Erinia (Enhanced version)

Break Space

Dave

Mpk

ERINIA Daniel Revenga £4.00 Dave's Review Erinia started life in 2020 as a text-only, Spanish-only, adventure for the 48K. The original PAWs game was updated with 'DAAD Ready', a modern tool to make el Disenador de Aventuras AD more accessible, so we now have this glossy, illustrated adventure in both Spanish & English, and on disk. So once you've dug out your trusty +3, replaced the broken drive belt a couple of times and cursed the day it was born, you can open your laptop and play it in your emulator of choice. The story begins in prison (remember it was written during lockdown) on the isolated oceanic island of Erinia, or more accurately Project Erinia, as you will discover. You have long since forgotten how you came to be here, if indeed you ever knew. You play Tisiphone, about to put an escape plan into action with your cell-mate Meg (nice juxtaposition of futuristic and prosaic names there – hopefully we'll meet Anakin & Barry later). The English translation is fine - it might say "flashlight", but it understands "torch". We have plenty of 'damp cells' and 'constant low hums resonating', which scene-set an oppressive atmosphere without resorting to INK 3 prose. It's the pictures that do most of the talking though. All black & white, they look cleaned-up enough to not appear lazily-digitised, yet dirty enough to be edgy and dystopian. In a couple of instances the images are dynamic, one case seeing a drawbridge either up or down depending on how curious you were about a certain lever elsewhere. The narrator gives plenty of help, As examples, you are told when an object is no longer needed, and that it might be a good idea to turn the electricity back on after fixing the cables. The most battle-hardened adventurer may find it too easy and mollycoddling, but the rest of us will be thankful. A lot of thought has gone into avoiding the usual text adventure pitfalls like 'guess the verb' or endless purposeless wandering, if you still struggle, then the author has been excessively merciful and provided a solution in the form of Tisiphone's diary. I'd say solve the game yourself, then read that. Less common features are keeping on top of your health and ammo. As you learn more about Project Erinia, you'll encounter different baddies and both get depleted when you fight. Thankfully the battles are not in real time*, but the number of turns does count: it would be a bad idea to examine a table while a gaggle of mutants is clawing at your face, for example. There's a couple of bugs to be aware of, one more fatal than the other: if you try to "pull lever" it thinks you want to "quit" the game! So levers should only be pushed and never pulled. Also "search" is interpreted as "shoot" for some reason. All in all, it's a perfect entry-level text adventure. And there's a twist...

Damn this confounded modern technology!

Poor old Meg, lying on the floor. At least let them use the lower bunk