Arcane: The Stone Circle (2010). Company: Warner Bros. Studios. Developer: Sarbakan Game Studio. Platform: Web. Rating: Unrated (appropriate for most ages).
On the surface, Warner Bros’ “Online Mystery Serial” Arcane: The Stone Circle sounds like a marriage made in some sort of fantastic dimension outside of time and space: an admixture of Scooby Doo-styled creepy cartoon mystery, Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, and the well-loved point-and-click adventure genre, thought in many circles to be long extinct. All this in a free Flash game that can be played without leaving the comfort of your web browser.
And, in many ways, Arcane is exactly what you should be expecting. It’s a bit campy, a bit entertaining, and it’ll certainly murder a decent chunk of your life, depending on how much you’re willing to suspend higher brain functions for a few name-drops like ‘Azathoth’, ‘Dagon’, and ‘Nyarlathotep’. Unfortunately, a few frustrating missteps on the level of gameplay ensure that this is one dark adventure on which only the most devoted Lovecraft enthusiast should consider embarking.
The Stone Circle is actually Season Two of what looks to be a three-season arc. The first season, subtitled ‘The Miller Estate’, has been dropped by its original web host, but can still be uncovered by a dedicated-enough internet archaeologist. It introduced the trio of Prescott Bridgeman, engineer-cum-paranormal investigator; Ophelia MacDermoth, a beautiful psychic; and Dr. Gregor MacDermoth, world-renowned anthropologist. It also introduced the evil Cardinal, leader of the Elder Star cult, intent on restoring the Great Ancients to power by activating three sites of ancient mystical influence spread across the world. The first, beneath the Miller Estate in New England, was inadvertently activated by the three heroes at the conclusion to Season One. Season Two sees them traveling to London to reach the second site, before the Cardinal gets to it.
The ensuing adventure will take you through dank sewers, abandoned concert halls, trains carrying dark and mysterious cargo, museums filled with occult artifacts, and even a creepy interdimensional web of time and space, before reaching the Stone Circle of the title. Though Season Three has been postponed indefinitely by Warner Bros., Episode Eight concludes with enough finality that you won’t be left too much in suspense. If this premise intrigues you, I highly recommend you seek out one of the online walkthroughs for the game and save yourself the headache of actually playing it. Taken as a web a***tion, Arcane is at least as worthy of your attention as that one about the kitty cat that dance, dance, dances. Taken as a game, well….
Arcane is, quintessentially, an adventure game in the tradition of Broken Sword and Day of the Tentacle. This means that most of the playtime will be devoted to navigating the somewhat-small two-dimensional environments and solving simple puzzles, all of which can be accomplished by clicking on various parts of the screen. The game provides the option of a surprisingly robust tutorial for those new to the genre, but it’s all fairly self-explanatory: click on anything that stands out to pick it up, then click or drag it from your inventory when logic dictates.
Or not, as is often the case here. Unfortunately, Arcane has also inherited the wacky logic of some classic adventure games, which is related to conventional logic by name alone. Finding the solutions to many of the puzzles involves less lateral thinking than trying everything in your inventory with everything on the screen until something sticks.
For example, a sequence in one of the early episodes tasks Prescott with getting rid of three heavily-built-but-oblivious cult members, all conveniently facing the other direction. Having recently come in possession of a large, heavy-looking mallet, you might think the logical thing to do would be to bash them each on the skull and get on with things. Unfortunately, the game won’t even accept this as an option; instead, you take one out by lassoing him with a flotation device, drop another by filling the room with noxious fumes, and distract the third with an alarm clock. Which, I will admit, is more interesting than visiting blunt trauma on their heads, but it’s a bit like building a working helicopter to cross a puddle.
