Northern Journey (2021)

 

Northern Journey opens with you controlling a guy in a rowboat, apparently having gotten lost among the Norwegian fjords. You turn and notice an operating lighthouse on a nearby island and a moment later some strange energy comes from near the lighthouse and pokes holes in your boat, forcing you to hurriedly row to the shore, arriving just before the boat sinks. You take a path up a hill and meet a strange man wearing a wolf's head, playing a flute, who tells you some things were stolen from him and he needs you to find them. A short way further in, you find a tiny village, but everything is strange. The constable is keeping some kind of demon or elf woman in his cell, there are tiny humanoid creatures scampering about who burrow into the earth when they see you coming closer, a little boy is torturing a thief locked in some stocks, something big is locked in a cellar under the church, and a there's a pair of witches keeping two black goats and boiling some strange green stuff in a cauldron. The whole place has a sense of wrongness similar to the atmosphere in Lovecraft's Innsmouth. With nothing else to do, you push forward on your mission to help the flute player get his stuff back.

In short order, you start accumulating weapons, starting with a sling, and you find yourself using them against the island's hostile wildlife, which is mostly represented by giant bugs. There's a variety of spiders who attack you, giant mosquitos, and trilobytes, among others. Northern Journey isn't a game that should be played by people with bug phobias. One particularly harrowing sequence has you creeping through a crevasse with a high tree canopy above, with giant ticks raining down on you. Unlike your average video game enemies, these creatures generally don't announce their presence with audio cues, but like real world predators and parasites they stay silent and they use camouflage to ambush you. Many jumpscares await, not with a trite musical sting but simply because you'll be shocked to see long arachnid legs noiselessly creeping up on you right as you thought you'd cleaned an area out.

There are some non-bug enemies. You'll face a few moose and bears, and there are some sheep that have gone mad because of the ticks hanging off of their bodies. And you eventually start encountering more overtly supernatural foes, many of which are drawn from Norwegian folklore. If you know your mythology, it won't take long to realize that the mysterious flute player, with his helpful wolves and ravens, is probably Odin and the cause of the rot in the land and the outburst of supernatural creatures is probably the handiwork of Loki. As often happens in the stories, Odin is using you as his instrument to clean up a mess whether you want to or not.

The game as a whole is a tribute to the Norwegian countryside. The creator, Øystein Pedersen (Slid Studio is just him), wanted to make a game that reflected his love of hiking through the places he knows in Norway. Despite the relatively modest graphics, the game looks real in a way many far more expensive games don't approach. There are steep hills and towering cliffs, grasses and weeds that sway in the breeze, heavy waterfalls and violent rapids (deep water is your worst enemy of all in this game), and sprawling bogs. Many of the textures used to create the vivid foliage were based on photos he took while hiking, and the game also incorporates his interest in scuba diving by including a couple of underwater levels. These levels are as scary as anything in the game but there's also a great sense of authenticity in how they depict the lack of light deep underwater and the lay of the depths. Same with the subterranean spaces - many of them are tight and claustrophobic as you'd find while doing actual spelunking. When you finally meet some undead skeletons, they don't stand upright like the usual Harryhausen skeletons but crawl at you on their bellies because they just came straight out of their graves and there isn't much room to stand in their cramped burial mounds.

Whatever nature didn't provide in inspiration was complemented by Norwegian artist Theodor Kittelsen. The game's poster is directly based on Kittelsen's Nokken painting from 1904, and when gazing on the misty landscapes in the game it can be hard to tell what was maybe taken from life and what was inspired by Kittelsen's work.

Pedersen also cited games like Skyrim as influences, mostly the sense of walking and exploring, although Northern Journey is not a walking simulator. In terms of how it plays, it's mostly a traditional and simple FPS. There are health and ammo pickups scattered around the levels and you're supposed to find newer and more interesting weapons. The weapons are quite uncommon, though. There are no guns in the game despite the presence of certain types of advanced technology (e.g., the diving sphere you use to explore the Nokkpond). The sling you obtain first is a viable weapon through the entire game, and beyond that you get a bow, throwing axes, multiple types of fast-loading crossbows, and spears. You do get some swords, but as there is no melee combat in the game, you throw the swords like everything else. Weapons also tend to be slow and require careful aiming that accounts for drops over distance while also leading targets, which gets tough when you're being swarmed by skittering bugs. Pedersen is experienced in the use of slings and archery in the real world, so he wanted to draw on that for his game. If nothing else, Northern Journey has the most well-implemented sling ever done in a video game.

