Doctor Lautrec and the Forgotten Knights Review
With mysteries and treasure hiding under the streets of Paris, it’s up to Doctor Lautrec and his assistant Sophie to solve them all. Doctor Lautrec and the Forgotten Knights mixes puzzles, exploration, and combat into one mystery adventure through the catacombs of Paris. This game seems to bite off more than it can chew, though. With so many different gameplay elements combined into one game, it’s difficult to keep everything balanced and maintain a sense of quality.
When a young girl comes to Doctor Lautrec’s office asking for help, the doctor and Sophie are pulled into a mystery surrounding the underground of Paris and the true ruler of France. Despite its mystery setting the game is woefully short in surprising revelations or really any powerful story moments. Instead the story wraps up quite quickly with many flat and frankly dull characters. Lautrec especially could have used a more rounded character development and background, but instead the game is actually rather light on story and makes little effort to truly explore the setting it establishes. The one interesting part of the plot is its use of French history, though the presentation is so dry that its doubtful any of the information will be retained by the player. Furthermore, a lot is left unsaid–including the reason why treasures have fighting spirits inside them–which might have been meant to leave room for a sequel, though that might be counting chickens before they hatch on the developers’ part.
Parisian police have nothing better to do than chase you around underground mazes.
Doctor Lautrec just about throws everything into the pot when it comes to gameplay. There are three distinct elements in each level–exploration, puzzles, and combat–but none of them come across as the focus of the game and none of them really connect with one another, which causes their quality to suffer. First of all, you explore each underground maze which requires Lautrec to move blocks to create paths and avoid the apparently constant patrols of Parisian police or underground cultists. These areas provide decent little challenges to find the way to the exit, but can be painfully slow to the extent of boredom. Block puzzles are fine every now and then, but when just about every room has them, they quickly become annoying. Avoiding patrolling enemies further adds to how slowly you are forced to progress through each room; with no way of fighting these patrols, all you can do is keep out of eyesight which, again, would be fine in moderation but is tiresome and tedious in Doctor Lautrec.
Next up are puzzles. When you reach certain checkpoints you have to complete a short puzzle to progress. The selection of puzzles, however, could use a significant increase in variety. There are only a handful of puzzle types, including crosswords or spot-the-differences, the kind of puzzles that severely lack depth or intrigue. Occasionally you’ll encounter a unique logic puzzle, but these are few and far between among puzzles that are already limited to only a few in each level. Overall these puzzles show an absolute lack of imagination, and are so quick and easy that they add almost no gameplay value to the game.
Puzzles lean upon simple logic patterns or simplistic crossword games.
And finally, when you come upon a treasure, you have to battle its spirit in order to claim it. This is where the game has the most squandered potential. Like a watered down version of Pokémon, you use your own treasure spirits to battle new ones, weakening them to the point where you can capture them. Combat involves placing treasures on a circular field and taking advantage of enemy weaknesses–e.g. avian spirits do more damage to terrestrial spirits. The game does a disappointingly poor job of explaining some of the more intricate details of this combat system; with a little bit of polish this treasure fighting system could have shined. Furthermore, there’s no sense of development or progress with the treasures you collect. Despite accumulating experience points, you’re really meant to ditch older treasure for newer, higher level treasure when you find them. As a result creating a team of strong spirits is somewhat hasty and rushed. Compared to the other two gameplay elements of Doctor Lautrec, this battle system is so far in left field that it might as well have been its own game if it was fleshed out and felt less tacked on.
Doctor Lautrec puts both the touch screen and the regular buttons on the 3DS to use in its mix of gameplay elements. Puzzles and combat require stylus controls, while simple exploration uses the circle pad. As usual this combination of control schemes feels a little inconvenient, but you’re never required to switch rapidly between the two, so it’s a fairly minor problem. More annoying is the limited camera perspective while exploring. Scoping out a room for enemy patrols and pathways is, like everything else in this game, slower and more tedious than it needs to be. A quick view of the entire room would at least slightly help the plodding pace of the game’s action.
Basic strategy is required to effeciently take down wild treasure spirits.
Like the gameplay, the graphics are a rather eclectic mix of styles. While the gameplay features 3D models, dialogue is done in 2D cartoon portraits while cutscenes use a separate style of 2D animation. Despite this quite frankly pointless blend of art styles, the 2D cutscenes look great, and stereoscopic 3D helps the visuals to pop a little more. The rest of the visuals are decent if somewhat uninspired, which the mix of art styles certainly doesn’t help. The background music is similarly unremarkable, though the game has tons of voice acting, most of which is a lot of fun to hear.
Surprisingly, Doctor Lautrec is a relatively short game. Completing the main game can take as little as ten hours or so, but the game makes up for this with dozens of side quests. These optional quests offer more treasure to find and tame, and feature more puzzles and underground labyrinths to explore. Completing one side quest after another can be quite repetitive, though, which doesn’t help the slow, dull gameplay.
Despite some good production values and plenty of potential, Doctor Lautrec and the Forgotten Knights is ultimately a fairly bland experience. The game has a hard time keeping all its plates spinning, and as a result the gameplay feels directionless. A game that focused on any one of these three gameplay elements could have been more extensive and involving, but as it is the player only gets a taste of each idea, leaving much to be desired. It seems as though the developers couldn’t decide exactly what game they were making, and ended up on a middle-of-the-road approach that makes all three gameplay elements fall flat.
Rating: 
