Retro Replay Review

Gameplay

The first hour has a pleasingly direct mystery-game pull. You wake up as Carl Corey in a hospital with no memory, get out, and start piecing together why this life feels wrong. That setup gives even the game’s simple point-and-click adventuring a useful sense of momentum: you are not merely collecting answers for their own sake, but trying to understand who Carl is and what sort of world he has stumbled into.

Do not expect a free-form detective adventure. The path is linear, and the game breaks its progress into loosely connected pieces: conventional adventure scenes, quick-time events, and nine stand-alone puzzles. That variety prevents the format from settling into a single routine, yet it also makes the experience feel segmented. Just when you are invested in following clues through dialogue, the game may ask you to shift gears and solve a discrete puzzle or react to a quick-time prompt.

Whether that structure works for you comes down to what you want from the license. If you enjoy older adventures with clear forward progress and do not mind a game changing its mode on you, there is enough here to keep the journey moving. If you want puzzles and exploration to grow naturally out of every scene, the seams will be hard to ignore. Treat it as a compact, guided adaptation rather than a sprawling fantasy sandbox, and its design is easier to meet on its own terms.

Graphics

The game uses hand-drawn 2D characters over pre-rendered backgrounds. That combination gives Carl and the other figures a distinctly illustrated look while the locations sit behind them as fixed, composed scenes. It is a recognizably late-1990s adventure-game style, more concerned with framing each stop on the journey than with fluid visual motion.

Story

The story carries Devyat’ princev Ambera. Carl’s amnesia is not just an opening excuse: it is the lens through which you enter a fantasy world hidden from ordinary people, gradually uncovering his true identity and mission. That is an excellent foundation for an adventure, because every answer has the potential to redraw what you think you know about the protagonist.

This is an adaptation of Roger Zelazny’s Nine Princes in Amber, and its dialogue follows the novel closely. For fans, that fidelity is the main payoff. You are revisiting the book’s words and revelations from inside Carl’s search rather than receiving a loose reinterpretation that merely borrows the title.

That same closeness may be less welcoming if you come in cold. The game is most compelling when you are interested in Amber’s underlying mystery and Carl’s route toward it; the linear structure leaves little room to build a separate identity between major story beats. Still, the source is sturdy, and the game wisely puts the characters’ conversations at the center of the trip.

Overall Experience

Devyat’ princev Ambera is an uneven but sincere piece of licensed adventure design. The amnesiac opening and the gradual shift from hospital escape to hidden fantasy give it a real narrative engine, while the point-and-click sections offer a simple way to inhabit that search. Its best moments are likely to be the ones where a conversation advances Carl’s understanding of himself and Amber.

The compromises are plain. Quick-time events and separate puzzles add variety, but they can interrupt the story rather than deepen it, and the strictly linear route limits the pleasure of discovery. You are moving through an adaptation’s selected stops, not carving out your own path through its world.

Give it a chance if the Chronicles of Amber matter to you, or if you have a taste for late-1990s adventures that mix several challenge types around a strong literary premise. Everyone else may find the structure too patchwork to recommend without reservation. The payoff is there for the right audience: a faithful return to a memorable fantasy novel, carried by its mystery even when the game around it changes gears.

Retro Replay Score

6.5/10