Another early example sees a legless, knife-wielding vagrant warning Prescott not to touch his stuff. How do you suppose we’re meant to get around this one? If you guessed it was by swiping the poor man’s malt liquor, then you, like the developers of Arcane, have likely spent a few too many nights reading the mad Arab’s infamous tome. There’s another “puzzle” that involves literally ripping a steel ladder out of a concrete wall with your bare hands. Episode Six, easily the creepiest and most interesting of the bunch otherwise, makes heavy use of a magical item that behaves differently virtually every time you use it.
While these are the worst examples, there are a few good puzzles to be found here, especially for those who find themselves nostalgic for the golden days of the adventure game. Unfortunately, the frustrating gameplay extends beyond the puzzle design itself. To get from place to place, players will have to click on large red arrows that only appear after you’ve moused over them. These tend to be remarkably well-hidden, and never in any consistent or logical place on the screen. Simply zooming back out from an inventory item can be more mentally taxing than most of the actual puzzles. To enter rooms, you’ll usually need to find some obscure point between where you’re standing and the actual door, while zooming out often involves clicking on the character’s wrist, or even somewhere on the item itself. This assumes, of course, you know where you’re trying to get to in the first place.
Arcane tries to inject some action into the adventure game formula by adding an element of danger: every episode has an arbitrary “time limit” based on the number of clicks you’ve made. Spend too long on any given puzzle, and you’ll be facing death and the prospect of starting the level from the beginning. While this does nothing significant to add to the tension, since saving and reloading effectively restart the timer, it does make certain frustrating moments even more annoying than they should be. The warning a***tions involving creeping shadows are pretty cool, though.
There’s also one, and only one, sorely misjudged “action” moment at the end of Episode Four, in which the player must click at the right time to avoid being offed by an angry cult member. It’s nothing too demanding on the reflexes, but because this sort of gameplay has never appeared before, in this or any other episode, and because it’s not even immediately apparent that the player has control of the action at this point, it will likely result in numerous needless deaths for the uninitiated.
The production values are resplendently various. The artwork’s Saturday-morning-cartoon aesthetic works surprisingly well with the abominations and elder things presented herein, although there will be a few times when clickable areas are not as prominent as they should be – particularly given that every stray click brings you closer to a grisly, sadly un-pictured death.
The music is also a treat: the main theme, which goes through a number of different arrangements appropriate to the setting of each episode, can be creepy, mysterious, or rousing, as the situation calls. Getting to the end of the episode and hearing the music swell with horns and choral voices never failed to get my heart pumping, no matter how frustrated I had been with the puzzles that came before.
Less successful is the dialogue: the awkward writing and cheesy, highly compressed performances, while appropriate to a certain variety of classic cartoon, don’t do the atmosphere any favours. There are times when it becomes so awful that it approaches Resident Evil-style campy hilarity: Prescott’s one-two punch, “What are they doing? So, that’s what they were doing,” or Ophelia’s egregiously shocked, “These are just ordinary personal belongings!”
For those uncertain if they will be able to stomach the awkwardness, the first line in Episode One provides a nice taste of what’s to come: American engineer Prescott, pulling his hat closer over his ears, bemoans the “Blasted London weather”, then continues, with a wry smile, “I should have brought my collection of umbrellas.”
There is also a handful of typos and misspellings, which have become distressingly par for the course, even in otherwise-perfectly-tuned Flash outings. It’s not enough to amount to more than a minor annoyance, but I can’t help thinking a major company like Warner Bros. could have been a little more careful about these things, especially in a game that concerns itself so overtly with a literary legacy such as Lovecraft’s.
I’m certain you can think of more torturous ways to spend your afternoon, though you might have to get creative to devise more than a handful. The enjoyment you end up getting out of Arcane depends largely on your ability to check your forebrain at the door: if you can swallow your pride, and your logic, and consult a walkthrough for some of the hairier sequences, it transforms from an abomination of the interactive form to a thrilling, charming cartoon adventure.
Nonetheless, given that this is the Cthulhu Mythos we’re talking about here, it’s a shame that this one can’t reach the levels of psychological terror WB has tapped in the past, such as that cartoon about the deathless dancing frog. I still get the shivers every time I hear the first strains of “Hello, My Baby”.
