My Thoughts on Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Amnesia: Justine

Amnesia: The Dark Descent is a game in which you explore a shadowy Gothic castle full of forbidden secrets with a lantern, so naturally I like it quite a bit. But while it succeeds at creating a constantly foreboding atmosphere through an excellent mix of unsettling sound design and a great use of light and darkness, I’d be lying if I said Amnesia fully lived up to its reputation for me. Chiefly, the experience just didn’t spook me as much as I thought it would. Don’t get me wrong though, Amnesia has some great spooks and is certainly an extremely tense experience. For one thing, it does jump scares well, often staying its hand the first three times I expected to shit my pants and then turning me into a jittery, jumpy mess unable to properly function on the fourth, unexpected time. I also like the way the game’s mechanics play off of each other. For example, if the player stays in dark areas for too long, they begin to lose “sanity” which leads to vision and control problems. Staying in the light keeps one sane but also exposes them to roving monsters. In order to stay out of sight of a creeping horror, you often need to hunker down in the darkness as you slowly, unnervingly lose sanity. Neat trade-offs like this add to the overall tenseness of the experience. Speaking of creeping horrors, perhaps my favorite part of Amnesia is how it handles its monsters. You can’t fight back in Amnesia, so your only option is to run or hide. Monsters almost always appear when you least want them to and when they spot you, they shamble towards you at a deceptively quick pace. But what I really love about them isn’t actually the creatures themselves but everything that accompanies their presence. You are penalized for looking directly at them by a blurry, disorientating screen and a loss of sanity (which you’re going to want to keep in order to effectively run away and hide), which I think is just brilliant. In fact, if it wasn’t for the internet, I wouldn’t even really know what the creatures looked like besides being vaguely humanoid monstrosities. My favorite aspect of monster encounters, however, is the brilliant, intensifying dissonance that blares into your ears as they lurch closer and closer towards you, which never failed to unravel my nerves and make me clench my teeth as I accidently hit the ‘crouch’ key instead of the ‘sprint’ one for the seventeenth time.

There’s a lot done very well in Amnesia but when going into it, I guess I expected a deeply unnerving psychological horror experience; I expected to be wandering scared and delirious and alone in the dark while being hunted by barely glimpsed horrors, never really sure what was going on. And while the game comes close to this type of experience at times, Amnesia is ultimately a lot more formulaic and “gamey” than I anticipated, especially after its introduction message sets it up as, and I paraphrase, an “immersive experience that shouldn’t be played to win”. The experience is divided up into several hub areas, or large safe zones, with several sub-areas branching off of them, and the game soon falls into a formula of getting to a new hub and going around its areas, collecting notes and items, solving puzzles, and occasionally having a monster thrown at you. There are also “interim” areas between each hub that contain some of the best moments of the game, as well as a few other curveballs that shake the formula up a bit. This all isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and I actually quite enjoyed the experience’s traditional survival horror elements, but it all just felt a little too “safe” a lot of the time. And while I have a lot of love for the way the monster encounters are handled and while they are still very effective, sadly evading these eldritch abominations is often far too easy (at least the standard monsters); hiding behind a couple of boxes at a dead end was often enough to confound them and I only was caught by them once (after which the game dumped me in a random room I hadn’t been in yet, which confused me greatly…do the monsters actually kill Daniel? Or is he being revived somehow?). Once in a safe hiding place, one only needs to stay put for a few minutes until the creatures shamble off and disappear entirely.

