Zelenhgorm: Episode I
Quicklist of game characteristics -
(requested by Gameboomers members)
·
FMV (full motion video) - both gameworld and characters
·
Mouse-controlled, similar to the node-and-panning interface
used in many Cryo games
·
First person perspective with your character only visible
in cut scenes (and in the mirror)
·
You can die in the game if you make bad decisions, but most
are predictable
·
Ten save slots
·
Timed sequences, mainly fishing for pearls underwater
·
Some character interaction, but approaching people for
conversation can be risky
·
Works with Windows XP, at least on some computers
·
3 CD's with optional full install to hard drive
·
First game of a series
Most of what I talk about can be found either in the game
manual, on the game website, or at the very beginning of the game. But to
avoid all spoilers, skip the Playing Zelenhgorm and My
unsolicited opinion sections (especially the opinion section).
Playing Zelenhgorm
Zelenhgorm starts with an introductory video which is full
of confusing and sometimes violent images. A skull with oversized canine
teeth and evil-looking eye sockets lies on a beach. There is a scene in a
tavern where a fortune teller uses a deck of tarot-like cards. Mysterious
airships drop flaming objects on tall, odd-looking structures that may be
some sort of castles or city complexes. There are scenes showing people
rioting and destroying pottery and other artifacts. Someone is seen prying
up a stone tile and dropping an object into the water beneath. You see a
maggot-ridden corpse in the desert sand. Mysterious standing stones are
etched against the sky in a nighttime thunderstorm. One man performs some
sort of tribal dance while another cleans a sword, perhaps in preparation
for some sort of ritual or spell. Creaky voices tell you that your
character, Arikk Vaheirr, has been "chosen" by the "powers of water" and
that he must "awaken the ancient ones" after first awakening himself. Then
the game credits appear over images of an interesting-looking ship with 3
enormous fan-shaped sails. The ship glides into harbor, guided by an
unusual-looking lighthouse beacon. Then your character awakens with a
start. What does his dream mean? Are these images of the past or of the
future? It's a very intriguing and cinematic introduction for a game, full
of promise.
After this very dramatic opening, your character wakes up
and you get control of the game. You find the ship that your character,
Arikk, saw in his dream has mysteriously beached itself in your garden.
Everyone in your village thinks you are responsible for the ship's
presence because you are left-handed. And supposedly left-handed people
have evil powers or something. Most of the people in your village are
extremely bigoted and you meet a lot of people who blame you for
everything they think is wrong with the world simply because you are
left-handed. You have to be very careful who you talk to because most
villagers will be all too eager to have you drowned at the slightest
provocation. You are allowed a few missteps. Usually you are put in the
stocks overnight instead of drowned. But too many infractions and there's
an end to you.
Most of the game takes place within the village of Senava
and you start out by exploring the village and talking to those very few
people who are willing to talk to you without accusing you, insulting you,
or sending you to the stocks. Often you get more information by
eavesdropping on other peoples' conversations than by trying to talk to
them yourself. Besides the ship, you also find the lighthouse that you saw
in your dream. Mysteriously, after untold years of dormancy, it is now
flashing. Besides Arikk's house and the lighthouse area, you can visit the
market, Arikk's grandmother's house, the Council House, the tavern, the
dock where the ferryman waits, and a grassy park with a stone monument. By
the end of the game you will have also boarded the mysterious ship that
has beached in your garden.
People in the village don't trust Arikk, but they react in
different ways. Some are unashamedly spiteful, can't wait to see you
drowned, and tell you so. Arikk's uncle seems more afraid of him than
antagonistic and makes a big deal about how he never thought anything bad
about Arikk. The draftsman doesn't dislike Arikk, but doesn't want to be
seen talking to him. Only Arikk's grandmother really relates to him as a
person.
