You are a weary traveler whose flight has been delayed, so you decide to kill some time by touring New York City by cab. Only the cab driver turns out to be a minion of the devil, and until you can pay his steep fare, you're in for one hell of a ride...

Hell Cab was created by the legendary Pepe Moreno known for his beautifully drawn and written comics and graphic novels with a very striking style that is easily recognizable to his fans. It is a bit of a stretch to call this an adventure game but it does have some adventure elements. The game is point and click in the slideshow format. The cursor changes to indicate change of direction or options for interaction. There is an inventory and in one case you don’t just click the item to use it but rather drag it to its required. Accessing the inventory while activity is happening in the game is not a good idea-a number of times the game froze or became “stuck” and I either had to Ctrl-Alt-Del to get out of it or Alt-Tab on the occasions where I was somewhat luckier.

Hell Cab has some striking backgrounds and must have been a visual feast in 1993-very similar in appearance to The Journeyman Project Turbo. It was one of the very first games to take advantage of the then-new CD-ROM technology. Some backgrounds are digitized from photographs of actual places. The few characters you interact with feature moving mouths similar to those in Dust or Titanic: Adventure out of Time. For those adventure game historians and trivia buffs, some of the QuickTime movies are from The Residents’ Freak Show (which is more eye candy than game). This is probably because the late Jim Ludtke of The Residents had a hand in some of the graphics in the game.

Music is crystal clear and helps sets the scene quite well, but if I never hear the elevator music again, I will be a happy man. Acting is generally poor, especially the voiceover at the beginning. The cab driver, Raul, was an exception, and suited the game adequately.

This game is impossible to get working right, in my opinion because of the problems with compatibility of old QuickTime with modern systems. Even in Windows 98, I could never get this game to work right. Anyhow, I bit the bullet and decided to play it disregarding the “cannot find GDI” errors. These errors are commented upon in the Readme file:

“A common message if there is a compatibility problem is a "General Protection Fault Error in GDI.EXE" when Hell Cab is loaded. If you encounter problems and are not certain whether or not your graphics driver is at fault (please check below for known problems), you can switch to 16-color mode and run Hell Cab. You will encounter a few error messages when in 16-color mode which you can bypass and the graphics will not display correctly, but you will still be able to play the game.”

Other warnings in the Readme include:

“Be VERY careful when clicking repeatedly, as Windows will store your mouse clicks. Windows will execute them one by one, often causing unwanted results. When watching a video sequence, such as the ones in the Empire State Building lobby or in Hell's reception area, you should let it play through without interrupting it by clicking the mouse. If it is stopped before it completes, the video sequence may cause the bag, Soul-O-Meter and inventory window to not respond until the player allows a video to play through completely or moves to another part of the game (such as another hallway).”

And now for a special feature:

"As an added feature there is a quick way to quit Hell Cab without saving your current position. This can be done by pressing the "ESC" key. Warning! You will not be prompted to save your current game if you exit the program this way.”

What a great idea-a way to quit without saving your game! Good thinking, Pepe!

These issues suggest a very buggy game to me…

I also had color palette errors-most were overcome in Windows XP by playing in Windows 95 compatibility mode with 256 colors and 640x480 resolution. When the color became distorted, I just pressed the Windows key and then clicked on the Hell Cab window on the taskbar-this tended to fix the errors.

All in all, the game can be completed in about thirty minutes once you know what you are doing-it will take you much longer with the freezing and trial and errors to lengthen your gameplay. I don’t blame you if you give up. It has taken me more than ten years of intermittent attempts to get to the end sort of like Mortalus but for different reasons. The adventuring elements are far outweighed by the mad clicking to a point that I felt I was playing a primitive action game. This too made me very frustrated. The backgrounds certainly aspire to being an adventure game, but at best, it has adventure game elements. Still, better than none at all…? If I had to give this a grade, I couldn’t go higher than a D+.