There are other factors as well that kept Amnesia from being the scariest of scares for me. The Gothic castle setting is something I have too much affection for to be truly unsettled by (the game brought to mind both Dracula and Castlevania for me, and sometimes while skulking through a dungeon with my lantern lit, I was reminded of something out of The Legend of Zelda or some other comforting fantasy experience). The game is also very chatty; what is supposed to be a dark and lonely atmosphere is often interrupted by campy voice acting, whether in the entries of Daniel’s diary strewn about or the frequent flashback conversations between Daniel and Alexander. Besides this, Amnesia is a game composed of both brilliant scares and laughably goofy ones. Creepy statues suddenly appearing inside of bloody fountains and then being mysteriously gone the next time I look in their direction is a fantastic way of freaking me out, and dashing through a water-logged basement labyrinth being chased by loud, invisible horrors is one of the most purely terrifying moments in any game for me (along with a few other similarly tense moments in the game). But then there are the times when you turn a corner and the screen contracts accompanied by a spoooooky noise and some spoooooky dust clouds puffing about which are decent enough in the early sections of the game, but when these tame “scares” still happen occasionally even late in the game, it reminds me of a cardboard ghost popping out and saying “BOO!” in a haunted house. The sound design, for that matter, is mostly good and sometimes brilliant (mainly during monster encounters), but is also sometimes far too busy and consistent. What I mean is that while exploring some areas, the same random background combination of disembodied footsteps, fluttering paper, and soft whimpering chatters in my speakers constantly until it’s no longer unsettling but just mundane background noise. The same sound effects and musical cues are recycled throughout the game, so by the end they did little to disturb me. I suppose I’ve been spoiled by the masterful transformative sound design in the early Silent Hill games, where often you’ll hear a very specific creepy noise in one specific location and never hear it again…and never forget it again. Even though Amnesia is unpredictable on a moment to moment basis, it has a predictable nature to it in the grand scheme of things and this goes a long way in diminishing the horror for me. Ultimately, Amnesia just didn’t get under my skin the way I expected it to; it’s more of an in the moment “oh boy I’m having fun being spooked in this game” experience than a lingering kind of horror that I can’t help but ruminate on when I’m closing my eyes trying to sleep at night. In a game with a sanity meter, that is seemingly inspired by H.P. Lovecraft, and subtitled “The Dark Descent”, I expected this experience to get to me more psychologically than viscerally, but the opposite is true. This is both a disappointment and a relief, if you catch my drift. Also, full disclaimer, I only played this game alone late at night with all the lights off with headphones and the sound turned up, as it should be, so I certainly made myself vulnerable to the experience’s frights.

While Amnesia isn’t the kind of horror I was expecting, and maybe isn’t even the kind of horror I feel it’s going for a lot of the time, it’s not a bad horror experience. I quite enjoy its Gothic atmosphere and its traditional survival horror/adventure game elements and while I criticized it for diminishing the fright, I also enjoy its campiness to an extent. It also undoubtedly succeeds very well at momentarily tense and terrifying moments that made me want to just give up and curl up in a ball in the corner with a blankie. And since I most often didn’t quite know what was going to be around the next corner or at the bottom of those stairs leading into a dark void, it also did a nice job of keeping me on edge most of the time even outside of those sharply intense moments. I found the narrative intriguing enough as well, if not a bit muddily delivered. Exposition is fed to the player in so many different ways (scattered notes, flashbacks, random whispers, weird memory canisters, snippets of random text thrown at the player in the game’s brief loading screens and so on) that it becomes a bit overwhelming. I also feel that the game’s writing simply does a poor job of conveying information at times; some notes are unclearly-written while others seem to contradict information presented elsewhere and even within their own text. It’s not that the text is purposefully vague, but rather it just seems awkwardly written in places, and for me at least, some pieces of the story don’t seem to add up. The game’s finale also kind of infuriated me at first as well. It’s difficult to explain without spoiling too much but basically one’s ending is decided by what they do in the last three or so minutes of the game. I sort of predicted something like this would be coming, and I knew what I wanted to do, but the ending sequence was just very unclear to me my first time encountering it and there is a very brief amount of time that decides whether all your hard work throughout the adventure will pay off or, like in my initial experience, be rewarded with the most horrible ending I could have asked for all because I stalled for a few seconds and wasn’t exactly sure what I should be doing to achieve the goal I wanted. After the credits abruptly rolled to my extreme annoyance and confusion, I was able to think clearly and figure out what I should have done. I was then able to reload my save and get the other two endings, but I was still frustrated by the first ending that I got. I can accept an “unhappy ending”, especially in a horror game, but when I have the agency to make a choice, and it’s unclear what choice I’m exactly making or rather how to make the choice that I want to make, and then something happens that I absolutely didn’t want to happen and the game frames it like it was a choice I consciously made, it’s quite frustrating. Maybe this is more on me and not entirely the game’s fault, but I feel like there could have been a little more direction in the finale at the very least, not so much that it feels like I don’t have to figure anything out, but just a bit more of a nudge so I don’t unwittingly make a huge mistake.

