Each of us has films or series that we can watch over and over again without ever getting tired of them – for me the Indiana Jones films definitely belong in this category (yes, even the fourth one – I haven’t watched the fifth one yet). So it probably didn’t surprise anyone that I loved the “Lego Indiana Jones” video games. What I didn’t know for a long time: there is also Indiana Jones Point & Click Adventures! We’re talking about one of them today: the fate of Atlantis!

Today’s title is definitely one of the oldest games we’ve played on stream so far: released in 1992 for Amiga, Dos and Macintosh, the game has definitely been around for a year or two. Luckily gog.com offers the game in conjunction with the SCUMM VM, so we were able to play it on a modern Windows 10 computer – very nice.

As already mentioned, it is a point & click adventure. It makes sense to be one of the classic series from LucasArts, which is characterized by the text commands and the inventory at the bottom of the screen. You click on a command, for example “Take” and then on an object in the top two thirds of the image and the corresponding action is carried out.

From a technical perspective, the game does a good job. The graphics are surprisingly detailed for pixel art and, above all, well animated, even the facial expressions of the characters come across very well in some places. Performance is of course not a problem on a modern system, and we didn’t have any bugs or crashes either. The controls are good and precise, although there is of course little room for improvement. And the sound output is both understandable (not always the case with such old titles) and surprisingly complex – not just sound effects and music, but also a full voice acting for the dialogues.

The only thing that can really be evaluated is the content of the game, and I was thoroughly impressed by it. The intro is also a small control tutorial, and it’s brilliantly done. With a magnificent soundtrack in your ears, you stumble and tumble through the university, Indie’s workplace as a professor. The humor of the game is presented just as well as the aforementioned animations, which really make it seem alive. Eventually we end up with our friend Marcus and a stranger, and the story takes its course from there.

As always, I don’t want to go into too much detail about the story itself, but I found it very interesting throughout the game. There were one or two exciting moments, but overall the puzzles to be solved and the humor dominated. Above all, the dynamic between Indie and his accompaniment contributed a lot to this.

The puzzles had their weaknesses in one place or another, but overall I found them very well made. You had to find a lot of objects and sometimes combine them in order to master seemingly trivial tasks in a crazy way – that’s exactly what I love about this genre. But it never got too absurd and at one point or another you were nudged in the right direction so that you never got completely lost.

Above all, the fact that there were never too many storylines opened up at the same time contributed to a fun experience. While modern remakes of the classics tend to exaggerate a bit in my experience, the happy medium was found here so that the puzzles’ dependencies on each other were never too obvious, but still clearly defined. The main weakness here was the fact that the resolution was sometimes not enough to see everything – that’s a shame, but it was to be expected to this extent.

The only other negative point was the use of backtracking, i.e. the repeated running back and forth between two locations. It got a bit much, especially in the last few levels, which made the game drag a bit – but even that can only slightly dampen my overall impression.

A very interesting aspect of the game and especially the puzzles was the style of play that you could actually choose at the beginning of the game – did you want to play only Indie, only the companion or both as a team? Since Indie wanted to go the more violent route (yes, there was even a very crude combat system) and the companion wanted to go the witty route, they were very fun to play as a team – with every puzzle you could choose your playstyle again. I found that absolutely fantastic and surprising for a game of this age!

Other than that, I don’t really have much to say about this game. Personally, I was definitely surprised at how much fun I had and will definitely play other parts of the series – as an Indiana Jones fan, it’s probably somewhat of a requirement. I was impressed by how well thought out the game was in many places, and was rarely annoyed by mechanics. The story got a bit strange towards the end, but it kept me hooked throughout the game – what more could I want? It definitely gets a recommendation from me if you haven’t played it yet!

What do you think? Was the game interesting to watch, have you already played it yourself or are you planning to? Which title from the series should I pick up next? Join the discussion on Discord!