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Doing a Halloween twitter thread about a long time favorite of mine, the criminally under appreciated trail blazing 1994 proto survival horror game Ecstatica!
And I am bringing the business today, Ecstatica is one of those low influence games that managed to do a whole mess of impressive things that it just doesn& #39;t get enough respect for so let& #39;s change that.
Nestled comfortably between Alone in the Dark (1992) and Resident Evil (1996) it managed to slip under the radar by releasing exclusively on the PC and deciding to focus on animation and audio effects, neither of which make good box photos.
But what it has is a table that tries to murder you.
You should probably unmute these videos even though the game has full subtitle support. Ecstatica needs it since there are multiple in engine conversations, with elaborate for the time synced character acting complete with sound effects.
The premise of the game is your character (male or female, with unique voice acting for both) rides into a town for supplies where all kinds of hell has broken lose. Here& #39;s the games full intro when selecting the lady character.
Ecstatica is a game of lush excessive animated detail, if you try and leave the town like any rational person would well...
Now I said it was a proto-survival horror game, which is true. Presenting one of the cruelest first minute of game you& #39;re likely to see.
But what& #39;s going on here is extra special, none of that had to happen. Instead of having a fixed sequence of events the different areas of the game have events that occasionally go off, until you& #39;ve seen them all you don& #39;t even know what could happen.
And there& #39;s quite a few, each one loaded with far more animation that anything else at the time. The weird circular look built around ellipsoids was never going to beat polygons in the long run but Ecstatica puts in a lot of hard work, nothing comes close circa 1994.
Your character reads a book, he turns pages, stretches his legs, reads along while his reading switches to that of the diaries writer - games years later would just freeze the game and throw some text on screen. This ones all about atmosphere.
I& #39;m going to tweet off the whole game so I& #39;m going to get into the later game portions, I figure no one is going to play Ecstatica without some hefty convincing so here& #39;s a major moment in the game where you throw a sword in a lake. Naturally some birds fly off just for effect.
You get another long conversation with a wizard, another over delivery, which you just couldn& #39;t do with anything else all seamless real time game. Great little spooky music too.
Most likely you& #39;ll die a lot so why not have a long game over sequence (there& #39;s two different ones actually) where the evil werewolf mocks your performance to his ghastly buddies. While you& #39;re just dead I guess. Nice.
On the subject of the Werewolf, he& #39;s basically Nemesis from Resident Evil 3, chasing you throughout the town and next to unkillable. Even if you get the armor.
Don& #39;t get the armor, it& #39;s a big joke. An elaborate one. You can even take it off making this a rare example of a death trap in a game which isn& #39;t actually instant doom. Plus of course the take off animation is unique.
Sorry the videos aren& #39;t uploading in great quality! The real game looks exceptionally crisp I promise. Swear to naked embarrassed Jesus.
It& #39;s also surprisingly generous, it& #39;s not an especially long game but it& #39;s more than happy to tell you what items you& #39;re going to need to progress through the games puzzles - it wouldn& #39;t be an Alone in the Dark clone (or Survival Horror game) if it didn& #39;t have those.
Combat is kind of weird, you can hold an item in each hand which is your inventory, then swing them by pressing keys on the numpad, the entire game is played using the numpad one handed which surprisingly works. Except for the F-keys which let you set your moment speed.
Eventually you& #39;re going to have to fight the bad guy but first a gremlin/evil weasel in pants explains you have to go find the king, I& #39;m only including this because this whole scene exists to tell you to go somewhere else.
The game remembers it& #39;s a horror game and really amps it back up as you descend into the demons lair. Get ready for...
...Another conversation! You& #39;ll have to make a decision on whether to accept his offer. Fairly standard ending if you reject it but you& #39;ll have to play the game to see that.
The real twist is if you decide to side with the bad guy. Turns out he& #39;s not such a bad guy after all. Play the game if you want to desperately need some very small ellipsoid penises in your life.
We& #39;re almost finished here but as I said Ecstatica is a game just loaded with extra detail, you can access the end boss area much earlier in the game which is baffling for both you the player and the character.
Before I let you go, watch the Ecstatica character grab a ledge over and over instead of falling to their death, a feature in games that took decades to implement as something approaching standard.
Play Ecstatica this Halloween, it& #39;s worth it.
As an after note if anyone knows what happened to Andrew Spencer the lead on this (and its sequel) I& #39;d really like to know what happened to him.