I realize that a lot of my issues with Amnesia are based purely on it not living up to my expectations, but that’s just the experience I had with this game. But even if I attempt to view the experience through a lens divorced from those expectations, while I feel Amnesia is a strong experience, I still don’t think it’s a remarkable one. But looking back, there is truth in the notion that I built this game up in my head for years to be some kind of horror masterpiece, and naturally, it didn’t quite live up to those lofty expectations. But it’s still a very good horror experience and a very tense one for sure. “Terrifying” as opposed to “horrifying” is the word I would use to describe Amnesia. It’s not an experience that gets inside my head too much, but it’s still a worthy, atmospheric, and terrifying experience I quite enjoyed partaking in.

But there is also the matter of Amnesia’s free DLC add-on, Amnesia: Justine. Mechanically, it’s basically the same deal as the main game, and while I haven’t managed to finish it, I find its plot (which seems to be no more than tangentially connected to The Dark Descent) to be interesting. Essentially, you play as an unknown protagonist who wakes up in a prison cell and proceeds to be subjected to what seems to be a series of psychological experiments set up by the eponymous Justine, all while being hunted by some kind of creature (or maybe just a really messed-up human being, because it coherently talks). Why haven’t I managed to finish it yet, you ask? Well that is due to what is undoubtedly Justine’s most notable feature: perma-death. There’s no saving. You have one chance. Once the “monster” catches you, that’s it. After a fade to black and some creepy squelching sounds, the game simply boots you back to your desktop. This makes Justine an even tenser experience than The Dark Descent and an almost unbearably stressful one. If you do fail, you need to get back to where you were previously, and since the game remains the same each time you play it, this can be quite tedious and also obviously drains the tension out of the familiar bits. Predictably, the perma-death approach can also lead to frustration. I’ve attempted Justine three times now and all three times have died in the same area (for those that have played it: the flooded “Dungeon” area right after the Library), which seems to harbor a sudden and steep difficulty curve (and I might even go so far as to say it just feels cheap). My most frustrating death wasn’t the first one, but the second one, where the game seemed to glitch out somehow and put me in a seemingly unwinnable situation. That’s great; why bother wasting my time slogging through a game with perma-death again and again when it might just unexpectedly screw me over, at no fault of my own? I could probably succeed if I kept trying, but I simply just don’t have the energy to keep getting to my dying point just to try again; I know exactly what to do there at this point, but actually accomplishing it is a whole other story. There are a few aspects that make replaying Justine a bit more bearable though. For one, I hear the game in its entirety is fairly brief; an hour or so seems to be the average, though in my experience it took me longer than that just to get to where I keep dying. Also, the game’s different “levels” (at least up to the point I’ve reached) each involve a puzzle that doesn’t necessarily require solving in order to proceed with the game, so going back and trying again to figure these problems out (note: I still haven’t despite my best efforts) made my replays a bit less tiresome. All the same, maybe I’ll go back to it one day, but for now I’ve given up on Justine. It’s an interesting concept, but I’m really sick of the Amnesia experience right now and I have other games to play. And yes, I’ll admit that the game is just stressful as fuck to play and I’m tired of subjecting myself to it.

The Power of Video Games: The Crushing Despair and Subtle Horror of Ecco the Dolphin

Warning: Full spoilers for the entirety of Ecco the Dolphin follow

What do you think of when you look at the artwork above? Perhaps you think of nature shows about marine life, maybe about a trip to Sea World you took, or maybe you think of those colorful Lisa Frank folders you used to have...

You may think about any one of these things when you see the peaceful, calming image above...that is, unless you've actually played Ecco the Dolphin, a game developed by Novotrade International and published by Sega that was originally released in 1992 for the Sega Mega Drive in Europe (and in 1993 for the Sega Genesis in North America). There are several versions of Ecco the Dolphin for different platforms, but I'll be talking about the original Mega Drive/Genesis version.

If you were to ask me what the eeriest, most unsettling video game I've ever played was, you might think I'd refer you to Silent Hill, or perhaps Super Metroid. My actual answer however, is a game far more subtle and less talked about. A game that scarred me as a child with its unexpected twists, lonely atmosphere, and endless feeling of isolation and despair.

Maybe this all sounds like a joke, or an exaggeration, but it is neither: Ecco the Dolphin is one of the most unnerving artistic creations I've ever encountered and it both demonstrates the potential of video games as a unique artistic medium and also their power to be something more than their label would fool you into thinking, something more than simply a "game".