Most of the puzzles in Zelenhgorm are inventory based, but
inventory can be hard to find. I had a problem finding the scissors
because I didn't realize I had to get a closeup of an area before I could
see the scissors. And because the cursor to zoom in does not appear unless
you target the area you want to zoom in on, and the area I needed to zoom
in on to see the scissors did not look promising to me, I didn't think to
try to zoom in on that particular area until someone at Gameboomers gave
me a hint. So careful examination of all areas for potential zoom points
is recommended. However a surprisingly large number of inventory items are
things you have to buy at the market rather than found items. Usually you
swipe things in adventure games rather than having to pay for them. But
not in Zelenhgorm.
You have to buy several things in the market in order to
solve puzzles and finish the game. To do this, you need money. In
Zelenhgorm, pearls are used as money. There are two ways of making money.
One is by pearl diving and the other is by gambling. Pearl diving is a
rather simple timed puzzle. There are 3 locations where you are allowed to
click on the water and jump in to search for pearls. It is always the same
scene when you jump in the water and the oysters that potentially hold
pearls are always in the same places. You click them to open them and if
you find one that holds a pearl, you click it to pick it up. When you
start hearing Arikk's heart beating along with ominous music, you head
upwards to jump out of the water or you will drown. If you jump in again,
some of the oysters that held no pearls before may now have them, and vice
versa. F12 skips the diving cut scenes that play before you jump into the
water and after you jump out. Since you have to dive repeatedly to collect
enough pearls, F12 is your good friend.
Besides needing money to buy items, you also need money to
play the Jester's games and gain information from him. Each time you play,
it costs a pearl. If you win, you get your pearl back as well as a piece
of information that will be interesting, if not always valuable to you.
The Jester's games were all random games of chance as far as I could tell,
with Arikk having a one in three chance of winning.
It is possible to fight with guards, but winning gets you
nowhere. If you win the fight you will be sent to trial and either sent to
the stocks or drowned. And if you lose the fight, your grandmother puts
you to bed with a busted head and they send you to trial, etc. after
you're well enough to walk. So there's not much point in fighting. Maybe
fighting will be more useful in the next game of the series, but in this
one it's quite useless.
Plot and Character Development
In this particular installment of the series, the plot does
not advance much and I didn't notice any real character development.
Apparently as a result of his abusive treatment by his fellow Senavans,
Arikk is a very meek individual. He doesn't have much of interest to say
and asks very simplistic questions. You don't learn much about him or
about his thought processes during the game. You are left to guess what he
is thinking when he finds things and examines objects because he does not
comment on them. He doesn't write his thoughts in a journal. He rarely
talks to anyone. By the end of the game I didn't know Arikk any better
than when I started.
Installation
Zelenhgorm comes on 3 CD's. The Readme includes
instructions for a full install to the hard drive. After running the
standard game install, you copy the contents of the Gfx folders on CD's 2
and 3 to the Gfx folder inside the Zelenhgorm folder on your hard drive.
If you don't have the hard drive space, but have more than one CD, CDRW,
or DVD drive on your computer, you can put a CD in each drive to cut down
on swapping. The game will search all your drives to find the files it
needs if it doesn't find them in the Gfx folder on the hard drive.
Whether you do a full install or not, you'll need a game CD
in the CD drive in order to start the game. But you can use any of the 3
CD's for this. It doesn't have to be CD1. A full install is recommended.
Even though the gameworld is rather small, it is non-linear and there is a
lot of disc swapping without the full install.
The version of Zelenhgorm that I played had 4 language
options: English, Spanish, German, and Swedish.
An empty folder called Screenshots was created by the
installation. But I couldn't find any instructions on how to take
screenshots during the game in either the Readme or the paper manual. Nor
were there any screenshots automatically created by the game. Print Screen
did not put screen shots in the Screenshots folder. And when I tried to
use Print Screen to copy and paste a screenshot into MS Paint, the picture
was an ugly mess. Maybe the ability to take screenshots was something that
was planned that didn't make it into the final game. Or maybe they just
forgot to include the instructions anywhere.
