review

Review: The Protagonish

~ mpklamerus ~ Leave a comment

The Protagonish is a recently released adventure game by College Fun Games where the twist is that you control everyone in the story but the protagonist. You follow him around on his quest but whenever he interacts with another character, you control their actions and influence his journey.

a woman saying "holy radish, what now?" as a man bursts through the front door of her tavern

Each playthrough of the game features the protagonist interacting with NPCs in four scenes, with each scene lasting about a minute or two. The playthroughs are about five minutes long and you’ll want to replay the game a few times to see how your actions can affect the story and see all the endings. The animation and voice acting in each scene were top notch and made the scenes pleasant to watch, even on repeat playthroughs.

a miner sitting outside of a mine and he's saying "what the fog?"

If I did have any criticisms of the game, I wish it were longer. I think the concept works very well and it would have been interesting to see what a game like this would be like if a playthrough was at least twice as long. It took about 20 minutes for me to get through everything in the game and it felt like a satisfying experience, but I think it could have also been longer without wearing out its welcome. I don’t feel like that is a bad deal for a game that’s $4, but that’s very subjective and I personally don’t feel very comfortable about telling you how much entertainment per dollar you should be ok with since we all value this stuff differently.

That all said, I had a good time playing The Protagonish and would recommend it to others if you want to see a game experiment with the tropes of the adventure genre. I would love to see a sequel that expands on the ideas in this game.

The Protagonish is available for $3.99 on Itch.io and Steam. The review is based on a key sent from the developer.

Review: Deja Vu: A Nightmares Comes True!! (1985)

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first person view of a detective's door that says "Ace Harding Private Eye" and the silhouette of someone behind the window in the door

This month’s game in the Adventure Game Club discord is Deja Vu: A Nightmare Comes True so I have finally played through that for the first time after it sitting in my backlog for forever. It’s the first MacVenture by ICOM and man, weird game. I’ll mention the stuff I was frustrated with but it’s difficult to get too mad at the game when it’s one of the first point-and-click adventures ever, it’s short, and the Macintosh art really holds up!

The premise of the game is that you wake up in a toilet stall and must find out who you are, what happened to you, and why. In addition to that, you have also been injected with something and have a limited amount of time to find a cure. That’s really all there is to it! You walk around a city and various buildings, occasionally taking a taxi to different regions to do some more exploration, but luckily it’s a pretty small world, since you will need to restart a few times from softlocks and optimizing your path because of the time limit. The time limit is also the source of most of my frustration with the game. It’s not that aggressive of a time limit but every single action takes time off, making it feel like you’re being punished for basic actions in any adventure game like examining objects. That’s right, even looking at an object means time is removed and I have to reload to get that time back. I’m generally a hater of time limits in adventure games anyway because to me, part of the appeal is an adventure game is that I usually have a world to explore and now the game wants me to focus instead on creating an optimal path instead of focusing on the world building. Oh well.

Eventually you do find a cure and can explore more freely. Even without the time limit though, the game still feels a bit tedious because of the verb system. I honestly don’t mind it that much, but there’s parts where it feels like a slog, such as having to pay the cab driver in quarters. But this is where you can tell it’s an early graphic adventure and they’re trying to figure out how to adapt that.

Another part of the game I really disliked is the occasional racist joke and frequent fatphobic jokes. The game cannot get enough of making fat jokes and it really sucks!

What did I actually like about the game? Well, the art is great. Black and white art on the Macintosh is incredibly charming to me and what you see here is great. The versions on the Apple IIGS and NES with color art aren’t bad either. I guess it just comes down to what you like more. The puzzles aren’t usually that difficult either, it’s just a time limit you fight with and busy work with the verbs. It’s also short! That sounds like I’m making fun of the game but I do like short games.

Eventually I want to play the rest of the Macventures. I’ve poked at Uninvited and Shadowgate before and knew of the time limit in the latter, but I guess every Macventure has a time limit? Come on man, just let me vibe and look at the great art.

So who would I recommend this to? I guess adventure game history nerds? It’s not actually painful, especially if you are ok with peeking at a walkthrough, the art is great, and parts of the writing are charming too.

Deja Vu: A Nightmares Comes True is available on Steam and includes the Macintosh and Apple IIGS versions.

Review: The Making of Karateka

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I was a massive fan of the Atari 50 collection by Digital Eclipse so I was thrilled when they announced The Making of Karateka. I think people have been asking for decades for a Criterion Collection style rerelease of old games, where interviews and documents are packaged with the game. It follows the same format of the Atari 50 collection, where you are presented with multiple timelines, each documenting a different era, and scroll through the timelines to see various documents, interviews with people involved, and games to play. I wasn’t sure how much you could do for just one game but it’s the perfect rerelease to me, no complaints. It’s stunning how much was preserved by Jordan. I knew he had journals during the making of his games because I had read the one he released for Prince of Persia, but the collection also features playable prototypes for games that were never released and letters sent back and forth between him and Broderbund. The remakes created by Digital Eclipse for the games in the collection are a lot of fun too.

screenshot of Karateka of the guy kicking another guy

I’m hoping the collection is a big hit and we’ll see more of these. I don’t know how many are possible because it’s hard to imagine anyone preserving everything as well as Jordan Mechner has, but I’m sure Digital Eclipse has a few in the works if they announced this is the beginning of a Gold Master Series that “presents iconic games in an innovative “interactive documentary” format, putting the shared history of games and their creators into one comprehensive package.” I think my dream version of one of these that I think would actually be possible, meaning a game not owned by a giant company like Lucasarts or Sierra, would be something like Llamasoft. Seeing prototypes and interviews for anything they put out would be fantastic.