Although there's some backtracking around the game's map, it's mostly a linear experience that's well-paced and is quick to make sure you're constantly seeing and doing new things. The only major gameplay issue is that it's easy to get hung up on parts of the environment, or to be a bit screwed over by the physics and end up slipping over a cliff because the character didn't have his footing. There's a lot of ground-level foliage, which is meant to hide enemies but has the downside of making the ground somewhat fuzzy and hard to read when engaged in combat or making difficult jumps. It's nothing insurmountable but it does lead to some frustration.

Leave it to a Norwegian to show how "the Northern Thing" is done. Pedersen has created a beautiful and scary as well as funny and melancholic game. "Happysad" as he describes it. It captures the flavor of folklore and it's weird. Not quirky modern weird but in the way people used to speak of weird tales. If Poul Anderson had lived to see it, I think he would have appreciated this game.

LOVECRAFTIAN: Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem (2002)

 

A few years after releasing Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, Silicon Knights and Denis Dyack returned with another horror adventure, this one somewhat surprisingly released exclusively on Nintendo's adorable GameCube. Eternal Darkness isn't based directly on but is heavily inspired by H.P. Lovecraft's work.

The game opens in the modern day when Alexandra Roivas, an attractive college student who at a glance might be confused for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is called by an Inspector LeGrasse to be informed that her grandfather has been brutally murdered at his Rhode Island mansion. With the police stumped, Alexandra vows to find the truth, so she begins searching the mansion and finds an ancient book, the Tome of Eternal Darkness, said to be made from skin and bone like the Necronomicon particular to the Evil Dead movies. As she reads the book, the game flashes back throughout history, allowing the player to control characters in times and places that are crucial to the story. 

The first segment follows Pious Augustus, a Roman commander in Persia, 26 BC, who is drawn to a strange underground tomb. Fighting his way through the undead inhabiting the tomb, Pious claims a strange artifact and is transformed by powers beyond into a sorcerous lich. The chapter ends and the game returns to the present, but the book isn't complete, so Alexandra must search the rest of the house, finding more pages to unlock more chapters. These chapters will take the player to Cambodia, France, and the original Persian tomb in times hundreds of years apart, often following doomed protagonists who end up in conflict with Pious. Eventually Alexandra herself will put the pieces together and put an end to things. The game must also be completed three times to unlock its true ending, a multiple timeline concept that Denis Dyack credited to being inspired by Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion stories. Dyack also wanted to take historical occurrences and put a supernatural horror spin on them, such as atrocities committed by conquerors like Tamerlane. "The Pillar of Flesh in the chapter with Abdul, that's historically accurate. That stuff really did happen."

Probably the most memorable feature of the game was the insanity system it pulled from the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game. Fighting monsters causes the character's sanity to deplete, which at first causes odd effects such as bleeding walls or statues that move but in more advanced stages will seem to take over the game system itself, bringing up messages that the player's save card is being erased or changing the volume on the TV, which genuinely caught some players by surprise. The insanity system is an amusing feature, although the general fixation on insanity in Lovecraftian games sometimes feels misplaced since not all characters need be as mentally fragile as Lovecraft's protagonists tend to be. Robert E. Howard wrote Lovecraftian stories without necessarily having his characters swoon at a terrible sight.

The story is pretty good and shows the work Silicon Knights did on Blood Omen wasn't a fluke. The characters are an interesting bunch and the story builds steadily and reasonably while hitting all the main tropes associated with Lovecraftian fiction. It also doesn't really go much outside the boundaries, but video game storytelling is often so inept that it's noteworthy when a game simply manages to tell a story competently. Eternal Darkness tells a better Lovecraft story than many games that are actually based on his work.

