Atlantis: The Lost Tales

Atlantis: The Lost Tales is a fantasy adventure computer game. The game is named after its initial and most important setting, Atlantis. It is the first in a Myst-like series, and is followed by Atlantis II (Beyond Atlantis outside Europe), Atlantis III: The New World (Beyond Atlantis II), Atlantis Evolution and The Secrets of Atlantis: The Sacred Legacy.

The game begins with Seth, the protagonist, joining the Queen's Companions, the personal guardians of the Queen of Atlantis. He discovers after he arrives that the Queen disappeared shortly before he joined.

Atlantis is a first-person perspective puzzle game. The entire game is in 3-D. The HUD is basically a 'window' into the world of Atlantis, instead of moving a mouse around the screen, moving the mouse actually moves the screen itself. To interact with the world, the player must position the item, NPC or thing into the middle of the screen.

Progression through the game involves solving various puzzles of varying difficulty. Some puzzles are extremely abstract and the solution is completely unexpected, whereas other puzzles are very simple. Another feature of Atlantis is having periods where the player must react quickly to certain events happening in the game.

The game features a number of proprietary technologies developed by Cryo. One such technology is called OMNI 3D which provides a smooth, panoramic 360-degree first-person view of the game environment. All the character animations are motion captured and feature another technology called OMNI SYNC to ensure proper lip synchronization with audio speech.

The soundtrack for Atlantis: The Lost Tales was released in 1998 as a two-CD set (one of which being an enhanced CD containg wallpapers).

Source: Wikipedia, "Atlantis: The Lost Tales," available under the CC-BY-SA License.