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A very impressive EGA image of the Psygnosis logo. |
Oddly, this is the first Psygnosis game I've played here that fits into the classic image of Psygnosis, previous titles I've played, including another FPS I couldn't get past the opening screen of. I've played several before off-blog, of course, but this is, in my mind at least, the first proper Psygnosis game.
There are Amiga, Atari ST, DOS and SNES versions. I'll be playing the DOS version because the Amiga version is a bit tricky to get working and the SNES version is a bit odd. Especially since this is a game that makes extensive use of the mouse. The DOS version is EGA only, but has Adlib music. I have played the opening bits of this before and found it to be a video game of general description.
The backstory is, once there was King Cirkassia, who was a great ruler and the kingdom of Middlemere was doing great. Alas, he couldn't find a suitable wife, so he had no heir. The evil wizard DomaKk [sic] hated the king and the land, so he snuck into the castle as a loyal member of the realm and cast spells promising the king a wife and children. The wizard gave him a wife and soon there were four sons. Because the wizard spawned the wife, the children were full of envy. When their father passed away, the four brothers engaged in a war, tearing the land apart. DomaKk left for another plane, his evil complete.
One day, a mysterious machine appeared in the center of Middlemere. Everyone feared the machine, even the four sons. Nothing happened, it just existed. The sons began to explore the machine, soon realizing they could take the parts of it, which allowed them to rule their subjects easier. They feared the machine, even a small part that the sons had. A truce was made, and the land was divided into four.
In our modern day, Wil Mason, history professor and Volvo owner is driving in the rain, crashes his car trying to avoid a branch. Leaving to find someone who knows how to fix a car, he finds a mysterious light and heads towards it. Finding himself in a strange tower with four doors, he enters. Protected from the rain, he sleeps, and finds himself in another world.The game gives you a message telling you you're in a tower with four stone doors and then throws you in it. The backstory does at least feel important even if it isn't likely to mean much. The game is controlled by a combination of mouse and keyboard/joystick. The keyboard controls are entirely selected by the player, movement in four directions and a fire button. In this case, the arrow keys duplicate the directional marks on that dial. In addition, we get nine actions. There's no looking, what you see is what you can use.There's a key here, which opens the northwest door. Note that the while the compass itself on the GUI is nice and large, the direction it points is not entirely obvious. Because it's showing a person from an upward view. The direction you're pointed in lights up, at least.This leads to Falcon Wood, a maze if ever there was one. A maze with a purpose, as the game's claim to fame on Amiga is the incredible parallax graphics, which is still incredible in EGA. It's some of the smoothest and incredible pixel art in motion. The inevitable but here is that you turn around in eight directions and move slowly around in a circle. Movement forward, while smooth, gives you an unnecessary amount of freedom.That's the key word, freedom. It's still technically tile-based, but every tile is eight-sided. In motion, you have to turn around a lot, and while it is accurate to how little you would turn to go from east to northeast, in a video game that's too short. It's disorienting, especially since while the parallax is nice, it's about all you're getting visually. Forward and back slowly glides along, and I'm just left wondering why it couldn't be tile-based.
The starting area around the town consists of a loop with two exits, one inside and out outside. There's some arrows and an apple. The arrows function as a weapon, use while you have it equipped and you shoot whatever's in front of you. Each quiver gives you more ammo, no bow required. Apple is food, which I think is somewhere between health and a hunger meter. I haven't seen the later, the former's on the lower left.A knight is the first enemy you meet. You can try talking to any character you meet, but some are less helpful than others, like this knight. I don't have enough arrows for him, unfortunately, so I die and restart. When I returned later, he was still too tough for me, probably a puzzle enemy.Killing an archer, who doesn't actually start shooting me until I get close, I make my way to this random guy. Or woman, I'm not sure, I started looking at online maps pretty quickly and it called the sprite a woman. Either way, she gives you a key when you talk to her. It's at this point that I discover that talking works in weird ways. Some characters have more than one piece of dialog, but to get it working, you need to save and reload to get it.Exploring the rest of the area is more or less just going around and clearing it out. Most enemies outside of the archers involves you attacking first, sometimes you can even talk to them. I feel like if this game had any sign of a decent story, this would be foreshadowing that you aren't the good guy. At the end I've gotten a page, a red potion, a silver bar, a flask (food), a roll, "Firebrand" (a stick), and a blue gem.There's a gap in the woods leading to another area, where this guy blocks it. He, like everyone else so far, gives a cryptic message, this one about the knight I couldn't kill yet. The knight is someone I'm going to have to come back to later, even though I have daggers now, I'm not sure how dangerous they are.Going into the gap leads to a side-scrolling area. Enemies hide either in the bushes or in the branches above. Bump into them or shoot them, and they die. You lose a little health from bumping into them, but it's more economical to do so that to shoot them. There are a lot of guys. Also, if you run past some, they just randomly die. This is very weird.
There is a bit of a pattern to it all, since you can jump at the right moment to dodge. There is an obvious pattern to it, you're not just frantically doing it against razor sharp margins. It's probable that this is going to change at some point, but for now these sections seem to be easy.
At the other end of the straightforward side-scrolling section are the Eldon Mines. I'll stop here for now despite not having gone through much. It's a very point and click approach to FPS, if I could say that. There's just not much of anything going on here. Be it as an adventure game, a FPS/RPG or as a side-scroller. To say there's style over substance so far would be to imply there's substance.
This Session: 50 minutes