Разработчик: Cryo Interactive
Описание
Inspired by the novel of Gustave Flaubert and the works of Phillippe Druillet, Salammbo: Battle for Carthage puts you in the middle of two of antiquities greatest powers. Can you deliver Salammbo's message before it's too late?
- Whether crossing gardens full of poisonous fumes or unleashing hell on Mount Solitude, the world of Salammbo is a dark one
- Get immersed in the 360° panorama of the dark and dangerous world of Salammbo, accompanied by the powerful score from Dvorak's epic "New World Symphony"
- A series of 3D frescoes forms a unique player's journal summarizing the adventures and providing a new insight into ancient History
Поддерживаемые языки: english, french, italian, german, spanish - spain
Системные требования
Windows
- OS *: Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8
- Processor: 400 MHz
- Memory: 128 MB RAM
- Graphics: DirectX compatible Video Card
- DirectX: Version 9.0c
- Storage: 1 GB available space
- Sound Card: DirectX compatible Sound Card
- Additional Notes: Mouse, Keyboard
Отзывы пользователей
A well made game still fun to play. brain teasing puzzles great dialogues and dark immersive game environment.
Push updates to fix compatibility issues and keep this piece of art alive
awesome graphics, fun plot. very comfy
Hum... Good and bad. This is a P&C game. The graphics are old but very nice. The music is OK. The story is somewhat interesting.
No bugs or crashes.
Overall, an interesting experience. The graphics and the atmosphere are great. The story is good and keeps you interested. That's the good part. On the other hand, very dated mechanics, moon logic puzzles, and is hard to navigate. This company, Cryo, was good at experimenting and creating atmospheres and weird worlds to lose in them, but they were pretty bad with their games' technical stuff and playability. This one is quite the child of Cryo. You might like the juice but not everybody would care to go for the squeeze. It's very cheap when on sale. I am still gonna give it a cautious recommendation for those who can appreciate the artwork beyond the gameplay.
Fun short puzzle game. The puzzles were for the most part realistic and I enjoyed the mix of combat. Where it shines is art direction, it's a beautiful world.
Nice little adventure game, that takes you to an alien, yet so familiar world.
And don't worry, it is very easy to get this game to run properly, just follow the instructions on Steam guides.
I hope you like black, dark brown and dark gray, because those are the only colors you will see in this game. The developers went for certain aesthetic, but they overdone it in my opinion. The result is an unintentionaly ugly game.
The game stops reacting on a map screen 2 hours in so I cannot finish it.
An excellent point and click game. Puzzles are logical and satisfying. Graphics are great for the time. The only downside for me is that it is quite easy to get disorientated and lost, because of the method of movement (e.g. in the mercenary camp). Had a great time finishing it though (took me 14 hours).
Holy-moly, the art in this game is so good. The gameplay for an adventure game from 2003 is surprisingly solid. The puzzles are mostly logical and straightforward. The storyline is enjoyable. Spendius definitely grows on you as a character. The Myst-like navigation can sometimes be disorienting, but you get used to it very quickly after memorizing the lay of the land. If any game is worth being called a "hidden gem" then it's this one.
Playthrough was completed on Manjaro Linux using the latest Proton with no problems. If you use Windows and encounter any difficulties, try using dgVoodoo 2. Overall score is 8/10, highly recommended for any point & click adventure fans.
This game is a hidden gem. I have a soft spot for point-and-click adventure games, and this one is for sure one of the more memorable I've played. The art style is incredibly gripping and unique, the puzzles are generally fair and the story actually had me wanting to see what happens next, which does not happen for me in these types of game since I play them mostly for the aesthetics. I highly recommend this game, I got about 14 hours out of it and I plan to replay it around Halloween each year, given it's creepy aesthetics and harsh world-building.
i bought and had to refund this game because it doesn't work properly in modern systems.
Although this game barely runs on Win 10, I was compelled to finish the game on the strengths of its story, the impressive visuals (being based on a graphic novel) and the variety of puzzles. This game definitely stands out amongst other point & click puzzle games.
Dear Steam...
Salammbo: Battle for Carthage looks like a great game. With dark and alien architecture, a strange world that is barely introduced before you are dropped down into it, and a compelling frame of a story.
However, Steam is selling a product that is outright broken on modern systems. Menus where your cursor is invisible, meaning saving, loading and then exiting the menu you opened is a test of patience, a horribly flickering quest log, and crashes to desktop from launch. Salammbo: Battle for Carthage is a game I bought ages ago and had finally been hoping to get stuck into. Unfortunately for me, I left it too late, meaning I can't get a refund.
