Equinox

"This Game Will Drive You Bloody Insane"

I can't say I remember the original NES game Solstice very well, but I knew of it enough to be thrilled when a good friend of mine brought the cart over to my house. After all, there's nothing like obscure classics from the age of sprites to peak my interest and true enough this was, if nothing else, a very unique game.

The story is nothing out of the ordinary; basically your run of the mill “retrieve the kidnapped person,” gimmick. Instead of saving your girlfriend or some princess though, this time around you're saving your father and hero of the previous game Shadax. Perhaps the wives of the developers smacked them around for treating women like feeble objects to be captured and retrieved in the grandiose battles of powerful men. Still, seeing the victorious heroes of previous games treated like the frail little girls of more traditional titles is just a tad disheartening… I'm looking at you Donkey Kong Country!

Anyway, the story doesn't really matter. As with most adventure games it's the gameplay that really drives things. You start out wandering around on this overworld map wondering what the hell's going on at first, but soon enough you fumble your way into a dungeon where the real action takes place. You then find yourself again wonder what the hells going on as you wander about wither neither weapons nor magic, probably killing yourself several times as you get used to the games nutty mechanics. Like Mario RPG and Diablo Equinox takes place in isometric perspective.

Instead of moving up, down, left, right, you move NW, NE, SW, SE. This may be confusing at first for new players but for veteran gamers it shouldn't be a problem. The real downside to the isometric viewpoint is its total lack of depth perception. For instance, a block low to the ground towards the northern end of the room might look to be the same height as block very high up towards the southern end. Sometimes several blocks overlap the same visual space. Furthermore, because of the game intricate 3D level design you'll almost constantly be wondering where the hell anything actually is.

Oh! But it gets worse! The game's collision detection is simply brutal. Damage terrain can kill you without touching a single pixel of your character's sprite. It's like there's an invisible death bubble around everything that could possibly kill you. Add to this that the damage terrain exist as 3D blocks with no indication of where the aforementioned death bubble begins or ends and you're left killing yourself trying to execute even the most mundane of tasks. Furthermore, you can't move or jump on the diagonals, of pure north, east, south or west. Of course, many situation necessitate that you do just that! Perhaps now you can begin to understand how challenging this game is.

See, the programmers obviously knew how bad the controls were when they made the thing because they blatantly exploit their work to torture the player at every turn. They take the fact that it's impossible to tell where anything is and they make platform jumping puzzles out of it. Then they surround said puzzles with the previously mentioned brutal damage terrain. Then they throw in blocks to push, moving blocks, invisible blocks, disappearing blocks, crumbling blocks and blocks that sink when jumped on. Oh, and the invisible conveyer belt effect that randomly turns up on otherwise normal looking terrain. Then they'll flood rooms with enemies that take several hits to kill!

And I'm not kidding when I say the programmers purposefully made the controls shoddy just to raise the difficulty. For instance, while standing on any given block, you can walk right to the end of it. You can walk past the end of it until only your shadow's touching the surface of it. You can walk so far off the end of it that not a single pixel of even your shadow is touching a single pixel of the block you're supposedly standing on. Many of the game's puzzles furthermore demand that you do this to clear the kind of jumps they're demanding of you. Almost any time this procedure is warranted there will be damage terrain below to kill you if everything isn't executed exactly as demanded.

That's how difficult this game is. That you're actually expected to make regular use of the games bugs to be able to complete fairly routine tasks. Some of the things they have you doing are just unbelievable; things you'd usually only see in a speed run or something. On the other hand, that's probably what makes this game so rewarding. Solving these ridiculous puzzles and then executing the ridiculous feats it takes to complete them brings a kind of satisfaction you just can't get doing anything else. On the other hand, there were several places where I just gave up and headed to gamefaqs. I mean, there's problem solving and then there's post modern anti-jokes.

Most of the time when I was forced to resort to gamefaqs the solution ended up being something completely unreasonable and stupid. Like finding completely unmarked invisible doors or jumping into random pits of spikes to find hidden invisible blocks. Most of the time I'd already found the solution and the walkthrough simply reassured me that it was indeed what was being demanded of me and possible to execute without dying. So, what about the other aspects of the gameplay?

Well, as you can imagine, you get killed fairly often in this game. You've got a life meter, but as it only ever takes one hit to kill you, resetting the room and taking away half a point of life, it probably would have made more sense to render it as “lives” instead of “life”. Usually that's what we mean when something indicates how many times you can be slaughtered before hitting a game over screen. You also have a magic meter for casting the numerous spells you find, one in each dungeon. Most are fairly useless and some I neglected using at all

The healing spell is definitely the most handy considering how much you end up getting killed, and besides that, the save spell you get later in the game used up the brunt of my MP. The “zap” spell which instantly kills everything on screen was also useful for those times when I was just to impatient to waste time killing everything myself while the “slow” spell also saw periodic usage. The “unlock” spell which opens locked gates appears at the very end of the game when you've only got a couple of gates left and already have keys for most of them. It is required for exactly one door. The rest of the spells don't warrant any mention at all.

The over world alluded to earlier is almost entirely useless. You can wander over to different entrances to a given dungeon, but that's about as much as it's really necessary. It features bats, which you can kill for magic refills, at least when the collision detection doesn't start bugging out on you, as well as trolls which can be killed every time you get a new weapon, one each for every dungeon, to get an additional point on your life meter. If you try going to a new area before you're ready, the ghost of a boss will block your way on the bridge between worlds. The dungeons themselves are sprawling mazes featuring the kind of gameplay described above; progress through them requires various colored keys to unlock matching gates.

To complete a dungeon you must find the 12 tokens hidden within it which are used to “summon” a boss. The bosses themselves are massive sprites with woefully predictable attack patterns. The primary difficult with any boss is the likelihood of it gliding around the screen, because massive as they are, it's pretty much impossible to avoid them once they're in motion. Although there are 8 dungeons in all, the difficulty of their bosses seems entirely random. For instance, I found the first boss harder than the last.

In any case, I think the developers deserve some credit for not making the final boss some enormous big breasted harlot flying around the screen in lingerie's despite her being an “ice queen”. Instead she was a giant cloak thing with eyes. It's always rather embarrassing when developers try to use mindless pulp fantasy sex appeal to attract players and doubly embarrassing when the person playing it happens to be a girl. Still, I'll bet the reason she wasn't a giant flying sex object had more to do with the graphic designer they hired not being able to render such a thing.

What else can I say about this game? Apparently it was originally going to feature RPG type elements like towns full of NPCs and shops. Evidently though, their ambition waned and they scraped the idea. I think they made the right choice. As I see it, the gameplay just doesn't lend itself to an RPG's framework. It's a puzzle game under the very thin venire of an adventure game. If they tried to further disguise it as an RPG, it would have been a complete mess.

In conclusion, I'll say that this was a decent game. If you can bare the shoddy controls, overly demanding gameplay and other frustrations, you'll find yourself with a very unique puzzle game and dungeon crawler. Actually managing to complete the kind of crazy tasks the game demands is really very rewarding for fans of difficult gameplay. The graphics and sound are fine, but then, I'm of the opinion that such things really don't matter unless they're bad enough to prevent you from playing. It's gameplay that really makes or breaks a game; everything else is just window dressing. I give this game a 6. Horrifying as the game could be, it was fun enough that I took the time to beat it.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 07/10/06