Eye of the Kraken - Free PC Game Review

Eye of the Kraken was released in 2002 by independent Canadian developer Absurdus. It’s a point and click adventure filled to the brim with literary references, quirky characters and a hero named Abdullah.

The game starts with a grainy black and white chase sequence, depicting someone stealing a magical artifact. It looks like the thief is on the same boat as Abdullah, who receives a letter requesting him to find the culprit. And so begins our ‘whodunit’, over the course of five days. Not real-time, obviously, but chapters. Everything is linear and needs to be solved to make the game story advance.

The interface is clean and functional, but there are a couple of flaws that should be noticed. To pick up an object from the inventory and use it on the game world we need to click on it and select the ‘Take’ option, and that is clearly unnecessary. Abdullah also can get a bit confused navigating through the ship, but he’s a fast runner, so there’s not much time lost.

Visually Eye of the Kraken is shown in a isometric perspective, with detailed backgrounds but blurred and stiff characters. Their animation also pales nowadays, extremely simplistic and robotic. It hasn’t aged well, but it’s not exactly bad material.

The game features no speech but has some musical themes from the first half of the 20th century, complete with grainy sounds. It quickly becomes annoying so it’s a plus that we have an option to completely turn the music off. Sound effects are extremely scarce.

Eye of the Kraken lasts for approximately 6 hours, which is a good duration for a free game. That and the – sometimes obscure – humor are its greatest strengths. It’s easy to see why it still is cherished as a competent adventure game, but times have changed and now there are more interesting proposals in the genre, like Nelly Cootalot or Dirty Split.

Graphics: 4/10 Sound: 4/10 Gameplay: 5/10

Overall: 5/10

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