Like I said earlier,
Sentinel: Descendants in Time reminds me a lot of the original
Myst games, but with a few differences. One of the major differences is the fact that you aren’t viewing the world one frame at a time. Instead, you have full control over your character’s movements in the 3D space. Because of this, the gameplay feel is more like a First Person Shooter than a standard adventure game. But it is still jam-packed with unique puzzles that will keep any problem-solver busy for hours on end.
Sentinel takes place more than 1,900 years in the future. In that time, civilizations have risen and fallen. One such society is the Tastans. These advanced people are but a memory, and they have left tombs all over the world. Each tomb contains portals to places the inhabitant liked to visit when he/she/it was alive. The tomb you will explore in this game is Tomb 35 -- the most feared because its guardian A.I. is ruthless and doesn’t like to be disturbed.
So why are you trekking through this sacred chamber? You are Beni, a local who has learned which tombs are safe and which ones people don’t come back out of. But you find out that some mafia-like people are holding your sister until you get whatever riches are in the burial chamber and bring them back.
As you explore the different worlds that Dormeuse (the resident A.I.) allows you to go into, you learn more and more about these people and who they were before they died out. But Dormeuse has a dark plan. She doesn’t want anybody getting to the inhabitant’s remains (no matter what the grave-robber’s motives may be).
The puzzles you will find are a mix between the classic tasks you see in most games and a good number of unique ones to keep the challenge alive. Though I liked the new puzzles, a lot of the time their solutions made no sense. For example, early in the game you are given a control panel and need to use it to maneuver a lighthouse so that it hits five or six giant flowers. When you first go into it, you have no idea why you want to do this -- there aren’t any clues as to what will happen when you do, but you do it because there is nothing else to do. I found this to be the case somewhat frequently. This pulled me out of the game at times because I couldn’t see ahead to know what I would do after I finally got past whatever puzzle was ahead of me.
