What is Traitors Gate?

Traitors Gate, the new 3D point-and-click adventure in the mold of Myst and The 7th Guest, should remain forever locked as a punishment for its tedious gameplay. The game asks players to assume the role of special operative Raven, taking on a challenging — albeit Saturday-morning-cartoonish — mission, code-named “Traitors Gate.”

In the hackneyed plot, a high-level U.S. operative has gone rogue and is planning to steal England’s famed Crown Jewels. Raven’s task is to infiltrate the Tower of London, avoid detection at all costs, and replace the real jewels with fakes, which you’ll use to track the game’s true enemy. This makes sense, of course, except for the part that makes no sense.

As players click, click, click their way through pixilated environments, they follow an imperative to leave no trace of their existence — though the game contradictorily lets them burn through locks and shoot guards with nonlethal darts. Players have access to a good crop of weapons and tools, but must deal with an ineptly designed inventory interface. Instead of storing acquired gadgets in one place, it provides two separate and distinct inventory boxes (one for mission items, the other for acquired goodies) — you must scroll through items individually to find the one you want.

Mind-numbing gameplay dominates this four-CD wreck. Each point-and-click moves the hero around, but about a 3-second lag separates your mouse click and the response. This happens every time the hero enters a new location, so exploring a good-size room could easily eat up half an hour. In-game puzzles, which invariably require Raven to use an item in his inventory to manipulate an item in the environment, largely involve finding ingenious ways to unlock doors. This strategy can only hold your interest for so long, however, and Traitors Gate uses up all the portal-opening methods in the first disc. An in-game cursor allows a player to adjust the camera view (to look upward or downward and pan left or right) — this otherwise cool feature goes awry when it allows the camera to swing in wild circles.

Though saving the Crown Jewels may be an excellent cause, we propose a still more noble effort — preventing people from spending their precious cash on this game.

Orlando, Greg. (October 2000). Traitors Gate. MacAddict. (pg. 59).

Download Traitors Gate for Mac

Architecture

IBM PowerPC

System Requirements

From Mac OS 7.5

Compatibility notes

Minimum Requirements

• PowerPC @ 100 MHz
• 32 MB RAM (Virtual Memory turned on)
• 100 MB hard disk available
• 8X CD-ROM drive
• System 7.5

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver