Malachi is a real globe-trotter, flitting to Venice, Cairo, Zurich, Washington D.C. It also never stops being painfully obvious that Moebius is a point-and-click adventure. The analyses generally aren’t terribly difficult so it’s not as though you’re likely to spend much time with them anyway, but the realization that you literally cannot fail at the game’s most central mechanic really sucks the urgency out of it. There’s no penalty for blowing it, no lost conversation options or need to find another, more difficult way to get the job done you just keep trying until you get it right. You can get it wrong, but doing so only results in being told you chose incorrectly and must try again. The idea is to determine if a person has any connection to famous figures from the past, and the process of narrowing down a large pool of candidates to a single individual is a pretty cool bit of puzzling – until you realize that you can’t get it wrong. As part of his investigation, Malachi must analyze many of the people he meets, collecting “data points” about their lives and then comparing them to real-life people throughout history. It’s a unique talent that earns the attention of FITA, a secretive government agency that recruits him to investigate a young woman who’s been murdered in Venice: Not the murder itself, but the victim, a strange distinction that’s central to the story and so of course isn’t clarified until much later. He serves a very exclusive and wealthy clientele, traveling around the world to tell them whether they’re investing in genuine and valuable antiquities or being fleeced by shady con-men. Moebius: Empire Rising is played, mostly, as Malachi Rector, an antiques dealer and appraiser who fits nicely into the character archetype that’s grown popular in television shows from House to Elementary: socially maladroit but so sparklingly brilliant that people put up with his brash rudeness. There’s a potentially good story in there somewhere, but it’s laid low by awkward plot twists, paper-thin characters and a slavish devotion to old-fashioned adventure game mechanics. Jane Jensen’s Moebius: Empire Rising is billed as a metaphysical thriller, but it’s really not very thrilling at all.
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