Kult


Title           Kult
Game Type       Adventure
Company         Exxos, 1989
Players         1
HD Installable	No
Compatibility   OCS/ECS?
Submission      Jonathan Armstrong

Review
This is one of my all-time favorite games on any platform. Looking
through the Net, it appears as though it was renamed "Chamber of the
Sci-Fi Mutant Priestess" for release in America (or elsewhere?)  It
presents a sort of visionary weirdspace that is definitely locked into
time - a postmodern collusion of technology (the Amiga) and downright
funky Germanic weirdness that has a definite European aesthetic to it.
(Back before it was banal to e-mail people on the other side of the world,
we Americans often marvelled at getting software from Norway or France and
the particular aesthetics of a game often coroborrated with its country of
origin.)

The game seems to take place sometime far into the future, although the
future looks a lot like the past. The game consists of a series of rooms,
each of which has a puzzle that needs to be solved. Not a typical
text-based adventure game or anything of that nature, the game is rather
purely visual with a point and click interface, and is the most likely
predecessor to games in the Myst vein. You must collect a series of icons
and tokens, go about the rooms, and attempt to solve a series of puzzles.
The puzzles are very strange and only make sense in a very disconnected,
psychedelic sort of way. In fact, this has got to be one of the most
bizarre, trippy games ever invented!

The game requires solving five "Ordeals" (De Profundis, The Twins, In The
Scorpion's Presence, The Wall, and The Noose.)  You may freely travel
around to any of the five Ordeals via a three-dimensional pathway that
encircles the rooms. Once you are in a room, you have little idea what to
do. Each room is three-dimensional and you just try to push and pull
things around until you find something that works. The trick is, of
course, to not recreate the beginning of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and do
something to cause your death. Again, this game is highly abstract, which
is what makes it so appealing!

You collect various items, some of which are necessary for passing
subsequent ordeals. For example, you need to obtain a Goblet from the
Twins ordeal in order to progress through the rest of the levels. The
interface is very much like Myst or some similar game - drop the icon of
the object you're carrying over the mouth of the statue if you wish to
perform the action of "putting the egg in the statue."

Visually, this game is about as close as you can get to doing a high dose
of Ketamine while sitting in your living room, and is immensely enjoyable,
and doesn't take a million years to solve. Plenty of hints/cheats are
available out there on the Net, just search for these under either of
the game's two monikers.




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