Photos
Storyline
Featured review
Unleashes the amazing
You play as king Callash(charming yet willing to invoke his authority), and Sanwe(deliciously evil), a sorcerer has vowed to take revenge on you. He was trapped before you were crowned, 20 years ago by Ner-Tom(clever), The Court Wizard who is now missing, and now that time is up and he may soon be free. The titular Dragonsphere represents his unnatural prison and him remaining trapped within: and recently, the surface has begun to crack, and the creature inside, stir. You go alone since an army is more likely to be detected, and send no one in your place as it is your responsibility now that you're on the throne... one of the many themes explored well here, along with humility, acceptance, cooperation, respect, culture, expectations, blind spots, loyalty, identity. This is genuinely a well crafted, smart fantasy tale, and along with an intricate and involved plot wasting not a single encounter(the only exception to it is that near the end, we do get a bunch of exposition dumps, rather than it just fading in and out to say everything was said, since we already know the details, and they are being told to another person), detail or line, it switches deftly between being sweet, scary, awe-inspiring, etc.
My experience with these is limited, so I will be drawing comparisons throughout to the contemporary Beneath a Steel Sky(both are from '94), and The Curse of Monkey Island('97). This has easily the best twist of the three. With dialog choices, much of the storytelling lies in the interesting conversations. The digitized speech and great acting really help bring these memorable characters to life, albeit this won't say descriptions, actions("I'm pulling the lever") or responses(whether failed or not). It is cemented by the realistic human movement, due to rotoscoping. At times, details will be a little hard to make out, when they're subtle movements, such as a hand reaching into a breastpocket, and close-ups on such are rare. You look forward to the cutscenes, with detailed animations, cuts, angles, and effects. The more frequent in-engine ones are great, also due to the good, graphics for the time, 256-color. And a version optimized for today is easy to get your hands on, with the only shortcoming being that at times it is slow to respond. The soundtrack pulls you in.
Moving across vast stretches will be shown, often taking the time it would, so you can get an idea of the scope, and it builds the consistently compelling atmosphere of the deeply engaging world. Half the time, you can press Space to speed it up. Heck, the intro has you riding a horse-sized lizards, or Dramels(presumably a mix between a camel, and a, y'know)! All in your realm, for you to explore, is a huge, seemingly endless desert, a cave with pits of lava, a forest full of life of varying shapes and sizes, such as massive toads, and you can meet and speak with fairies and sprites. Others include Shamans, shapechangers, animals, even seemingly inanimate objects may reveal themselves to be cognizant. Some you'll work with, for, avoid, trick or the like. This enables you to save(it'll even do this for you when you exit this if you forgot to!) and load progress. This is useful for taking breaks from playing, cutting down on time moving back and forth between far apart places. You can die, yet will automatically come back to life, nothing lost or required. That can be annoying to watch if you keep dying the same one place. You can't mess up, so you can focus entirely on the solving.
The puzzles are intricate, intuitive and involved, some of them requiring you to do set things before too many seconds have passed, other than those, this goes entirely "at your pace", with you picking to proceed. There is always a logic to them based on the rules of the land, often specific to where you currently are, including one very Alice in Wonderland quiz from The Butterfly King. There are entire rooms where you do nothing other than learn more about this universe, which I don't recall being the case in the others I've tried. And this is too open right from the start, you can go anywhere and do a lot, making it hard to figure out where to go. Thankfully, going back and forth between areas is swift, once you've dealt with what prevents you from making progress. There are two difficulty settings, for how hard the events are, and how many hints there are towards how to complete them. There is no overall time limit, in spite of the image of the orb gradually worsening in condition, which this keeps going to. The main source of the sparse replayability here is that you earn points, the amount of which are revealed at the end, and you can try to top that.
This is the third graphical adventure developed by MicroProse, and it's of the point-and-click variety. While the mouse is recommended, keyboard can also be used. You move to a new screen by clicking at the edge of the current one. This is the less well-designed interface and takes getting used to, with many pointless orders cluttering up that section. The inventory is at the bottom of your screen, always visible. Click on the item or its icon "to supply nouns for your sentence". It will also give you a list of special commands, verbs - clearly the better way.
