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Review
Your blood is yearning for understanding. No matter how harshly you’ve been warned, no matter how scary the elders’ stories, you are drawn to explore the old ruins outside the village.
On the surface, Terra Nova plays as an old-school parser adventure. A map full of blocked passages, basic but engaging puzzles to unblock them, finding artefacts and information that uncover the events that came before. And death.
Even though the map is small, there’s a whole lot to discover, thorough and persistent investigation is rewarded. Doubly so because a number of discoveries about the backstory are not strictly required to move on to the next part of the map, or indeed even to complete the game.
Another reason why playing in an adventurous and curious manner is the above-mentioned death. There are many well-written failure scenes in Terra Nova, some dramatic, some over-the-top humorous. Often a hint is included about what you could have done different. I really liked this, so much so that poking around looking for ways to die became a very entertaining side-quest.
I felt very sympathetic towards Kai, the protagonist of the story. A blend of a children’s book curious and brave hero, and a lonely boy who feels distanced and unconnected to his community, his determined exploration of the dangerous ruins becomes more and more justified as a deep and strong inner need, rather than being the result of the external drive of just being the “You” in and adventure game.
The setting, ancient ruins filled with half-broken tech from a bygone age, now only known through oral history, is right up my alley. The writing is certainly adequate by itself, terse and to the point, with just the right amount of atmospheric detail. I would have gladly played the raw text version had I not been aware of the Vorple multimedia version. It does gain strength with the accompanying graphics. They show the coherent author’s vision of what this imaginary world looks like, and they make the deaths even better. Likewise, the sound effects are well-suited, unobtrusive (I switch the sound off for most games that have it), and draw the player deeper into the setting in a balanced interplay with the text and images.
At times, I found the implementation somewhat on the light side. Little technical things, like the singular of a plural noun in the description not being recognised, or a verb not working in a situation one would expect it to. But also by deliberate design choice. Set on a world of ancient desert ruins, in a parser game that thrives on exploration and discovery, there were nontheless a bunch of instances where the implementation could have been at least one level more fine-grained. Such a setting lends itself superbly to the proud use of underused (and, granted, sometimes controversial) verbs such as MOVE, LIFT, LOOK BEHIND, and SEARCH. This mainly caught my attention when there was a pile of stuff in a certain location, and all I had to do was X it to find and take the object buried in there. After this, I began to notice other places where the use of more specific, or perhaps repeated, verbs would have emphasised my active influence on the surroundings and thus deepened my engagement.
The further the story progresses, the more it brings up themes and questions which go beyond the simple dungeon-search treasure-hunt set-up of the beginning. The ending especially takes the player aback, it compelled me to go through all that I had learned again and look at my discoveries about the history of the settlement of Zephyr’s Landing in a new light.
Very good game.
