When
I’m asked what my favorite videogames are, the answers I give usually draw
confusion even among people who play videogames themselves. My tastes tend to
run to the obscure, for one reason or another, and to give one example, I’ve
never really seen what the big deal was about the Super Mario series. One of my
favorite, most oft-replayed games, is a case in point when it comes to
obscurity.
You’re
an officer worker living a dreary life represented by a monochrome filter. On
the subway ride home one Friday night, you suddenly find yourself pulled out of
your nice safe place in the space-time continuum by a strange man with wings.
This proves to be Daedalus. Yes, that
Daedalus, the legendary genius who created the Labyrinth of Crete to imprison
the Minotaur. His old boss King Minos has indentured him again, taking
advantage of his supernatural abilities as a ghost to create a new labyrinth. One
that crosses time and space. With it, Minos can invade all eras and conquer
them all at once. But not if you can find a way to destroy the labyrinth before
he has the chance. With that, Daedalus vanishes.
As
promised, the game does bridge various locations and eras from history,
although some of them you’d only really know from the decorations on the walls
and name on the text bar above your interface icons. You’ll be in a hotel one
moment only to go through a door and find yourself on an abandoned fairground with
a gigantic clown face complete with menacing laughter daring you to enter a
hall of mirrors. Or in a 50’s diner one second and as soon as you try to get
into the bathroom, suddenly in a hedge maze.
Yes,
there are a lot of mazes in this game. It’s a labyrinth, there have to be. Let
me hasten to assure anyone who hates mazes that it isn’t as bad as it probably
sounds. In general, I don’t like mazes in adventure games myself, since I’m not
a big fan of mapping. Particularly, because it usually involves tons of dying
and reloading because of traps. The nice thing is, the game maps its play area
for you as you explore it. There’s a fair bit of backtracking in this game, but
as soon as you’ve solved a maze once, all you have to do is click the button on
the bottom right of the screen to see how to do it again.
Even
the part about lots of deaths to find where not
to go is absent. This was around the time when the people who made point and
click adventures started deciding, as a group, that it was rude to repeatedly
murder the people who shelled out money to buy their games. And so, the long-running
series that hadn’t been murdering their customers since the 80’s started not
murdering them at all. There are two or three ways to make the game unwinnable,
but in general if you seem to have hit a dead end, you just haven’t looked in
the right corner or tried a key in the right lock yet.
Also, it's nice to see a game about saving all of creation that still has a touch of humor about itself.
The
adventure game maxim of “save early, save often” to avoid getting killed or stuck
is something of an awkward proposition in Labyrinth. Instead of doing what most games did and giving you a save game
interface where you could type in a little description of the file to serve as
an instant reminder of what you were doing at the time of the save, instead you
get nine little check boxes. The only real way to have any idea of your
progress is to open up a game and flick through your inventory and map to see
how full they are.
While
the game isn’t easy by any stretch either, the puzzles do make sense when you
step back and think about them, and take the time to read the couple of notes
and books there are to find. And ultimately winning the game does involve you
finding a way to change history. Which it really should, you know? What’s the
point of going back in time if you don’t get to dick around with it, after all?
Where
the game really shines is in its soundtrack, however. Every track on it
alternately made me feel like I was on a quest in a strange place and needed to
do some investigating, or that I was alone in a place outside of space and time
and that literally anything could happen if I wasn’t careful. I don’t mind
saying that even though I enjoy this game plenty, the music is what really
transforms it into something memorable.
But
being memorable was the game’s biggest problem, in a way. It had the misfortune
of hitting store shelves at about the same time as Myst and The 7th
Guest. Those games hogged all the attention of the crowd that plays these
kinds of games, leaving The Labyrinth of
Time ignored. Just to pour salt in the wound, they always
intended for it to go to sequel.
Still,
guess we’ll always have…whatever that 50’s diner was called.
Oh, and in case you're stuck, here's a walkthrough.
No comments:
Post a Comment