Nirvana: A Road to India is one very frustrating game. If you decide to play this game, save often! The game crashes back to my desktop quite a bit. The game was developed and published by Microids which was subsumed by Ubisoft early in 2005. Check out this interesting article at JustAdventure.com on the deal and it's potential impact on adventure gaming. Microids also developed the fantastic adventure games Syberia 1 and 2, Post Mortem, and Amerzone, but since the business deal went down, we probably won't see the talent from Microids developing any more new adventure games.
Admittedly, I've only just started the game. At this point, however, in terms of interest and quality, A Road to India doesn't come close to those other games. Syberia also had some problems with crashing, but the story about Kate Walker just drew me right in from the very beginning. I may be unfairly comparing the two games. Syberia was designed by the fantastic Benoit Sokal-- a man who because of his artistic sensibility can drum up interest in a new game by the use of his name alone.
In A Road to India, you play as Fred Reynolds (even his name is boring!). Fred has just received a letter from his fiance Anusha calling it quits. He's puzzled, of course, and takes off to India to find out what has happened to his fiance, and to determine what could be behind all of the strange dreams that he has been having recently. Once there, Fred finds himself in the middle of want may be a kidnapping conspiracy involving Kali-worshipping Thugs.
The game is played in first-person perspective and most of the puzzles are inventory based and are not that difficult. The graphics and the level of detail in each scene are wonderful, but I don't know if it's enough at this point to counteract some of the drawbacks to the game. Aside from the frequent crashes, the load times for new scenes can be maddeningly slow.
We'll see if the rest of the game gets anymore interesting.
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