In terms of how it plays, the game's primary emphasis on horror gives exploration and combat a weighty feel that also makes it engrossing as a sword-and-sorcery experience. The various characters fight like hell but taking down a handful of undead shambling toward them feels like accomplishment and not some mild diversion on the way to destroying an entire horde. The game might resemble Alone in the Dark or Resident Evil but the characters are nimble and swift, not lumbering tanks, and are easy to get in position for either a melee strike or a shotgun blast. A notable aspect of the combat system is the ability to aim at specific body parts - lopping off a skeleton's head will cause it to lose track of where the player is, for instance. However, the game is a bit on the easy side, both in terms of combat and puzzle-solving, and even the much-lauded insanity system is so manageable that some players might not see the more extreme effects it has to offer unless they go out of their way to not keep the sanity meter topped off.

It still looks and sounds great, though. GameCube games at their best were some of the best-looking of their generation and Eternal Darkness features art direction that hasn't aged badly at all. The human characters are attractively rendered and have personality and the monsters are appropriately disgusting to look upon, and the locations all get across a sense of age and atmosphere with their musty tombs and temples, torch-lit churches, and cyclopean alien cities. The game was released just as 3D graphics technology had matured beyond its awkward early years when everything was still very abstract.

Despite a strong cult following, a sequel has yet to be produced.

Dark Adventure/Devil World (1987)

Konami got in on the Gauntlet craze with its own 3-player take-off (its first 3-player game) called Dark Adventure, but they gave their game a different slant by favoring a pulpy, Indiana Jones theme instead of Dungeons & Dragons. 

Dark Adventure's attract mode informs us that our three heroes, Condor (i.e., Indiana Jones), a pretty blonde reporter named Labryna, and Zorlock, another archeologist who seems inspired by Belloq from Raiders of the Lost Ark, are holding a press conference to announce the discovery of a strange sarcophagus. Condor slides open the lid, the box explodes with light, and the three characters vanish as a voice declares, "Those who tamper with the sacred ark...are DOOMED!" On starting the game, the heroes appear in a strange land of demons and the only way out is to fight their way through to the demon king and slay him.

Condor of course has a whip, Labryna a sword, and Zorlock a spear, and each can also fling sticks of dynamite around. As with Gauntlet, the characters' health steadily (and quickly) declines and can only be restored by picking up soda cans that occasionally appear. The monsters mostly appear from stone generators and exits must be unlocked by finding keys. Complicating things, however, is that levels often feature multiple exits and taking the wrong one can cause the players to loop back to levels they've already played. More powerful weapons, such as laser guns or bazookas can also be found occasionally, or power-ups that can speed up the characters or extend their melee range.

Dark Adventure makes a strong first impression. The graphics are quite nice, with an appropriately dark color scheme and characters that are taller and more detailed than Gauntlet's. The first level features you battling hordes of minotaurs and then suddenly the music picks up as a giant sword-wielding slime monster starts chasing after you, booming with each footstep. Killing this creature will cause it to collapse back into the muck, but if you linger too long the monster will reappear, so there's a sense of urgency created. Unfortunately, the game isn't consistent in keeping up this atmosphere and it feels like it played its best hand right away. There are some cool monsters and sights still to be seen - e.g., demonic trees that try to ensnare you, bat-winged men similar to those Solomon Kane fought in Wings of the Night, and lava-based levels with their own giants - but not much with the impact of that muck giant chasing you on the very first level. Among other creatures the come against you are rats, giant spiders, bats, and the undead skeletons do finally arrive relatively late in the game. 

Konami also produced an alternate version for two-player cabinets called Devil World.

Devil World deletes the Zorlock character as an option, and includes some significant changes such as ditching the non-linear progression and starting the characters out with ranged weapons that can be upgraded with a Gradius-style system in which you pick up orbs that can be saved up and traded in when you have enough for whichever weapon you want. On the downside, the game is stripped down a bit in its rogues gallery and its audio presentation. 

It never got a home port. Perhaps it just didn't make much money in arcades but it seems like the concept would have been good for an NES adaptation that could have shifted the design more toward something like a more horror-tinged The Legend of Zelda, similar to what Blood Omen did years later.