review

Review: Heretic

~ mpklamerus ~ Leave a comment

Developer: Raven Software
Publisher: Id Software
Year: 1994
Genre: First Person Shooter

Raven Software is a game developer located in Middleton, Wisconsin that was founded in 1990. Their first game, Black Crypt (1992), was a dungeon crawler for the Amiga. While it wasn’t a massive commercial hit, the game was critically well received and got the attention of ID Software. John Romero approached Raven and proposed using ID Software’s technology to make games for the PC. Raven licensed a heavily modified version of the Wolfenstein 3D engine to make ShadowCaster, a fantasy action game that ditches some of the RPG elements of their previous game to focus more on action. The game was a success and Raven Software completed their transition to action games by licensing ID Software’s new Doom engine and creating the FPS Heretic, released in 1994.

first person view of a staff pointing at a mummy trying to punch you
Screenshot taken from Steam page

Heretic is set in a world conquered by three brothers known as the Serpent Riders. While most of the beings in the land fall under their control, the Sidhe elves resist and become known as heretics. You play as one of these elves, who is revealed to be named Corvus in Heretic 2, and fight the Serpent Rider known as D’Sparil. The format of the game is very much like Doom’s. You have three episodes (five in the retail version) and make your way through levels, grabbing keys to unlock doors, and shooting all enemies you come across.

While it may have a lot in common with Doom, to the extent that some people will say that it’s basically a medieval reskin, it’s not without its innovations and improvements. Doom has a few enemies that rely on hitscan detection, where they fire a gun and then the game does a check to see if you are hit or not. I’m not going to go into if this is bad game design in this style of FPS or not. Generally, I’m not a fan but that’s just my personal preference and there’s plenty of people who have no issue with it. I find it interesting that this doesn’t exist at all in Heretic and the player is able to dodge all projectile shots. I suppose it makes sense, there’s no reason why someone would have a gun in this world, but the player still has two hitscan weapons that carried over from the conversion from Doom, the pistol-like Elven Wand and chaingun-like Dragon Claw. I think it’s fun that some of the weapons are wonderfully illustrated and some clearly are a developer’s hands holding something and have been digitized.

The addition of items adds some depth to the gameplay and a small rpg element to the game. Throughout the levels are pickups like potions that restore health and other bits that will give you powers like temporary flight and invisibility. The most interesting of these is the Tome of Power. This item will temporarily change all your weapons to a different effect, essentially creating a second set of weapons for you to use. Some are more useful than others, but it’s fascinating how much work Raven put into one powerup.

The game also features some innovation in its level design. The variety of environmental hazards and elements like wind and current in the water are a very nice touch and it feels like the developers are building upon what they saw in the level design for Doom and trying to do more complex designs. I would maybe argue that I prefer the simpler level design of Doom, but I think at the time it was probably impressive how much the level designers were trying to build levels that look like real places that people could live in.

The original three episodes in the shareware release of the game are all solid. I feel like in shareware games the first free episode is often the best one. The theory is that they front load the game with some of the best material so you’ll go out and buy it. I don’t think that’s the case here. Both episodes 2 and 3 have better level design and boss fights. There were one or two levels with poor switch placement in Episode 1 that absolutely ruined the pacing for me. 

My only major complaint about Episode 2 is that they fill levels with an enemy called the Sabreclaw. It’s incredibly dull and brown and it doesn’t help that it is frequently used in levels with brown walls. All it does is slowly walk up to you and try to do a melee attack and only serves to be a bullet sponge. It is funny that I came across a mod that makes it a more golden color, looks much better, and helps it not blend in with all the brown walls. By the end of the episode they pull back a bit on this enemy as others are introduced, and 3 overall feels more balanced.

The bonus episodes that came with the rerelease of the game, episodes 4 and 5, are competent enough but aren’t interesting. They don’t add anything new and episode 4 has a slow start. Episodes 4 and even 3 to some extent, have you heavily managing your ammo in their first two levels while avoiding batches of enemies since you will not have enough ammo to kill them all. It is a fun novelty for one level but becomes a slog after that when you are repeatedly reloading your game to minimize the amount of ammo you use and damage you take so you can get through the encounters after that. It eventually lets up though and after getting enough weapons over two levels, the game goes back to being fun. 

Episode 5 on the other hand feels like it has convoluted level design just for the sake of padding the runtime. It felt like every level had you hitting a switch, searching the rest of the level to see what it opened, and repeating the process. It is incredibly tedious to play and the entire episode does it. It doesn’t help that the game also decides that sometimes you’ll now need to shoot doors to open them. It doesn’t happen very often, just enough that you’ll forget that’s now a mechanic in the game and waste a lot of time trying to figure out if there’s a switch that will open them. Neither of these episodes adds anything new, so you’re just seeing repeats of enemies you already fought many times in Episodes 1-3.

