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From the very start, Alida lacks interesting features. When you take a look over the box to the title, there really isn’t anything tantalizing to speak of that would make you go ‘wow’ and, unfortunately, things don’t get much better once the game is in your computer.

Alida is a huge back step for the adventure genre in pretty much every sense. There is next-to-no story at all, you never get involved with what story there is, you don’t care about the character you meet (yes, that’s singular), and it isn’t any fun to play… at all.

Gameplay for Alida will be pretty easy to get a hold of for most adventure gamers, or children over 4. Simply put, you have a little hand in place of your mouse pointer, and you click in the direction you want to move, or the item you wish to interact with. Everything you can do in Alida is done via clicking, everything. This isn’t really surprising though, since, well, I’ve just pretty much laid out all there is to do in Alida.

Navigation is handled through unimpressively rendered backdrops, some animate, while others are still, and very, very boring. This is 2004: we are in the age of Doom 3’s, Half-Life 2’s, and Killzones. We expect certain things when we play games now, and a bare minimum of decent looking graphics is one of them. No, good graphics don’t make a game good, but then, neither do flat, rendered backgrounds. What makes it worse is that Alida, like many other adventure games, is made up of individual screens. This means, you cannot actually ‘walk’ around the game, instead you click the direction you want to go, and you are mystically teleported slightly in that direction, and to a new rendered background. Ooh, ahh.

Alida takes place on a big island full of machinery and puzzles, big surprise, but wait! There’s more! Alida strays away from the pack by having the island in the shape of… a guitar? Apparently, Alida, the name of the island you’re on, is an unfinished theme park that was built by a successful rock band. The part that confuses me about all this, aside from the gigantic guitar-island, is where are all the rides? If this island was supposed to be a theme park, where’s the park part? Or the theme for that matter? I’m completely lost here…

Since Alida is completely lacking a coherent storyline, the focus of the game is on the puzzles. For whatever reason, this theme park guitar island is filled to the brim and more with a load of seemingly unrelated puzzles. Too many times you’ll have no idea what the purpose behind a certain puzzle is, or what to do with it. Sometimes dumb luck is the only thing that gets you moving in Alida, and that is something that becomes frustrating very, very quickly.

Audio in the game is about as simplistic as the rest of the package, featuring little else than ambient noises and very little music. There is some voice acting in a couple of the developments in the game, but it’s pretty bland and badly done.

This has been a decidedly short review for one simple reason: to extend my analysis of Alida any further than I already have would be redundant, since there is only so many times you can point out shoddy elements in a video game before it gets tiresome to write, and boring to read. I don’t know who decided the idea of Alida was a good one, and I don’t know how they came to that conclusion, but Alida exists, if only to collect dust beside some much better games at your local retailer. Stay away.