Ancipital (1984)

Name:Ancipital
Number:211
Year:1984
Publisher:Llamasoft
Developer:Llamasoft
Genre:Top-Down Shooter
Difficulty:5/5
Time:1 hour 50 minutes
Won:No (85W/68L)

I can't believe I haven't actually covered a Llamasoft game before, but I guess there just hasn't been much for me to talk about. Back when I did the one Intellivision Star Wars game I did, I'm sure I mentioned Attack of the Mutant Camels as a counterpoint for the utterly awful design of that game. Llamasoft is Jeff Minter, unsung hero of the early years of gaming, he made the best home computer knock-offs of arcade games, something we don't appreciate all that much today.

Ancipital is a weird game. If there's a story to it, it doesn't matter. You're a goat man controlled by the joystick. You move along a wall as you wish, and if you press the "up" direction on the joystick, you change the orientation of gravity. Hold down the fire button and then "left" or "right" and you switch to those walls. This changes depending on where you are on the screen. In theory, you can be on any side of the screen you wish. In practice, if you land "sideways" the wrong way you die. The fire button shoots "up" as well, but if you move left or right it goes at an angle. Each screen is on a time limit, if it runs out, you die, but so long as you have lives you continue on.

From this simple but weird concept, you'd imagine the game would be quite mundane and boring. It isn't, at least at first. It's another one of those games where the gimmick is there's always a gimmick on one screen. To start off with, you get a room filled with fruit. There are green apples you're probably not supposed to touch and eaten apples you definitely shouldn't touch. The objective seems to be to take a jumping diamond, then shoot all the green apples into eaten ones. Finishing an objective, which you at least know, causes one of the walls to turn into a caution tape wall, crash into it and change rooms. Hope you change rooms, anyway.

No, this isn't some strange anti-piracy measure...I think, it's another screen. Now you shoot cassettes out at floppy disks shot out by floating skulls. I think you're supposed to grab the floppies after shooting them once, but I can't be too sure. This isn't a game you understand, it's a game where you're along for the ride and hope you got it right.

Every single room changes, including down to how many shots you can get off at once. Though this seems tied into how many objects are on-screen. Sometimes you avoid certain enemies and shoot others, sometimes it's pure luck where you have to shoot. Then I get stuck in a room involving bombs. As in I manage to fulfill the conditions to move rooms, but not to open another room. How unfortunate that this is a thing. As a result it's easy to accidentally screw yourself over by allowing yourself to move to another room before you activate any exit out of the room.

I reach another room after restarting. Good. Floating heads shoot out jeans you have to burn with giant lighters. This one's difficult to deal with, because there are a ton of enemy objects on-screen. It's at this point that the game loses a bit of its magic, because the tricks become somewhat obvious. You shoot the enemy shots, which causes one of the two objects to shift into something you need, or you wait for the enemy shot to turn into something you need. Repeat a couple of different ways to unlock all the doors you need.

Okay, I'm not winning this even in the sense that it's possible to win this. Time to cheat. This isn't necessarily the boon you think it is. The true difficulty lies in making it through all the stages. Since being able to leave a stage is more common than opening up a new pathway, and the second you leave a stage you can't open any more pathways there.

But as I go through further areas, I can't help but feel like I understand what I'm doing any better. Nor does looking at a video reveal anything more to me. Every time I advance or see someone else advancing, I don't understand it more, it just seems like it was something that happened. There's certainly something there, but it's far too esoteric and strange for even me to comprehend.

One particular stage sticks out at this point. Inca 1. You shoot llamas into nothing. What you're supposed to do, as far as I can tell, is shoot a couple out, wait for this to turn into a weird ball. Then wait for it to turn into a purple ball and then shoot it, which should activate a passageway on the other side. At least that worked for the one passageway I opened, I'll never know if that's true of the others.

I can't imagine how a walkthrough of this would work, because to get anywhere you'd need to make yourself a walkthrough. You'd get stuff like "Shoot left wall" with "Shoot green enemy (Maybe?)" and you'd never know after multiple attempts if that's right or just a bizarre coincidence. And by the point you have to do it this way it's just not that fun to me.

Weapons:
Technically impressive, considering on some stages you have instead of a regular weird weapon, you get an exploding weird weapon. But this is just part of the every stage is a puzzle bit. 1/10

Enemies:
What amounts to infinitely respawning enemies which shoot other enemies infinitely...I think. 2/10

Non-Enemies:
None?

Levels:
Basically 100 variations of shooting at infinitely respawning enemies. Interesting, but I found it long in the tooth. 4/10

Player Agency:
Mostly fine for what it's trying to do, shooting up from the ground is something I dislike on principle to begin with. I do dislike how touching the "walls", that is "left" or "right" from where you're standing on kills you, when you can leave a stage this makes getting on a wall that can be left annoying, especially since you almost always can leave the room before the fourth or third exit is unlocked. 4/10

Interactivity:
It kind of does and kind of doesn't have any. 1/10

Atmosphere:
It's weird, bordering on non-sensical. Weird should invoke a place that doesn't seem right, not someone throwing things at a wall until they stick. 2/10

Graphics:
A selection of simple objects and walls. 1/10

Story:
None.

Sound/Music:
Simple sound effects and a basic background drumming track. 1/10

And that's 16.

This was never really going to rate highly, considering this is a weird piece of psychedelia masquerading as a game. To a certain degree this is playing the card of "lol, random", but enough of this seems competent that this is merely a consequence of having to fill 100 rooms. Whether anyone is willing to see those 100 rooms is another question entirely.