Nikopol: Secrets of the Immortals
Preview
'1984' - with aliens!
by Marcus Mulkins
previewed on PC
Our story begins… (cntd)
Now, just as an added twist, recall that Nikopol had been in suspended animation for 20 years. At the time he had been frozen, he had a son, Alcide Junior, who is now the same age and – setting aside the repaired broken leg, essentially identical to his dad. Junior learns of his father’s escape and takes to tracking him down for the inevitable joyful reunion. Once they do meet up, how he is going to react to not just daddy, but also an alien tag-along… Well, you’ll just have to cross that bridge when you get to it.
It’s ‘1984’ all over again
Like Orwell, Bilal had been trying to envision the near future back in 1980. And like Orwell, his vision was a bit too ambitious for what actually came to transpire. As far as I can remember, in 1993 we didn’t have any form of suspended animation and we didn’t toss our criminals into an orbit around the Earth.
And I’m wondering, as a form of punishment, how onerous can it be if you’re put into sleep freeze? One moment, they’re laying you down; the next moment they’re pouring you out. There’s no sensation of confinement and missing out on the action for 20 years. Other than the awkwardness of working through the social re-integration, where’s the pain from which we learn the errors of our ways? Or will we be rehabilitated via sleep learning, like in Demolition Man? Likewise, I haven’t seen France taken over by a Fascist dictator. Corporate lackey may be more like it though, so maybe reality is only a decade or two behind Bilal on that score.
Nikopol is meant to be ominous and foreboding, a look at a grim What-If?-society. If not for the Egyptian ‘god’ aliens literally floating into the picture, what would remain would be something very much like ‘1984’. But given the close proximity dating, we slip off into Science Fiction. That isn’t really a criticism – except that the computer graphic artists at White Birds Productions have really gone overboard on the dark-toned imagery. I have to really crank up the gamma setting just to catch many of the details that would otherwise be lost in the shadows.
Entertaining romp
This is a trend that I’ve been witnessing in nearly every Horror game that has popped up during the last decade. I don’t know if this is a consensus of the artists or if the developers have just fixated on the concept that dark pictures = dark emotional perceptions = a perceptible appropriate physical reaction from the viewer. Like they seem to think that evrybody is automatically afraid of the dark. Maybe I’m abnormal – scratch that: I am; no doubt about it – but instead of being uncomfortable and/or disconcerted by dark imagery, I find I am simply just annoyed because I have to go through so much just to catch all the artistic details. In a point-and-click game, details are important.
Other than these two niggling concerns, I’m expecting that Nikopol: Secrets of the Immortals will be an entertaining romp. Probably an entertaining enough romp that I’ll be seriously looking forward to the next installment.
