hi everyone. Reading the novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, about two idealistic friends developing an 8-bit (I think) game where the character grows up and experiences a profound journey, I started thinking about whether the Spectrum could handle a game involving emotional depth and narrative.
I've definitely felt things during gameplay -- epic loneliness during Tir Na Nog for instance, a sort of mild grief when teammates die in Rebelstar Raiders and Shadowfire, as well as frustration during multiple platform games -- but I think most Spectrum games aim for excitement and reward rather than other emotions.
Here's my draft idea for something different. I don't know if it could genuinely be done on a Spectrum or emulator -- it might need something more sophisticated, but in the Spectrum aesthetic. It would have to be 128k or multiload, anyway. But I think the point would be not the graphics but the story and character.
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THE EGG
The title evokes Easter Eggs, Chuckie Egg and Dizzy. But in the game, it becomes a symbol for something more.
The game has two distinct modes, ADULT and CHILD. One of them is text-based, and uses graphics as illustrations in a small window above the text, only drawing on magenta, cyan, black, blue and some white for highlights. The mood is sombre and subdued.
In this 'dimension' of the game, you are an adult waking up in some form of hospital or medical suite. Through text you navigate the environment and interact with a nurse and therapist, choosing answers to their questions from a set of options that takes you down multiple possible paths. Your fatigue, energy, depression, happiness are measured visually, like the hearts, crosses and sperm in Frankie Goes to Hollywood. These aspects of your personality vary according to your authentic answers and your discovery of the truth about your past, while your fatigue grows and energy wanes, the longer you take to successfully uncover your own repressed backstory by looking through notes, diaries and photographs, choosing the right medication, and talking to your therapist. So there's a time limit based on you making the right choices while you have the stamina to keep going, before you collapse back into sleep.
This may sound grim and in a way it's meant to be challenging. Think of the game Mindshadow as a parallel, and there could be minigames along the lines of Deus Ex Machina and Frankie, based around visual navigation of your fears and your barriers to discovering the truth (eg. a mini Breakout to progress to the next level).
You enter the CHILD mode through uncovering of specific artefacts and the successful discovery of memories -- through the conversations you have with the nurse and therapist, and through your searches through your own possessions (a cassette, a photo album, a hidden diary).
This mode uses the full Spectrum 'spectrum', focusing on reds, yellows, cyan, greens, and using BRIGHT fully. It would be vivid and beautiful compared to the bleaker adult text adventure. It's like entering the technicolour world of Oz. Think of Dizzy's colourful vistas, but with the techniques we can now draw on to avoid colour clash. Particle effects like Rex to create waterfalls and storms. Gorgeous settings, detailed graphics. It looks like the Spectrum games we remember, but as we remember them, not actually how they were.
In this mode the player progresses through various levels - The House, The Garden, The School, the Park, the Underworld.
On the surface these look very much like familiar games. The House recalls Pyjamarama - not a copy, but evocative of it. The Garden has elements of PSSST's flowers. The School is a level that reminds the player instantly of School Daze. The Park is Hungry Horace, but more detailed and realistic than that old classic. These aren't copies, but memories of those games -- yet technically far 'better'.
These levels seem fun and innocent compared to the present day adult mode. Jumping, avoiding, shooting, working out routes. You aren't given any clues. You have to play based on your memory of how the old games worked. And after a while you'll realise that you can pick up items, join them together, drop them, use them. One of these is hidden on a top shelf of your parents' bedroom. It's your Easter Egg.
Once you collect this item, you find yourself on a reward screen reminiscent of Sabre Wulf's 'amulet' display, showing you that you've found one piece of the puzzle -- one fragment of the egg. And you return to the adult level.
Through the CHILD levels, you gradually come to realise that there is more to it than just fun gameplay with beautiful graphics and smooth animation. Items from the ADULT level recur, like diaries, photos and locked boxes. You are navigating through memories of your childhood, symbolically, through the games you remember, rather than through a real environment. The items you discover link to your exploration of your own repressed memories. And so some of the game is surprisingly sinister and grown-up, with elements of your adult life creeping in.
You progress through alternate levels of CHILD and ADULT - bullied at school, abandoned by your parents at home while they work, escaping to the park, where you're chased by older boys. Gradually it becomes clear that a terrible assault happened in the park. When the big boys catch you, you're returned to ADULT level, and should feel a genuine shock and realisation about what happened to you on that afternoon when you bunked off from school and didn't go home.
From there, you're transported to an arcade puzzle level where you have to assemble all the parts of the egg. Think of the mini-games in RoboCop for instance. But here, you know that you're putting together fragments of your broken self, which were shattered by your experience.
The goal is to face up to your repressed past and reassemble yourself as an adult. The final level combines the palettes of the ADULT and CHILD level, and arcade with text, as you form a complete, mature individual that can go out into the world as a strong, authentic person.
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I can imagine this might sound too bleak to some, but it would be very different from most retro ZX games now, and most Spectrum games from the classic period.
Am I cracked, or does this have any promise as a potential idea?