Weirdly enough, there’s also a partially complete Episode 6 hidden in the game. It’s just a few levels, with the last one being unfinished, so it’s not terribly interesting. I just find it fascinating that it was left in. It’s not something I can complain about, you must enter codes to access the levels, but it’s interesting that it exists.

If there’s a hot take in this review, I think that it’s that Raven Software was just not that good at level design compared to some of their peers. A lot of people give Hexen 1 and 2 grief for clunky design (the case for why both of these games are good is coming at a later date) but I wasn’t impressed by a lot of the design in the later episodes of Heretic and Jedi Knight 2 is also a game that’s infamous for having a dull single player campaign up until you get the lightsaber before that game improves.

It’s hard to be too critical of these episodes because I see them as bonus levels anyway and the game’s story has already concluded by the time you get to these. If you want more Heretic, here you go, but if not then it’s fine to just stop after the first 3 episodes. If you would like to read more about the game’s level design process, I found this interview with the level designer to be interesting.

Overall, I’d highly recommend this game to anyone who enjoys faster paced FPS. I have my gripes about the pacing in some parts of the game, but I think it holds up very well. As a long time Raven Software fan, it’s fun seeing their evolution from being a roleplaying game developer with Black Crypt on the Amiga, to transitioning to the FPS/RPG hybrid Shadowcaster, and then to FPS that contain some RPG elements like Heretic and Hexen. It’s a little less fun seeing them being absorbed into the Call of Duty machine and only working on entries in that series now. 

Heretic is available through Steam and GOG.

Review: Chesstris 2000

~ mpklamerus ~ Leave a comment

Developer: Jonny Hopkins
Publisher: Johnny Hopkins
Year: 2020
Genre: Puzzle

In the decades since Tetris was released, there have been hundreds of games inspired by it. Not just clones involving falling blocks but also games that use the famous Tetris block pieces for other types of gameplay. Chesstris 2000 is a recent favorite of mine that does just that. The game combines elements of Tetris and Chess to create something new. Players clear levels by navigating a chess piece attached to a Tetris block though a maze of blocks to an exit square on the board. The Tetris inspiration also comes through in the line clearing mechanic where having a row of 8 squares clears that line. Sometimes you’ll need to clear lines to create room on the board but must also be careful to not eliminate your chess piece. I felt that the levels were well designed and slowly ramp up in difficulty.

isometric view of blocks on a chessboard in space, with two chess pieces sitting on the blocks. Tetris blocks floating in the background

I also love how the game sounds and looks. The Itch page cites inspirations like Tetris for Philips CD-i, Tetrisphere, Myst, and educational software, which all contribute to the game’s combination of the vaporwave and utopian scholastic aesthetics that really works for me. If you haven’t seen Tetris for the Philips CD-i before, I highly recommend watching a video of it on YouTube. We’ve had so many rereleases of Tetris games but I’m still waiting for this one. The soundtrack is by Stevia Sphere, using vaporwave music under the Creative Commons license, and fits perfectly with the aesthetic the game is going for.

I really can’t recommend Chesstris 2000 enough if you’re looking for a puzzle game. It’s available as Pay-What-You-Want on Itch and available as both a browser game and download so anyone can play it.

Chesstriss 2000 is available on Itch.io and through the Indiepocalypse anthology.

Review: Command & Conquer

~ mpklamerus ~ Leave a comment
box art for command & conquer showing a guy with an explosion in the reflection of his goggles

Developer: Westwood Studios
Publisher: Virgin Interactive
Year: 1995
Genre: RTS

After developing the massive hit Dune 2, Westwood was looking to make another RTS but set in a property they owned and created Command & Conquer. C&C is about a war between two factions, the Global Defense Initiative, which is a military force setup by the United Nation, and the Brotherhood of Nod, a terrorist cult. The war is focused on their fight over a resource called Tiberium, a material that has arrived from space and is a powerful resource, but at the expense of it destroying the planet wherever it grows. Bretty Sperry, a producer for the game, had slowly been developing a fictional universe for a few years which would set the foundation for the C&C universe. The game was designed to be set in the very near future since modern military combat was on the minds of folks at the studio due to news events at the time such as the Gulf War. From watching the GDC classic game postmortem, development of the game seemed to go along very smoothly. It was described as a very collaborative environment and morale was generally high during development. 

