Most of you who watch my streams have noticed when I suddenly got in a kick of point-and-click games... This would explain why the most people that’d show up were 4.
During my adventuring I stumbled across an old Winblows games called Lighthouse: The Dark Being. Created by Sierra On-line back in 1996 it was very well known for its extremely vague and difficult puzzles. This, I must say, piqued my interest quite a bit. My years of puzzle solving however, NEVER helped me when it came to this game.
Unlike other point-and-click games where the developers made it easy for you to infer what you had to do, this game makes it seem like they made it almost impossible to complete on your first playthrough without missing an item or fucking something up so bad that you'd have to reload a previous save file, or what usually happens, you go around to every location you've been to just to make sure you got everything.
The story was slightly entertaining, and for the graphics at that time they were semi-amazing. You play as an assumed female character (Note: the handbag), who just moved into a new place along the Oregon coast. He/She/It is a writer, and your neighbor is some sort of mad scientist in a way who lives in a lighthouse with his annoying infant. You look out of the window to see the place struck by lightning and then glow. You hear and answering machine message from the guy telling you to come over to his place to watch his daughter for him.
When you get there the front door is locked. Why would someone tell you to come over to watch your baby and yet you have the doors locked? I’d probably just say to hell with it, go back home and look up porn. Sadly, that isn’t an option in this game. Instead, you have to open his mailbox and take his note. Why such an odd place for a note? Not just that, but isn’t going through someone’s mail… I don’t know… ILLEGAL?! The note basically tells you how to unlock the door, and after entering you journey the house to find the child.
Of course, you find the kid and everything is peachy. Until there is a loud noise which scares the damn menace, and you’re ears start to bleed from the annoying crying. So you go check on the thing to find the “Dark Being” that the game is titled after take the kid (Thank fucking GOD!), and jump through a portal. Obviously you’re supposed to jump in after it. In the mad scientists journal it basically just talks about how this parallel place is just a concept of Godel’s Universe.
For you math geeks you can open your textbooks to page 573, and read section 8 paragraph 2: For those who aren’t in college and/or math geeks: WIKI THAT SHIT!
The story doesn’t really go beyond this. You just need to get the doctor and the kid back. Meanwhile, building a DustBuster™ powered gun to capture the “Dark Being”.
Regardless of story, critics could never get over these god damned puzzles. On some of them you have to be precise with your clicks, or even turn up your monitors’ brightness settings so you can actually see an item in a less than optimally lit room.
I think it's needless to say that I had to use a walkthrough at a few points (Mainly the extremely confusing mineshaft maze), and let me tell you... You may be thinking ‘Well why didn’t you just make a map for the maze?’ Well guess what? You fucking can't. AT ALL! Shit is so jumbled you'd be lost even more if you did try to make one. Luckily, the creators had a hint system for the game, but the fucking tw@ seemed extremely selective in helping you, and at points making it even vaguer.
During the time frame of point and click games, it seemed to dwindle off and die for a while in the late 90's... Which I blame on Lighthouse: The Dark Being even though it was released in 96. The few people who have watched the playthough of the game kept saying. "Wow! This is like Myst." I've heard it so many times (23 times to be exact) that I just said... "Fuck! This is nothing like Myst except for the interface and how you interact with it... It's a standard Point-and-Click 1st person game... You know what? I'm gonna play through all of those so you people will see the difference." Which I more than happily did…
No comments:
Post a Comment