Shakespeare Enters the World of Video Games, Stage Left

Renowned works of literature - especially those many centuries old - are not often to be found in video game form. Off the top of my head, only Dante's Inferno comes to mind, a game that came in for a good deal of criticism for its stale gameplay (ripped straight from God of War) and some mystifying departures from the source material. It seems strange, to me at least, that some of the most thrilling and thought-provoking stories ever written down so rarely find a place to stay in Video-Game-Land. Imagine my pleasant surprise, then, when I saw a set of games on Humble Bundle's latest sale that included two entitled The Chronicles of Shakespeare, adaptations of Romeo and Juliet, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Works from arguably the greatest literary artist of all time, expressed through a medium advancing and evolving in unprecedented ways. What could go wrong?

The format: the tried and true genre of point and click adventure. The theatre: pretty much any PC or Mac. The players: Daedalic Entertainment, who have in their portfolio some very impressive entries to the adventure game genre, including Deponia, Harvey & Edna, and one of my personal favourites, Machinarium. I started with Romeo and Juliet, unsure of how much to hope for from this game. After all, capturing one of history's greatest love stories is an ambitious challenge, especially considering (I think it is safe to assume) that Daedalic's team were probably not offered a huge budget by video game standards. Nonetheless, I was glad to see new ground being trodden, and did my best to play with an open mind.

Perhaps "Equine Simulator 2011"
would have been a more suitable name.

The story revolves around Shakespeare himself narrating his new play, awkwardly named "Veronese Romance", to the young daughter of his good friend and benefactor, Fernandino. Visually these play out through the use of still panels, and characters posed in mid-speech with little actual animation.The artwork is pretty, but won't exactly knock your socks off. Nonetheless, it gives the game a certain style that goes beyond mere good looks. For example, there's an interesting contrast between Shakespeare's drab accommodation and the luxurious environments of Verona as the game transitions to the Italy of Shakespeare's imagination. The cutscenes seemed to stutter at the beginning and end of each section, as if the video files were poorly compressed - but I also had some initial issues running the game at all, so this might be down to problems unique to my PC. The clickable backgrounds are visually striking, and consistent sound effects provide a nice touch: for instance, as Romeo and Mercutio attempt to crash the Capulet's ball, the horse-drawn carriages in front of the mansion are represented by some appropriate neighs and whinnies. These backgrounds are static for the most part, but there are some exceptions that stand out as a result - after I'd become used to clicking manically on still images, the sight of a dog moving slightly caught my attention. To be brutally honest, the graphics just appear old-aged: this game, released in 2011, might have looked impressive 15-20 years ago, when a voxel image of a moving canine was a sight to behold. Today they're not exactly ugly, but quaint at best.

Wait - is this an adaptation of
the play, or Baz Luhrmann's film?

Moving on to gameplay, I'm sorry to say that the moment-to-moment activity of playing Romeo & Juliet is a massive disappointment. The game largely consists of searching the aforementioned static environments for unremarkable items that will move the plot forward - for example, Juliet needs to get ready for the ball, so you have to find the individual parts of her costume. This alone might not have been terrible, but frequently the hidden objects are, say, eight pieces of a torn-up letter, and other variations on this theme that amount to nothing more than mindless busywork to stall your progress towards the next cutscene. I am well aware that the act of searching for various random items is a traditional staple of many outstanding adventure games. However, in a Monkey Island or Sam & Max game these items are the keys to some truly ingenious and devilishly mind-boggling puzzles, but in Romeo & Juliet the puzzles are banal, tedious and unimaginative. The flaws go deeper, as the gameplay interferes with elements of the story in ways that struck me as particularly jarring. In the original play, I don't recall Romeo being asked by Friar Laurence to pass four "tests of virtue" prior to marrying his beloved. And in any case, redirecting a beam of light by adjusting mirrors, and balancing weights on a set of scales, seem like rather bizarre ways to assess one's virtue. In a different setting, these puzzles might have been just an inoffensive distraction, but in this game they are boring and often nonsensical. Fortunately a simple hint system renders every gameplay section skippable - the best I can say about Romeo & Juliet's gameplay is that it didn't take up much of my time, clocking in at just a few hours.

It's hard not to speculate at what this game could have been had the focus been upon the dramatic flashpoints of Shakespeare's play, rather than the dull actions of the characters between scenes that (for obvious reasons) the Bard neglected to mention. We could have had some kind of conversation minigame when Romeo and Juliet first meet, selecting appropriate or comically ridiculous Shakespearean phrases for the lovesick Romeo to blurt out. In the build-up to Mercutio and Tybalt's duel, we could have been tasked with aiding the former and distracting the latter. Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, though a well-worn story, has a pace to it that leaves little room for breath as it hurries towards its bittersweet, tragic conclusion. Rather than zooming in on the moments of heightened tension, the game asks which herbs Juliet gathered to make her deathlike sedative.

I won't fault the makers of Romeo & Juliet for trying, but a bad game doesn't get a free pass just because it's breaking new ground. If anything, the challenge they took on raised the bar even higher. I found most of the artwork aesthetically pleasing, and it's a point in their favour that they told an interesting story without merely rewording the plot of the play, although I was a little surprised that at no point were lines quoted from the original. On the other hand, the game is available in several languages, and Daedalic are a German company, so I won't judge them harshly on that aspect. I will, however, call them to task on attempting a rendition of a spellbinding work of literature, and producing a bland soup of tedious busywork unworthy of Shakespeare's name.

Final Score: 4/10

The Chronicles of Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet is available for $2.99 at bigfishgames, or for $9.99 from Apple's Macstore.