I don’t think I like Akka Ahrr, but I do recommend it.

I came into Llamasoft’s work as very much a twenty-first century American human slightly afraid to get spat upon by the beasties, but also enough of an animal lover and video game fan that I brought a towel. I started extremely intrigued by Christian Donlan’s Eurogamer review that compared Jeff Minter’s creativity style to an oil painting and gave Akka Ahrr five gold stars. Thus christening it Essential, I simply couldn’t ignore the entire Jeff Minter / Llamasoft journey.

So I set out to undo my ignorance and start in 1982 with Digital Eclipses collection, Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story. Boy, has it been an enjoyable education, even if all of the games aren’t my jam. Thus, the journey is very recommended: especially pairing both Akka Ahrr and the Jeff Minter Story as a complete experience.

I should say what works and doesn’t work for Akka Ahrr before I sign off. My favorite thing is when I get perfect clarity: know what I need to do and that execution is the only gap needed to cross. Akka Ahrr constantly divides you between an assortment of priorities where the joy comes from discerning the order of importance correctly. With time, I could develop this skill, have my enemy particles driven before me and hear the lamentations of their fragmented pixels. Unfortunately my motivation just isn’t high enough to do so. For the ones who that perfectly scratches their brain itch, I see how it lights up like rainbow gold.

So again, not for me; but I recommend the ride.

I loved this game at times, was burnt out at others, and somehow saved all one hundred cats. The storytelling was almost entirely skippable, but the combat was so relentlessly enjoyable, that I almost didn’t mind that this consumed sixty hours of my life. But ultimately I was very done well before I hit credits because the pacing was over-extended, making the whole experience feel like a phenomenal thirty hour experience was underneath one twice as long. I’ve loved Team Ninja’s last five games, so I know they tend to be a little bloated. But this one lacked some special sauce beyond the pseudo-historical tourism.

I adored this, but I’m gonna dunk on it because I desire more out of Digital Eclipse’s interactive documentaries in the future. Also, this form of interactive documentaries mixed with video game museums are absolutely the future and I hope there’s hundreds of them years from now.

So yeah, Llamasoft’s history is over forty-two years long, but this thing spends 95% of its documentation efforts in those first seven years. Then, right as things start getting challenging and difficult for Jeff, we get a last flash of light in 91 as Jeff finds a life raft with shareware. Then another highlight in 1994 with his Tempest update on the Atari Jaguar. And by then it’s like Digital Eclipse ran out of runway on this whole story.

Then we see a video introducing Llamasoft’s second team member before the whole last thirty years are flown-through like nothing important happened in that time. There’s some brief callouts, but as a whole documentary, this thing eludes the dramatic tension; then drops the dang ball.

I bought this in tandem with Llamasoft’s newest game, Akka Ahrr, thinking this doc would give me the full context leading up to the studio’s latest. Instead, it felt like I got an appetizer — and desert — with no entre. I still don't know exactly how Akka Ahrr fits in the history exactly, but I guess that's what Wikipedia is for.
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It’s clear that most of the games in this collection feel rather displaced by the span of thirty plus years , but it still feels like a treasure trove of discoveries as I worked my way through them all. It’s magical and delightful and also a little insanely unstructured. I recommend it and I’ll be hopping into Digital Eclipse’s prior releases soon!