Among the point & click adventure games of the mid-1990s, Master Lu has become one of the most obscure ones. You'll be hard pressed to find records of its existence, let alone more current testimonials of any players from the time of its release or more recent experiences. All that in spite of having scored high marks all across the board when it was new. My personal experience with it wasn't all that far from that. I played it, but never very far. The very few, unspecific recollections I kept were all positive, so it became a bit of a mystery to myself why I never got further than the second major location. Is there anything to this game which makes it universally forgettable? Let's rediscover and test this hypothesis!
29th of Mage, Birthday
I have decided to return to the temple of Aggripa. It has been far too long since my last visit, must be almost over five years by now since the last time I retraced Nemesis’ steps. As always I read Bivotar’s journal while I was waiting for the temple doors to open. This booklet seems like an ancient relic in itself, for long gone are the days when every game told a good part of its story with actual items you could touch and feel. And maybe that’s exactly why it did not fail to set me in the proper mood for the journey ahead.
Successful games like Zelda, Ultima, Baldur's Gate and others dazzle us with an atmospheric fantasy world, challenge by fighting against hostile forces and offer a lot of experience for further survival. The top-down perspective – i.e. moving on a kind of world map – is a striking common feature of the aforementioned classics. The player has a top-down view of the environment and his avatar, but without taking over the avatar's field of vision and thus his role – as is usual in 3D shooters. In this kind of flight over the actual scene, the player is a bit further away from the action and gets a more abstract picture of the game's progress. The mentioned game titles nevertheless manage to captivate the player without much effort and integrate him into the story. This is achieved by the perfection of the well-known technical elements like graphics, music, game mechanics and also the psychological incentives, which reward a fight with progress in the story and increase the experience points.