Shadow of the Comet

Often during the holidays I decide to treat myself to a late-night game playing session, like I used to do when I was in school and staying up until past midnight was a novelty usually only reserved for New Year. After all, I'm not going to have the opportunity to have them for much longer as with any luck I'll soon be living with Whitney. That actually sounds a bit more negative than it should. Never mind. My point is that when I start playing something now, I often get tired at only about one o'clock, check my watch, and shuffle off to bed like some sort of geriatric. It's not right.

I found a moderately great abandonware site by the name of Abandonia a few days ago and have been downloading things off it like mad - one game that's taken hold of my attention is the almost completely overlooked adventure game "Shadow of the Comet", which I remembered having a demo of ages ago (in which I never got anywhere). I'm also stealing the screenshots off that site.

I never got anywhere in the demo, though, and that's hardly surprising - the game has the worst interface ever designed, involving movement with the arrow keys and some random letters on the keyboard to do things with the environment - and you have to be standing in exactly the right place to be able to do anything. Most of the actions you have to perform are so obscure ("Put the feather on the tree stump and you'll turn in to a dove") that it's much more satisfying to play the game with a walkthrough on hand. Fortunately I had one in PC Zone issue 5, back in the days when my dad bought PC magazines.

Looks like a bad Japanese film.

Despite its awkwardness (I can see why I had trouble with the demo now), I like it because of its storyline - it starts off as a very normal adventure game, but gets stranger and stranger as it goes on until you're killing members of the town who are actually undead and preventing Cthulhu from condemning what's left of the populace to a tentacley doom. The scene to the right, which is rather disturbing when it pops up full-screen, occurs after you get rid of the mayor by casting a spell and putting a statue on the star that appears on his house.

Eek!

In fact, the whole game is very unsettling. Part of this is because it insists on Kikiaing you at every opportunity - I was very glad of being able to play in a window during some sections. The charming fellow on the left, who goes by the name of Jonas, appears when your character goes exploring in a crypt alone (because no adventure game star has ever been particularly bright) - once he's survived many Knightmare-esque and often very unfair puzzles, he has to run back through the crypt while pursued by the slug monster. As monsters go it's a fairly easy encounter after a couple of saves and reloads, but sleeping was hard that night.

There's also the matter of the can of nitroglycerine that you can pick up at the bottom of a well - if you decide to collect this, numbers count back from 5 above your character's head, then he shrugs and explodes in what can only be a homage to Lemmings. The strangeness of it is inexplicable, but Infogrames was known for being a little odd sometimes.

Anyway, I've completed it now and the world is safe once again. Does anyone know what this song means at all? It appears to be something about not wasting time in your life, but the reason why it's called "Weballergy" continues to elude me. Answers on a postcard. Or just in the comments. That would probably be a bit quicker.