Amerzone The Explorer’s Legacy review - a beautiful but hollow homage

Firstly, a big thanks to Amerzone The Explorer’s Legacy for making journalists seem cool as hell. Going from first-day-at-the-office nerves to crash-landing into a snake-infested swamp in the middle of a murderous dictatorship is something I’ve (thankfully) never had to experience, but it’s certainly a reputational aura boost for us all.

This semi-surreal equatorial adventure puts its newbie-journo protagonist in the cockpit of a homemade seaplane and catapults him across the world in search of an elusive tribe. His unlikely journey starts when he’s sent to interview Professor Valembois, an aging zoologist who was rejected from the scientific community for his outlandish theories on the mythical Amerzonian White Bird. During the interview – which is cut short by Valembois’ untimely death – the journalist learns that the professor is in possession of a White Bird egg, which has, incredibly, remained unspoiled after all these years.

Hatching the egg, however, is complicated, involving a ritual performed by the Ovo-Vohalos tribe in the country of Amerzone (a fictional entity nestled on the banks of the Amazon river), but Valembois’ unchecked greed during an expedition in the 1930s led him to betray the tribe and steal the egg before the cosmic checks and balances could be fulfilled. Over the years, the tribe has been subject to a campaign of brutal ethnic cleansing by the dictatorial President Alvarez, and the existence of the White Bird has been almost fully erased. Valembois’ dying wish is that you, the journalist – who, let’s not forget, he just met – take the egg to Amerzone and complete the ritual to save the White Bird and prove its existence once and for all.

And, of course, you – whose main goal in life so far had been to get your press accreditation formally accepted – are willing to fly out of the country using a rickety old hand-made plane on a whim, without alerting anyone, gathering supplies, or even packing a camera. Just go with it. It was the ’90s. The story is convoluted and makes zero sense, but if you can suspend your disbelief you’ll probably come to enjoy what is ultimately a fun, if gentle, ride.

Piloting a curious vehicle that can switch between configurations to become a boat, a plane, and just about anything in between, our hero’s quest is dense with contraptions, mechanical marvels, and technical diagrams. Information is communicated mainly through beautiful pictorial representations or dense tomes of floral writing, but you’ll occasionally be rewarded with a video sequence, tying things together with surprising artistic flair. This is where the game really shines, showing you tightly packed scenes of adventure and intrigue in a hazy, dreamy jumble of images.

The original Amerzone was released in 1999, and was a window into the legendary Benoît Sokal’s unique, fantastical world, which in time became the foundation for his Syberia series. What was once a fairly static adventure with occasional animated sequences limited by the tech of the time (think the original Myst), has become a densely packed 3D world inhabited by whimsical flora and fauna that almost looks real. The visuals and sound design are undeniably impressive, making the remake feel infinitely more immersive than the original would in 2025. Although it still uses ‘click to go forward’-type controls, you’re fairly unrestrained in your exploration, and encouraged to use pushing, pulling, and twisting mouse movements to see things from a fresh perspective.

There were moments in my journey where I could have sworn I felt the heat from the rainforest, or the cool from the waterfall. The first-person perspective is sometimes excessively realistic – bumping and ducking and nodding as you weave your way through this strange land, and even raising a hand to shield your eyes from the sun when you ‘zoom’ your view into an area – but it makes for one of the most entrancing sensory experiences you could ask for in a game.

The puzzles, however, are not what you might expect, especially if you’re coming to this as a point-and-click adventure game fan with no prior experience of the original. It toys with being a deductive game, occasionally prompting you to read documents you have with you, or touch objects in a specific way, but never quite seems to commit. Mostly, you’ll find everything you need for a specific task fairly easily, then work out how to combine these together to move onto the next step. It’s more of a jigsaw puzzle than anything else – all the pieces are there and you slot them together, rather than making any leaps of reasoning or the usual outside-the-box thinking you get in good point-and-click games.

The best way I can describe the feeling of playing this game is like an immersive ride at a high-budget theme park, maybe something that would one day be hosted via VR, with a seat that shimmies and spurts steam at you from hidden vents. Your journey never slows down, you’re never truly in peril, the puzzles are easily solved, and you spend a lot of your time experiencing the journey rather than being an active participant. It doesn’t feel like a proper investigation, leaning more into interactive fiction than anything else.

That being said, if you’ve played the original and still harbour a fondness for it, you’d be a fool not to pick up this game. It takes what was already a beautifully inventive make-believe world full of strange creatures and tragic characters, and brings it up-to-date with what is clearly a deep affection for the reference material. I just don’t think it has enough there to similarly captivate a new generation of adventure game fans.

In some lights, Amerzone is a truly enchanting, exotic adventure, and in others, a lackluster relic of a less-demanding audience. While there are new puzzles and the option to remove hints to make things a little harder, there’s still very little genuine challenge. But there’s lots of rich detail to look at and everything feels pleasantly tactile. As the full sum of its parts I’d say Amerzone The Explorer’s Legacy was just…solid.