Have you ever played a game which should be good, but really wasn’t?
Friend-of-the-blog Darkshoxx and I kicked off our Love Letters to Adventures collaboration in January. Starting with ‘A’ at the beginning of the year, we’re on a mission to try a classic or obscure point-and-click release with a title starting with each letter of the alphabet.
We had a few potential choices lined up for ‘C’ at the end of March. It would be my call for this episode as my partner-in-crime had wanted to play the strange Bad Day on the Midway in February. After watching trailers and wheedling out a couple of options based on espionage stories, I decided to go for a December 1995 release by DreamForge Intertainment and science-fiction novelist Roger Zelazny.
Chronomaster appealed to me as the name implied that it would feature time-travel. However, I was sorely mistaken: it doesn’t appear in this game at all, and we concluded that the title actually refers to the ‘bottled time’ carried around by the protagonist. The story therefore didn’t play out in the way we expected it to and this is unlikely to be an adventure that sticks in my head for a long time.
Rene Korda is a retired designer of pocket universes, self-contained worlds developed according to the tastes and preferences of the person financing their construction. His peace is disrupted when receives an emergency message from the Old Terran Government. Two universes have been shut down so time has ceased to function within them, threatening the continued existence of many sentient beings. It’s then up to Rene to restart them and find out who is responsible for these atrocities.
Although Chronomaster is generally regarded as being visually impressive at the time of its release, the user-interface feels extremely clunky nowadays. Right-clicking will change the cursor to different icons representing the actions you’d expect in a point-and-click such as talk, push and open, but it takes ages to switch between them. I frequently found myself opening the top-menu and manually selecting an icon instead, but there are so many here that that layout felt overwhelming at the start of the game.
The other frustrating element is the way the inventory is depicted. Each time Rene picks up an object, it’s added here and displayed by a wireframe. This means it isn’t always immediately obvious what each inventory object represents and it’s necessary to hover your cursor over each of them in order to display a written summary. This can be time-consuming, particularly when you consider how full your inventory gets due to the way puzzle solutions have been designed.
Challenges can be solved in multiple ways. For example, we encountered a huge metal statue when exploring the first universe visited; and while Darkshoxx decided to blow it up using a missile launcher found in another location, I chose to persuade it to move in an entirely different way. Some puzzles can also be solved by your Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) if you can’t be bothered to figure out the answer for yourself. We liked these mechanics as they added an interesting twist to linearity of point-and-clicks.
The first universe went pretty well and, despite the multiple-puzzle-solutions adding a little complexity, we didn’t require any help from Pete who was on standby during our Twitch stream with a walkthrough. The challenges were logical and the story started off interestingly enough, despite it being dialogue heavy. Similar to the first title we played for our Love Letters to Adventures project, Atlantis: The Lost Tales, both Darkshoxx and I enjoyed the initial hours and thought we could see ourselves carrying on.
I continued my playthrough offline over the next few weeks and sadly, the universes deteriorated in both quality and logic as I progressed. The solutions to many puzzles stopped making sense and, as I’d managed to pick up loads of inventory items for their multiple answers along the way, there were certain points where I didn’t know what to do next and couldn’t be bothered to try every-object-with-every-other-object. In the end, I turned to Pete’s walkthrough and followed it entirely in a bid to simply finish the game.
Perhaps this reduction in quality was caused by Zelazny’s death in June 1995. Chronomaster was his last known work and he passed away before it was completed. DreamForge turned to fellow author Jane Lindskold and in-house designers John McGirk and Aaron Kreader to finish the majority of the puzzles, while leaving the overall plot and concept intact as per the novelist’s original vision. The gameplay becomes more convoluted as it goes on though and it eventually becomes a bit of a slog.
There’s so much backtracking and many pointless cutscenes. At one point, I flew to a universe (cutscene) and completed an initial puzzle to get inside. I was then automatically returned to my spaceship (cutscene) and had to immediately go back to the universe in order to continue the game (cutscene). You might be treated to an animation every time you go to a universe, but these quickly get repetitive and turn into an annoyance. Fortunately, as discovered by Darkshoxx, they can be quickly skipped.
Considering the name of the release and the fact that Rene carries around bottled time with him, it’s surprising how little the item actually features during this release. Its inclusion as an actual object therefore seems slightly pointless. I think I ended up using it once, when I needed something to trade for an important item; and we discovered that being bitten by a snake or spider in a dessert universe would send the protagonist to sleep and cause one portion of bottled time to be removed from the inventory.
As to be expected with 1990s point-and-clicks, there are plenty of death scenes in Chronomaster. Walking into some water, giving someone the wrong item or taking an incorrect path through a scene will result in Rene being killed in some random way. While most of these situations are obvious, some really aren’t and not having a recent save can potentially result in hours of lost gameplay. Thankfully, Darkshoxx and I learnt our lesson early on and from then on saved frequently.
I realised that I’d stopped following the story a while back when I finally reached the end of the game. I didn’t understand what was happening, other than that the protagonist and an old student of his were trying to get retribution for something bad that happened fifty years ago (it’s amazing how youthful they both look). There are three different endings with each depending on how you choose to deal with the main antagonist shortly before the final scene. None of them are particularly different from each other or even that rewarding.
Almost everything I’ve written about Chronomaster in this post so far is negative. The weird thing is though that underneath all these issues lies what could be a really good point-and-click. Perhaps if it were to be remade for today’s market, with a modern interface and controls, streamlined puzzle solutions and fewer repetitive cutscenes, it would have the potential to be a release which would be popular with adventure fans. I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up seeing a crowdfunding campaign one day.
Chronomaster isn’t the worst title we’ve played during our Love Letters to Adventures collaboration so far (that award is still reserved for Atlantis: The Lost Tales right now). But it’s also not a standout entry, and it’s hard not to feel as though we’re going to experience far better titles over the course of the rest of the alphabet. Next up is the letter ‘D’ and there are several options to choose from: DreamWeb by Creative Reality, Double Switch by Digital Pictures or The Dame was Loaded by Beam Software.
As Chronomaster was my choice, and I eventually want to play all of the games mentioned in the paragraph above at some point anyway, Darkshoxx will be making the decision this time around. After the experiences we’ve had on this journey so far: no pressure.