Xiama is that rarity: the commercial graphic version of modern-day text adventures. It was designed and programmed by Peter Hewitt, an Australian with a penchant for magic and programming. There is no publisher: he is selling it directly from his web site. The result is a charming if uneven collection of puzzles ranging from the simple to the obscure, with the Australian park of Alligator Creek Falls, in North Queensland, serving as backdrop. The pictures of Alligator Creek Falls were all taken by Peter. Some are too overexposed, but on the whole do a decent job of conveying the beauty of the game's real-world setting.

At this point in reviews I usually discuss the game's plot. Xiama, however, doesn't really have one. Sure, the game makes reference to you being on a hike with Peter and him having left a trail of puzzles for you to solve, but it doesn't really matter. Walk around; find puzzles; solve puzzles. Continue until all are solved.

Having no plot to speak of frees Xiama from the usual strictures of adventure games. You can wander around freely, looking at the pictures and finding puzzles. You can attempt to solve the puzzles you find; if you can't, you can move on to other parts of the game and come back later. This is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, you can't get stuck. As long as there are more puzzles left that you haven't solved you can work on any of them. At the same time, though, this removes one of the driving forces of many adventure games. What's your incentive to solve puzzles, beyond the pleasure of solving puzzles?

The Opening Screen

The approach Xiama takes isn't necessarily right or wrong. At this point I'm wandering deep into the trackless bog of personal taste. Xiama isn't breaking any new ground, as plenty of "adventure" games, including The 7th Guest and Safecracker, have been mostly puzzles. Whether or not you'll like Xiama depends heavily on how much you like puzzles.

I like puzzles.

So let's talk about them. There are twenty-four puzzles in Xiama, scattered hither and thither about Alligator Creek Falls. All are self-contained, requiring no items or clues from other parts of the game. That one bit of classification cuts down on the possible puzzles.

Within that limitation, though, are scads of possibilities. There's a jigsaw puzzle involving pieces of a camera. There is the stone version of that peg-jumping game found in faux-rustic Cracker Barrels. There are word puzzles, one of which involves assembling the lyrics to the first stanza of Waltzing Matilda. Visual puzzles. Sound puzzles. Playing card puzzles. Puzzles from Martin Gardner's Scientific America columns. There are twenty-four puzzles in all, though the last one is not available until after you've solved the prior twenty-three. The puzzles vary in difficulty from relatively easy to very obscure.

One of the Turtle Puzzles

To my mind the most outstanding puzzles are the "turtle" puzzles. These are based on the Logo Turtle, an educational device. Logo is a computer language designed to teach students about programming and logic. It was popular in the late 70's and early 80's here in the US. Originally the turtle was an actual robot that you drove around the room using Logo commands; later an on-screen version of the robot helped teach geometry to students. I've even actually seen one of those old robotic Logo Turtles.

The turtle puzzles in Xiama involve creating certain geometric shapes by issuing commands to an on-screen turtle. The idea is simple, but immensely appealing. In talking to people who have played Xiama, they always say, "Oh, what did you think about the turtle puzzles?" There are three of them, and are nearly worth the price of admission on their own.

Your Puzzle Book

Motivation for solving the puzzles is provided in part by the book of scores you carry around with you. After you solve a puzzle it is entered in this book, along with your score. For some puzzles that score is a fixed value: solve the puzzle, get the maximum score. For others that score depends on how well you did, or how few moves you were able to make. Along with the scores you get a small post-it note that gives some background information with the game. I enjoyed reading the notes after each puzzle, especially since some explained the reasoning behind the puzzle. But be warned: each note vanishes as soon as you solve the next puzzle. If you want to read them, check your book after each successful solution.

Xiama Review

The puzzles are not perfect. For example, there is one puzzle which involves placing the frames of an animated picture in the proper order to make a smooth movie. You are giving the starting and ending frame, along with a jumble of other frames. Here's the thing, though: the motion involved is circular. Given a starting and ending frame, I could place the frames so that they move in either direction, clockwise or counterclockwise. There is no obvious reason to prefer one over the other. I picked the wrong direction the first time around, and then couldn't figure out why I hadn't solved the puzzle. It took me a while to figure out what I had done wrong, though strictly speaking there was nothing wrong with my solution.