I have myself tinkered to get other games running before on Steam. Many older games simply come with no compatibility options, and you are forced to tinker with stuff just to get it playable. Older games on Steam seem to have Bethesda's ethos - that is, the consumer will fix all the problems for us. Except we're expected to pay money for this stuff. If we paid for a disc that was scratched and broken, we'd be frustrated and annoyed with whoever supplied us a disc that clearly wasn't working. Really inexcusable.
Sadly I couldn't even find this available for purchase on GOG. If you are keen on buying this game, buy it with the knowledge you'll have to do some fixing of your own to get it working on a system that's remotely modern.
This game looks like it might be a cool game, but I wouldn't know. I've waited years for them to release some sort of patch to support this product, I've been in contact with support (until they flat out stopped replying to emails), and I've even looked into third party solutions.
But at the end of the day, the bottom line is that THIS GAME SHOULD NOT BE ON THE STEAM PLATFORM. This does not work on modern computer hardware without third party software to disable graphics features, significant settings and config editing, etc. This is just to get the game to load up.
If a game is on the steam platform, it should work on the majority of PC hardware out of the box. The comment section for this game is flooded with people trying to get the game to work.
If you love the surreal, you may love Salammbo. Right from the menu it feels alien then continues to do so with such a bizarre mix in almost every corner of the design with its design of the characters, the architecture and the VERY dramatic orchestral music.
There's no preface to the world either, which I loved. So I had a sense of wonder about the world throughout the entire game, and even remain curious to figure what it's all about after completion. Salammbo: Battle for Carthage is based on the comic series of the same name, which is based off the 17th century historical novel about a mercenary revolt during pre-Imperial Rome. So, how it came to be this bizarre alien depiction from the comics, I don't know, but there's no other point and click like this.
It plays like Myst, point and teleport '3D' screen movement. This is mostly fine, sadly the weird world backdrops can be overly rasterized, which has certainly damaged the art produced for the game. (just accommodating to hardware of the time I guess). The puzzles are messy. The worst are a few with hunting large areas (Myst style, remember!) trying to find one crucial item to solve your problem. Some problems I just fluked the solution, and was left lost on how I could come to such a conclusion. That is my only gripe with the weird alien setting. The puzzles in a tomb were also a bit too far out for me, being full of riddles and imagery I just could get. Regardless, as difficult as these parts were, this was still a wonderful world to explore.
So if you love your strange games, Salammbo is certainly one of the more strange and obscure ones out there, and a world worth seeing.
Mediocre quest with mediocre puzzles, writing and voice acting which are compensated by brilliant art-style and unique atmosphere of classic French Space Opera comics. Its plot is based on Philippe Druillet's "Salammbo" trilogy (which is loosely based on Gustave Flaubert's novel of the same name), and Druillet's artistic influence on developers from Cryo Interactive is easily noticeable.
Alas, as a game Salammbo suffers from dozens of little flaws that makes its gameplay painfully frustrating in modern era. For example, it has no hint system, but sometimes none of the characters tell you how to push the in-game plot further - all you have to do in a situation like this is to use every item from the inventory on every active spot of every location, only to find out that all this time our hero had his own plan of actions in mind (but for some reason he forgot to share it with the player).
Another example - the game starts with a couple of impressive intro-puzzles that are completely logical (in the context of prison escape), and therefore simple but elegant. What comes next? Big maze-like Mercenary Camp that is one of the main locations of the game - it's so tangled that players can easily get lost, but there is no map to help them navigate through it.
There are many other problems with Salammbo, but despite everything it completely deserves to be played at least once - its gourgeous landscapes and unique aesthetics are the real heart and soul of the project. On the other hand, the gameplay often cannot correspond to them, so if you seek for a really good quest that you can play comfortably without a walkthrough, you need to seek further: technically, Salammbo is a generic first-person point-and-click quest that is similar to other generic quests of that genre from 2000's (like Riddle of the Sphinx, or Atlantis III: The New World, or Aura 2: The Sacred Rings). The only difference is an awesome visual style - and it's the only reason I can recommend Salammbo to modern gamers, but from my perspective this reason is truly significant.
“Through the forest he pursued the she-monster whose tail coiled over the dead leaves like a silver stream; and he came to a meadow where women, with the hindquarters of dragons, stood around a great fire, raised on the tips of their tails. The moon shone red as blood in a pale circle and their scarlet tongues, formed like fishing harpoons, stretched out, curling to the edge of the flame.” ― Gustave Flaubert, Salammbô
Salammbo, hailing from year 2003, is the last of the adventure games created by the French developer team, Cyro Interactive. Since then, all rights of Cyro Interactive products - including Salammbo - is acquired by Microids, another wondrous name for the adventure game genre. I must declare that it is more than lucky Microids decided to distribute Cyro's old games digitally, so newer generations of adventure lovers may also experience this beauty, based on Gustave Flaubert's original novel with the same name.
