Sebit, Inc., 1998
Piri, the Explorer Ship is a unique and little known interactive adventure game created by a Turkish gaming company. The game is set aboard Piri, a 16th century carrack ready to embark on a quest to unravel the hidden secrets of Piri Reis’ map that he made in 1531 by copying most of it’s parts from the Columbus’ maps. Piri Reis was a great Turkish cartographer and a corsair in the Ottoman’s empire and he lived most of his life exploring different places and lands.
Back in the year 1926, the western part of Piri Reis’ map of 1513 was accidentally discovered in Topkapi Palace when it was undergoing major renovation for getting converted into a museum. Since, no work of Columbus was in existence then, this map was taken as the only source to represents Piri Reis’ and Columbus’ shared cartographic skills.
As you start the game in the Captain’s role aboard the ship, the old Captain’s voice welcomes and invites you to go ahead and unravel the hidden secrets of the map. In doing so, you need to sail from Istanbul to Dakar, Seville, Cordoba and Rio de Janeiro docking your ship in different places, exploring different lands and cultures and gathering information using ship’s highly sophisticated mechanisms, which in return will help you in finding the secrets hidden in the map.
Visually, the game presents superb quality pre-rendered 3D graphics with a mouse driven interface commonly found in most Myst type of games. Sound and music are equally nice and very entertaining. The game box contains a copy of the Piri Reis’ map of 1513 to consult and find clues and hints for most of the puzzles and problems, which in return are quite hard for most novice adventure gamers. Finally, I would highly recommend this game to all hardcore adventure gamers, who love challenging adventure games with a unique theme.
