The story: secret Nazi uber science experiments and an archaeologist who gets caught up in the middle of it all. Hmmm...sound familiar? If you were expecting Indiana Jones, you would be sorely mistaken. The plot in
Nibiru is as thick as grapefruit juice and tastes about the same going down. As you control Martin Holan, the main character, you feel like you are leading around Dan Quayle on a series of idiotic mishaps. There are no emotional or even visual traits that Martin ever conveys (even though he wears a familiar brown leather jacket no matter what climate he is in).
Bad stories can be easily forgotten if the gameplay is good, even in adventure games. This is not the case in Nibiru. Adventure games are a dying breed and this one does nothing to alleviate that trend. No innovation has taken place here, and it seems that all the old rules from the classics have been ignored. There are a handful of puzzles that will satisfy; the rest of the game is easily forgotten.
The bulk of the game involves a haphazard search for items that are either blatantly apparent as to what they will be used for, or else trying to figure out the most illogical combinations of items to solve obscure puzzles. The basic formula of adventure games has been stripped down to something even less, as you will find puzzles with their solutions literally sitting right in front of them. Keys to a lock anyone? Oh! Here they are, right in front of the locked door. Amazing!
Then there are the puzzles that require a significant amount of demented thought. Some puzzles are solved simply by talking to people over and over again, leaving the player in a state of bewilderment as they scour the area for any sign of clues when the solution is simply in exhausting the dialogue. Other puzzles require looking at items multiple times. The worst are those that don't even make any physical sense, like using a magnet to pull a key out of a drain.
The areas that you can explore are limited to about three or four screens at a time. The limitations on the exploration in this game are severe, and you are sometimes kept in a certain area by Martin's apparent omnipotence that you have not picked up all of the necessary items yet. Worse, the interactive objects in each area are on triggers, meaning that if you have thoroughly explored one area and a certain event happens elsewhere, that area may now have more interactive objects that were not there previously.
