Curse of Enchantia

DOSBox, Curse of Enchantia (1993) game

A game I first played many years ago, and which I was pleased to find available to download on the Abandonia site as it had remained an unconquered challenge for me. I originally played it on my Amiga, but whether it was because of a problem with one of the disks, or because I got irrevocably stuck, I was never able to complete the game. I remember getting to the cliff face section at least, but I'd certainly never reached the icy wasteland, so it was with some pride that I was finally able to lay the game to rest, and more importantly to me, having completed it without referring to any guides, despite getting stuck a few times. Strangely, the percentage complete showed as only 98% when I was done, so I'm not sure what I missed (although I never did gain access to The Red Dragon inn situated just before the fountain in the village, so perhaps there was something I could have done there which would have secured the missing 2%?), but it was a relief to finish. And not, I'm afraid, just due to the satisfaction of completion - it could be a bit of a chore sometimes, and one aspect of the game that proved a grave irritation was the music. The same piece played throughout the entire game without end, and while there were some good little sound effects occasionally, nothing else broke up the aural monotony of this tune. It's not even that it was a terrible piece of music, it was just so repetitive and in the version I was playing on DOSBox, there was no option to turn it off, so the only recourse was to have no sound, something you don't want to resort to!

If the music was a negative, the visuals were quite the opposite, being beautifully designed pixel graphics, the design of which is an art form all its own. Great effort and time must have gone into every detail of each screen - I'm tempted to save off some of the screenshots to use as desktop pictures, they were that nice to look at. Just as 'The Settlers' was a delight to experience in great part due to the beauty and simplicity of the graphics, 'Enchantia' really was enchanting, with a good variety of locations and colourful characters. In fact, some of it was more than colourful, you might even say bizarre. By the time you get to the weird area to the left of the village, you're starting to wonder if Salvador Dali was an influence, with a huge nose on legs, piles of cars, socks, cassette tapes and various other things situated around a dreamlike landscape; lips sitting atop another pile of control pads; a volcano spitting out rocks… surreal was definitely the word for it! But that was the form of the game, it was heavily stylised, uniquely so, even among the usual point-and-click adventures which tended to be full of odd characters and strange places in 'The Secret of Monkey Island' mould. 'Enchantia' took things further, however, into the illogical and bizarre, so that if you hoped to solve many of the puzzles you had to think outside the box. Actually, thought wouldn't often be of great assistance thanks to some ridiculous solutions that were inconsistent with the rest of the game or were discovered by accident in trial and error. Perhaps the inconsistency was consistent in itself, so you should have expected silly solutions, but that's not much of a consolation when you're stuck.

I have to admit I was halted a good five times - I couldn't work out what to do on the snowy waste, when it was a case of having to return to somewhere you'd been before after doing something in another area (namely, talking to the walrus, who would then appear at the opposite part of the area to bridge a gap); the ice palace corridor with the pulley system (insert a gun into a panel on the wall! Why? Attack an ice ledge with a broom…?); the ice cave with the green ogre inside (stand behind the pillar so he shuts his eyes); and in the surreal area I was stuck twice. Once, fair enough, because it took me a while to work out I could combine the gold coins with the sock to create a weapon, and second when I was really stuck and all I needed to do was insert the hair into the nose. Yes, because that would make the lips vanish on another screen, wouldn't it… That surreal area may have been the toughest to get past as there were so many options and variables that you would soon get tired of inserting this into that, or combining these two items, or whatever combination of commands you could perform. In the end I had to create a checklist of every action I'd performed with every item, on every other person or object on each screen. And that wasn't much fun. (Not to say some of the solutions weren't ingenious, my favourite being the use of marbles and a tray to cross an electrified floor!).

The trouble was that some of the actions you had available to you were very similar in nature and you had to choose the exact option to make it work. So you might have to insert something, but if you tried to combine it instead, it wouldn't work. Combine, give, insert, unlock could all have been one action. The tone of the game was in the humorous vein, for sure, but rather than being witty as in 'Monkey Island,' it was odd. Granted, the deaths your character experienced were an amusing side note, especially as progress was unaffected, so it was more like a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Animation was good and I liked the breadth of characters you meet, but everything felt so unconnected. The reason I enjoyed it most was because I'd played it before, so there was a nice sense of returning to a place I'd visited long ago in the late nineties, rather than the game's merits. For everything I liked (beautiful visuals), there was something else that got on my nerves (music), so although a challenge, it was a relief to finish, mainly for the unfairness of the puzzles. As you'd expect for those days, the ending was rather limp - a fairly simple final boss battle with the evil queen, then a picture saying 'The End.' The story itself was barely a part of it, unlike, say 'The Legend of Kyrandia,' thanks to the disconnect between many of the people and places. It was unique in that there was no language in it, all communication by pictogram, which must have made it easy to translate for multiple territories. But I couldn't really recommend it. Although unique in some ways (featuring some sections more in the way of platform games), it's flaws outweigh any advancement of the genre, and frustration was far too prevalent. It was pretty, though!

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