On the surface, Warner Bros’ “Online Mystery Serial” Arcane: The Stone Circle sounds like a marriage made in some sort of fantastic dimension outside of time and space: an admixture of Scooby Doo-styled creepy cartoon mystery, Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, and the well-loved point-and-click adventure genre, thought in many circles to be long extinct. All this in a free Flash game that can be played without leaving the comfort of your web browser.
And, in many ways, Arcane is exactly what you should be expecting. It’s a bit campy, a bit entertaining, and it’ll certainly murder a decent chunk of your life, depending on how much you’re willing to suspend higher brain functions for a few name-drops like ‘Azathoth’, ‘Dagon’, and ‘Nyarlathotep’. Unfortunately, a few frustrating missteps on the level of gameplay ensure that this is one dark adventure on which only the most devoted Lovecraft enthusiast should consider embarking.
The Stone Circle is actually Season Two of what looks to be a three-season arc. The first season, subtitled ‘The Miller Estate’, has been dropped by its original web host, but can still be uncovered by a dedicated-enough internet archaeologist. It introduced the trio of Prescott Bridgeman, engineer-cum-paranormal investigator; Ophelia MacDermoth, a beautiful psychic; and Dr. Gregor MacDermoth, world-renowned anthropologist. It also introduced the evil Cardinal, leader of the Elder Star cult, intent on restoring the Great Ancients to power by activating three sites of ancient mystical influence spread across the world. The first, beneath the Miller Estate in New England, was inadvertently activated by the three heroes at the conclusion to Season One. Season Two sees them traveling to London to reach the second site, before the Cardinal gets to it.
The ensuing adventure will take you through dank sewers, abandoned concert halls, trains carrying dark and mysterious cargo, museums filled with occult artifacts, and even a creepy interdimensional web of time and space, before reaching the Stone Circle of the title. Though Season Three has been postponed indefinitely by Warner Bros., Episode Eight concludes with enough finality that you won’t be left too much in suspense. If this premise intrigues you, I highly recommend you seek out one of the online walkthroughs for the game and save yourself the headache of actually playing it. Taken as a web a***tion, Arcane is at least as worthy of your attention as that one about the kitty cat that dance, dance, dances. Taken as a game, well….
Arcane is, quintessentially, an adventure game in the tradition of Broken Sword and Day of the Tentacle. This means that most of the playtime will be devoted to navigating the somewhat-small two-dimensional environments and solving simple puzzles, all of which can be accomplished by clicking on various parts of the screen. The game provides the option of a surprisingly robust tutorial for those new to the genre, but it’s all fairly self-explanatory: click on anything that stands out to pick it up, then click or drag it from your inventory when logic dictates.
Or not, as is often the case here. Unfortunately, Arcane has also inherited the wacky logic of some classic adventure games, which is related to conventional logic by name alone. Finding the solutions to many of the puzzles involves less lateral thinking than trying everything in your inventory with everything on the screen until something sticks.
For example, a sequence in one of the early episodes tasks Prescott with getting rid of three heavily-built-but-oblivious cult members, all conveniently facing the other direction. Having recently come in possession of a large, heavy-looking mallet, you might think the logical thing to do would be to bash them each on the skull and get on with things. Unfortunately, the game won’t even accept this as an option; instead, you take one out by lassoing him with a flotation device, drop another by filling the room with noxious fumes, and distract the third with an alarm clock. Which, I will admit, is more interesting than visiting blunt trauma on their heads, but it’s a bit like building a working helicopter to cross a puddle.
Another early example sees a legless, knife-wielding vagrant warning Prescott not to touch his stuff. How do you suppose we’re meant to get around this one? If you guessed it was by swiping the poor man’s malt liquor, then you, like the developers of Arcane, have likely spent a few too many nights reading the mad Arab’s infamous tome. There’s another “puzzle” that involves literally ripping a steel ladder out of a concrete wall with your bare hands. Episode Six, easily the creepiest and most interesting of the bunch otherwise, makes heavy use of a magical item that behaves differently virtually every time you use it.
