Year Released: 1994

Genre: Survival Horror

System: PC (DOS)

Producer/Developer: Pygnosis Ltd and Andrew Spencer Studios

Hear ye, hear ye, come oneth, come all! Psygnosis Limited, producers of yon great titles such as Lemmings and Wipeout, doth indeed launcheth a title mixing both the elements of fantasy and the genre of horror with a technology unheardeth of in the early 1990s.

Uncover your ears, the butchering of the Shakespearean speech has ceased. Hit the jump for heck of a lot more.

Developed by a two-man company called Andrew Spencer Studios, Ecstatica puts you in the shoes of a weary traveller who stumbles onto a village called Tirich, searching for food and water. Little did he (or she; you get to change your gender at the start) know that the former human populace of the village is filled with all manners of demons, beasts and offsprings of the Devil. Add in a rescue-the-hot-princess-who-did-all-this-in-the-first-place plot, a persistent bunch of near-unbeatable enemies, a bit of sadistic humor, and you got yourself a pretty unique medieval survival horror title.

As you can see from the literal balls-to-the-walls screenshots here, Ecstatica uses an archaic Ellipsoid graphics engine which gives every character and interactive object a rather bizarre look. According to this trivia bit from MobyGames:

Estatica uses an interesting software 3D “ellipsoid” technology that renders objects and characters completely using filled spheres/ellipses. The highly-optimized rendering algorithm performs automatic Gouraud shading and z-buffering, so the spheres are lit correctly and mesh together without noticable artifacts. The results are interesting and effective.

I’d say. This showing-off of technology almost worked against the aspect of the horror element; it can be hard to take any of the bad guys seriously. Dragons and drakes look like those blown-up toy balloons you see in your local carnival handed down by scary coke-sniffing-and-potential-rapist clowns. In fact, the whole damn village has colors similar to that of a carnival; all bright and chirpy.

I said ‘almost’ because, as far as atmosphere goes, it convey its intentions well.

Before Resident Evil 3 introduced the scare-tactic known as the Nemesis, Ecstatica had the Werewolf. As you walk into the village, this lupine gentleman comes down on you from the roof, renders you unconscious, and drags your ass to a barn. He then hangs you upside down and basically does to you what Rocky did with his punching bag. In other instances, you catch it in the act of beating down on a poor townsfolk and proceeds to chase you down. Creepy music, black humor, and weirdness contributes to the aura of fear emanating from the village of Tirich. Shapeshift into a weasel! Beat up a scared priest in the belfry of the local church! Fight midgets and minotaurs! Get chased around by a horny fat witch! I wish I was making this stuff up.

In the village, nothing is certain. You may think that the cuddly honey-eating bear in one of the houses might help you out, but no, he knocks you back off if you try to go anywhere near it. You may think that that book you find in the church won’t get you anywhere, but lo and behold, it grants you safe passage into the nearby monastery. Hell, you may even think that that piece of stainless steel armor in the blacksmith’s armory might help you with your constitution, but upon putting it on, you are encumbered beyond belief, and as soon as you set foot outside to the lush cliffside of the village, you fall on your ass and not able to get up ever again. And guess who comes walking by to drag you into the dungeon to teach you the finer points of being an eternal human punching bag?

Our good fucking friend, the Werewolf. Body of a Fisher Price reject, mind of a sadist.

As with old survival horror games predating Resident Evil 4, your character controls like a tank. Despite that little snag, Ecstatica was one of the first games to introduce a unique HUD system; your health is represented by how your character looks like on-screen. If your health is low, your character limps and holds his chest in pain. Other features include the ability to hold up to not 30, not 15, BUT up to two (numero DOS!) items, one in each hand. As this adds a little innovation and realism in contrast to the “manage your inventory” style of game design most games do back in the day (and now), you will do a lot of backtracking dropping and recollecting key items back and forth. Still, a stellar effort from a two-man development team.

The game did pretty decently that it spawned a sequel. As much as it look significantly better and is much larger, Ecstatica II felt more like a single player beat-em-up than an actual survival horror game. As with most old games, you can probably play Ecstatica on the DosBox emulator. If you are indeed searching for that special something to fill the “creative” survival horror void, then this humble retrogamer suggest that you revel in Ecstatica if, perchance, you can find a copy, for you may not find another as creepily kooky and as “ball-busting” as this.

All pictures are courtesy of MobyGames, hence the watermark.

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