As intended, of course: The Immortals of Terra takes its cues from one of the oldest sci-fi pulp serials in history, about the swashbuckling star of some 2,400 novella-sized "Perry Rhodan" episodes spawned by German authors Walter Ernsting and Karl Herbert Scheer back in 1961. Rhodan's an interminably 39-year-old human, survivor of the first manned moon landing in 1971, where he encounters stranded albino E.Ts, averts a nuclear war and unifies humanity. Somewhere along the line he also acquires immortality and proceeds to change the course of intergalactic ... well, pretty much everything (think Buck Rogers without the Rip Van Winkle stuff). Now thousands of years old, with hundreds of cosmically improbable adventures under his belt, Rhodan governs as regent of the Terran Empire along with fellow immortal and pal Reginald "Bully" Bull. As The Immortals of Terra opens on the year 4934 A.D., Rhodan's Solar Residence is under attack, his ex-lover Mondra Diamond has been kidnapped, and his only clues about her abductors lie in a diary lined with notes about a mythical alien race with possible links to ancient human civilization.

Assuming control of Rhodan using a simple point-and-click interface, players explore areas ranging from the Terran Solar Residence to distant alien planets and secluded asteroids harboring ancient enigmas. Employing classic adventure mechanics, players engage dozens of characters in conversation, decipher logic puzzles, play mini-games and interact with hotspots to collect objects and combine them with others held in inventory. The story takes place across five unique levels composed of some 300 backgrounds.

Gonzo old-school adventure

Pulp sci-fi fans have possibly heard of Perry Rhodan or stumbled across one of his innumerable magazines, comics, collectibles, audio plays, encyclopedias, a soundtrack by Tangerine Dream or his one movie adaptation, Mission Stardust (described by Wikipedia as "so appallingly bad that fans of the series playfully deny its very existence"). Even if you haven't, The Immortals of Terra feels pretty familiar, like popping in an old episode of Star Trek by way of Flash Gordon or Adam Strange. You've seen this sort of sci-fi conspiracy yarn a thousand times before, after all, which makes it that much easier to slip comfortably into its old-school adventure regalia.

And by old school, I mean pure vintage, as in "find the special goggles to read the hidden numbers to manipulate a power grid to gain access to someone's office." There's only one way to move forward here, no way to actually lose and only a minimal attempt leveled to make the puzzles intuitive or even halfway logical, boiling progress down to testing every object with every other object in your inventory until something randomly coheres. Immortals is also the sort of adventure game where the protagonist mumbles to himself hyper-explicitly every time you click on something, where terms like "Gatusian lasers," "Dimesexta drives" and "Supran hypercrystals" are bandied about like routine vernacular, and where you occasionally have to do dopey stuff like leave an area and then march right back in to trigger a sequence or cause a crucial quest item to appear. If that sounds old-fashioned, it is.

The real appeal of Immortals, though, lies in the way it looks, a melange of gloriously epic vistas often viewed at uneasy Dutch angles (like the camera shots in the 1960s Batman TV series) and rendered with the sort of exquisite high fidelity today's most advanced 3-D games still only dream of. If you enjoy poking around digital art with colors that pop as if someone slipped the original artist's canvas behind the glass of your display screen, you'll find the panoramas in Immortals glorious just to behold.

The biggest uh-oh happens in the final chapter, where a game that front-loads its narrative with detailed cutscenes and tons of "found" exposition wraps in less than 30 paltry seconds, leaving its most interesting questions only haphazardly answered. It's sloppy and disappointing, because the whole conspiracy plot-shtick is halfway intriguing. Maybe a series as gonzo as Perry Rhodan deserved something grander, but Rhodan buffs will probably take what they can get, and even if the game clocks in at less than half of its touted "25 hours of innovative adventure gameplay," it's still a decent enough deal for a budget 20 bucks.