Faust

Arxel Tribe/Cryo
Projected Release Date: Fall 1999

Are you disgusted with the seemingly limited imagination of adventure
game plots? Either you’re a knight/peasant/magician in some mythical kingdom
or you’re a sleazy private detective in some past/present/futuristic city.
Well, adventure gaming is about to take a turn for the better. Faust
is a modern-day morality play set in Mississippi. You play as Marcellus
Faust, caretaker of an abandoned amusement park. When Mephistopheles arrives
to make you an offer, you must choose between a future of salvation or
eternal damnation. It is Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and
Al Pacino’s The Devil’s Advocate melded into an adventure epic.
It is a game that asks the player to make conscientious decisions, and
it doesn’t hurt that the graphics are mind-boggling.

I have seen a lot of things in my many years of adventure gaming, but
Katie tells me that my jaw was hanging to the floor when Guillaume J.
de Fondaumiere, the Executive Director of Arxel Tribe, showed us a sneak
preview of Faust. What was it that affected a jaded gamer such
as myself? Well, I don’t want to give away a key scene of the game, but
suffice it to say that if and when Faust is released in the United
States (right now it is only scheduled for release in Europe), the lines
of protest will make the uproar over Phantasmagoria seem like a
tea party. Adventure gaming will enter into a new age of maturity with
Faust as plot and theme finally transcend the insipid juvenility
that has haunted us for much too long.