More damaging is the interface and the paucity of documentation which comes with the game.

(Those of you who have read my reviews regularly know what's coming. Please, bear with me. I'm going to keep hammering the interface issue until game designers by damn get it right.)

Xiama is for the most part mouse-driven. Sure, you can use the arrow keys to move from place to place, but you can also use the mouse, and the only way to interact with items in the game world is via mouse.

The problem comes with how the mouse is utilized. You use the left mouse button to select items. Click on a gleaming hot spot to begin a puzzle. Once in it, use the left mouse button to move items around, or draw cards. In general all interaction is handled via the left mouse button.

The right mouse button is used to abandon a puzzle. Once you've entered a puzzle, which often has its own separate screen, press the right mouse button to return to the park.

So far, so good. The problem comes with how the right mouse button functions are overloaded. For example, one puzzle involves putting together the broken pieces of a camera. It's a jigsaw puzzle, but what you're not told is that you need to use the right mouse button to reverse certain pieces left to right. It took me quite some time to figure this out. I didn't understand why the pieces weren't fitting together properly, and it never occured to me to hit what is in effect the cancel button to interact with things.

How do you know when to use the right mouse button and when not to? You have to experiment in each puzzle. In some, clicking anywhere with the right mouse button will toss you back out of the puzzle. In some you can't solve the puzzle without using the right mouse button.

A Stone-Jumping Puzzle

Designers, please: be consistent. A foolish consistency may be the hobgoblin of little minds, but when it comes to user interface design, it's hard to have too much consistency. Above all, do not not not use the keys/buttons/telepathic control that means "cancel" as something else later. (I'm looking at you, Microsoft! Ctrl-Alt-Del to log in is not a good idea.)

This could have been alleviated by the addition of documentation explaining how to interact with the game, but to my knowledge there is none. For the most part this doesn't present a problem, but in my case it turned the interface into one of the puzzles, and few people, myself included, like such puzzles. It's the equivalent of the text adventure "guess the verb" puzzle, or the graphic adventure "find the hotspot" one.

Xiama also should have given additional feedback as you worked on some puzzles. For example, it would have been nice had the camera pieces in the camera jigsaw puzzle been a little stickier: as you got the pieces nearly in their proper orientation relative to each other, they could have stuck together as if magnetized. Such give-and-take feedback can really enhance puzzles.

Still, I enjoyed Xiama a lot. What started out with me yelling at the computer about the game's interface ended with me grinning happily as I solved puzzle after puzzle. I spent about three or four nights working on the game: if you're not already familiar with the Logo Turtle or haven't had cause to think of geometry in a long time, you'll probably take longer.

An Example of a Hotspot

The hard-core gamers, the ones who are right now planning their next offensive to capture the enemy flag or are downloading Rocket Arena, aren't likely to enjoy Xiama. To them I say: you'll find this game to be like Myst, only more boring. The gamers who prefer story with their puzzles will likewise be disappointed. Xiama is about puzzles. It makes no apologies for this, nor does it try to hide this fact as The 7th Guest did.

But those who like puzzles, and especially those who are parents and are looking for games they can play with their young kids, should take a look at Xiama. It's far from perfect, but it's a lot of fun.

Stephen's Score

20 out of 24

Technical aspects: the entire game can be played from CD, with only your saved high scores going on your hard drive. What was the last game you played where that was an option? I ran into one bug which caused the game to die whenever it tried to play a certain animation. At Peter's suggestion I tried playing the game's animations using the separate Windows Media Player and discovered that two of the animations were encoded using a codec I didn't have. WMP downloaded the appropriate codec and all was well thereafter.

Recommended computer: Are you kidding? You could run this game on a 486, assuming you're willing to wait a bit between moves. All you need is a machine running Windows 95 or later and which can handle DirectX 6.1a or later.

My computer: Duron 800 MHz, 128 MB of RAM, GeForce 2 MX with 32 MB. Thank goodness for these specs, eh?

The Puzzle in its Natural Habitat The Card Puzzle Up Close

A Game of Concentration A Picture Jumble