Enclosure

[davidn]

WARNING: There are some graphic scenes in this game. If you could not handle 5 Days a Stranger or 7 Days a Skeptic, do not attempt to play this game.

I really do walk into these things, don't I?

The premise

As recommended to me by rakarr last week, Enclosure is a horror/mystery adventure done in a version of Sierra's AGI engine. The idea is that you're a con-man who masquerades as a psychic, and have been picked up to join a ghostbusting mission at an abandoned research station where mysterious sightings have been reported. Naturally this turns out to be as bad an idea as it sounds, your means of leaving the station are cut off very early on, and it's up to you to solve the mystery and survive while the rest of the party are gradually picked off.

It struck me that the adventure is very well animated for an AGI game - a lot is done with the few pixels on offer in the horizontally doubled resolution. In fact, like I mentioned for Judith before, the 80s appearance of the game does quite a lot for the scare factor in itself - PC speaker stings conjure up bad memories for me in particular, and it's strange to see claustrophobic and frightening environments (and grisly murder scenes) through the previously innocent graphical style, making it look like a really twisted King's Quest. However, the game itself seems undecided as to whether it wants to take the light-hearted tone of the other AGI games or not - there's a part where you've just discovered the body of someone you were talking to a few minutes ago, and have to cross the room over an escaped ant colony to get a vital item. If you walk across without dealing with the ants, they'll leap on to your character and jump away revealing a skeleton that then shrugs wearily. It's as if opening the escape pod in 7 Days resulted in you being squashed by a falling anvil.

The inevitable

The storyline starts off well as you explore and talk to people, but ultimately it seems rather end-heavy, in that the gradual decay expected from these sorts of games is just about present but then accelerates massively towards the end. There are a couple of deaths throughout the storyline, and then it begins squashing everything into the very last part where you discover that *thunk* he's dead, and *spthwap* she's gone as well, as if the writer had suddenly realized that it was the end of the game and the surviving party was still far too large. After a good buildup otherwise, the answer to the mystery is done in a really appallingly Scooby Doo-like fashion as well - it would have been equally satisfying if it had just turned out that the ghost was really Mr Jameson the caretaker from the nearby abandoned fairground who was trying to scare people away from the goldmine.

I would certainly recommend a walkthrough, because a lot of the time, the puzzles are of the variety where you have to do something and then wander around the station for ages trying to work out the one detail that's changed (although Scorpion from Mortal Kombat will occasionally appear for some reason and give you a hint as to what to do next). You can die fairly easily in it, but for the most part, not in enormously sadistic and ridiculous ways like Roberta Williams' series - the only real sticking points are the two arcade sequences, which are both completely awful (and the game has the courtesy to open the game with one of them, but it gets better after that, I promise).

It's not something on the level of the Chzo games as the top description would imply (in fact it would seem to be rather closer to Hugo's House of Horrors in mood), but it's a decent attempt at one, and I admit that it certainly managed to scare me a couple of times.

Comments

[tamakun.livejournal.com]

Thank you for reminding me that I still have yet to finish the trilogy of Trilby games. I... think I finished the first one (my memory is hazy, but I think I did get through it) but I wanted to see the others...

[davidn]

It's definitely worth finishing them! They only get better as they go on - I actually find myself hesitating to recommend 5 Days to people because it's so sub-par compared to the other games, saying that once you're over that they get a lot better... even though I remember that when played on its own as a first impression, 5 Days isn't a bad game at all.

[tamakun.livejournal.com]

I originally got interested in the games when Yahtzee built that "Art of Theft" game. Trilby sounded like an interesting character to find out more about, so I started going through the other, earlier games.

Now that you mention that 5 Days is not as good as the others, I have high hopes, even though I enjoyed it for its storyline. :D I should get to them! :)

[davidn]

It must have been... an experience to go back and find out the kinds of games that he starred in before that one :) Similarly, I think that it was after Art of Theft came out that I suddenly found the series, although I hadn't played it before the Chzo games... I remember other people who had only played Art of Theft being mystified by how I could be scared of a 'Trilby' game.

The storyline is my favourite aspect of the games, and specifically, just how mad it gets later on, knowing that the games weren't planned out as a series but bolted on on top of each other, and how much sense they all nevertheless seem to make together. I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts!

[rakarr.livejournal.com]

Actually, there are four games in the series. In the order of their release (I think): Five Days a Stranger; Seven Days a Skeptic; Trilby's Notes and Six Days a Sacrifice. Trilby's Notes is a departure in that it uses a text parser instead of a point-and-click interface. They're rather enjoyable games, and I wouldn't want you to miss out on one.

[tamakun.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this! I also wouldn't want to miss out on the continuity (if there is any), but it also satisfies the completist in me to get through the series and not have an open hole in the middle there. :)

[rakarr.livejournal.com]

I'm glad I'm not the only one that resorted to using a walkthrough fairly early on. It's not that the puzzles are hard, but that the game is very directionless until the end.

And regarding the action sequences, I don't usually take adventure games up on their offer to let me skip them, because usually they're reasonable. These two are dreadful and don't just need to be skippable (which they aren't); they need to not exist to begin with. The first one is fairly atmospheric until you realise the part you can land on seems to be one pixel wide, but the second is just unnecessary and masochistic. And that Frank guy keeps blocking you.

Anyway, yes, I agree with your assessment of the game overall. It's immersive and makes you want to continue with it, but it's far from the peak of its craft, even among free/independent games.

But as I said, it's a huge improvement over Hank's Quest.

[davidn]

The awfulness of the arcade sequences really can't be stressed enough - that second one took me many, many tries, and I eventually passed it by staying at the lower left of the screen, dodging up if a hole appeared at the bottom, and just relying on luck hoping that Frank didn't drift too far down and not many holes appeared where I was going.