Chronicles of Mystery: The Tree of Life

Chronicles of Mystery: The Tree of Life is the second in the Chronicles of Mystery series with Sylvie Leroux. The first being The Scorpio Ritual. You do not need to play The Scorpio Ritual in order to play The Tree of Life. The Tree of Life is a stand alone game.

The game story revolves around the search for the fountain of youth and what happened to the people on the Mary Celeste. Fascinating subjects for an adventure game.

The game begins with your discovery of a map to The Tree of Life. Only the coordinates to the location are missing from the map.You go to Venice to give a lecture and meet Count Saint Germaine. He is also searching for The Tree of Life. Together you begin your search.

The game play is advanced by solving puzzles. Puzzles include inventory based, a slider and a ring puzzle. The puzzles aren't difficult and are easily solved. There are two timed sequences that aren't difficult and easily solved. One of them will result in death if not solved in time. The game does restore back to just before the puzzle if not solved in time.

Clicking on the question mark shows all hotspots. Inventory is located at the bottom of the screen. Menu, save , load, options and notebook can be accessed by moving the cursor over the top of the screen. The DVD has to be in the drive to play. There are sufficient save slots.

With a little more work to the story and characters this could have been a good game. As it was the characters and story were underdeveloped making it difficult to connect with the story or the characters.

I found no bugs or glitches in my gameplay. I played the game on a win XP.

Genre : Adventure
Point and Click
Win XP/Vista Compatible
DVD - ROM Drive
Released: Dec. 2009
Grade: C

hatshepsut

Very nice game! It has the kind of story that I mostly like. I think that it is much better than "The scorpio Ritual".

This is the game that had a puzzle that I was only able to solve by getting angry at it, believe it or not! It was the circle puzzle where 2 rings would move at the same time while trying to form the picture of the tree. I can do such a puzzle when only one ring turns, but 2 is beyond me, so I got mad and just took my mouse and swirled it around and around as fast as I could over the puzzle, just any which way. Suddenly I heard a voice say, "You have put 2 rings in the right place." The rings locked there and I was then able to move the others into place with no trouble. What a shock that was, totally unexpected. I was able to finish the game after that and I would rate it higher than a C, more like B+ I'd say.

Yeah, minimum B+ I would say! I agree with you!

tsampikos and mindysue thank you for your opinions. I liked The Tree of Life and thought it was a good game. And I would have given the game a B except for two things. The puzzles in the end and the end. The puzzles first. They were good puzzles except they were so dark they were frustratingly difficult to solve. One of them was so difficult to see it was more guessing and getting lucky rather than seeing and solving. I love a good puzzle. I even love a good frustrating puzzle (after it's solved of course ). But when you take a good puzzle and make it so dark it is frustrating and difficult that's not good. ( My opinion) Second the ending. It felt rushed and just ended like they weren't sure how to end it. I had to go back and watch the the ending several times to realize I hadn't missed something. So that is why I gave it a C. I would welcome you both or anyone else for that matter to write a review on this game or any other game. It is good to get more than one view point.

hatshepsut

You know sometimes the player "pays" the fight between the game designer and his wife. He gets ungry, creates a frustrating puzzle and the player hits his head on the wall....

lol I will remember that the next time I'm banging my head on the computer desk and contemplating smashing the monitor

hatshepsut

Yeah, I always wonder which "sick" brain manages to create such twisted puzzles like these at the end of "The Tree of Life".

Yes I've often thought the same thing. All my favorite developers seem like such nice normal guys but some of the things they think of makes you wonder

hatshepsut

Hmm, wonder about this for awhile:
When making a puzzle, I imagine (has to be my imagination since I never actually made a puzzle) that the maker knows the ending of the puzzle at the beginning of making it, the middle of the puzzle is then made to be challenging so the answer isn't too obvious or there would be no puzzle to it. Working on the challenge, the maker might make it harder than intended because the ending is already known. But to a player, the ending or solution to the puzzle has to come from making moves and then seeing what happens next, and trying to think what the maker might have had in mind, or what seems logical to the player with ideas that never occurred to the maker. So maybe the player made the challenge harder than necessary because different minds work differently. So, should the maker be blamed if the player has a mind-set that makes problems with the puzzle rather than finding the correct answers to it?
And now, speaking from my own experiences, I know that some of the problems I have with puzzles are strictly my own and I'm okay with that. See above, I don't think many players have ever solved anything by getting angry, but it worked great for me!

Thank You, GreyFuss, what else can I say?
Besides I'm laughing so hard I can hardly type!