Extremely experimental, weirdly innovative and also very flawed, this was a very interesting experience. Extremely hard to recommend, but if you want to play an adventure/FPS game combined, it’s pretty fun.

There's an endless deluge of incredibly cool ideas, the manual opens with the president (who, at the time would've been Bill Clinton) being told by alien diplomats that the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs is actually a dreaming god and needs to be point-blank nuked in the next week or the world ends, and the guy you send is by himself, and has the power to speak with the dead to discover clues about what happened.

And that premise carries it pretty damn far, but there's a secret developer message that betrays the insane crunch this game went through to meet the MacWorld release date, and wow, you can tell. For instance, there's 25 levels, and the 4 levels before the final one are nearly identical teleporter mazes filled with the most frustrating enemy types.

The actual "speaking with the dead" thing is a little finnicky, but super satisfying to reveal the mysteries of the expeditions that descended into the pyramid before you, but the storytelling doesn't feel like it quite gets to the point where it "wants to be."

A point also has to be made about the movement speed, coming from finishing the Marathon trilogy the day prior picking this game up was a night and day difference. Corridors that could be crossed in a few seconds in another FPS of the time take 20-30 seconds at this almost hilariously slow trudging pace. Good luck learning how to dodge projectiles like that!

Overall, it does feel like a lot of this game do not hold up to the scrutiny of the last 30 years, but it does make a pretty solid experience given the technical, budgetary, and time constraints it was made under.

5/10, I played this only for the tenuous connections the story has to Marathon's.

(Played on the excellent Aleph One port by W'rkncacnter )

This is definitely one of those games that's more interesting to think about than to play. I feel like this game steps out of the shadow of Wolfenstein by going in a different direction with a survival dungeon crawler with a tad bit of Lovecraft in there. The biggest problem for me, however, is despite having many interesting ideas it's just not fun to play at points. There's a point after when you get your first submachine gun where the game starts picking up, but it drops the ball in the third act by filling its last levels with the worst enemies (most specifically the poison shooting spiders). Still an incredibly creative game, definitely would recommend checking it out. I feel like these Bungie guys are definitely going somewhere.

loan me your imagination for a moment

imagine the government has been informed by aliens that a god has crash landed alongside the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs, it has come as close to dying during the whole ordeal and has been slumbering for the past couple of millenniums, the aliens now informed that the god is soon to be awakened in a week and must bury them with their strongest weapon possible to continue his slumber before they come themselves to remove him from earth

so, the government decides to simply send a spec ops team with a nuke to the god's location and go to the deepest part of his resting place, a pyramid located in the Yucatan peninsula

soon, you'll see plenty of odd things, crystals that give unique magic powers, monsters based on the fears of humans thanks to the god's immense power on turning the pyramid into a collective cognition by just dreaming, the fate of those who came before you and how much of death trap the pyramid is turning to be, as you scrap with whatever previous explorers left for you to survive after your equipment broke before reaching the place, all while time is running on real time and reminding you there's not much time before the world ends if you don't fulfilled your mission

all this sounds incredibly interesting and a great setting for a shooter dungeon crawler with RPG mechanics. right?

well too bad
the game doesn't live up to it at all

let me be clear, all the previously mentioned stuff is just small touches of interesting writing that you will get from the manual and talking with corpses around the pyramid (we get to that later), all while putting the puzzles pieces together with a lot of interjection

the actual game itself is a game that is not shy to hide the fact it was inspired by doom and ultima underworld with its shooting combined with very, very small RPG mechanics with open exploration, but the mistake this game makes is trying to do too much despite not having the people nor the tech to achieve what they aimed for

if SMT hired some halloween decorator to design every piece of art, this would be the result, monsters look extremely cartoonish to be taken seriously despite being told how the others died horribly by them, the actual game scenery looks like screensavers from Windows 98 and there is not a single piece of music at all, all you have is SFXs

at the beginning, you would believe its a game about managing your resources and saving up ammo or crystal spells when things are dire, it goes like this for almost half the game until they introduce a box than let you create an infinite amount of ammo, it does introduce a interesting debate whenever letting time pass to get a surplus of ammo or push forward while slowly letting the box run its course, but in practice, you pretty much always stock up since all you need to do is avoid being trigger-happy to always have ammo

its one unique mechanic involves talking with corpses thanks to a spell inside a yellow crystal, this is where you gather up most of the background plot and clues on how to advance inside the pyramid, alongside trying to help you solve cryptic stuff like a wall not having collision and hiding a crystal that can damage an enemy type who can't be harmed by bullets, it still won't save you from the more cryptic puzzles that comes into the late game, like having to wear a cloak to avoid suffocating in a trap you cannot avoid (which no one solved unless they bought a manual that outright tells you) or figuring out that the meditating guys blocking your way can only be killed with an earthquake made by your spells

in general, the game feels like for every 4 levels, the devs figure out a new gimmick they wanna try and expect the player to just try everything by brute force and gotta keep tally on everything they do, right down on how you have to search for the bomb, arm it and get an escape beacon, but its also surprising the game also gives you the leeway of skip getting any of them in exchange for a worse ending

yet, looking back, the game didn't piss me off that much and those small touches of writing kept me engage all the way until the end, it really carry the whole thing

i would recommend playing it at least once in your life, just to see how Bungie started and slowly develop into the powerhouse than they are now