The one guarantee is that when things happen, they're going to be pretty weird. The downside is that there's not much story here at all, or much in the way of direction. The world is open, and it feels like you're poking around a real place and trying to deal with things as they come rather than simply going from set-piece to set-piece and being force-fed the solution. Unlike Alone in the Dark for instance, the hero recovers from damage quickly, meaning that it can get away with the muggings as long as you as a player can get away from the werewolf or whatever. That's actually pretty cool for a horror game, albeit quite brutal, and not Ecstatica's only neat thing. It's horror, but it's horror where when you die, the Game Over sequence cuts to the monsters hanging around in the pub or similar and the werewolf telling the minotaur 'Wow, that was easy.' as a dragon enjoys their company. It's hard to be too disturbed though, not only because of the ball thing, but because Ecstatica can never decide what mood it's going for. All the buildings are trashed, and the people are either dead or praying for the sweet release of death-one guy crawling around without the use of his legs. Must be the same builders they hired in King's Quest 2.Įven from a distance, it's pretty obvious that this isn't a good place for a supply run. It collapses as soon as you try to leave. If you're wondering how long that bridge lasts once the game starts, the answer is 'about five femtoseconds'. Out of water and with Pepsi Max not invented yet, he/she spots a village that's carefully placed on a floating platform in the middle of an abyss with only one bridge linking it to the other side. The basic premise of Ecstatica is that you're a traveller-male or female, in a pleasant detail, and both destined to get the shit kicked out of them-on a mysterious journey in 928AD. The same company also made the first 15-rated game, Dracula.) As a marketing coup though, it worked pretty well.

Needless to say, no, there was no good reason. (Out of historical interest, the first game in the UK to be graced with the mighty '18' badge was a text-adventure called Jack the Ripper. In retrospect, this may help explain the shuriken thing.

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