Ecco the Dolphin opens just as you'd expect it to: a tranquil scene of several dolphins swimming through a calming blue ocean as this tranquil music plays in the background. Soon enough, the titular dolphin Ecco pokes his head out of the water, at which point the camera zooms in on a detailed piece of artwork depicting our marine hero, which also doubles as the title screen:

But if you listen to that music closely, you might notice something off about it, like there's more going on than just happy dolphins here. The song's calming melody has a subtle undertone of sadness, but what could be sad about playful little dolphin friends? As the song goes on, it turns to harsher tones that seem to clash with the more peaceful melody. Clearly, there's something more going on here...

The game itself opens with the player gaining control over Ecco as he swims in his home bay with his pod. If you take the time to "talk" to your pod-mates with your sonar, one of them will cryptically remark that the marks on Ecco's head look like "stars in the sky". Another one of Ecco's brethren presents Ecco with the playful challenge of "how high in the sky can you fly?" Taking on this challenge, Ecco, controlled by the player, leaps as high into the air as he can.

Then this happens (skip to around the one minute mark, or simply watch the whole video for the entire introduction to the game).

This scene alone is enough to traumatize any child who had the misfortune of growing up with this game. This scene terrified me as a child and still does today. The game immediately shifts tones. One minute, Ecco is happily playing with his family, and the next everyone and everything he knows and loves is sucked into the sky in a violent storm that is so horrifiying in its suddenness. The shift in music perfectly reflects this change of tone. Left confused and completely alone in a cold, deep ocean, both Ecco and the player must now cope with a sudden isolation and also the question of, "What do I do now?"

The next area combines a bleak, lonely musical piece with a wider, more open area full of creatures that hurt Ecco and cause him to let out a painful squeal when he makes contact with them. There are also some other dolphins who are just as confused as you are and offer little help. A killer whale tells Ecco that he "knows not what has happened to your pod" and that "perhaps the Big Blue can help you"...whatever that means. With only cryptic advice to go on, both the player and Ecco are left completely alone. The music, the big ocean setting, the lack of direction; everything combines to create a feeling of utter helplessness. This is not the happy video game about dolphins that you expected to play after seeing that boxart.

Ecco is thrust into a quest to find his family and the first proper "level" of the game that follows doesn't mess around, immediately throwing our poor little dolpnin into a frightening cave system filled with nothing but things that wants to hurt him: spiny shells, puffer fish, and a gigantic octopus. With its menacing sound and creatures, the "Undercaves" mean business.

Ecco's allies are few and far between. For the most part, everything in the ocean is trying to kill him. If the desperate feelings of isolation weren't enough, Ecco the Dolphin is also widely regarded as one of the most difficult video games ever created. Levels are often labyrinthine, with little to no direction or guidance. Ecco is also incredibly vulnerable, having both a very small life meter as well an equally tiny air meter that must be refreshed constantly.

Ecco is a video game that almost seems designed to instill despair and dread into the player and inevitably make them want to give up. This in turn, is part of what makes it so brilliant. Most video games, no matter how deep or sad or meaningful their narratives are, not matter how well-crafted their atmosphere is, are usually quite fun to play, enjoyable on some level, and therefore are built to satisfy a player and encourage them to reach the end of the game. Super Metroid, for example, is often rightfully praised for its sense of isolation and lonely alien atmosphere. Yet, as bounty hunter Samus Aran, you slowly amass a series of upgrades and fearsome weapons so that as the game goes on, the player doesn't feel helpless or trapped, but powerful and capable of accomplishing any feat. They may get lost at times, but they are constantly gaining new abilities that will inevitably help them to forge a path ahead. In Ecco, you're just a dolphin, with nothing but a pathetic dash move and some sonar waves. And you remain in this state, with no health or air upgrades and very little in the way of new attack upgrades, for the entire game until the very last few levels. But we'll get to those levels later. Trust me, your eventual upgrades mean little in the face of the horrors that await Ecco at the end of his journey.

Ecco depresses the player not by telling them a sad story, but by making them live one. The game throws them straight into a terrifying situation that they experience for themselves, followed by an incredibly potent sense of isolation that they feel themselves. While there is text in the game that furthers the story along, most of the experience will be spent alone and terrified of everything around you. Giant crabs come out of nowhere, toothy aquatic snakes swarm the seas around you, sharks charge you, and almost everything in your environment wants you dead. There's no partner to help you. You don't get any missile upgrades. You are alone. No happy reprieve, no break, no comfort. And this is all accomplished through actual gameplay, through experience, through a powerful combination of haunting music and sound design, bleakly life-like art direction, and an extreme sense of vulnerability.

