Many remember Alone in the Dark and rightly place it on the mantle as the grandfather of survival horror games. But fewer remember Ečstatica, a game that came out a couple of years after Alone in the Dark. A game set in a small, evil-ridden village where you can die at any time with a werewolf hunting you, minotaurs stomping on you, small goblins skewering you, or traps rending you into a bloody pulp.
As in Alone in the Dark, you play either a female or a male character who arrives in a small town on horseback. Your gender doesn't matter; the only thing that changes is your appearance and voice. As you've run out of water, you decide to venture towards the village, only to find yourself trapped within. A small walk reveals dying villagers crawling on the ground, a werewolf ripping some poor wretch to pieces, and a local priest, who has secluded himself in a bell tower, desperately warding off demons.
This horror is not hidden in the dark, gloomy shadows; it is all presented in bright colours and sunlight. You are thrown into a world that is doing its best to kill you at every turn, so the first thing to do is to find a weapon of some kind to give at least some amount of solace. But not even a weapon is enough, especially with the seemingly immortal werewolf tackling you at every point. (He's not immortal, mind you, just dreadfully hard to kill, mostly thanks to clunky controls.).
After some running around, you finally figure out what has happened. A sorceress, Ečstatica, summoned forth a demon, who took control over the village and imprisoned her in the castle dungeons. If you want to get out, you need to kill him—a task easier said than done.
All said, Ečstatica is not a terribly long game but it is a hard game. There are only a handful of puzzles, but solving them requires some planning and trial and error. There's no way around trial and error, even if you manage to make moving around a bit easier if you kill every monster in the village. A doable thing that takes some effort and exploiting the game engine against it, like trapping the werewolf in a corner where you can beat it to death if you can hit it continuously for about 5 minutes, Not riveting gameplay by any means, but doable if you want.
The biggest puzzle is getting into the castle, which means becoming a knight. That can happen only if you find a golden sword and throw it into a lake, where the Lady of the Lake can catch it and anoint you. It sounds more complicated than it is, but as there are so few puzzles in the game, it actually telegraphs it quite easily. Same with the monastery, which requires you to read some Bible verses to get in. It's easy to figure out where the Bible is, as you do see it early on and can carry it around, despite not knowing where you might need it.
If Ečstatica were a bigger game in terms of the size of the gameworld, the way it handles its inventory could become a problem. See, you can carry only two items at any given time, one in each hand. Usually, this means a weapon in one hand and a quest item in one. But, as stated, there aren't that many puzzles and the game world is quite nicely contained, so this actually never becomes too big of an issue. It needs to be said that if you put down items, place them in places with clear visibility; otherwise, you might have problems finding them again.
Graphically, Ečstatica looks quite unique. Mostly because it uses pre-rendered graphics, most of the items are constructed of small ellipsoids. This gives a nice texture to everything you see, including the characters, which are all made from ellipsoids as well. During this time, most of the 3D characters were blocky and sharp-edged; here, everything has a nice, curvy aesthetic to it. And the animation is very well done as well. You can tell the animators made the best use of the freedom 3D gave them, and I'd say the character animation was among the best done during this time. It's expressive, and there's a lot of variation in it.
Your characters are controlled via the numpad. 8, 4, 6, and 2 move you around. 7 and 9 are used for attacks; 5 is ducking; and 1 and 2 are for your left and right hands. Function keys from F1–F4 activate sneking, a very useful, albeit slow, way of moving; F5–F9 make you walk, and the rest make you run. Running is something you do a lot if you don't kill the monsters. While the moving is surprisingly solid for such an old game, I'd say Ečstatica controls far better than Alone in the Dark, Resident Evil, or Grim Fandango, but it still has some issues with combat and aligning your character just right to hit the monsters. But after you get over it, this is one of the most fluent attempts at this control method.
At times, thanks to the many cinematic camera angles, navigation can be a tad difficult. It is, at times, a bit too easy to get stuck in corners or get a bit disoriented with the fast-angle cuts. The locations of the game might not be many, but the developers took everything out of the pre-rendered world they were using.
I might have made it sound like combat is a big part of the game, but it's not really. Or it is, but it can also be skipped in most cases. Running away is a viable option, as is sneaking around. Traps are really the biggest killer in the game, as those are something you'll find only through trial and error. The game fully expects you to save often and experiment. Meta-gaming is a big part of the design; it simply expects you to be aware of things before they are even possible.
Ečstatica is, while far from being a perfect game, a surprisingly atmospheric horror survival adventure that doesn't hold your hand at any point. At times, it might feel unfair, in the same sense that games like King's Quest seem unfair, but at the same time, it is very good at telegraphing what you should be doing after the initial shock of your vicious environment and feeling of being lost. It's even possible to arrive at dead ends if you mess up, but here the relatively short duration of the game plays it to its advantage. This is one of those cases where trial and error is actually a viable gameplay mechanic.
It's really a shame Ečstatica is not sold anywhere at the moment. It really is, if not a hidden gem, an interesting little game from the past. It does things wrong, but it also does a lot right. It might have aged, but not so badly that it would be unplayable for a modern gamer, at least if you have the will to see the game through. It was a game of trial and error.
Surprisingly enough, I do recommend this one if you can find it from somewhere. It's interesting enough to give it a spin, at least, if nothing else.
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