The Adventure Game formally known as Myst was a really influential title, with its prerendered backdrops, full-motion video actors and the ability to turn an hour’s worth of content into a six-hour headache with its unintuitive puzzles.
One emulator of Myst’s style was Prince (or o(+>, if you’re being technical). Playing like a guided tour around the artist’s massive ego... we mean mansion, you stare at his Oscar, read about his backstory, rummage through his wardrobe and listen to celebrities describe Prince much like one would the Messiah.
We’re not really sure what happened to interactive tours of people’s careers in the form of a fictional mansion. Maybe they’ll factor that into Web 3.0.
Written and produced by the weird band themselves, Devo’s “comedy” shines through in this Myst-like adventure.
What Wikipedia describes as “kitsch science fiction themes, deadpan surrealist humour, and mordantly satirical social commentary” actually appears as an evil mutant Turkey Monkey who wishes to unleash a virus over Spudland. It’s probably a brutal social commentary on our dependence on technology, but we’re only guessing.
While it might provide a few laughs for Devo-obsessed weirdos, it’s almost unplayable, with its strict time limit and situations that are dependent on being in the right place at the right time. It’ll take you at least 10 attempts to have a chance at beating it.
So we’ve had games based on artists’ legacies, their twisted senses of humour and even their lyrics, but when Ocean snatched up the Frankie license, they based it on nothing less than the band’s logo: a silhouette of a man.
You play this soulless dude on a quest to become more human, and halfway through, you encounter a murder and then you play a mini-game where Reagan and Gorbachev spit at each other. Maybe it’s based on that feeling you get watching a Frankie music video, we just don’t know.
