EcoQuest review: diving deep into the environment

Love Letters to Adventures has been a varied experience so far.

Friend-of-the-blog Darkshoxx and I kicked off this collaboration at the start of the year, aiming to increase our game libraries and experience. The aim is to get together online every month to play a classic or obscure entry in the adventure genre, with their titles covering each letter of the alphabet.

My favourite Love Letters to Adventures title so far was May’s The Dame Was Loaded by Beam Software. This isn’t particularly surprising, considering my fondness for full-motion video (FMV) and detective narrative. The other games we’ve tried so far have had varying levels of quality. Atlantis: The Lost Tales by Cryo Interactive Entertainment is currently at the bottom of my list thanks to its bland characters and ridiculous story.

So, how did we fare with our choice for the letter ‘E’ in June? It was my turn to decide after Darkshoxx’s selection last time so I opted to go for EcoQuest: The Search for Cetus by Sierra On-Line. The fact that it had been designed by Jane Jensen, creator of the Gabriel Knight series and Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller, heavily influenced the result as these releases contain two of my favourite protagonists.

The other reason for my choice was that EcoQuest had been released as a form of edutainment. It was the last in Sierra’s Quest series in 1991 and aimed to teach children about the importance of environmental ethics, coming with a booklet titled I helped save the earth: 55 fun ways kids can make a world of difference. I remember my junior school’s BBC Micro in the late 1980s but edutainment wasn’t a big thing when I was a child. I therefore figured that this Love Letters to Adventures entry could be a double learning experience.

EcoQuest’s protagonist is a 10-year old boy named Adam Greene. He obviously keeps busy in his spare time as he recently managed to earn an Apprentice Dolphin Handler certificate and become an expert scuba diver. After his ecologist father rescues a dolphin named Delphineus from a driftnet, Adam befriends the creature who then reveals that he’s searching for Cetus. The sperm whale king of the underwater kingdom Eluria has gone missing and strange things are now happening there, putting its marine residents in danger.

There’s a lot of handholding at the start of the game and the first quarter serves as a tutorial. This may seem lengthy by today’s standards, but it’s important to remember that this release was designed with children in mind. The talking and semi-anthropomorphic creatures therefore don’t feel out of place despite the visual style usually being more realistic than cartoon-like. EcoQuest still looks pretty good after over 30 years, with the underwater areas being filled with ancient statues, crumbling temples and brightly coloured fish.

They’re also contaminated with unwanted objects that horrible humans have dumped into the ocean. Fortunately for Eluria, Adam can make use of a Recycle button to pick up the objects and improve the kingdom. Each item collected earns the player points in a system like those implemented in other Sierra titles. The mechanic serves its educational purpose without being intrusive but is rarely used in puzzle solutions, so it feels as though it could perhaps have been more integrated into the gameplay.

Attempt to recycle a useful object and Adam will explain that it might come in handy later. This means that EcoQuest is far easier than other releases of the same period and there are no dead-ends. As a result, the player’s willingness to learn from the title isn’t negatively impacted and the lessons taught by the puzzles hit their mark. For example, after removing a deflated balloon from a turtle’s throat, he explains that creatures often mistake floating objects for food and then can’t swallow them.

Experienced adventure gamers may struggle to find much in terms of gameplay here to keep them interested. EcoQuest feels like a great informative title to play as a family, with parents pointing children in the right direction whenever they become stuck, but its simple puzzles won’t hold much challenge for those familiar with point-and-clicks. I managed to make it to the end credits in just over four hours without any help from Pete (who’s on standby with walkthroughs during our Love Letters to Adventures streams).

Despite its whimsical narrative and talking characters, EcoQuest is a more serious adventure in tone due to its environmental message. This led me to wonder during my playthrough with Darkshoxx whether some of the depicted scenarios and descriptions would have been scary for children at the time of its release, and if the designers had been managed them somewhat heavy-handedly. My partner-in-crime however had a different perspective which is worth contemplating.

He argued that back in the 1990s, scenes of oil spills and other human-caused environmental disasters on television would have been frightening for kids too. What better way to explain to them what was happening, along with how they could help change things for the better, than something as accessible as EcoQuest? It’s a very good point to make. The game was published in an era when environmentalism was becoming popular and slogans such as ‘Reduce, Reuse, Recycle’ were being taught in schools.

As a young child during that period, I was very into conservative efforts. I shared a story during our stream about how playing a board game on the subject endangered creatures had inspired me to create hand-drawn ‘Save the Animals’ posters and plaster them around our street. If I’d had the opportunity to play Sierra’s edutainment release back then, I think it would have appealed to me. And it would likely have taught me that there were more practical things I could do for the environment than annoy our neighbours with posters.

While researching EcoQuest for this post, I came across a Compute article by David Sears. He wrote: “Ask one small boy named Adam, and he’ll remark that today the soft voice of the sea chokes on our garbage, our castoffs, our oil spills, our sewage. For him, and the young millions of the next generation, now is the time to clean up our act, halt pollution, and treat the sea as an equal, not a dumping ground – lest we drain all life from her.” It’s sad that we still haven’t learnt our lesson over three decades on.

While EcoQuest: The Search for Cetus hasn’t replaced The Dame Was Loaded as my favourite Love Letters to Adventures entry so far, it was still an experience worth having. Not only for its environmental message, but also for showcasing a different side to Jane Jensen’s creativity. A sequel called Lost Secret of the Rainforest, which didn’t involve the designer, was released in 1993. It has now been added to our potential games for the letter ‘L’ so who knows, it may make an appearance on stream in the future.

In the meantime, however, we need to consider our game for the letter ‘F’ at the end of July. Stay tuned to see what Darkshoxx picks for us.