By Tom Cross

When Myst III: Exile introduced the fisheye cam to puzzle games, the entire puzzle-adventure genre took a huge leap forward. No longer stuck in the static, postcard-like version of reality pioneered by Myst, gamers could see almost all of their surroundings, allowing for more complicated gameworld interaction, and more interesting and arresting landscapes.

What a sad thing it is to look at today's puzzle games and see that they haven't evolved in a promising way since Exile. If they've done anything, they've regressed, making up for this new technical capability by mothballing stories, acting, interactivity, and originality.

Cleopatra: Riddle of the Tomb is a poster child for this descent into mediocrity; a slow, steady path toward unmemorable gaming moments. You start the game as Thomas, an assistant to Cleopatra's chief astrologer, Akkad, whose happy (but secret) romance with Akkad's daughter Iris is shattered by sudden violence. Cleopatra is at war with her brother, and you, Iris, and Akkad are caught in the middle.

To set things right you'll have to solve many, many mysterious, "ancient" puzzles, traveling through Alexandria hot on the trail of Iris and Akkad's dangerous kidnappers.

If there is a landscape that evokes (for the 9-year-old in me) puzzles, strange languages and symbols, and intrigue, it's Egypt. To Nobilis' (the developer behind Cleopatra) credit, they realize the stereotypical Western notion of austere, lush Egyptian beauty quite adequately. Less to their credit, they've taken this interesting landscape and populated it with a bare smattering of boring, badly acted cutscenes and encounters, and rendered the items in this world with hardly any care or skill.

This world is static in every way. When you encounter murderous crocodiles, there's no reason to fear them: they don't move, they sit there like dummies, because they're just part of the background drawings.

Items are found seemingly at random, and your success at solving puzzles often stems from your propensity for combining every single item you have with every other single item. True, many puzzle games trade in this tired strategy, due to their terrible puzzle design, but Cleopatra's Tomb adds a new wrinkle to this old problem: they've gone and added an inventory system, one that make's Mass Effect's inventory management look like a piece of cake.

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