To quote this article, which I highly suggest you give a read: "When there's a video game that makes the player depressed, that's when the medium might be onto something as an art form...It's easy to like something that makes you feel powerful in its fantasy world, as games generally do. But would anybody play a game that makes him sad?"

Ecco the Dolphin is that game, or at least, one of the progenitors of that kind of game. Almost everything about Ecco makes me uncomfortable. It frightens me and makes me feel lonely and vulnerable. It's not a game I'd go to to have a good time, to let off some stress. Sometimes, I feel like it's a game that I'd just like to forget...yet, Ecco has a certain mystique, a certain quality that, despite how it makes me feel, forces me to return to it in my thoughts time and time again.

There's a certain brilliance in its strangeness and its eeriness that's undeniable.

Then there's the mid-game twist, where Ecco learns the truth about what happened to his pod. Apparently, storms like the one that took Ecco's family have been happening on Earth every 500 years. The cause? Aliens known as the "Vortex" whose home planet has lost the ability to produce food have turned their sights on the Earth for a harvesting ground. Every 500 years, they harvest from the Earth's oceans and with each harvest, the Vortex consume more and more and as the game puts it, "They are getting hungrier!" So not only is Ecco's family missing, but in all likelikehood they have probably already been eaten by hungry aliens.

This is all perhaps a metaphor for the way humans rip sea-life out of the only world the creatures know to be served on a dinner table. Imagine if you were spending a sunny afternoon in the park with your family, when suddenly a horrific storm erupted and lifted everyone you hold near and dear into the sky, leaving you helpless and alone. This is basically Ecco's exact situation.

After helping a god-like being known as the Asterite, the oldest living thing in the ocean, Ecco is granted  the power to fight back against the Vortex aliens: unlimited air and a deadly sonar weapon. After this, the dolphin uses a time machine built by the ancient people of Atlantis (yes, this is a game about a time-travelling dolphin that battles aliens, what of it?) to travel back to the hour of the storm that took his pod. This time, however, Ecco is sucked up into the sky with his pod to take the fight to the Vortex themselves (itself?).

Now we get to those end-game levels; now we get to the stuff that true nightmares are made of.

After the storm, Ecco finds himself in a mechanical tube full of machinery designed to cut up anything that survived the storm. His pod is nowhere to be seen, but all Ecco can do is continuously move upwards towards an unseen destination as he is sucked faster and faster upwards. The eerie and mechanical track that plays here suits the environment perfectly. The Tube is tense build-up; neither the player nor Ecco have any idea what's in store for them ahead. Where will this bizarre, alien passage take them? What horrors await them ahead?

After Ecco makes his way through The Tube, the player is greeted with the ominous words "Welcome to the Machine" and the penultimate level of the game (named after the Pink Floyd song of the same name) follows. Welcome to the Machine is an auto-scrolling nightmare not only considered by many to be one of the most difficult levels in all of video game history, but is the single creepiest environment of any video game in my own personal gaming history, accompanied by the eeriest music I've ever heard in a video game. That song is a masterpiece not only for its uncanny sound, but for just how perfectly fitting is it for the cold, mechanical and utterly alien environment it accompanies. I've come to learn that all this mechanized alien weirdness seems to be inspired by the work of Swiss surrealist artist H.R. Giger, who happens to be the designer of the iconic Alien from the Ridley Scott film of the same name.

Quite frankly, I am terrified of this level and the music that accompanies it...yet also fascinated by my terror and by the strangeness this whole experience represents. Here is the level in its entirety if you're curious and don't mind spoiling it (of course, if you're reading this, I've already spoiled everything anyway). Watch at your own risk.

If the player does not know the precisely correct path to follow, they will be crushed, and not only that, but the creepy Vortex aliens (whose severed heads split from their bodies after attacked by Ecco and continue to assault the dolphin) themselves finally make an appearance and are constantly hunting Ecco with their only intention being to feed the unfortunate mammal to their hideous queen.

Speaking of which...