Graphics
The graphics were mostly good quality. The view of the ship
looking through Arikk's bedroom window is particularly bad, but most of
the game looks better than that. Graphics are mostly in 640x480
resolution, though some of the zoomed in closeups, like the aformentioned
view of the ship, are obviously less. Most of the game looks better than
average for a node-with-panning type game, average being games like
Mystery of the Mummy, Loch Ness, and Pharaoh's Curse when run in software
mode.
The viewing window takes up about 2/3 of the screen. It's
similar to a widescreen movie window, extending the full width of the
screen with black bands above and below. On a 17" monitor, the band at the
top was about 1 inch tall (2.5 cm) while the band at the bottom was about
2¼ inches tall (5.7 cm), with the viewing window being about 6 inches tall
(15.2 cm). The inventory, when present, is seen in a strip that scrolls
across the 2¼ inch tall area below the viewing window.
Graphics are all FMV. Characters seem to have been filmed
separately from the backgrounds at least part of the time, though usually
this isn't too noticeable. The FMV environments were mostly very detailed
and realistic, except for the mountains in the distance which looked fake
to me. It was also a bit disconcerting to see static, frozen waves of
water while the people in the gameworld were so animated.
Sound Effects
Sound effects were mostly very good, though sometimes
somewhat repetitive. You hear such things as the creak of timber as the
wind blows, birds singing, the sound of the water, and other background
sounds. In the village you hear children laughing and crying, the squeals
and grunts of livestock, and vendors calling out what they are selling at
the market. The noise made by the lighthouse beacon is strange enough to
seem unworldly, but not so strange as to be implausible.
Music
The music sounded good as far as sound quality is
concerned. Most of it wasn't really strategically placed so as to heighten
suspense or mood though. It was sparsely used during the game. Besides
being heard in the introduction, it would sometimes play when you moved
into certain areas of the game. For example, you would always hear the
same music when you entered town from the direction of your house or
entered the market. But it didn't matter how many times you'd already gone
past that location, how far you were into the game, or whether there was
danger or not. It would always be that same music. So it lost a bit of its
drama due to repetition. A couple of places where the music really did
work well were inside the grandmother's house and in the navigation room
on the ship.
Interface
The interface is mouse-controlled and similar to the
node-and-panning interface used by game companies like Cryo and Arxel.
Using the mouse you are able to pan around 360°. The cursor only appears
when an action can be taken, such as picking up an inventory item, zooming
in, and moving forwards. A circular cursor means you can pick something
up. A triangular cursor means you can zoom in on something, move in that
direction, or talk to another character.
Movement is node-based, with transition videos (which can
be skipped using the F12 key). You are allowed to zoom in on some objects.
Right-clicking will take you back out of the zoom. A right-click when you
aren't zoomed in will bring up the inventory. Right-clicking will also
back you out of finished conversations or conversations you don't wish to
pursue.
Inventory appears as a row of items that scrolls across the
bottom of the screen. Placing your cursor near one of the ends of the bar
will cause it to scroll in that direction. Clicking on an item in
inventory produces a large view of the object that fills the viewing
window. Dragging the magnifying glass in inventory over an object in the
viewing window sometimes allows you to examine it further, for example
when you want to read a book. You can also combine items by dragging an
inventory item over one that is already in the viewing window. It's very
simple as long as you remember that sometimes you need to drag items
instead of merely clicking on them.
Minimum specs
PII 266 MHz
64 MB RAM
DirectX 7 compatible 3D
graphics card with at least 8 MB video RAM
DirectX 7 compatible
16-bit sound card
16X CD-ROM
650 MB free hard drive
space
Windows 95/98
Recommended specs
PII 450
The rest of the specs are the same as the Minimum specs.
Slydos of http://www.adventure-archiv.com reported playing
Zelenhgorm on a Windows XP computer. So even though Windows XP is not
listed as supported in the official system specs it can work.
