Nostradamus: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

This casual point-and-click adventure is impressive in some ways, but it's hard to recommend it due to clunky, inconsistent gameplay.

The graphics are quite beautiful, and the story, though somewhat incoherent, has a nice occult atmosphere to it.

But the puzzles are all over the place. Some are infantile: for example, placing shaped blocks into shaped holes, something a toddler might find challenging. But others are unnecessarily difficult, made so due to being just plain incomprehensible. Especially annoying is that some items you need to pick up are barely visible on the screen. I strongly recommend playing on "easy" mode, which will at least mark them when your mouse is close. I usually play such games on "hard", but in this case it was just impossible.

The game engine involves dragging and dropping objects, an annoying mechanic in itself, and it's made even more annoying by being quite buggy.

There are also some arcade-like sequences of moderate difficulty. They seem very out of place in a game like this.

Perhaps hardcore HOG fanatics would find something to enjoy here, but everybody else would surely find this game frustrating.