Nikopol: Secrets of the Immortals Demo

Dystopian worlds are pretty difficult to pull off properly without falling into cliches and giving into the temptation to copy Orwell’s model. However, there are plenty of good examples out there and new ideas are constantly being pitched left and right, some of which end up as books, movies, or video games. Nikopol: Secrets of the Immortals takes its inspiration from both a book and a movie, which should technically mean that it learned from both of them and only kept the good parts in.

On the other hand, the developers might have left out a bit too much, since you often find yourself not being able to make heads or tails when it comes to the plot. Right from the very first seconds you are presented with a classic dystopian city of the future, with hovercars, tall gray buildings and the usual dirty streets filled with propaganda flyers and newspapers. There’s a pyramid floating in the sky, which is hardly mentioned at all in the beginning, other than the usual ‘nobody knows why it’s there’.

You play as Nikopol, a man who’s searching for his father and decides to join a religious rebellion against the dictatorship, because that’s the sort of thing an artist would do if he were paying for rent with portraits. In essence, you may have a difficult time understanding the world and the characters if you are not familiar with the book, but the overall plot should make sense, even if it is not very well constructed anyway.

Being a point-and-click adventure game, the mechanics are the classic ones and you should not have any trouble figuring out how to get by. Clicking on objects allows you to observe or use them, although you can also pick up various items. The right-click button opens up the inventory in which all the gathered items are stored and you can access them at any point in order to solve the puzzles.

Speaking of which, the puzzles are either classic ‘figure out how to combine the items you pick up’, or timed challenges, in which you have to quickly come up with a solution to get out of a pickle. These can turn into quite the click-fests most of the time, since you can rarely guess what the game wants you to do and some of the puzzles are actually impossible to get right from the first try. They are pretty thrilling, on the other hand, especially since you die if you do not find the solution in time.

All things considered, Nikopol: Secrets of the Immortals is way too confusing and short to stick with you for a long time, but the experience is enjoyable and fun in any case. You might be annoyed by the repetitive puzzles and the lack of explanations regarding the universe in question, but the plot makes sense and it evolves nicely from one event to the other.