The rose campion, a perennial pink-ish carnation found throughout temperate regions, has long been the study of biologists and botanists, from Darwin to Mendel. Now called silene coronaria, it formerly bore the designation lychnis, associated with a herbivorous moth of the same name, both fragile and humble. In this sense, this duo's unlikely contributions to modern life sciences mirror that of the original Korean PC platformer sharing the moniker, itself a key release for its field. I wish I could more easily recommend Softmax's first release beyond its historic significance, as the game itself is frustratingly unpolished and shows so much missed potential. But like its namesake, one shouldn't expect too much from what's just the beginnings of these ludo-scientists' forays into genres once untenable in this realm.

Video games in South Korea during the early '90s (well before today's glut of MMOs and mobile Skinner boxes) fell into two boxes: action-packed arcade releases and slower, more story-driven xRPGs and puzzlers on IBM-compatible PCs. The relative lack of consoles in the country—first because of low-quality bootlegs and second due to government bans on certain Japanese exports in the aftermath of WWII—meant that home enthusiasts needed a desktop computer to try anything outside the game centers. Anyone in the Anglosphere from that era can attest to so many CGA-/EGA-age struggles with rendering fast scrolling scenes and action, a feat relegated to works like Commander Keen or the occasional shoot-em-up such as Dragon Force: The Day 3. Even ambitious early iterations on JP-imported genres like the action-RPG suffered from choppy performance and limited colors, as was the case for Zinnia. VGA video and graphics accelerators, plus the rise of Windows 95 and GPUs, meant that PC compatibles could finally compete with TV hardware on arcade-like visuals and the aspirations that made possible. Lychnis was arguably the first non-STG Korean home title to herald this change.

Made by Artcraft, a grassroots team led by Hyak-kun Kim (later head of Gravity, creators of Ragnarok Online) and Yeon-kyu Choe (main director at publisher Softmax, leading tentpole series like War of Genesis), this was hardly an auspicious project. Yes, proving that VGA-equipped PCs just entering the market could handle something akin to Super Mario World was a challenge, but they didn't have much time or budget to make this a reality. And that shows throughout most of Lychnis' 15 levels, varying wildly in design quality, variety, and conveyance to players. I suspect that, like so many Korean PC games up through the turn of the millennium, this didn't get much playtesting beyond the developers themselves, who obviously knew how to play their own game quite well. Nor does this floppy-only game always play ball in DOSBox; whatever you do, keep the sound effects set to PC speaker, or this thing will just crash before you can even get past the vanity plate!

Still, the Falcom-esque opening sequence and fantasy artwork, vibrant and rich with that signature '90s D&D-inspired look, shows a lot of promise for new players. Same goes for the AdLib FM-synth soundtrack and crunchy PCM sound throughout your playthrough, with bubbly driving melodies fitting each world and a solid amount of aural feedback during tough action or platforming. There's a surprising amount of polish clashing against jank, which made my experience all the more beguiling. How could a team this evidently talented drop the ball in some very key areas? Was this the result of a rocky dev cycle, perhaps the main reason why Kim and Choe both splintered after this game and brought different friends to different companies? Just as the moth feeds upon the flower, this experiment in translating arcade and console play to monitor and keyboard was just one more casualty that would repeat itself, followed by other small studios making action/platformer/etc. debuts before working towards beefier software.

Lychnis drew in crowds of malnourished PC gamers with its heavy amount of smooth vertical and horizontal scrolling, harkening to the likes of Sonic and other mascots. (There's even a porcupine baddie early in the game which feels like an ode to SEGA's superstar.) Its premise also has a cute young adult appeal, with you choosing either the wall-jumping titular character in knight's armor, or his friend Iris, a cheeky mage with a very useful double jump and projectiles. Either way, we're off to defeat an evil sorcerer hell-bent on reviving ancient powers to conquer the continent of Laurasia. The worlds we visit reflect that treacherous journey away from home, starting in verdant fields, hills, and skies before ending within Sakiski's dread citadel full of traps and monsters. Anyone who's played a classic Ys story should recognize the similarities, and parts of this adventure brought Adol's trials in Esteria or Felghana to mind.

However, this still most resembles a platformer more like Wardner, Rastan, or the aforementioned Mario titles on Super Nintendo. The game loop consists of reaching each level's crystalline endpoint and then visiting the shop if you've acquired the requisite keycard. Pro tip: raise max continues to 5 and lives to 7. Lychnis doesn't ramp up its difficult right from the get-go, but World 1-3 presents the first big challenge, an arduous auto-scrolling climb from trees to clouds with no checkpoints whatsoever. I couldn't help but feel the designers struggled to decide if this would focus on 1CC play or heavy continues usage. There's a couple levels, both auto-scrollers, placed around mid-game which are very clearly meant to force Game Overs upon unsuspecting players who aren't concentrating and memorizing. Your lack of control per jump makes Iris the easy pick just for having more opportunities to correct trajectory, both for gaps and to keep distance from enemies and their attacks. Progressing through stages rarely feels that confusing in a navigation sense, but most present puzzles of varying efficacy which can impede you and lead to retries. With no saves or passwords, nor ways to gain continues or lives through high scores, this journey's very unforgiving for most today.