It's 241 BC. After the First Punic War between Roman Republic and Carthage, Rome wins the war. An uneasy treaty of peace has been signed between parties, mostly to the benefit of Rome and now Carthage must pay mercenaries that has been recruited from various countries. While the mercenary camps are settled just outside of the city borders in an uneasy wait, a slave named Spendius manages to escape his masters. While he was trying to get out of the city without being noticed, he is stopped by Salammbo, the daughter of General Hamilcar Barca and the high priestess of goddess Tanith. Salammbo pleads with Spendius that he would carry a message to the one she loves, Matho, the Libyan leader of mercenaries. Spendius agrees, and thus begins his long, brutal and laborious climb from a lowly slave to a general of the Mercenary Revolt that would threaten to bring Carthage to its fall.
The original story is written by Gustave Flaubert, after the immense success of his first novel, Madame Bovary. Even though his main source was Polybius's Histoires to establish the story on a historically just timeline, the setting itself is highly fictitious. With its incredibly violent descriptions of war and surreal depictions of ritualistic traditions of Carthage back at the time, Salammbo was sensational for the era it was published. It should be also proper to note that the game is based upon Flaubert' work, yet takes a different turn rather than actual recordings; namely prefers to end the series of events with a less gruesome take.
The graphics of the game are simply breathtaking for its era, with futuristic architecture and intimidating character models. The artwork is inspired from French comic artist Philippe Druillet's graphic novel with the same name, and he has been heavily involved with the development of the game himself. The atmosphere is dark, elegant and overwhelming. Everything is intimidatingly surreal and there is a surprising attention to detail when it comes to all and any textures. It is probably nothing impressive for today, but it is simply beautiful still.
The game interface is annoying though, and it works really slowly. Remember really old adventure classics like Myst series, where you'd have a 360 degree of visual angle, yet to you'd have to click at some direction to move? Salammbo carries the same tradition. Since there is no "you are here" indicator or any kind of "useful" map interface, this can get pretty disorienting with all that dark and alien architecture around at the start. If you are not easily discouraged though, you get the hang of what is what and what may reside where after a while.
Gameplay is fairly simple. Collecting items, solving puzzles and some riddles. Fair enough. Nothing is especially hard or boorishly easy. If you are to listen to dialogue implications carefully and get used to making the best of your environment, the game flows fairly. One warning though: even though the story and the gameplay is linear, there are many, many ways to end up dead. You may very well imply the wrong notion to the wrong person in a dialogue or miss a timed puzzle to end up Spendius massacred in various brutal ways. Don't forget that you are a rebel and spy, trying to fight not only against a whole city, yet anyone that may decide it could be beneficial to get rid of you. Luckily, the game restores you to the last point where everything was somewhat okay the minute you screw up and end up dead. So, you won't be facing the labor of playing through a portion of the game just because you forgot to save.
The game isn't for everyone. But for the adventure gamer who'd appreciate a good story, beautiful environment design and some fair puzzle challenges, Salammbo is a true gem, even today. It might be a bit frustrating for the history buff, since the environment is futuristic and the events do not match up with the actual recording, but I truly recommend to spare a leisurely evening to give this one a try. Good day, and good gaming to you!
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Salammbô is the last game from Cryo, the legendary game studio that made great games like Atlantis, and always had a great eye for detail and valued art and considered games like a new way of expression (back when games were not still considered as such). Cryo was founded also by members of Infogrames, the creators of Alone in the dark (the original)
This last effort of theirs, was troubled in its conception, partly because the studio closed its doors while doing this game (2002). Wich of course affected the development but luckily didn't affect the game too much so the game was finished and published (2003). And while the game was not the best of the studio it was one of the good ones. The art, still present to the last minute was done in this case by Philippe Druillet an acomplished french artist who did work inspired by the writing of HP Lovecraft. Druillet created originally a series of graphic novels in the 1980s called Salammbó wich were based on the novel of the same name created by Gustave Flaubert in the 1800s. This was a lush and very violent narrative wich depicted historical events about the fall of Carthage during the 3th century (the Punic wars) and the revolt of the mercenaries.
Salammbó is a dark game with weird visuals wich reflects perfectly the character of the artist. The game alltough it is dated now (2016) and has low resolution (it was one of the last full screen games before everyone went widescreen) still manages to this day to show some incredible art from Druillet wich work previously with Cryo doing Ring: The legend of the Nibelungen. I played originally the dubbed english version wich has horrible voices and now the original french one (both on steam) wich is better but still is not the reason why you are going to play this game.
