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A game released in 1990 for the Amiga, which managed to persistently haunt some non-trivial volume of my brain across all the subsequent decades. Today I dug it out again and finally completed it. To complete the exorcism, I will now tell you about it.
First, the music.
This is a game about the culture and traditions of an imaginary people, and the music does much of the work of evoking a deep tradition quite unlike any which have developed in reality. Maybe it sounds a little like something from Westish Asia, but it is essentially its own self-consistent thing, human but unearthly.
Next, the imagery. The massive skeleton of a drowned behemoth, timeless through the changing seasons: now stark bony white above the summer green, now hidden against the snow. Mesmeric patterns swirling on the backs of cards played on a plain desk, a pot of pencils in the corner. A cowled figure half turned away from you, solemnly accepting your need to journey into the depths. A pipe-organ of bony outcrops deep within a convoluted skull.
Then, the gameplay. First what works. A Pelmanism-like card game to build your psychic abilities, represented by near-subliminal flashes revealing the front of a card through its back. An economic subgame which emphasises the interdependence of a group of families rather than just the competition between them. Placing charged stones in groups shaped to direct the charge at collectors moving in ritual patterns. Lighting the way ahead through a shadowy maze.
Where it fails. The economic sim is mostly a dry numbers game, with too little feedback. There's a 2-player board game you have to play against the AI, which is actually quite interesting but feels extraneous. But worst is the main part of the game, which consists of exploring a maze of twisty passages, mostly alike. This can be engaging, if not hugely exciting in itself, and it could have worked but for one awful choice: the mazes are full of sudden deathtraps, sending you back to the start. Some of these can be avoided if you've played enough of the card game, but for many all you can do is learn by painful experience which paths to avoid. I assume this was a desperate attempt to make the game "difficult" enough that all the other parts of the game would play a role -- although there are also reflex challenges involved, without the unfair deathtraps it wouldn't be so hard to complete all the maze-delving in one go. But even that excuse doesn't apply to the most ludicrous design choice: if you do get to the end, you are then presented with a 1-in-6 random chance of winning, with permanent death the rest of the time.
Luckily, the amiga emulator I use (fs-uae) allows saving and loading states, so I could cheat past all this frustration, and see the unusually good ending animation.
In summary: one of the most interesting games I've known. Purely as a game, it doesn't exactly work; but as an artistic work I can't say that it failed, given how deeply it got under my skin and cranium.
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