Aura: Fate of the Ages

How Do you open a locked door? You find a key, put it in the slot, turn it until the lock clicks and then pull the door handle. Not if you happen to live in an adventure game you don't.

To open a locked door in an adventure game, you usually have to first discover the whereabouts of the key by travelling halfway across a bizarre landscape in which every rock is inscribed with an obscurely enigmatic zodiac symbol. You then embark on twisting a series of differently-shaped levers into a combination that's revealed to you only after looking through a prism at the sun's reflection in a mystical puddle, before putting the key into a completely different door in another building across a lake of fire. You usually then have to enter a combination based on the reverse order of the symbols seen earlier into an indescribably weird device sitting in an attic, and then turn the door handle backwards. And even then, you usually find the door doesn't lead where you expect it to, and the real one is off round the back somewhere instead, disguised as a daffodil or something.

That's not actually one of the puzzles in obscure logic stretcher Aura: Fate Of The Ages, but it might as well be. It's not all bad. Apart from the acting and character animation. Oh, and the interface. And the story. True, some of the puzzles do make a twisted kind of sense. But there's nothing gripping about it. Life's too short, basically.