Thankfully there's only one case of multiple dubiously engineered levels in a row, unfortunately coming a bit early with 2-2 and 2-3. The former's just outright broken unless you play a certain way, having to time your attacks and positioning upon each set of mine-carts as tons of obstacles threaten to knock you off. Someone in the office must have had a penchant for auto-scrollers, which live up to their foul reputation whenever they appear here. (I'll cut 3-3 some slack for having a more unique combat-heavy approach, plus being a lot shorter, but it's still a waste of space vs. a fully fleshed-out exploratory jaunt across the seas.) 2-3, meanwhile, shows how masochistic Lychnis can get, with many blind jumps, sudden bursts of enemies from off-screen knocking you down bottomless pits, and lava eruptions casting extra hazards down upon you for insult to injury. Contrast this with the demanding but far fairer platforming gauntlets in 2-1, 3-2, and all of World 4's surprisingly non-slippery icy reaches. "All over the place" describes the content on offer here, and I could hardly accuse Artcraft of, um, crafting a boring or indistinct trip across these biomes.

What Lychnis does excel at is its pacing and means of livening up potential filler via an upgrades system. Thoroughly exploring stages, and clearing as many enemies and chests as you can find, builds up your coffers over time. Survive long enough, farm those 1-Ups and gold sacks, and eventually those top-tier weapons and armor are affordable, plus the ever nifty elixir that refills your life once between shops. This learn-die-hoard-buy loop takes most of the sting away from otherwise mirthless runs through these worlds, but is unfortunately tied to the game's most egregious failing: its one and only boss fight. Ever wonder how the rock-paper-scissors encounters from classic Alex Kidd games could get worse?! This game manages it by basically having you play slots with the big bad, where one either matches all symbols for damage or fails and takes a beating themselves. Only having the best gear makes this climactic moment reliably winnable, which I think is a step too far towards punishing all players, even the most skilled. It sucks because I kind of enjoy 5-3 right before, a very dungeon crawler-esque finale with lots of mooks to juggle and careful resource management. The ending sequence itself is as nice and triumphant as I'd expect, but what came right before was a killjoy.

I've shown a lot of mixed feelings for this so far, yet I still would recommend Lychnis to any classic 2D bump-and-jump aficionados who can appreciate the history behind this Frankenstein. For all my misgivings, it still felt to satisfying to learn the ins and outs, optimize my times, and somewhat put to rest that sorcerer's curse of not having played many Korean PC games. Of course, both Softmax and its offshoot Gravity would soon well surpass this impressive but unready foundation, whose success led to the frenetic sci-fi blockbuster Antman 2 and idiosyncratic pre-StarCraft strategy faire like Panthalassa. I suspect this thorny rose among Korean classics won't rank with many others waiting in my backlog, not that it's done a disservice by those later games fulfilling Artcraft's vision and promises of DOS-/Windows-era software finally reaching the mainstream. The biggest shame is how fragile that region's games industry has always been, from early dalliances with bootlegs and largely text-driven titles to the market constricting massively towards MMOs and other stuff built only for Internet cafes (no shade to those, though).

Just about the biggest advantage these classic Korean floppy and CD releases have over, say, anything for PC-98 is their ease of emulation. Lychnis remains abandonware, the result of its publisher not caring to re-release or even remaster this for Steam and other distributors. Free downloads are just a hop and a skip away, though none of these games have anything like the GOG treatment. With recent news of Project EGG bringing classic Japanese PC games to Switch, though, perhaps there's a chance that other East Asian gems and curiosities can find a place in the sun once more. Well, I can dream.

Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Mar. 14 - 20, 2023 LATE

     ‘Another hundred days before the resurrection ceremony!’

Played during the Backloggd’s Game of the Week (Mar. 14 – Mar. 20, 2023).

In the early 1990s, the majority of Korean video game production ignored the platformer genre. Titles such as Sin'geom-ui Jeonseol (1987) or Pungnyu Hyeopgaek (1989) were representative of an RPG genre inspired by the Ultima series. Some titles followed the Japanese shoot'em up tradition, while others were elimination games where the player had to kill all the enemies on a screen. Lychnis holds a special significance, as it is generally accepted that it was the first Korean title to use smooth scrolling. This new technology allowed the game to explore the platformer format more thoroughly and offer a full adventure. Perhaps due to its ambitious marketing, which relied heavily on this feature, the title is remembered by Korean gamers as one of the pioneers of the second generation of Korean video games. Softmax is better known for its The War of Genesis series (1995-2000), but there are elements of Lychnis in it. Similarly, producer and programmer Kim Hak-kyun later founded Gravity, whose games also borrow ideas from Lychnis, as can be seen in Lars the Wanderer (1995).

