Eldritch Quest

While not the first ever made, the original Alone in the Dark was the first video game I ever played that had clear ties to H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos.  Since then, I've played may more, but honestly feel that direct adaptations of his creations don't work nearly as well as games that eschew those details in lieu of key thematic elements (cosmic horror and a fear of the unknown).  Enter The Last Door, a game that feels very Lovecraftian without any shoggoths prowling about or copies of the Necronomicon waiting to be read.  Much like Shadow of the Comet though, it does feel very reminiscent of old Sierra "Quest" games; except more EGA than VGA.

For those who are too young (or too old) to remember Sierra On-line was a California-based developer and publisher that was known for making a number of adventure game IPs with the word "Quest" in the title.  Some of the most famous examples are King's Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest, and somewhat later on down the road, Hero's Quest (eventually renamed Quest for Glory in order to avoid copyright infringement with a board game of the same name).  Two of the most defining aspects of Sierra games were item-based puzzle solving and a fair amount of text to support the on-screen visuals.  Both of these things are fully represented in The Last Door.  Where the game differs though is in the visual presentation.  I'm not talking about the blocky character sprites...those are actually very true to the originals; right down to the minimalistic double digit pixel count.  In truth, that aspect of the the entire design continues to work surprisingly well.  It's kind of amazing how much visual information can be communicated just by adjusting the colors of a pixel or two.  Want a character to look baling?  Just make the pixel at the top of their head the color of skin instead of the color of hair.  To make a character look unshaven all one has to do is use a slightly darker shade of skin tone on the lower two (out of four) facial pixels.  No, that aspect is fine, rather it is the background environments that look noticeably different. 

Back in the days of King's Quest I to III, Space Quest 1 and 2, in addition to the original Police Quest, every visual had to be made using EGA graphics.  This meant developers had to choose a maximum of 16 colors from a total palette of 64 for any given onscreen image.  The result was, unsurprisingly, very sharp images made up of mostly primary colors.  The Last Door isn't limited by this constraint having access to several orders of magnitude more colors to choose from.  Perhaps because of this, the backgrounds have a somewhat murky look (kind of like a low-res scan of an actual photo).  On the plus side though, the wider color pallet allows for some interesting use of light and shadow.  Combining that with parallax scrolling for foreground, middle ground and background objects, actually produces some truly unique visuals.  Despite not being an accurate recreation of EGA graphics, the overall style does tie well into the game's themes of a veil that obscures reality and hides the true nature of the world.  

The time period in which The Last Door is set is another interesting choice.  1890s London might be familiar to table-top gaming enthusiasts in the form of the "Cthulhu by Gaslight" RPG.  Meanwhile avid readers of fiction might be well versed in that time and place through the works of novelists such as H.G. Wells, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, or William Hope Hodgson.  Personally, I found the setting very similar to the "Cthulhu Casebook" trilogy by James Lovegrove, but unlike the other examples, he wrote those novels in recent years and just happened to set them in the 1890s.  Regardless, it's an under-utilized setting in video games so I'm glad to see it represented here, albeit in a highly pixelated fashion.