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You are one of many people who have been abducted from earth by aliens and transported to an alternate dimension where you are dumped in a strange, yet familiar city. Your quest is to explore the city, and find the clues that will lead you to your captors and help you get back home. In addition to standard first-person RPG features of that era, like skills, stats, experience points and a repertoire of shops and places to visit, the game offers moral evaluation of your character, and depending on your actions you become good or evil, and that affects how the environment reacts to you. Encounters are not necessarily just resolved with the turn-based combat system, but you can also try to trick, charm or bribe opponents. The storyline is non-linear, for example allowing you to take a job in order to enhance a particular skill or just to pass away time. This was a planned 5 part series, but only the second part The Dungeon was ever released but not on PC. It has achieved cult status for its ambition. It uses a 3D first-person perspective, with a small window taking up about 1/9 of the screen at the center. The player controlled one character who had an absolute minimum of visual representation - the closest to a character image to be found was when one encountered a "doppelganger" monster. The 3D used was not like other contemporary 3D graphics either. Most other 3D first-person games used static graphics to represent the walls, meaning the player could only move one tile at a time. However, in this game the rate of travel depended on the character's speed, and moved incrementally along the tile. Distant walls would slowly come in to focus rather than suddenly appear. It had a raycasting engine equaling that of Wolfenstein 3D, which came seven years later, but was recognized for popularizing the system. However, the design implemented right-angle movement only. Another upshot of the fact that the graphics were rendered rather than simple images is that while the sun was setting, the entire palette of colors changed convincingly. Distant waterfalls moved, and the rain was realistically rendered. |