The Vortex queen appears in the form of a massive head with beady, black eyes and razor-sharp teeth. The queen constantly inhales and eats everything around her and if she gobbles Ecco up, the player is sent back to The Machine where they have to repeat that nightmare all over again. If anyone made it this far in the game, than they surely gave up at this point as the game doesn't even give you a password for the final boss battle until after it is defeated (unlike every other stage where the password appears at the start of the level).

If Ecco is lucky and brave enough to blow the queen's eyes out of her sockets and rip her jaw off, the creature will fall and Ecco's pod, miraculously still alive somehow, will come flying out of her body, after which our hero and his family swim back down The Tube and back to their home bay on Earth.

But...one of Ecco's podmates ominously asks, "Do you think the Vortex are destroyed?" You mean that thing could still be alive?

Yeesh.

I don't know if anyone who popped in Ecco the Dolphin back in the early nineties ever expected the eldritch horrors that this game had in store for them. Between its crushing sense of despair and horrifying final stages, Ecco is an experience that bores its way into a poor hapless child like myself's subconscious and stays there. Forever.

Now, perhaps Ecco won't be as frightening for everyone as it is for me (I do know I'm not the only one though). After all, I was subjected to this nightmare when I was very young and therefore the game has a special kind of terrifying quality for me that seeded my mind when I was very young and has only grown since. Also, the game combines two of my biggest long-standing fears: malevolent, scary aliens that want to eat me and the deep, open abyss of the ocean into one specially packaged nightmare that feels tailor-made for me personally.

Also, I must confess that I've never actually played through this whole game. I don't even think I made it past the Undercaves (first proper level) when I was little, but thanks to the magic of passwords, I skipped around to the various levels in the game to see more of the experience, including the traumatizing final stages. Ecco recently creeped back into the forefront of my mind (as it tends to do from time to time) and I decided to watch someone else play through the entirely of the game. After seeing the game in full, I'm not sure I'd ever want to play it myself.

This isn't solely because of the game's lonely and depressing atmosphere, or its sheer terror levels, but more because of just how frustrating and tedious the game actually looks to play. Even if Ecco is a brilliant early example of the power that video games have to be something more than just a fun game with an enjoyable story behind the gameplay, it is far from a flawless experience. Even though the game's atmosphere, build-up and themes are all incredibly well-incorporated, the tediousness of having to push a shell across an undersea cavern with slippery controls just isn't something I'm exactly jumping to experience. Therefore, with some more polish, and perhaps a little more balancing that would make the game a bit more playable, perhaps Ecco could maintain its eerie, unmistakable sense of dread that makes the player want to quit or run away sweaty and terrified, but because of the atmosphere and not because of tediousness.

But I'm also just making excuses, because I'm still downright scared to play this game, even knowing all of its tricks.

Oh, and in regards to that question from the ending above: Are the Vortex really destroyed? Well, it turns out, no, they weren't. As a matter of fact, the queen is still alive and kicking and she follows Ecco back to Earth to make a new nest for herself there. This all happens in the sequel to Ecco the Dolphin entitled Ecco: The Tides of Time, a game which I had much less experience with as a child (rented it once or twice) and one that I also watched a playthrough of recently. While still featuring a timeless soundtrack and a trippy, surreal adventure filled with flying dolphins from the future and a much more heavily sci-fi-focused story, Tides of Times seems to lack the loneliness and isolation of the first game. The game still has plenty of potent atmosphere, just not quite in the same way as the first title. When Tides of Time starts, Ecco is already a hero, and the Vortex are no longer as unknown and mysterious as they used to be. The game doesn't build up to the weirdness, but instead starts with it early on and rolls with it. It's a sci-fi adventure that certainly has its eerie moments, but ultimately has a more inviting, action adventure feel than the first game. You can tell the difference in tone just by listening to the game's opening theme, which does have a melancholic sound, but ultimately feels more adventurous than sad and lonely. All this said, Tides of Time is still something special all its own and is a worthy continuation of the Ecco story.

If you've never played Ecco the Dolphin before, than I encourage you to at least try it (you can get the original cart for cheap online or find it on Steam, XBLA, Virtual Console, iOS, multiple Sega Mega Drive/Genesis collections, etc.; it's all over the place). Try just playing through the opening levels and I think you'll see and feel part of what I've been prattling on about. And if you have played the game, if you ventured into its deep, dark waters in your youth like I did, well, sorry I brought back the bad memories.

I hope the nightmares don't start again for you.