The manual reports that there are problems with the
following video cards:
Permedia 3
VideoLogic Neon 250
Intel 810
Matrox Productiva G100
Matrox Millennium G250
Jason Video 67p
(I think they meant
Jaton Video 67p here)
I know from my own experience that Zelenhgorm isn't fully
compatible with the Matrox Mystique. Mostly it will be older cards that
have the problems. Here's a quote from the Zelenhgorm FAQ at http://www.federationx.com/moloto/faq.htm
Streaming video to textures are used a lot during the game.
This seems to be a problem on some cards with older drivers (i.e. TNT with
2.x drivers) Make sure you have new drivers installed.
The game will NOT work with 3dfx VooDoo2 graphics cards.
Some very unusual cards could also show difficulties to play the game. "
Tested computers
slower computer:
Win 98 SE
PII 266 MHz
320 MB RAM
17 GB hard drive
4.8X DVD drive
QuickTime 4.12 (from the
ROTS CD)
SB AWE 32 sound card
Matrox Mystique 8 MB
video card
DirectX 7a
faster computer:
Win 98 SE
Athlon 1.2 GHz
512 MB RAM
15 GB partition
48X CD drive
QuickTime 4.03 (from the
Bioscopia CD)
Hercules Fortissimo II
sound card
ATI Radeon 8500 128 MB
video card
DirectX 8.1
The game wasn't very playable on the PII 266 because of
problems with the video card. Most of the game looked fine, except for the
inventory that showed up at the bottom of the screen. Inventory items were
the right shape, but had their colors scrambled in a mosaic mess. Since
inventory items appeared normally in the viewing window when I clicked on
them, the game was still playable. But another problem appeared when I
attempted to go pearl diving. The entire surface of the riverbed turned
white with a blue grid stamped on it. So I had no idea where the oysters
were. Without being able to see what I was clicking on, I was only able to
collect 2 pearls in 9 dives by clicking around blindly hoping to find a
hotspot. I didn't bother with further testing on that computer, even
though gambling is an alternative way to make money. So there might have
been other video problems further on. However a PII 266 MHz processor is
more than fast enough and you could probably get away with playing the
game on an even slower computer, provided your graphics card is
compatible.
The game ran without any issues on the Athlon.
My unsolicited opinion
When I first installed the game, I was thrilled with the
FMV. Exploring the gameworld seemed almost like walking around inside a
movie. Unfortunately my initial exhilaration did not last. The gameworld
is confined to the one village until you leave it towards the end of the
game. So there isn't all that much variety in the exploration.
There are a lot of people walking around the gameworld and
the Zelenhgorm series boasts a large cast of actors. But there is not that
much opportunity for conversation or character interaction unless you
enjoy being insulted, sneered at, thrown in the stocks, or drowned.
Because your character is something of a pariah, most of the people you
see essentially function as part of the scenery. I was expecting more
character interaction. It seemed to me to be sort of a waste to have these
realistic-looking FMV people and then to make almost all of them
unapproachable. The only people who really had anything of interest to say
to me were the Jester and the grandmother. And I needed money to talk to
the Jester.
One thing that was especially annoying was that the books
on the ship were illegible. At first I thought it might be a technical
problem with my video cards. The illustrations in the books looked fine,
but the printing seemed jumbled most of the time and I couldn't make out
what it said. Here and there I'd see a phrase I could recognize among the
gibberish. I loaded a saved game from the Athlon onto the PII to see if
the text was more legible with the Matrox than with the Radeon. It wasn't.
I wondered if it might be meant to be this way - as if the books had water
damage and the printing had bled through the pages - or as if Arikk was
having problems reading an antique language. But none of the illustrations
in the books had similar "damage," which eliminated the water damage
theory. Eventually I asked about it on JA+ and on the adventure newsgroup
and three helpful people answered, saying the books were not legible for
them either. Apparently the illegibility is meant to simulate Arikk's
difficulty in reading the language. Personally I did not appreciate this
attempt at "realism" and neither did the three other gamers who I
corresponded with. It was frustrating not to be able to read what was
there, especially since you learn so little about the world outside of
Senava, or even the history of Senava itself, while you're playing the
game.
