The Collection Chamber: ECOQUEST: THE SEARCH FOR CETUS

Adventure, Danger and Discovery Beneath the Sea.

Take Your Family on a Journey of Discovery. Uncover the beauty and mystery of the sea. EcoQuest will take you on a thrilling adventure that underscores the delicate and miraculous balance of nature. Find out what you can do to help save the Earth!

Their Fate is in Your Hands. Join young Adam and Delphineus the dolphin on a perilous undersea quest. Together, you must brave the terrors of toxic waste, oil spills, deadly driftnets, and other environmental hazards as you seek the great whale, King Cetus.

Take an Active Role. See and do things that no human has ever experienced before. Share the excitement as your family grows to understand how each individual makes a difference to the survival of the planet. Everyone will want to get involved!

Incredible Characters, Colors and Sounds. Spectacular, luminous underwater scenery, lively animation, and fascinating sealife characters take you to a whole new world. Your whole family will enjoy this delightful, exciting and sometimes even scary adventure.

FEATURES
Includes a FREE book with 55 fun ways to help save our planet.
Beautiful, hand-painted backgrounds and colorful underwater scenery.
Exciting animated undersea creatures.
A dynamic stereo soundtrack.
Fun, challenging and educational ecological puzzles.
Extensive research and attention to detail create a realistic play environment.
For ages 10 and up.

~ from the back of the box

In the pantheon of Sierra classics, the EcoQuest series has been somewhat forgotten compared to King's Quest, Space Quest or Police Quest. It was originally released in 1991 as an educational title to "get young minds moving" with the talkie CD-ROM version going all-out in Sierra's Discovery Series of edutainment titles. And everyone knows that feeling when you get one of those for Christmas.

If you haven't played it, there's very little education in here beyond the constant push for litter picking and recycling. You play as an ever-so-90s twelve-year-old surfer dude named Adam who befriends a talking dolphin named Delphinius. Cue child abduction and a serious amount of child endangerment as he's taken to the underwater fish city of Eluria struggling to cope after the disappearance of its leader, Cetus. No one knows where he went, or saw him go which is pretty alarming considering he's a sperm whale.

You can forgive them of their complacency, though. All of the sea creatures you meet are perfectly realised with distinct personalities and a top notch voice cast. The raspiness of the recording may show its age, but it really does add to the experience. You'll miss it once the sequel comes around.

Mechanically, it plays like every other Quest game from this period using the SCI engine to its fullest. A bar at the top shows your progress in numerical form and hovering your mouse over it will give you access to your inventory and options menu. You can right-click through your basic actions such as move, talk or use but I always found this to be more cumbersome than the verb panel used by LucasArts.

Adam does shuffle a little too slow for my liking, and the need to pick up trash on almost every screen gets a bit tedious too, yet there is a charm that exudes for each and every pixel. If you've had your fill of Daventry, got tired of planet Xenon or started to think Lytton has too much crime for its own good, try some honest-to-goodness litter-picking in Eluria instead. Any adventure gamer would get a real kick out of it.

To download the game, follow the link below. This custom installer exclusive to The Collection Chamber uses ScummVM to allow the game to run on modern PCs. Manual, Hint Book and Book Supplement included. Tested on Windows 10.

File Size: 185 Mb. Install Size: 399 Mb. Need help? Consult the Collection Chamber FAQ

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