Partway through the game, an "intelligence management" system is unveiled, which ranks how well Ardan understands the world around him. It's essentially a point system that echoes the classic Sierra adventures, but with a twist—you won't be allowed to advance in certain parts of the game until your lunar IQ is high enough. This means the more time you take to learn about the Selenites' environment and culture early on, the smarter you'll be later when you need to be. If your score is still relatively low when this system comes into play, you'll have to do some backtracking and boost it before you can progress. In this open-ended game, neither is the "right" way to play—they're just two different ways that ultimately change the focus of the player's experience. The point system doesn't guarantee tons of replayability—the same options are ultimately available every time you play, no matter what order you do things in—but some players will undoubtedly want to play again and see how different actions affect the score.

VOYAGE is hardly a comedy, but one of its strengths is its subtle, off-beat humor. This tone is evident from the very opening of the game, as a mischievous Ardan taps on the glass from inside the monitor and a Selenite rides across the menu screen on a bicycle, E.T. style. The humor isn't as in your face as in a Leisure Suit Larry or Monkey Island game, but it's prevalent, and it often emerged when I least expected it. Some of the game's funniest tidbits are not required actions, but it's worth it to putter around until you uncover them.

The voice acting is average, although there isn't all that much of it. All of the talking is done by Ardan, one Selenite, and the narrator. The rest of VOYAGE's dialogue is conducted in the Selenites' native language, a cacophony of melodies and tones that Ardan must learn to understand and speak as part of his journey. This works extremely well in context. Ardan starts with a Rosetta Stone of sorts that defines a few basic glyphs and proceeds from there. This makes sense from a logistical standpoint (Star Trek's universal translator always seemed a little too convenient to me). The game is subtitled, and early on, subtitles of the Selenite language display as a jumble of symbols. It's only after Ardan proves his competence in the Selenite tongue that these symbols are replaced with English translations. In addition to the music of the Selenites' language, the game features a diverse orchestral soundtrack that just sounds lunar, with a collection of hauntingly high-pitched melodies that shift depending on the location and the current mood of the gameplay.

If you like your adventure games full of cinematic cutscenes, you may be a little disappointed. There are three or four near the beginning of the game and one at the end. The rest of the time, action is depicted with still images described by an omniscient narrator. These graphics (or comics, as Kheops calls them) have a lithograph-like style that's reminiscent of the illustrations in many nineteenth century novels. This is probably a compromise Kheops had to make in order to stay in budget, and I'm glad they used the money they had to beef up gameplay rather than spending it on a bunch of movies. I'm a big fan of movies myself, but I thought the comics worked well. In fact, I didn't really notice the lack of cinematics until I hit the game's closing movie and realized it was the first I'd seen since landing on the moon.

VOYAGE took me about thirteen hours to play the first time, at a leisurely pace, and without ever feeling really stuck. With so many machines, recipes, and experiments to try out, I never found myself at a loss for what to do. If I couldn't figure out one puzzle, I just went to another area and worked on something else. VOYAGE gives you an incredible freedom to try different things, to uncover multiple ways past the same obstacle, and ultimately to control the pace and gaming experience by focusing on the types of puzzles you enjoy. Someone less interested in exploring the world and more intent on getting through to the end could skip much of what I spent my time on, and probably complete the game a lot faster. But taking my time and immersing myself in the lunar frontier was the best part of my gaming experience. In fact, even when I knew I had everything I needed to return to Earth, I kept puttering around and exploring alternatives. For an impatient player like me, that says a lot.

I'm a stickler for story, though, and I'm sorry to say that VOYAGE doesn't have much in that department. A strong narrative does emerge at the beginning of the game, as Ardan uncovers the mystery of his friends' fate. This backstory, which describes the events leading up to the beginning of the game, is accompanied by a special interface accessed from the inventory screen. As Ardan discovers clues on the shuttle, a 16-square grid fills in with pictures depicting the events he remembers and those that happened while he was unconscious. I enjoyed this method of storytelling and hope to see it employed on a larger scale in a future project. The backstory gives a firm grasp of the time, place, and situation in which Ardan finds himself, but once it's revealed in full, we're left with little more to hold onto than that our hero needs to find his way off this rock.

Of course, that's not all there is to it. The Selenites' history and culture, and the way things work in this lunar world, are part of the story too. These elements are just not compelling as the clearly-defined narrative at the beginning of the game. Kheops did a good job of setting up a mystery—what happened to the Selenite people—but the answer turns out to be fairly simple, and very much secondary to Ardan's task of getting off the moon. No real deep-rooted secrets or big revelations here.

I can't complain too much about VOYAGE's lack of narrative, because the game doesn't really need it. Its strengths lie in exploration and figuring out how things work, and in these areas Kheops has done very well. They've also infused the Selenites with a good deal of background, which may not completely replace a more compelling narrative, but still left me believing in their existence as a race and feeling immersed in the gameworld. So although I would have preferred a stronger narrative and hope to see Kheops push that angle farther if they make another game in this style, I'm not marking VOYAGE down for it.

As much as I hated to leave Kheops' fantastic lunar vision, the objective in VOYAGE is to get Ardan back home. But that's not the end of the adventure. Ardan's return trip takes an unexpected detour that establishes the game in a broader context and hints at the future. (Incidentally, this twist is exactly the type of narrative surprise I was hoping for during the game itself—guess I'll just have to be patient!) I won't tell you where he ends up, but I will tell you this: the last we see before the screen fades to black is, fittingly, the necropolis I described at the beginning of this review, the camera pulling back to reveal rows of Selenite tombs and the distant Earth centered in the night sky. This time it didn't make me think about death and games past, but of games yet to come. Because as long as studios like Kheops continue to turn out high-quality titles like VOYAGE, adventure gamers have nothing to worry about.