The plot of the game didn't really seem to get started
until after I'd gotten onboard the ship, and by then the game was
practically over. Instead of Arikk gradually learning more and more about
the history of his world and his place in the scheme of things as the game
progressed, he spent most of the game trying to figure out how to get on
the ship. And once he did, there wasn't much he could do there. He
couldn't even read the books. Getting on the ship only served as a trigger
for a conversation with his grandmother. The adventure had barely begun
when it ended. Continued next game.
Zelenhgorm has some very nice extra touches that make the
gameworld seem more real. For example when Arikk looks in the mirror, you
see an image of his face with blinking eyes and subtle body movement. It's
not some frozen image of a person with movement only in a couple of areas.
It's like looking at a real person in a mirror. The FMV environments with
FMV people standing around talking or working on things make the gameworld
very lifelike. At one point in the game, Arikk loses consciousness and
wakes to find a dog licking his face. If he wants to, Arikk can feed the
dog some meat he bought at the market. When Arikk offends somebody and
spends the night in the stocks, the video that plays can be different each
time. He may even get a visit and a game hint from the Jester.
There is clearly a lot of history developed for the
gameworld and its characters. If you visit the website at http://www.zelenhgorm.com/
you find a host of tantalizing background information regarding the land
of Zelenhgorm, its inhabitants, its past, and the potential dangers it
will face in the future. Especially interesting to me was the message from
the Second Voice in the Well that had the picture of the merperson next to
it. It suggested that the evil-looking skull seen in the introductory
dream sequence was that of one of an evil race of merpeople. I never
encountered anything like that Well in the game. Maybe an explanation of
what it is and where it is will surface in one of the later games of the
series. After examining the website prior to playing the game and after
viewing the introductory cut scene, I expected more mystery and drama in
the game. I expected more magic. It wasn't until I got onboard the ship
and found my way into the navigation room that I felt like I was finally
getting into the meat of the game. And then I was unable to read the books
or accomplish anything else onboard the ship.
For me this first installment of the Zelenhgorm series was
essentially just a teaser. So despite all the realism of the FMV gameworld,
the nice extra touches that added verisimilitude, and the intriguing
overall plot for the entire Zelenhgorm series, I don't think this first
installment fulfilled its promise. Unlike Amerzone and other short games
that I enjoyed, the story in Zelenhgorm never really got started until
much too late in the game. I know it was the first of a series, but I
think more story should have happened during the first episode.
I don't require much of a story in a game as long as there
is a big gameworld to explore. And I don't require much of a gameworld as
long as there is a good story with rich characters in the game. But this
game had very little of either. That leaves the puzzles. They weren't bad,
but they weren't wonderful enough to recommend the game by themselves.
Although the Zelenhgorm series still sounds very promising
as a whole, I think they could have skipped most of the first episode and
combined what was left with the next installment. As a teaser meant to
whet the gamer's appetite for future games in the series, the website
itself holds as much promise as this first game did. That's my unsolicited
opinion anyway.
Recommendations
I wouldn't recommend Zelenhgorm: Episode I for the story
because there isn't enough of one and what story there is doesn't get
interesting until too late in the game. Nor is there a large enough or
varied enough gameworld to recommend it as an exploration-type adventure
game. But there is something to be said for the realism of the FMV. So the
game might be worth trying for FMV devotees. Just be prepared for the fact
that Zelenghorm: Episode I is the introduction to a series rather than a
free-standing game that belongs to a series (the Gabriel Knight and Tex
Murphy games being examples of the latter).
Overall Grade:
I for Incomplete
copyright © 2004
GameBoomers
