Nikopol: Secrets of the Immortals

I have a soft spot for games that exist in their own strange atmosphere and refuse to apologize for it, and Nikopol: Secrets of the Immortals is exactly that kind of oddity. You step into the worn shoes of Alcide Nikopol, a struggling painter scraping by in a fascist, theocratic Paris where lobster-like creatures patrol the streets as government enforcers, an alien pyramid floats silently over the Seine, and Egyptian gods have apparently decided the city's political situation warrants their direct intervention. Nobody in this world seems particularly alarmed. That ambient weirdness, drawn directly from Enki Bilal's celebrated graphic novel trilogy "La Foire aux Immortels," is simultaneously the game's greatest strength and its most alienating quality. Mechanically, this is a first-person point-and-click in the Myst lineage: you hop between discrete scenes by clicking directional arrows, interact with hotspots via left click, and carry a small inventory of scavenged items that you combine or deploy to push the story forward. The six environments, ranging from Nikopol's condemned flat to the resistance church's hidden quarters, are rendered with genuine artistry. Crumbling old-city architecture pressed up against cold, utilitarian modern tech gives the dystopia a texture that pre-rendered screens rarely achieve. Comic-book-style cutscenes split across the screen like panels between chapters, and the ambient propaganda blaring from loudspeakers lends the whole thing a suffocating, lived-in mood. The soundscape is deliberately sparse and unsettling. For a 2009 budget title, the presentation punches above its weight. Where the game loses people fast is in its puzzle design. Many puzzles are timed, and failure means instant death and a reload from a checkpoint. An early sequence in the apartment has you racing to evade a giant slug-like militia enforcer while figuring out which items to combine under pressure, and the game never really stops doing this. The logic connecting objects to solutions can feel more associative than rational, shaped by Bilal's surrealist visual vocabulary rather than game-design convention. A hexagon-tile puzzle on a flickering monitor, a wall-tile re-arrangement, a code cipher retrieved from Gorgon's room, and a moment where you must push keys under a door with a chisel and a piece of paper: the puzzles are inventive, but the learning curve for each feels steep. Player opinions split almost cleanly: those who love old-school challenge and happened to know the source material found the difficulty refreshing; everyone else hit a walkthrough within the first hour. The narrative, too, asks more patience than it earns on its own terms. Characters like the resistance leader Gorgon speak in stilted, archaic phrasing. Horus, the Egyptian god who comes looking for Nikopol's cryogenically frozen father, arrives with almost no setup for players unfamiliar with the novels. The game works best as a video-game companion to Bilal's trilogy or the film adaptation "Immortel, ad vitam." Strip that context away and the plot feels less like mystery and more like purposeful obscurantism. It is short too, completable in a single long sitting for experienced adventure players, with no replay value to speak of. For the right person, though, specifically someone who has read the Nikopol Trilogy or watched Immortel, or someone who simply craves a point-and-click built around a genuinely uncommon fictional universe, this is a quiet, moody gem worth the low asking price. The voice acting for Alcide is solid, the art direction holds up better than you would expect from its era, and there is something genuinely affecting about wandering through Bilal's Paris even when the puzzles are fighting you. Go in knowing the source material will do half the storytelling work for you, keep a walkthrough at arm's length for the timed sequences, and you will find a game that knows exactly what kind of strange it wants to be.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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