It’s clear from playing it that a great amount of love went into each part of the game. Even the installation process is very elaborate and visually impressive. The game was originally planned to have mission briefings given through text but after some testing, realized this was too boring and went with the approach to have actors in live action video describing the mission to you with graphics overlaid to show you what you needed to do on the mission’s map. Since it was still the early days of full motion video, the game’s cutscenes were very loosely put together. The set, consisting of just a green screen, was a room that Westwood rented out on the other side of the office building they were in, and Eric Gooch, who oversaw video and film and played the Brotherhood of Nod’s Seth, just bought some linoleum from a store and painted it green. Rewrites frequently happened too, including on the set on the days of filming. Joe Kucan, who worked in casting and direction at Westwood and had even voice acted in some of their previous games, portrayed the game’s main villain Kane, the head of The Brotherhood of Nod. His performance is the standout in the game’s cutscenes and even in later games when Westwood started to hire famous actors for their games, his scenes usually remained the most interesting. Many of the other actors in the game came from the Las Vegas strip, since Westwood Studios was in Las Vegas, while others were employees of Westwood or people that the developers knew. Even if they’re low budget, the cutscenes are very charming in their unique and cheesy way. It’s not quite as intentionally campy as the cutscenes would be in later games but they never feel cringeworthy either and are a nice little reward after completing levels.

top down view of a military base
Screenshot of the game from the remastered collection

Multiplayer also contributed to the game’s success. The game supports 4 players over a network. It helped that the game shipped on two CDs, one for the GDI campaign and one for the NOD campaign, so two people could play multiplayer with one copy of the game. Multiplayer would be a big component of future games as well and there was even a multiplayer focused Command & Conquer game released in 1997 called Command & Conquer: Sole Survivor. This was a multiplayer only game where players each controlled one unit and would explore a map and gain power ups, while engaging in deathmatch with other player controlled units. The game was considered a disaster at the time but could maybe be considered a proto-MOBA today.

The memorable soundtrack by Frank Klepacki, which took advantage of the switch to CD and streaming audio, features a mix of influences from basically everything and determined the sound for the rest of the franchise. Westwood must have been confident in how great their soundtrack was because the game also features a Jukebox option, which lets people select what songs they want to use while they play. Highlights of the soundtrack include the tracks Mechanical Man and C&C Thang.

The game is a bit dated due to all the advances made in the genre since it has been released but I was pleasantly surprised that most of the game still held up for me and it was very enjoyable to revisit. It featured enough quality of life items like being able to select multiple units at once to attack that kept it from feeling too dated for me to enjoy, like Warcraft 1 and Dune 2. The story and cutscenes were good, cheesy fun that kept me playing and there’s still nothing else like that game’s soundtrack outside of the C&C series. It might be a little harder for people with no nostalgia for 90’s PC games to get into it, but if you grew up playing the game or other RTS for the era, consider going back to play Command & Conquer. 

a general saying "nod forces have fortified this beachhead at x16-Y42
Screenshot of the upscaled video

In 2020, we got the Command & Conquer Remastered Collection, a compilation of Command & Conquer, Command & Conquer: Red Alert, the expansions for both games and levels that were originally exclusive to console versions of the game. The compilation was developed by Petroglyph, a company started by ex-Westwood employees, so it was nice to see the original creators of the series still involved in some capacity. It’s a pretty nifty package and the unused and behind the scenes videos from the making of the original game are interesting. The game also features some upscaled videos and 4K graphics for the art, to mixed results. The updated art looks fine enough but I turned that off and the upscaled videos mostly look ok but occasionally you’ll get the thing in AI upscaled art where a frame will look off and you’ll see a nightmarish image for one frame. That said, it’s not a bad way to check out the game if you’re apathetic about playing the original DOS version, and the accessibility options are nice too. Electronic Arts also released the source code for the original game, which has been released as freeware, so people have made some nice source ports and mods for the game as well.

Command & Conquer is available either as freeware on various websites or through the Command & Conquer Remastered Collection on Steam.

