The first wrinkle is that of the \u201cscroll bar\u201d in an adventure game context. So, imagine a screen of average proportions \u2013 say a 640×480 screen \u2013 because back then, that was about \u201cthe default\u201d for most games. Ordinarily, this means the \u201cscreen\u201d approach: walk near the edge, and the game dissolves the current screen and takes you to the next one after a brief loading period. But this is the late 90\u2019sand that approach won\u2019t do anymore. So, instead, areas are huge, sprawling vistas that extend up and right further than most Sierra Games would bother with. But with this comes a problem: you might want to see what\u2019s ahead \u2013 or down. Al Lowe solves this by having scroll bars for the environment. Now you can plan ahead.<\/p>\n There\u2019s also a \u201cdual inventory\u201d which is a neat idea. On the one hand, you have all the stuff Torin picks up and on the other you have all the shapes that Torin\u2019s little buddy Boogle collect, because sometimes, Boogle will walk into a room, see something he can become, sniff that thing and \u201cremember\u201d it.<\/p>\n There\u2019s also one other great idea that he borrowed from Roberta Williams\u2019 Phantasmagoria<\/a> \u2013 you no longer need to start at point a and work your way through the game. Instead, it\u2019s broken up into Chapters, and you can pick and choose from these Chapters, solving the game in a non-linear fashion. This does<\/em> wreck the story a little, but if there\u2019s something you can\u2019t solve in Chapter 2 and you want to skip ahead, well, this lets you.<\/p>\n There\u2019s also a hints system with a timer attached, but you can turn the timer off. However, asking for hints [which are in the UHS style \u2013 the more you request help with a puzzle, the less abstract the clue becomes] the lower your score drops. [You can totally cheat, though: save before asking for a clue, ask for a clue, lose the points, and then restore.]<\/p>\n So, really, there\u2019s a lot of interface goodness going on here that I like, but you\u2019ll notice that I haven\u2019t really talked about the main ingredients of any adventure game: the plot, characters and puzzles, that\u2019s because \u2013 unfortunately \u2013 none of these stand out in particular in this game.<\/p>\n Torin is a fairly average teenager who lives on a planet called Strata in an area of that planet called The Lands Above. His life is fairly humdrum until, one day; his parents get vanished by an evil witch named Lycentia. He vows to find them. To do this, he has to pass through several \u201clayers\u201d of strata, encountering different environments and people on each layer until he finds the witch and frees his parents.<\/p>\n This idea is great. Strata sounds like it should be immense fun and on layers one and two, it certainly is. There\u2019s lots to see and lots to do and the inhabitants are all suitably interesting, but from layer three [and downwards] the whole game becomes far more linear. Now, you\u2019re trying to reach the end of the world so you can get one more layer down. You also don\u2019t see very much of these later layers \u2013 in one criminal case, a land that should be very interesting to explore [Pergola] \u2013 a place that looks green and full of forest-life \u2013 is exactly four or five screens big. And not even scrolling screens, either.<\/p>\n There are also characterization problems. Everyone\u2019s basically a walking stereotype. Torin is blonde and handsome, but not the sharpest tool in the shed. The skunks you meet in Escarpa are testy and ready to defend their territory with their \u201cweapons.\u201d A two-headed vulture has a \u201cgood side\u201d and a \u201cbad side.\u201d It\u2019s all so terrifically paint by numbers that it\u2019s almost sad to watch. This is especially true of Torin\u2019s love interest [who gets hinted at in the second world, foisted on the player in the third world and summarily disappears from the game after a couple of lines of dialogue.]<\/p>\n Special mention has to be made \u2013 when talking about the characters \u2013 of the Bitternuts. I have no <\/em>idea why they\u2019re in the game.\u00a0\u00a0 Allow me to elaborate: Strata is mostly colourful and largely kid-friendly. The characters you meet all have humorous dialogue that will sometimes have something for the kids and something for the adults in the audience. While the characters are kind of ho-hum, some of their lines are fantastic. Then, out of nowhere, there\u2019s the Bitternuts. This is an in-black-and-white segment of the game that takes place in a fictional sitcom featuring the Bitternuts. It is a serious break in what is \u2013 until that point \u2013 a pretty immersive experience. Sure. It\u2019s Al Lowe, and yes, he likes humour. And absolutely, this is very meta humour, but it\u2019s a giant disconnect from the rest of the game.<\/p>\n Lastly, I feel that \u2013 given that this is an adventure game \u2013 I should talk about the puzzles. Now, to be fair, none of these are veer particularly into real <\/em>headscratcher territory, but most of them \u2013 especially the later ones \u2013 err on the side of \u201cfrustrating.\u201d Some bad examples: There are two mazes. One tile puzzle without any clues. A sight puzzle that relies [somewhat heavily] on your intuiting that colours matter, a musical puzzle that relies on you understanding scales, what appears to be a simple stepping-stones puzzle that isn\u2019t as simple as it first looks…basically: there\u2019s not enough clues. The game almost expects you to use the hint feature to figure out what should be hinted at through game play. It\u2019s iffy design.<\/p>\n So, my by-line was about Al Lowe meeting Roberta Williams, but I haven\u2019t explained that at all, so let me try that real quickly. See, I think that Al Lowe looked at King\u2019s Quest in an oblique kind of fashion and thought: \u201cyou know, that series needs a refresh. I\u2019m sure I can do something like it with a little bit of a twist going on. It\u2019ll be great! Sierra will have two King\u2019s Quests!\u201d Except that history has shown that it didn\u2019t work out that way.<\/p>\n Torin\u2019s Passage is an OK game with some beautiful [if forgettable] music and animations wrapped around it. Animation wise, this is the game King\u2019s Quest 7 was trying to be. It has a great world that\u2019s let down by it\u2019s humdrum handling of the characters, situations and puzzles. It isn\u2019t an Al Lowe failure, but it\u2019s also not his best work, either. It\u2019s a shame, too: a different [maybe more science fiction?] handling of Strata might have lead to sequels, but what is here is what it is. And what it is is decidedly average.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By and large, when Al Lowe wasn\u2019t making Larry games, he was doing interesting things with user interfaces in different games. In Black Cauldron, he did the \u201cLucasarts Interface\u201d before there was such a thing by binding \u201coften used\u201d adventure commands to the f-keys. In Troll\u2019s Tale, he wanted to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10],"tags":[18,3,17,31],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=269"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":273,"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269\/revisions\/273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Torin's](\"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/torin_boogle_and_maze.png\")
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