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 The Sacred Rings
The Adventure Company, 2007. Windows 2000 / XP / Vista. Rated E for Everyone. Available online at Amazon.com.
The Sacred Rings is a fantastical, first person sci-fi game made by The Adventure Company for the PC. In this sequel to the hit game Aura, you play as a man named Umang, who mysteriously falls from the sky and awakes in a strange land. He discovers in his possession some mysterious rings - which come to find out have strong magical powers that give the owner immortality. Soon, Umang is being hunted by an evil clan who want the rings for themselves. But it is up to you to keep the rings safe - until they can be returned to those who can care properly for them, the Keepers.
Game play for The Sacred Rings is fairly fast-paced; you get to the action quite quickly. You begin by solving a series of puzzles and riddles in order to - quite literally - get moving on your quest. The puzzles are great; they're not impossible to solve, yet they're still challenging, and once you complete one, the rewards are usually very satisfying. To that end, The Sacred Rings is quite addicting; you'll want to keep going in order to keep solving the puzzles and move the story along. (I did have to look up a walk-through of the game a few times, though, in order to solve a puzzle here and there; the solutions weren't always necessarily cut and dry.) The voice acting in the game is average, as is the story. There really isn't anything new here, other than the standard adventure storylines that seasoned gamers will be more than familiar with. As for the graphics, they are quite good in terms of scenery and adventure, whereas the characters and people - in design as well as dialogue - tend toward the cheesy. However, the camera angles are very sensitive and intuitive, which puts much of the game play into your own hands; by moving the mouse, the camera swings along with it. The upside is that there is no delay for your character to search a particular room or to check out a particular scene or puzzle. The downside is that for sensitive players, the result can make you motion sick. I, for one, got a headache after playing this game for just a few minutes; I had to keep coming back in small doses to play, as the fast, swinging camera action got to be just too much for my sensitive eyes. (This does get better as you get used to it, but makes it no less disconcerting.) With that said, The Sacred Rings does provide for some fairly addicting game play, and while I wouldn't say that it's the best game I've ever played, I would say that it's intriguing enough for you to play through to the end. Difficulty level is average to intermediate; execution of the graphics, story, and more is, well, a bit above average.  Screenshots    
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