Thorgal's Quest is an adventure "on rails." While visually it's three-dimensional, the game itself is pretty much one-dimensional: you either follow the path or are forced to follow it. There are no alternatives to "the path" in this game, leaving you unable to explore the environment or even to perform actions out of order, lest you find you can't finish the "quest" for the round.

Controlling Thorgal is done using the classic point-and-click method adventure gamers have become accustomed to, despite the game’s use of a 3D environment. You just point your mouse at a location and click, and there goes Thorgal. If you want Thorgal to run, then double click on the location. You'll quickly appreciate this run option, as you spend a lot of time going from point A to point B. To investigate an object or speak with someone, you hover your cursor over the target until it changes shape, then click. Conversations are non-interactive once initiated, with the dialog just running along on autopilot until you click again to start the next round of speech.

Being an adventure title, Thorgal's Quest has plenty of puzzles. While most of the puzzles involve collecting small items to then use in the proper sequence, you also encounter sliding tile games, archery puzzles and some Othello knock-offs. The puzzles are somewhat enjoyable, but they’re almost universally too easy and thus leave you with little sense of accomplishment. Mind you, I'm not one of those people who enjoy wracking my brain for hours over a single puzzle, but most of those in Thorgal's Quest are just too short and too easy, making me wonder whether the game is intended for those just starting out with adventure games.

Thorgal's Quest, for the most part, is a visually pretty game. The 3D environments are richly textured and have lots of great detail, like grass that actually looks like grass and fire that licks at the air realistically. With that said, the character models are quite ugly. Jagged and chunky, they seem very out of place when set against the lush backdrops. One unique graphical element is the "story" mode, which lets you look at a sort of comic book of your completed adventures. Sometimes completing a task will cause the comic book to appear, which is pretty cool the first few times you see it.

I have to chuckle when I think about the sound in this game. For starters, the so-called Vikings in Thorgal's Quest all have either English or Scottish accents. You will not hear a Scandinavian sounding voice anywhere in this game. I especially loved the Viking mother who sounded like Maureen O'Hara in "The Quiet Man." Secondly, the voice acting is blatantly home-brewed; you'd swear it was done by the development staff and in the developer's offices. Echoes abound, and the overall tinny nature of the voice assures you that it was recorded in the break room on a long weekend. Outside of the voices, the rest of the sounds are pretty much par for the course: nothing outstanding, but nothing painful to listen to, either.

When this game's over, it's over for good. Being that it absolutely requires you to find everything available in order to complete your quests, there's no reason to come back later to try and find things you might have missed; the game simply will not have allowed you to miss anything.

Although I've griped about the simplicity of Curse of Atlantis: Thorgal's Quest and its voice acting, overall, this game's not a bad purchase under the right conditions. Those conditions being that you're looking for an introduction to adventure gaming, or you've got some casual gamers in the house who just don't want to spend 10 hours figuring out how to build a bridge from toothpicks and tinsel. At $19.99, it's also not a bad budget title to have around when you just want to while away a little time in a simple adventure.