Qin: Tomb of the Middle Kingdom

7Set in the burial tomb of Qin Shi Huangdi, the first Emperor of China, Qin places the player in the role of an amateur archaeologist whose job it is to solve puzzles of assorted difficulty and survive pitfalls in order to unravel the mysteries of this historical underworld. Qin is divided into five separate realms: the Plaza, the Palace, the Crypt, the Garden and the Mountain. Solving puzzles in each realm grants access to the next and eventually one reaches an endgame, after plodding through an endless array of mystical puzzles.

Qin is half adventure game, half learning software. Ancient Chinese mythology, alchemy, medicine, art, religion, literature, architecture…any historical aspect imaginable is present in the Qin encyclopedia. The problem is that I prefer not to have to examine yards and yards of textual rhetoric during my gaming. Not all puzzles require searching the encyclopedia for entries that refer to puzzle-related material, but many do — and it gets annoying, feeling more like work and less like gaming.

Anyone interested in the culture and history of China will be impressed by this product. But most of us do not buy games to be impressed; we buy them to have fun. As a work of art Qin succeeds, but as a game it’s only a passable Myst clone.


System Requirements: Pentium 90 MHz, 16 MB RAM, Win95

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