My friend Laurie and I have just finished Drowned God, and I’m
not sure what feeling is stronger–our admiration for the game or the need to
go get some therapy. This is the strangest, creepiest, most psychedelic adventure
game I’ve yet to come across.

The tagline of this ambitious game is “Unlock
40,000 Years of Lies,” and they aren’t exaggerating much. As alien conspiracy
stories go, this one makes Special Agent Mulder seem like a cynical amateur.

The
game begins as your character, an unnamed special agent yourself, arrives at a
mysterious headquarters to receive something called the “Bequest Globe.”
This artifact makes it possible for you to travel between various realms of reality,
tracking down the aforementioned secrets and lies. The game has a randomizer that
allows you to put in a name and receive a number by which your character is known.
Throughout the game, this number remains relevant. Before sending you off on your
adventures, the computer console in the headquarters reviews for you a whole series
of past lives you have lived. It’s a creepy and creative beginning.

Next,
in time-honored Myst-clone fashion, you set off to explore four different
realms: Binah (Air), Chesed (Water), Din (Earth), and Chokmah (fire).

This
is a first-person, point-and-click adventure with that tidy look that comes from
games built using programs like Macromedia Director (though in this case it was
something called Metagraphics Media!Lab). The graphics are lush and wildly varied,
with mountains of imagery laden with symbolism and allegory.

Through your
travels, you explore Stonehenge, match wits with Morgan LeFay and a drunken Templar
Knight (yet another old dude guarding the Holy Grail), explore mysterious DNA
implants, get stuck in bewildering revolving rooms, and much more. Along the way
you rub elbows with practically every conspiracy theory in history, from the Templars
to the Illuminati to Edgar Cayce to the Philadelphia Experiment to Area 51.

The
plot of this long game is given to you in the standard adventure game notes and
journals, but even more often from characters you meet along the way. What’s interesting
about the plot is that, even though it is utterly incomprehensible, it never put
me off. Why? Two reasons. First, the babble spouted by the various spooks I encountered
might have been mumbo-jumbo, but it was beautifully written mumbo-jumbo. In fact,
Drowned God has some of the most poetic writing of any game I’ve come across
(Azrael’s Tear is the only other game that comes close in this regard).
My gameplaying buddy and I got to the point where we just enjoyed letting this
volcanic torrent of beautiful babble wash over us like ear candy.

The second
reason the incomprehensible plot didn’t anger me was the feeling all through the
game that, even if it didn’t make sense to me, it made sense to the game’s characters
and creators. In other words, the malarkey was done with such well-researched
conviction that I bought it.

A large factor helping this baffling plot hold
together is the continued resonation of various themes and images all throughout
the game. While one of the main strengths of the game is the wild variety of locations
and settings, throughout the game certain images, names, and concepts keep recurring
in ingenious new ways. It gives this varied game a real sense of unity.

There’s
a lot of music in the game (by “Miasma”), and it’s a rich and varied
score.

For puzzle lovers, Drowned God is a treasure trove. Everything
from challenging AI games to Myst-y mechanical puzzles to circuit connectors to
inventory plug-ins. This collection of tricky puzzlers are challenging and frequently
innovative. One early puzzle in particular, which deals with a dialog between
Einstein and Newton, was just brilliant.

Final Grade: B+

If
you liked Drowned God:
Watch: The Parallax View
Read:
The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
Play: Azrael’s
Tear

System Requirements:
Windows 95
P75
2x CD-ROM drive
16-bit sound card