Review: Midnight Scenes: The Highway

~ mpklamerus ~ Leave a comment

Developer: Octavi Navarro
Publisher: Octavi Navarro
Year: 2017
Genre: Adventure

Midnight Scenes: The Highway is the first entry in a horror anthology series by Octavi Navarro, who also worked as an artist on Thimbleweed Park. There are currently five games in the series, with each one being completely standalone, but I would still recommend this one as a great place to start. The games feature gorgeous pixel art and all can be completed in one sitting, with some like this game only being 15 minutes long and later games in the series taking about 90 minutes to play through.

a woman standing next to a downed power line

In Midnight Scenes: The Highway you play as a woman who is stranded on a road after her path is blocked by a downed power line and must explore the area to find a way around, but something creepy is lurking out there. This entry in the series is strongly inspired by The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits and revisiting it reminds me that later games pull back on this and do their own thing a bit more by transitioning to color, dropping opening narration, and feel more violent and arguable more monster focused too. This certainly isn’t a complaint about any of the games in the series. I think they’re all great. It’s just interesting to see how the series has evolvesd. I think adventure game fans who enjoy horror but don’t want to be frustrated will be into this game. It’s not a difficult game, with puzzles that are very straightforward but don’t feel like busy work, no death sequences, and it only being 15 minutes long. That might be a turnoff to some hardcore fans of the genre but I feel very comfortable recommending it to people that just want some creepy vibes for a bit.

Octavi also developed some other short horror games outside of this series that I would recommend, The Supper and The Librarian, that play very similarly to the Midnight Scenes series and can be completed in one sitting.

Midnight Scenes: The Highway is available on Itch.io and Steam.

Review: Soldier Boyz

~ mpklamerus ~ Leave a comment
cover of Soldier Boyz, showing a large explosion and a guy thrown from the blast

Developer: Hypnotix, Inc.
Publisher: DreamCatcher Interactive
Year: 1997
Genre: Arcade; Interactive Movie

By the end of the 90’s it was becoming clear that the world of FMV wasn’t going to be the next place for Hollywood to conquer, but that didn’t stop some companies from still giving it a shot. Soldier Boyz is a rail shooter based off a movie of the same name created for HBO, and brings back the cast from the film to shoot new scenes for the game two years later. A billionaire has hired a Vietnam vet and convicts who have been sentenced to life to rescue his daughter from terrorists in Vietnam. Unfortunately, the heroes of the story immediately come off as unlikable. When the Vietnam vet (played by Michael Dudikoff) proposes his plan to use prisoners from a youth detention center (who are all played by much older actors) to rescue the woman, the billionaire father expresses concern that kids are being sent to die. These concerns are immediately shrugged off by our hero, who then hosts interviews to assemble his team. It’s possible that the writing in the original movie was better, unlikely since it received universally negative reviews, but every character in this game who is not a white person is written to be a racist stereotype.

very blurry photo of a forest and guy behind a tree pointing a gun at you
See that blurry mess to the right of the tree? That’s an enemy

I suppose some people would be able to move on from this intro if the game improved. The game doesn’t focus on the characters much after this and most of the FMV in the rest of the game is focused on shooting people in Vietnam and the player character reacting to it. However, the actual gameplay is awful as well. As critical as people were of games like Mad Dog McCree and Space Pirates, at least they were functional. The mouse went where you moved it, fired when you clicked the left mouse button, and you could see what was happening on the screen. Soldier Boyz is unable to even do this. I constantly fought with a lag on the mouse movements that made it difficult for me to shoot anyone. The game is a blurry mess too. The video quality is ridiculously poor and the scenes are disorienting. Nearly every time you shoot someone, the camera cuts to your character’s reaction and then cuts to another character. I’m not especially a fan of the wave of FMV rail shooters that we saw in the 90’s but this is the worst one.

I wouldn’t recommend the game to anyone but if you really must play it, it is playable in ScummVM. The engine used in this game was used for a few other games, although I know nothing about them other than Marvel Comics Spider-Man: The Sinister Six also being a poor game from the streams I saw of it.

There’s no reason to play this game and nothing interesting about it other than film director Darren Aronofsky helped shoot scenes for the game. It’s unfortunate that everything he shot is basically unwatchable but at least he would go on to better things (well, most of the time).

Soldier Boyz is no longer available for sale but it’s probably available on your abandonware site of choice.

Review: The Protagonish

~ mpklamerus ~ Leave a comment

Developer: College Fun Games
Publisher: College Fun Games
Year: 2024
Genre: Adventure

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!!

~ mpklamerus ~ Leave a comment

Developer: ICOM Simulations, Inc.
Publisher: Mindscape
Year: 1985
Genre: Adventure

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

~ mpklamerus ~ Leave a comment

Developer: Digital Eclipse
Publisher: Digital Eclipse
Year: 2023
Genre: Action

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

~ mpklamerus ~ Leave a comment

Developer: Microsoft Game Studios
Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios
Year: 1999
Genre: Puzzle

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

~ mpklamerus ~ Leave a comment

Developer: Coktel Vision
Publisher: Sierra On-Line
Year: 1992
Genre: Action, Adventure

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.