Review by Orb
March 2002

I recently tried playing a real live jigsaw puzzle with a couple of family members. Remember those? Game pieces that actually get held in your hand? Elbows kick pieces onto the floor; your head begins to throb as you cannot see all the pieces on the table with your reading glasses either on or off? Neck strains and stiffens? Gee, what fun. Let me tell ya, virtual is better.

The best part of a virtual jigsaw puzzle, of course, is that you don't get to the end of it and realize that you are missing three pieces that have been lost from the box. And those last five pieces? Why, those are from another puzzle entirely.

Notre Dame Cathedral is played in the same way as the other Puzz3D titles. These are very clever games, and the person who thought up the idea of assembling a 3D puzzle in a virtual setting, then allowing the player to be drawn into the assembled building to explore and enjoy a small adventure game, ought to be given a gold star.

The puzzle portion of the game is extremely addictive. There are many perks throughout to assist you in assembling the pieces and a variety of strategies that you can use to put them together. The game gives you the option of trays that can be used to separate out pieces in color or style sections, and these can either be locked at the bottom of the game screen or kept on the assembly table.

As sections are completed, you are given snippets of videos detailing the historical significance of the section of the cathedral that's just been completed, and the stories behind these sections are interesting and entertaining. Studying them, however, is not necessary to study to complete the game, and they can be skipped completely if one so wishes.

You are given a number of snazzy tools to fiddle with to assist you in the assembly of the cathedral: stats by which you can gauge your success rate in completing the game at a festive clip, sections of the cathedral to study, instructions to refer to covering the structure of the puzzles and how they are to be assembled.

The game overall can be played at three difficulty levels, as is true for all of the Puzz3D games. The only level worth its weight is "platinum;" at this level the puzzle consists of almost a thousand pieces, but once completed, the resultant mini adventure game can be fully played in its entirety, and all areas that can be explored in the cathedral are open. At the two earlier levels, access to exploration is curtailed to much less of the cathedral.

Once the puzzle is completed, you are allowed inside the Notre Dame cathedral to explore and enjoy a small adventure game. The story of the adventure game lifts its characters from Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The places in the cathedral that can be gotten into are tightly controlled, and you are pretty much led from one area to the next. Each open area contains a hotspot containing some stones for inventory and a cheesy video with bad acting. As the environments are navigated, the stones are collected in inventory, along with clues that enable you to put them together in the correct order to complete the game.

Throughout the game, there are small videos of characters from the story of the cathedral and, later in the adventure portion of the game, from the Victor Hugo tale. These are played by what looks suspiciously like the crew from the deli down the street from where the game was built. It's a real "hey you!" cast. This would be disconcerting except for the fact that there are so many other clever and interesting things about the game that the bad acting, in this instance, can truly be forgiven.

The game ran buggy in the adventure portion, on a 466 MHz iBook, with frequent crashes and dumps to the desktop. This has also occurred to the same degree with the Victorian Mansion Puzz3D, so it appears that the quality control on the Mac ports is consistently lacking. They have, of course, solved this with their most recent title by not bothering to port it to the Mac at all.

Puzz3D: Notre Dame Cathedral is a very enjoyable game for any lover of puzzles and adventure games. You get two bangs for the buck with both the puzzle and adventure games included. 

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: Wrebbit Interactive
Publisher: Wrebbit Interactive
Release Date: 1999

Available for:  

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Player Feedback

Screenshots

System Requirements

Windows:
Windows 95 or higher
Pentium 100 MHz (200 MHz recommended)
16 MB of RAM (24 MB recommended)
Microsoft compatible mouse
45 MB free (21 MB for files, 24 MB for virtual memory)
640x480, 16-bit colors, DirectX certified video driver (1 MB of cache video memory is recommended)
2X CD-ROM drive (minimum)

Macintosh:
MacOS 7.5 or higher
PowerPC 80 MHz (200 MHz recommended)
20 MB of RAM (32 MB recommended)
32 MB free
640x480, 16-bit colors
2X CD-ROM drive (minimum)

Where to Find It

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