From RealWorld
Eve is the second Peter Gabriel CD-ROM, the first is Xplora. Paradise has been lost and it is up to you to find the elements and bring Paradise back. This requires careful exploration of each environment, and a lot of playing around to find out the point of each piece of the world.
There are three separate worlds for you to explore. Each world features one Gabriel song, and the artwork from one artist. As you explore, you will find experts, interactive artwork, and pieces to use in the IMX musical toys. The musical toys are wonderful! Each world has a number of backgrounds and 'fly-bys', that will appear in your toys. You can build a song by selecting backgrounds and flybys, then play the recorded song in another interactive screen. Or you can just load elements and go to the interactive screen. Click when the cursor changes and you'll either change backgrounds or get a 'fly-by'. This is lots of fun, and you can make some pretty nice music with these toys.
Pay close attention to everything. Sounds, sights and your cursor will give you clues about what you should do. In the first screen of the mud world, a popping bubble attracts your attention. Moving the cursor around the bubble and you'll start making footprints. There is one building in the distance, you leave a trail of footprints to that building.
This world features the song Come Talk to Me, and the artwork of Yayoi Kusama.
This world features the song Shaking the tree, and the artwork of Helen Chadwick.
This world features the song In Your Eyes, and the artwork of Cathy de Monchaux.
Each artist created a specific piece for this CD, and is interviewed about their art and philosophy. You won't be able to see the interviews until you have found certain items in the world, and had a good play with the interactive gallery. I found some of the pieces in the interactive gallery to be a lot of fun. Others seemed fairly pointless (well, technically, they are all pointless; these were just less entertaining.)
Each world of Eve has a number of screens associated with the world. As you find items, more items will become available. Such as, you won't find the interactive art gallery until after you've found a number of the interactive art pieces. You will be able to play with the interactive music toys fairly quickly, but that's because the game gives you a couple of backgrounds and a couple of flyby's when you enter the world. I found everything for the mud world, but in both other worlds I missed some of the flybys, hidden in other screens.
The CD even has instructions in case of real frustration. On the PC, use the right mouse button to bring up a small menu. One of the items on the menu is help. The number that you will get refers to a specific hint in a file on the CD. Mainly useful if you simply have no clue what is meant to happen on a screen. Some of the instructions can get quite specific, others are just general hints.
It is very very frustrating that each screen where you need to find things has a limit of 2 or 3 wrong answers before you must change screens. When you need to test every insect in a garden and you have to leave the garden every couple of minutes, this gets frustrating.
As a surreal experience with some neat ideas, I can recommend this. Regular use of the hints can keep it from being too frustrating. But it doesn't seem like a package that I'll play with again and again for the most part, even the idea that there are more pieces to the toys is insufficient to interest me in too much more play. However, this is true of many other games, once is frequently enough or will last you for years anyway.
I think I'd have been much happier with the experience without the arbitrary "You must leave this bit now". That was simply no fun.
Quite frankly, this CD reminds me of the world's worst adventure game. Some of the tasks you have to perform seem pointless, you have a limited number of times to try things, and you can easily miss small items on the screen because there are many things there. There are even the classic moments when you can't progress till you catch this small moving object with your cursor. If you prefer games that make some sense, this is not for you. I did really enjoy Xplora though that is hard to find any more.