The game has not much support from its present publishers so if you have a problem you are probably going to search for a solution. Personally, the only problem i had was that i had to activate compatibility mode in Windows 7 x64 bit version for the game executable, because if i didn't do that, the game crashed miserably when opening it...but aside from that (it was a very quick solution) the game worked without problems...still, it would be better if you just sold a game that didn't have such a glaringly fatal problem so big and clear in first full view (when you open the game i mean) even if the game is 13 years old, you should check from time to time the games you are selling for any compatibility issues (in this case steam) and fix them before continue selling them... what the heck, i would gladly offer myself to take the job of checking these games if steam would be interested, just for them to be able to continue to sell them...without having crashing issues which can be solved so easily (but shouldn't be done by players, because when you buy a game it shouldn't be crashing on you....like Riven ...another great classic with compatibility issues....)
Anyway, besides that, the game is surely great....i wouldn't necessarily recommend it to a modern age player, because it can be hard to adjust to its gameplay rules.... BUT if you dare to do it...you are going to be rewarded, because there is a nice story and great visual work by druillet.
Based on the historic novel by Gustave Flaubert the team at Cryo Interactive (Rereleased by Anuman & Meridian4) made a first person point & click game with some combat in it to tell the story of how Carthage fell. Now before I start I want to get the negatives out of the way before I say anything good about it. The interface is god awful/annoying, the story is kinda linear but follows the original novel pretty well without being boring, the puzzles are easy except for a few hard ones (Perfect game for the new adventurer), the music is decent but it's inaccurate whenever the game plays it & depending on how good you are with puzzles (There's mini games like War Chess but that doesn't last too long) the game will last around 7 hours.
Now with that out of the way I'll start by saying for a 12 year old game it's got a weird & gorgeous art style it's just a unique piece of animation done well, the voice acting is very good, the humans look like aliens & demons, the atmosphere has that science fiction (Or Fantasy I dont know what Cryo was targeting) heavy metal type style you would see on music albums like Mastodan or GWAR for example & overall I would just wait for the game to go on sale since the game was only an average experience.
Bonus: The original story is on Good Reads if you want to check it out http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/221597.Salammb_
Bonus 2: Another influence for this game is Phillippe Druillet (the website is in french) http://www.druillet.com/
Old game but amazing art style. This game is not too hard like other old games so it suits for new gamers. The story is pretty linear but not boring because there are some minigames that fun a lot. I really like war chess minigame, creative and genius, though I wish it will have a few more rounds to play.
Just finished it. Don't know why ppl blame it so much for being hard, it's almost like Atlantis series, the puzzles aren't that impossible (I'm patience to take an hour to solve something that takes 30 secs, hate walkthroughs) though I had to look for a hint to only one or two puzzles. The timed actions aren't hard either.
People that complain about this game never played Myst, Lucas Arts series and other old adventure games. The story of this one is great, the only part I didn't like so much was the end, I thought it would have something more.
Anyway if you're not a point & click fan don't buy this, but if you are and want some good dialogs, puzzles and story this game is for you.
This is a very entertaining point-and-click adventure game. The game tells the story of Spendius, an actual historical figure, who rises from slavery to become a great commander of mercenary forces in the Mercenary War that further devastated Carthage after its defeat in the First Punic War. The art design is very creative but a little repetitive as is the sound design. Overall, the game has not aged too badly in the sound and graphics departments. The puzzles range from trivial to challenging and to be successful the player should make sure to take notes and look out for small details. Negatives include random crashing and the short duration of the game (I completed it in one long sitting).
It's easily worth $5 if you're a fan of old school adventure games.
The story is "heroic", with one improbable success and escape after another, in a dramatic comic book style.
That's ok, it's a valid style of adventure and story.
The story is slightly sophisticated, describing difficulties in negotiations to bring factions together for a common goal.
It is a full length game and story.
The inability to easily see which direction one can move is a critical downfall of the game, detracting so much from gameplay that I regret having played.
Figuring out which exits are possible is a methodical process of scanning each direction with the mouse.
It is very easy to overlook a possible exit and get stuck only for this reason.
Much time is wasted backtracking and double checking scans for possible exits.
The map is of no help at all in this regard.
The other downfall of the game is grossly unintuitive puzzles, that make little sense even in retrospect after consulting the walkthrough.
Even worse, some of the most difficult puzzles are timed events, where one must make a series of correct decisions in rapid succession to succeed. An absolute clickfest requiring many maddening repeats, even if one stares at the walkthrough knowing what to do.
If I was chained to the computer for 24 hours I would have NEVER gotten past some puzzles without the walkthrough. That's terrible.
Some of the story and art is interesting, but from a gameplay and puzzle perspective I cannot recommend this game.
I regret having purchased and played it.
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Дополнительная информация
Разработчик | Cryo Interactive |
Платформы | Windows |
Ограничение возраста | Нет |
Дата релиза | 18.01.2025 |
Metacritic | 77 |
Отзывы пользователей | 74% положительных (38) |