There is a lot of disturbing, brutal, bloody and violent content in this, though you'll miss the majority of them if you're careful not to suffer a sudden demise. The same goes for when the humor, isn't content to remain silly, "this is the best wall you've seen all day!", and goes into black comedy: "you died from a fall... too bad for you that no one has invented the parachute yet!" I warmly recommend this to any fan of the subgenre. 8/10
My experience with these is limited, so I will be drawing comparisons throughout to the contemporary Beneath a Steel Sky(both are from '94), and The Curse of Monkey Island('97). This has easily the best twist of the three. With dialog choices, much of the storytelling lies in the interesting conversations. The digitized speech and great acting really help bring these memorable characters to life, albeit this won't say descriptions, actions("I'm pulling the lever") or responses(whether failed or not). It is cemented by the realistic human movement, due to rotoscoping. At times, details will be a little hard to make out, when they're subtle movements, such as a hand reaching into a breastpocket, and close-ups on such are rare. You look forward to the cutscenes, with detailed animations, cuts, angles, and effects. The more frequent in-engine ones are great, also due to the good, graphics for the time, 256-color. And a version optimized for today is easy to get your hands on, with the only shortcoming being that at times it is slow to respond. The soundtrack pulls you in.
Moving across vast stretches will be shown, often taking the time it would, so you can get an idea of the scope, and it builds the consistently compelling atmosphere of the deeply engaging world. Half the time, you can press Space to speed it up. Heck, the intro has you riding a horse-sized lizards, or Dramels(presumably a mix between a camel, and a, y'know)! All in your realm, for you to explore, is a huge, seemingly endless desert, a cave with pits of lava, a forest full of life of varying shapes and sizes, such as massive toads, and you can meet and speak with fairies and sprites. Others include Shamans, shapechangers, animals, even seemingly inanimate objects may reveal themselves to be cognizant. Some you'll work with, for, avoid, trick or the like. This enables you to save(it'll even do this for you when you exit this if you forgot to!) and load progress. This is useful for taking breaks from playing, cutting down on time moving back and forth between far apart places. You can die, yet will automatically come back to life, nothing lost or required. That can be annoying to watch if you keep dying the same one place. You can't mess up, so you can focus entirely on the solving.
The puzzles are intricate, intuitive and involved, some of them requiring you to do set things before too many seconds have passed, other than those, this goes entirely "at your pace", with you picking to proceed. There is always a logic to them based on the rules of the land, often specific to where you currently are, including one very Alice in Wonderland quiz from The Butterfly King. There are entire rooms where you do nothing other than learn more about this universe, which I don't recall being the case in the others I've tried. And this is too open right from the start, you can go anywhere and do a lot, making it hard to figure out where to go. Thankfully, going back and forth between areas is swift, once you've dealt with what prevents you from making progress. There are two difficulty settings, for how hard the events are, and how many hints there are towards how to complete them. There is no overall time limit, in spite of the image of the orb gradually worsening in condition, which this keeps going to. The main source of the sparse replayability here is that you earn points, the amount of which are revealed at the end, and you can try to top that.
This is the third graphical adventure developed by MicroProse, and it's of the point-and-click variety. While the mouse is recommended, keyboard can also be used. You move to a new screen by clicking at the edge of the current one. This is the less well-designed interface and takes getting used to, with many pointless orders cluttering up that section. The inventory is at the bottom of your screen, always visible. Click on the item or its icon "to supply nouns for your sentence". It will also give you a list of special commands, verbs - clearly the better way.
There is a lot of disturbing, brutal, bloody and violent content in this, though you'll miss the majority of them if you're careful not to suffer a sudden demise. The same goes for when the humor, isn't content to remain silly, "this is the best wall you've seen all day!", and goes into black comedy: "you died from a fall... too bad for you that no one has invented the parachute yet!" I warmly recommend this to any fan of the subgenre. 8/10
helpful•00
- TBJCSKCNRRQTreviews
- May 30, 2015
Details
- Color
Contribute to this page
Suggest an edit or add missing content