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You surely remember Roger Wilco in the legendary Sierra's Space Quest series. Epsilon 9 attempts to follow the best tradition of those classic space stories. At first I didn't trust it much, because it came only on 2 disks and was made only by one guy. But - as many times before - the first look was deceiving.
The story is very, very weak: one colony on the desert planet of non-important name stopped to keep in contact. Because there was a history of problems with the extra terrestrial Stingon race (mentioned in the prequel Starbase 13), who have a special interest in the planet, they started to be suspicious of course. You play the role of Yeno Hou, who works for the Galactis forces. You are chosen to investigate what's wrong with the planet.
Arrival to the desert planet
The game begins by your arrival at the planet and landing in the colony. As I got into the controls, I started to search the first room. I found a PC, so I immediately used a "Fire" command. Yeno shrugged his shoulders and said that he would be glad to destroy it, but it could still be useful. But don't be afraid - a few seconds later a guy with machine gun ran out of the door and shot that piece of crap of the table. Yes, he was a real radical Amigan. His name was Nodd and he would become the second hero later in the game. You will face the first relatively difficult puzzle in the second room of the game and then there is a continuous series of puzzles as you progress through the game. Fortunately - they all are really logical puzzles and finally you will be able to work out how they work, nothing of the "insert the dog to the cassette player, you will get a letter" type, that was quite often seen in other adventures of that era. A good example is the room no. 4, where I lost six days of the real time in solving it. Imagine 3 levels of brain-teasers, which have twelve one-level sub puzzles and the whole thing is time limited. You will get one melted brain. But it is really wonderfully designed.
Meet the PC. And then use the icon between "talk" and "switch".
You can reach the end of the game by several ways and it depends which parts is solved by which character. Yeno is much stronger and therefore he can do some things that Nodd isn't able to.
As I have written before, the game requirements are very low. It requires only 1.5 MB on your harddisk. Graphics are beautiful and although it is not AGA, it is exactly what we expect from an adventure game. 32 colours palette is mixed so well that it looks like as twice as many colours. Also game characters are nicely drawn and their animations are smooth. Dialogs are mainly serious, there aren't any jokes in the game. Controls of the game are well-arranged and reliable. Aliens are pretty deceptive, but you can get the better of them all (one of them you will grill in an oven!).
The last part to rate is the sound. It is the only thing that I can criticise. There is a music missing on the standard A1200 because of lack of memory and there is only a few sounds effects. There is a message from author, that you need minimum of 1MB memory to play the game without music and animations, but you won't hear the music even with 2 megs (except for the short title tune, which has only 30 tones). And to play it silent? It is too similar to PC standard of those years.
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The graphics including the sprites are beautifully drawn, colourful and everything is sharp and visible, as we expect of point-n-click adventures.
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This is the only weakness of the game. Generally - there are no sounds (only a few). It is sad.
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Not as great as huge commercial adventures, but you must keep in mind that this game was done by only one man!
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| I can recommend this game, at least because of its nice and difficult puzzles. Try it. |
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