You’ve never played: Of Light and Darkness: The Prophecy

The box was surprisingly well designed for a game that sold buggery squat copies.

I don’t know if you’ve heard, but apparently the world will end on 21^st December 2012. Then again, they said the same about the year 2000, and look how that turned out (clue: we’re still alive). Will people never learn? But all this talk about humanity’s impending and certain doom reminded me of one of my favourite games from my formative years: Of Light and Darkness: The Prophecy. OK, maybe favourite is too strong a word, but it’s a game to which, despite questionable quality, I keep returning.

Released in the halcyon days of 1998, OLaD proudly declared itself a “realtime adventure game”. I’m still entirely sure what Interplay and developer Tribal Dreams meant by that. The game does feature a time limit, albeit a rather loose and ill-defined one. And there is an element of collecting and combining objects, but not in the traditional SCUMM sense. Perhaps “realtime adventure game” was the only way they could describe the game without sounding like complete nutters.

You see, OLaD is a strange game. You wake up in front of a demented jack-in-the-box, and listen as an unseen court declares the coming apocalypse and charges you with stopping it. A coloured light then flashes, and a pleasant tour guide voice instructs you to find the room displayed on the side of the box. And that really is just the beginning.

A platform takes you down to a street in the Village of the Damned (not that one). Where the Village is exactly, we’re never told. It could be a kind of purgatory. Or not. The only thing that matters is that the Village exists, along with its bizarre architecture. The visuals of OLaD were designed by artist Gil Bruvel, who infuses the game with a playful uneasiness. Imagine if H. R. Giger designed Disneyland, and you might have an idea of what OLaD looks like. Everything’s chunky, colourful and familiar, but there’s always something not quite right.

Movement is OlaD is similar to that of Myst: every location has a number of paths and doors coming off it, and clicking on these will propel you forward to adjacent locations. Once you’ve clicked your way to whichever location you were told to find, you discover that it is an “apocalyptic device room”. There are seven of these throughout the game, each one representing a different global catastrophe, from famine to war. Voices describe how these events could occur, and clicking on the devices themselves has the tour guide voice recite a prophecy pertaining to that event.

In the room are three artefacts, small objects such as a necklace or a dagger. Soon you are joined by three apparitions, who resemble floating deathmasks. The artefacts and the apparitions are linked, and, along with coloured orbs you find dotted around the village, they form the crux of OLaD‘s gameplay. Each artefact belongs to an apparition; each apparition corresponds to a colour; and each apparition is guilty of one of the Seven Deadly Sins. It’s your job to steal the artefacts, take them to the correct sin room and use the orbs to flash the correct colour, thus redeeming the apparition.

And a very important job it is too. The more apparitions enter the village, the closer the apocalypse gets. The apparitions are being sent by Gar Hob, Dark Lord of the Seventh Millenium, who is hellbent on destroying the world and commencing his thousand year reign of darkness. To this end, Hob has kidnapped Angel Gemini (pronounced “Gemeenee”, apparently), a stripper who gathered a cult following preaching the end of days. As you wander the village, television screen will occasionally materialise in front of you, depicting a war of words as Hob and Gemini debate the future of humanity.

But back to the apparitions. They aren’t just random masks; each one represents a figure from the past (some real, some fictional) whose life was a masterclass in one of the Seven Deadly Sins. For example, Xuanchiquel was the caretaker of a Mayan temple who would steal and eat the offerings left for the gods. When the High Priest found out, he left an especially delicious meal laced with baking soda. Xuanchiquel ate the meal and promptly exploded. That would be Gluttony, I guess.

As that little anecdote can attest, OLaD is full of humour, mostly of the dry variety. A lot of it comes from the unseen court, which applies the rigid and officious nature of legal proceedings to the chaos of Armageddon. But it’s in the architecture, too. The Sin Rooms, for instance, represent their respective vices in playful ways. Pride is a spotlit microphone in an empty theatre, while Greed is an all but empty vault protected by a network of laser tripwires. And James Woods (yes, that James Woods) lends Gar Hob a dry cynicism that clashes with Lolita Davidovich’s more preachy Angel Gemini.

I realise I’ve spent a great deal of time explaining what goes on in OLaD without really describing it. That’s because you need a blow by blow account of the first few minutes of the game to truly get a grip on just how odd it is. But odd does not necessarily equal good, and OlaD is the poster child for this. For all its visual splendour and rich pseudo-historical backstory, OLaD‘s gameplay is somewhat lacking.

Take the point-and-click navigation. It was fine in Myst, but that was 1993. OLaD was released in 1998, a time when great strides were being made in FPSs such as System Shock 2 and the Thief games. What worked for Myst just seems antiquated here. It also doesn’t help in the games more intense moments. Late in the proceedings you need to run from a series of powerful apparitions in order to lure them to the room in which you can redeem them. The problem is, the game can be picky about where on the screen you must click to advance, which can result in frustrating, and to be perfectly honest, unfair game overs.

Redeeming apparitions does get a little repetitive. The first three levels have you trotting off to the same rooms redeeming the same apparitions. The third level adds in a handful of new apparitions and rooms, but these do little to eliminate the growing tedium. The fourth and final level sees a change of pace with a puzzle disguised as a boss battle, but it’s just a standard “object X is next to object Y, but before object Z” affair. Not quite as climactic as the developers probably thought.

All of this might explain why OlaD didn’t sell. The adventure game was dying a slow death in 1998, and I imagine the bizarre art design put more than a few people off. Even so, I’m still surprised that I have never met a single person who has even heard pf the game. In fact, until I saw a couple of copies going on eBay, I was convinced I owned the only copy of OlaD in existence.

It’s a real shame, because Of Light and Darkness: The Prophecy is truly a unique experience. Despite what Tribal Dreams might have had in mind, OLaD isn’t a “realtime adventure game”; it’s an interactive fever dream. You emerge into the Village, wander around, stare in wonder at the architecture, get accosted by floating masks, and become seriously creeped out. The game isn’t about collecting orbs or finding secret rooms. Like Killer7, it’s about telling yourself that it can’t get any stranger, then turning corner and discovering that you couldn’t have been more wrong.