The Making of Karateka is available on PS4, PS5, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, Steam, GOG, and the Epic Store. The links to all of these are available here.

Review: Pandora’s Box

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Lately I’ve been playing Pandora’s Box, a 1999 puzzle game published by Microsoft that was designed by Alexey Pajitnov, the designer of Tetris. It’s really unfortunate that it seems to have been completely forgotten because it’s a really charming collection of puzzles.

screenshot of the puzzle select screen showing New York City's skyline

It’s a pretty straightforward collection of puzzles. There’s technically a plot about you having to recapture some tricksters that have escaped from Pandora’s box, which isn’t really how the story originally worked but whatever, it’s just there to give an excuse to do a variety of relaxing puzzles. The Wikipedia page has a good description of all the puzzle types. Not all of them are winners, the weirdly named Image Hole is a tedious slog where you just have to slowly move holes around until you see the place in a painting where they can fit in, but most of them are good and it’s a fun way to pass the time when I want to play a game to relax. I think the ones that I prefer the most are the ones that are closer to your traditional jigsaw puzzle. Overlap, Jesse’s Strips, and Outer Layer are the highlights for me and all involve you putting pieces together to form either a painting or photo, or in the case of Outer Layer, some sort of 3D artwork. Overlap and Jesse’s Strips have fun twists on the jigsaw puzzle by having pieces that overlap with each other.

a screenshot of the overlap screen, showing a jigsaw puzzle being put together

The game’s very 90s aesthetic and calming soundtrack just make this a really peaceful game for me to play, with the North and South America regions being the highlights in the game’s soundtrack. It’s too bad that Microsoft doesn’t seem to care about any of their old computer games outside of Age of Empires. There’s plenty of games like this, Motocross Madness, and Freelancer that could really use a rerelease but are just kinda stuck as abandonware and forgotten by most people.

Pandora’s Box is no longer available for sale but it has been updated to work for modern computers on the abandonware website The Collection Chamber.

Review: Inca

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Played Inca, an adventure game/rail shooter by Coktel Vision and released in 1992 about Incas and conquistadors fighting in space. If that sounds like a lot, that’s because it is! You journey through time and space to grab some important looking orbs to become El Dorado and bring the rebirth the Inca empire, all while fighting conquistadors flying boats in space. The game has you alternating through these shooting segments (there’s also some on foot) with traditional point-and-click adventure game parts. Since this is a French DOS game, none of it is really that well designed but it’s all fascinating and certainly a lot more playable than other DOS games that hop around between different genres, even with the difficulty spikes. I’ll definitely play Inca 2 at some point because the weird combination of it all and the FMV is very interesting to me.

I’ve been playing Goblins 3 this month for Adventure Game Club, which is by the same developer, so it’s fun looking at the credits and seeing that the people involved with that goofy game also worked on this right before that game. I don’t know if I could recommend it because it certainly is a clunky game and it becomes too difficult towards the end, but it’s easy to get running in DOS Box if you want to try it and it has passwords and stuff you can do to make the action segments a little bit easier. I would definitely recommend watching the intro which starts off normal enough and then suddenly shifts into “what the hell am I watching?”

I love French DOS games.

Inca is not available for sale but is updated to work on modern OS on the abandonware site The Collection Chamber along with Inca 2.

Review: Terminal Velocity: Boosted Edition

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I didn’t even notice it until I saw it in my GOG library, but I guess a rerelease of Terminal Velocity happened a couple months ago. Apparently buying the game on GOG over 10 years ago meant that I get the new version for free, which is nice. I’ve been playing it for the last day and…..it’s fine. The game was previously on GOG but running on DOSBox but with the new remaster it does the things you’d expect one to do, higher resolutions, adds achievements, improves the view draw distance, and runs natively on Windows. The original game is still included as a bonus too. It’s all fine even if I expected a little more from it. I’m sure it’s nostalgia doing most of the work but I’m having a good time with it. I find it kind of amusing that fixing the draw distance introduces a new issue, that you can see and shoot your enemies far before they notice you.

If you haven’t played the game before, it’s pretty straightforward stuff. You fly a spaceship around a planet’s surface, blowing up targets while avoiding or fighting enemy ships, and then make your way to the exit. Occasionally you have a boss fight but it’s basically this over and over. Everything feels and controls just fine, if maybe a little dated, but the repetition will probably be too much for most folks.

first person view of a ship over a planet's surface with mountains and another ship in view

I’m certainly not upset at all about this existing but I’m not really sure who it’s for. I don’t think I could really recommend the game to people who never played it before since it’s a pretty repetitive game and feels odd to fly around in, and people either already bought the DOS version or they’re busy moaning about the new version on GOG. It’s a perfectly fine update though and I’m glad it exists. I’d love for it to lead to a rerelease of Fury³ and Hellbender, which aren’t available anywhere since they’re Windows 95 games and won’t run anymore. This is probably unlikely to happen since Microsoft seems to have no interest in any of their old games outside of Age of Empires, but I’d love to be proven wrong.

Terminal Velocity: Boosted Edition is available on Steam and GOG.