     Lychnis' difficulty is a wolf in sheep's clothing

The player assumes the role of Lychnis or Iris, young adults who decide to embark on an adventure to defeat Sakiski, whose desire is to use the weapons of Hartinium to resurrect an ancient dragon and conquer the continent of Laurasia. The story is presented in a short cutscene, with an electric and solemn music accompanied by long dramatic arpeggios, before focusing on the two heroes and shifting to an optimistic and light melody, as well as shimmering colours, heralding the spirit of K-fantasy that would flourish on the Internet in the late 1990s. The relatively short adventure takes place in five different worlds, leading up to a showdown with Sakiski: at the start, the player can choose their character, each with a different moveset. While Lychnis attacks in close combat and can perform wall jumps, Iris fights from a distance with her magic and can double-jump; for this reason, she is generally the easiest character to control, making some of the platforming sequences less challenging.

Lychnis opens with levels reminiscent of Super Mario World (1990), but with more faded colours. As the first world is set in a forest, the early enemies are rather cute, if not particularly detailed, and give the adventure a childlike quality. The difficulty is fairly low, which seems to make Lychnis a relaxing title. Soon enough, the player will notice fundamental differences with the controls of the Mario games. For example, Lychnis does not allow the player to adjust the trajectory of a jump once the character is in the air: this design choice does not seem dramatic, as the first two stages offer plenty of space to avoid enemies. However, the game's philosophy shifts radically in Stage 1-3, where it is obvious that the developers wanted to display the technological achievement of their scrolling. This level is excessively long due to the exceptionally slow auto-scrolling: it also insists on platforming sequences that are moderately difficult – although the lack of visibility doesn't help – but prove less straightforward than expected due to the inertia of the jumps. It is particularly easy to fall into the void after a few minutes, forcing the player to start from the beginning of the level, as there are no checkpoints.

     A title that does not communicate its gameplay intentions

The protracted nature of Stage 1-3 makes it a particularly unexpected difficulty surge, in contrast to the tranquillity of the early levels. Lychnis is actually quite a challenging game. Later levels show little reluctance in multiplying enemies to overwhelm the player, and the platforming becomes increasingly unforgiving. In Stage 2-2, the player has to cross the level on moving platforms, similar to the lifts of Super Mario Bros. 3 (1988). The very poor visibility and the inability to control the jump in mid-air – at most, Iris can use her second jump to try to reposition herself – make this sequence an unpleasant obstacle to navigate. Occasional collision problems further complicate the progression. Such problems persist throughout the adventure, to the extent that the title has gained a reputation for being impossible to beat, not because of the aggressiveness of the enemies, but because of its unergonomic platforming. In World 4, the mountains form labyrinths that are somewhat navigable, but the player is not guided by any visual cues to find their way out: they must wander until they reach a new section, sometimes discovering secret passages as they go. Platforms are often positioned off-screen, forcing the player to make a blind jump and hope that there are no enemies on the other side to push them over the edge.

Lychnis suffers from poor communication, as it never manages to make clear what is expected of the player. In particular, it slyly hides its RPG mechanic. Throughout the five worlds, the player progresses through a traditional action platformer, but the situation changes with the showdown with Sakiski. It is literally a slot machine where the player must try to line up identical symbols as best they can to attack the boss. Because of the random nature of the battle, the only way to ensure victory is to have collected and purchased enough items with the money earned in the levels. Unfortunately, this requirement is never mentioned in the title, except in the manual, and it is entirely possible to fail against Sakiski due to insufficient equipment. Some of the items are prohibitively expensive, suggesting a need to explore the various levels in search of gold coins. It is quite difficult to understand the exact intention of the title, whose grammar oscillates between opposite poles.

Lychnis is a rather frustrating title that is not easily mastered, as its difficulty seems so disconnected from the atmosphere it exudes. However, the game does offer a real variety, with levels that renew their gimmicks one after the other. Some are more focused on action and combat, while others offer rigorous platforming. There is an undeniable charm to this game, which ushered in a new era for Korean video games. Nevertheless, the modern player should not be fooled by the colourful sprites and upbeat music: Lychnis requires more effort than one might think. Amusingly enough, the final world seems to sum up the title's philosophy much more accurately, with endless waves of enemies and a soundtrack that bears an uncanny resemblance to ZUN's work.