Necronomicon had potential, but they blew it

This game has a beautiful dark aura to it. The ambient sound is haunting, and this world immediately draws you in. When the game starts, all you know is that you are a young man living in Providence, Rhode Island in the 1920s, and your childhood friend has cracked up and he gave you this weird object and asked you not to tell anyone about it.

You leave your beautifully rendered colonial home and go outside. The sky is dark and foreboding, and you can almost feel the chilly wind on your neck. So you go into the eerie town of Pawtuxet, looking for clues as to where he could be. You walk up and down the dreary streets of this little town, looking for someone who can tell you where he is.

During your wandering you find out about this guy named Gregor Herschell, and all you know about him is that he was evil, mysterious, and has something to do with your friend's condition. At this point to puzzles are difficult, yet solvable by reasoning, and gratifying by bringing you closer to what the hell is going on.

You find out, as you suspected, that your friend's condition is more than mental illness, that he had been trying to raise the dead and something had gone horribly wrong. This is so cool, you think.

So your research leads you to a dark, seemingly abandoned farmhouse, in the middle of nowhere, Rhode Island. Everything about this house tells you that something is up, something very unkosher. A chill goes up your spine.

You find your way inside where it is dark as you expected. The house leads to an underground passage. You travel through and naturally are met with things that need keys. One key you have to get from the hand of a semi-decomposed corpse (creepy). You find this subterranean lab that you have to wander around until you figure out how to get the stupid lights on.

You realize that it's now your turn to try to raise the dead, so you save your game. You look through the literature you collected throughout the game, and although now you actually understand what it's talking about, it still has little relevance to what you have to do. I spent hours trying to make connections, but I couldn't find any, so I just said the hell with it, I'll use the walkthrough.

So you needed the walkthrough and you raised a corpse from fire. He tells you stuff that you think is relevant to the story or what you have to do later on, but it's not. So in the next cutscene your out of the lab (finally) and back in your house. Next stop is the Providence library.

The Library is absolutely beautiful. You talk to a scholar there who tells you he needs your help finding the books to translate something. This part managed to hold my interest; I enjoyed looking through the shelves. When you're done finding the books, this map takes you to an ancient stone monument in Rhode Island that no one seems to have disturbed for thousands of years.

Turns out that mysterious object you've been toting around in your inventory this whole time just gives you the arbitrary symbols to open a doorway. So now the door is open and you think, "cool, now I'll finally see something that's really cool." But, unfortunately, everything goes downhill from here.

Your next destination is maze-o-rama. The mazes get boring very quickly. They're annoying and arbitrary, and I needed the walkthrough when I got to the verge of wanting to break something.

So you get through a maze, and you think, "yeah, I'm through." Your great reward for getting through the maze is another maze, even more pointless and boring than the one before it. You don't know how much longer you can take these mazes, and you realize you're at the end when it won't let you save.

The last puzzle of the game is a door with eight different locks on it that you have to open in the right order. In addition to the puzzle resetting every time you push a wrong button, you are also timed. Naturally, since you have no idea what you are doing, time runs out and the world is taken over by a dark force.

After the apocalypse occurs at least three times after not unlocking the door in time, you resort to the walkthrough. I don't see how you can finish this game without the walkthrough. So you finally get that stupid door open in time, and you are rewarded with a gravely disappointing cutscene in which the world is yet again safe for democracy.