HAVE you ever thought that beneath the everyday and mundane aspects of existence lurks such supreme terror and depravity that the human mind just has to filter it out. Next time you are stuck on the tube for an hour it may not be simply that London Regional Transport are a bunch of bungling buffoons - it may be some dark and occult force that have made them that way.
It may have been encounters with LRT that led the famous patron of such schools of thought, H.P. Lovecraft, to pen great works on this very tpic. Such has been the appreciation of his efforts that the frenzied paranoic masses invented a role-
Now, I am making no statement whatsoever on the social adjustment of the people at Electronic Arts,but they too have decided that this is a pretty neat idea and have released this, the first in a series of adventures in this vein.
I say adventure, but much of the first disc is taken up with the generation of a character so it is more correct to say the first of a series of role-
The character generation ends up producing a fairly Cthulhu-
Next up is occupation. If you chose to be a woman I'm afraid that not all of the professions are open to you, but before my sisters of liberation of OASIS launch suicide bombing raids on EA HQ I'd like to point out that this is in keeping with the period of the '20s, when this game is set. Professions include amateur sleuth, occultist, novelist and the very honourable, noble and just career of journalism.
Your choices so far will give a start in some skills and a fund to enable you to practise others. Some skills may not be relevant to this particular scenario. But the characters are transferable to other titles in the series. However, beware, the skills do make a difference.
Your immediate task is to stay alive. There are some very strange goings on, er, going on. You'll be well into the game before you start to understand what you have to do.
The adventure surrounds the mysterious town of Blytheburg and a mythical black dog, the hound of shadow. Although much of the action takes place initially in London it will be necessary to travel to Blytheburg in the course of your investigations.
A lot of investigation also takes place in the reading room of the British Museum. Getting in may be the first test of your abilities.
One aspect of the game is was particularly impressed with was the interaction with other characters. No longer is the player assumed to be the only intelligent human being in existence. Other characters also make observations and suggestions which, while sometimes it may seem that they are dragging the plot in a direction one might not particularly wish to take, is certainly far more realistic.
The game is interspersed with lovely sepia-
This is the best presented adventure I've seen for a while and definitely the most interesting. I would be happier looking forward to the next in this series if only I could convince a rather large hound from Satan's own stable that Bonio are far more tasty.