button and joystick on the right or left controller. The joystick allows you to pick a spot to travel to, and the trigger button sends you there, with no option to change this to a free-roaming mode. To pick up objects with either hand, you employ a combination of the grip and trigger buttons. While in your grasp, objects can be looked at and moved around, put in inventory, or dropped. To add something to your inventory, you open the bag over your shoulder (both sides work) and place the item in one of the available slots. You can also use either hand to drop it over your shoulder. In most VR games you just see your simulated hands, but an unusual feature of this interface is that you can see both arms up to the elbows. This allows for a cool game mechanic, because different tattoos will appear on your forearms in various locations that provide clues to the current area’s puzzles.
Unfortunately, the inventory system is cumbersome. When you grab the bag from your back, it is sometimes difficult to open, as you need to coordinate your actions with the grip and trigger buttons at the same time. Even then, often when I tried to drop an item into an available slot, it would miss and fall onto the ground. Sometimes I could just pick it up and try again, but usually it disappeared and returned to its original location. On a few occasions, the item rolled to a spot where I could not get it back and I had to end my session and restart. Luckily your progress is automatically saved and you are restored right where you left off, with the item magically back in its original spot. This happened enough times to cause frustration and shows a lack of polish. On the plus side, the top of the inventory bag will display your current objective in case you forget.
As you follow the robot along a path on Thoros, you’ll run across one of many seashells that will continue to be scattered throughout the game, which contain recorded messages that tell you about the Atlanteans’ lives. To listen, just pick it up and hold the controller to your ear. These shells convey a variety of messages, some of which give you clues on how to solve puzzles or what you need to do next. Others represent war correspondence between couples (Atlantis is at war with Athens at this time), but some are more sinister and reference a conspiracy to overthrow the current government. These messages are not saved to access again later, however, so be sure to make note of them to help piece everything together.
When you reach the end of the path, you are confronted with the first puzzle, a digital lock put in place to ensure you are properly synchronized with the time travel system. To solve it you need to recreate the geometric shape of the lock using items in your inventory. This puzzle is very easy, but the same type gets much harder as you go along. Your guide informs you that if there is a system reset while you are trying to use the key, there may be some side effects and – you guessed it – that is what happens. The screen displays lots of interference once the puzzle is solved, and instead of ending up inside the body of a fisherman, you are in fact thrust into the High Priest and encounter guards that throw you in jail for some as-yet-unknown reason.
This is the point where the story begins in earnest and gameplay focuses on puzzle solving and exploration. With the aid of an unknown accomplice, you break out of jail using “attraction” and “repulsion” bracelets, which, as the names imply, allow you to attract or repulse specific objects made from a blue-tinged substance known as “orichalcum” (coincidently, the name of the game’s developer). While you lose these bracelets at the end of this sequence when another glitch sends you back to your tour guide, you eventually reacquire them and they become important tools for solving puzzles later on.
Soon you’ll find yourself standing near an Atlantis harbour, accompanied once again by your tour guide and robot, where you need to solve a series of puzzles to get into the temple. At first I was disappointed because the initial puzzles here were very easy – align concentric rings to match a pattern, rinse and repeat after finding the missing pieces for two more similar puzzles, and solve a simple gear challenge. Once I got rolling, however, I was pleased to discover that the puzzles – particularly those exploiting the VR technology – are the strength of Ryte. The digital lock challenges become increasingly complex, with many cubes and wedges needing to be combined to match the 3D image. Since you must view the key from all angles, and it’s positioned fairly low to the ground, I had to literally get down on my hands and knees on the floor to figure one particular solution out! Surprisingly, these types of challenges, along with your tour guide and robot, are abandoned once you leave the temple.
Other clever uses of virtual reality include a light beam and mirror alignment problem, for which you need to look around pillars to find the correct path, and using a slingshot to activate hammers in a forge to help recreate your repulsion bracelet. You also need to find and properly rotate a sword in your hand to reveal a clue to unlock a safe. There are plenty of fun conventional puzzles as well, many making use of your bracelets, mostly the one that is able to attract needed inventory items near enough to reach. Tasks include simply finding a gear to open a door, restoring a statue with a missing segment, and placing scattered orichalcum disks on top of pedestals to open gates. Other puzzles involve pattern tracing, slider alignment, connecting segments, Simon Says, and figuring out lock combinations. While these may sound all too familiar, they are quite enjoyable because they make good use of the VR environment and are seamlessly integrated into their surroundings, with each area having its own location-specific puzzles.
There are many places to explore in between, all of which are nicely designed with excellent graphics and sound design. In addition to the harbour and temple, Atlantean locales include a desert with an oasis and interesting constellations in the night sky above, a market, barracks, forge, museum, and even the inside of someone’s consciousness, which has a surreal look with oversized objects and an eerie red background.
You will meet several characters in your travels, some more interesting and useful than others. While you cannot directly interact with any of them, they will provide key information via one-way conversation. The first are what appear to be a pair of lesser Greek gods – Megreta and Tirza – who soon discover that you are not the true High Priest. They decide to help you in your mission to conduct a ceremony to stop a tidal wave from destroying Atlantis by sending you back in time to find the real cleric’s soul and restore him to his body. Danae, the High Priest’s assistant, is of great help in getting you where you have to go (you follow her around as needed) and providing hints on some of the puzzles. You will also hear dialog from other characters you meet, which is intended to help develop the plot.
Sadly, with the exception of Danae, who speaks with emotion and a slight English accent, all the characters (especially your tour guide) are hideously voiced, with flat or over-the-top delivery and in most cases failing to even match the subtitles, which I found jarring. Worse, the dialog is awkwardly worded. For example, the tour director says things like, “I was about to forget something capital” and, “you will crush any competition in the Olympics 100 meter run of 2084.” Who talks like that? Clearly there wasn’t a big budget for voice-overs, and my guess is that neither the actors nor the director are native English speakers, which is a shame as the otherwise high production values deserve better.
Fortunately the other soundscape elements fare much better. The menu screen features a male musical chorus with religious overtones, accompanied by deep orchestral music with lots of drums and bass. During gameplay, the instrumental score is area-specific and usually very low-key with just a hint of mystery and suspense. It does, however, get a bit repetitive if you linger in a given place too long. Sound effects are great, especially in the forge area where you need to pound metal and stoke a furnace in order to craft one of your bracelets.
I won’t spoil anything important regarding the plot, but the ending is sudden and disappointing, which is a shame as I found the experience quite interesting up to that point and was looking forward to more of what I’d been led to expect. Instead, your entire goal all along suddenly becomes moot as something completely different happens to end the game. You get a summary of your accomplishments, and based on the Steam achievements it appears there are at least two different variations, maybe more, but none affect the actual outcome. Many achievements are mutually exclusive – for example, you either save someone’s life or you don’t – and poorly clued. A first playthrough should take about 4-5 hours, and though a second run would be shorter, I wasn’t motivated enough to start all over again just for the sake of completeness. I would have much preferred a save game system that allowed for restoring key parts of the game to try different things.
Despite its few notable weaknesses, however, I largely enjoyed my experience with Ryte: The Eye of Atlantis. The titular Greek island is a lovely place to visit, and I had a good time using the VR handsets to navigate through the various environments and solve the many challenging and interesting puzzles. If you can get past the awful voice acting and disappointing ending, you will surely have a lot of fun no matter how often you may have traveled to Atlantis already.