While these are the worst examples, there are a few good puzzles to be found here, especially for those who find themselves nostalgic for the golden days of the adventure game. Unfortunately, the frustrating gameplay extends beyond the puzzle design itself. To get from place to place, players will have to click on large red arrows that only appear after you’ve moused over them. These tend to be remarkably well-hidden, and never in any consistent or logical place on the screen. Simply zooming back out from an inventory item can be more mentally taxing than most of the actual puzzles. To enter rooms, you’ll usually need to find some obscure point between where you’re standing and the actual door, while zooming out often involves clicking on the character’s wrist, or even somewhere on the item itself. This assumes, of course, you know where you’re trying to get to in the first place.
Arcane tries to inject some action into the adventure game formula by adding an element of danger: every episode has an arbitrary “time limit” based on the number of clicks you’ve made. Spend too long on any given puzzle, and you’ll be facing death and the prospect of starting the level from the beginning. While this does nothing significant to add to the tension, since saving and reloading effectively restart the timer, it does make certain frustrating moments even more annoying than they should be. The warning a***tions involving creeping shadows are pretty cool, though.
There’s also one, and only one, sorely misjudged “action” moment at the end of Episode Four, in which the player must click at the right time to avoid being offed by an angry cult member. It’s nothing too demanding on the reflexes, but because this sort of gameplay has never appeared before, in this or any other episode, and because it’s not even immediately apparent that the player has control of the action at this point, it will likely result in numerous needless deaths for the uninitiated.
The production values are resplendently various. The artwork’s Saturday-morning-cartoon aesthetic works surprisingly well with the abominations and elder things presented herein, although there will be a few times when clickable areas are not as prominent as they should be – particularly given that every stray click brings you closer to a grisly, sadly un-pictured death.
The music is also a treat: the main theme, which goes through a number of different arrangements appropriate to the setting of each episode, can be creepy, mysterious, or rousing, as the situation calls. Getting to the end of the episode and hearing the music swell with horns and choral voices never failed to get my heart pumping, no matter how frustrated I had been with the puzzles that came before.
Less successful is the dialogue: the awkward writing and cheesy, highly compressed performances, while appropriate to a certain variety of classic cartoon, don’t do the atmosphere any favours. There are times when it becomes so awful that it approaches Resident Evil-style campy hilarity: Prescott’s one-two punch, “What are they doing? So, that’s what they were doing,” or Ophelia’s egregiously shocked, “These are just ordinary personal belongings!”
For those uncertain if they will be able to stomach the awkwardness, the first line in Episode One provides a nice taste of what’s to come: American engineer Prescott, pulling his hat closer over his ears, bemoans the “Blasted London weather”, then continues, with a wry smile, “I should have brought my collection of umbrellas.”
There is also a handful of typos and misspellings, which have become distressingly par for the course, even in otherwise-perfectly-tuned Flash outings. It’s not enough to amount to more than a minor annoyance, but I can’t help thinking a major company like Warner Bros. could have been a little more careful about these things, especially in a game that concerns itself so overtly with a literary legacy such as Lovecraft’s.
I’m certain you can think of more torturous ways to spend your afternoon, though you might have to get creative to devise more than a handful. The enjoyment you end up getting out of Arcane depends largely on your ability to check your forebrain at the door: if you can swallow your pride, and your logic, and consult a walkthrough for some of the hairier sequences, it transforms from an abomination of the interactive form to a thrilling, charming cartoon adventure.
Nonetheless, given that this is the Cthulhu Mythos we’re talking about here, it’s a shame that this one can’t reach the levels of psychological terror WB has tapped in the past, such as that cartoon about the deathless dancing frog. I still get the shivers every time I hear the first strains of “Hello, My Baby”.
