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Atlantis seems like a natural setting for an engaging puzzle game and, truth be told, there are occasional flashes of real panache in the visuals in this title from DreamCatcher Interactive. There is often quite a bit that's interesting in Beyond Atlantis, particularly in the environment that you're painstakingly navigating through in your efforts to merely reach the undersea kingdom. But the road (puddle?) you're on is fraught with more monotonous busy- (and worse, guess-) work than is conceivable by any civilization that doesn't belong on the ocean floor.

Puzzle games are some of the most difficult to design of any genre, which is why so few stick out. The line between challenging tasks and those that simply irritate is a delicate one at best. Myst is the only real supernova of the genre, and not for its puzzles per se (anyone else remember a safe combination embossed on a steel wall you had to rotate an entire observatory to find?). Like any other breed of game, adventures thrive or die on their ability to transport you to another place. Atmosphere's the thing, and they either have it or they don't. Myst is more than just a gorgeous (in its day) dreamscape replete with psychos cackling at you from book pages and unsettling ambience; the tasks and topography tap into childhood fantasies that gamers and even non-gamers hadn't considered in years. When you get a rocket ship that's powered by a piano up and running, your elation is real and justified.

Just like DreamCatcher's The Crystal Key and Atlantis (the predecessor to Beyond Atlantis), this latest effort offers none of this giddy elan of Cyan's masterpieces-not even close. The tasks set before you are menial and surprisingly labyrinthine. You travel from Ireland to China to the Yucatan, collecting stamps, reorganizing dishes, computing Mayan math, and repeating endless sections of birdsong. Then, after you've finally, finally, reached the subterranean gates of the fabled city, you have to go back all over again and scavenger hunt for more stuff, including an Actual Wooden Stick (I'll save you three hours: it's in China).

Meant to keep you hooked along the way are the over 60 characters promised on the box, all of whom dole out gob after gob of sterile exposition with all the emotional resonance of a Godzilla movie (actually, make that Mothra). The spottily lip-synched words take you right out of it, which is especially bad since there's so much that's required listening. And it's tinny to boot-the actors sound as if they're speaking from inside a giant MRI tube. Even the Atlantean mythos is spewed as semi-illiterate dogma about the Dark and the Light. How could such an unimaginative culture tame black holes?

Finally, why is moving around always such a pain in puzzle games? Here you have a 360-degree view while stationary, but navigation is pathed in one or two directions at most. The artwork sluggishly reloads after a second or two each time you move-every single time-including when you're trying to dodge spiders in a giant web. The simple act of locomotion is so draining that you forget about the beautiful, unreachable vistas shimmering all around you-and quickly. Every mini-quest is so prolonged that you look forward to swapping out the next CD just for one little rush of accomplishment. (And since the swapping is so frequent, this might not even be a Bad Thing.) Even the save game system is screwy, since the images corresponding to each game all look identical.

To be fair, there's a certain type of gamer for whom the game's voluminous cavalcade of tile puzzles and minutiae is probably the stuff of unbridled joy. Taking a telephone apart can be fun, too…when you're five (and everything's a toy). But this game doesn't make you feel five again, or evoke a five-year-old's sense of wonder about mechanisms, or about Life. The box invites you to "step into the land of dreams and legends" and immediately sets you to work scrubbing floors, threading needles, picking up somebody else's cosmic droppings. It sucks you right to the bottom.

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