National Geographic’s online game, Herod’s Lost Tomb, has stunning visuals and graphics and offers a variety of historical sites for players to explore in during their quests for this lost tomb. The game is marketed as slightly instructive entertainment where players discover artifacts and work to uncover the lost secrets. In reality, I found the game overly educational, rather uninspiring, and a poor representation of archaeology.
When playing the limited free online version, I was frustrated by the game’s main format and the archaeological views the system represented. To solve the game, players visit various archaeological sites and must collect the artifacts from a list. At each site, objects are piled around simply waiting to be picked up. “Finding” these artifacts actually means clicking around the page until you identify the correct object. This strategy represents such incorrect archaeological techniques that it’s hard to know where to start analyzing. According to this game, archaeologists must go to sites and collect the artifacts they want most from a vast selection available from the site. In the game, no artifacts are broken and there is no process of analyzing these findings.
My other main complaint with this game is how boring I found it. To me, it was more like an online I Spy game than an historical adventure. The artifacts were often too small to see clearly and hard to distinguish from the bland color scheme of the game background. Also, these objects were mostly generic (urns, safety pins, flowers, knives, barrels, etc.) and not fundamental to understanding the particular archaeological site under investigation.
Overall, although this game does attempt to connect players to ancient cultures, the gameplay is fairly dry and incredibly boring. Herod’s Lost Tomb doesn’t even possess the draw of correctly portraying archaeological techniques. To me, this game was neither educational nor entertaining, and has nothing to offer its players.
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