les miserable enter the story
Les Miserables: Enter the Story

Chris Tolworthy is a class on its own. He finished his first game “Les Miserable” which is some like a first step of a broader concept “Enter the Story”, something Chris calls “world’s biggest adventure game”. Maybe I don’t get the genius of this game, or the game isn’t turned out to be that great yet. But before we get into the game and the really interesting concept, let’s talk a little bit about Chris himself…

Chris Tolworthy is the guy, who runs the biggest Zak McKracken archive on the web, where he collects every known fact under the sun about the Zak McKracken games. I spend hours and hours on this site, which is a good sign. It turns out that he is also a huge fan of Marvel comics and an advocate for “real-time in comics“. Some years ago he came up with the concept of “making the biggest adventure game of all time”, and I thought, well, yes, why not. This sounds interesting. If someone is capable of doing a really huge adventure game, than an adventure nerd like Chris. The whole concept he declares as “Enter the Story

The project “Enter the Story” wants to transform epic literature into a huge gaming world. The decent goal is to create the biggest adventure game, that was ever written, with stories and timelines, that bridge each other with places and characters intersecting. Where you can walk seamless from story to story and from time to time. To get into the “Enter the Story”-project, he began to create his first game “Les Miserables”. He used the Aventure Game Studio to implement the “Les Miserables” book from Victor Hugo. So far so good. And this is where we are now.

les miserable enter the story
Les Miserables Ingame

After hearing all the good things about the interesting concept, playing the demo of the recently released “Les Miserables” was more like a disappointment. Many time and work was put into the game, but the results just feel like a beginner-game (and in fact it is the first game he made). For example, just look at the graphics. Is this a golden view upon history and how it should look like on a game of today, or are they Photoshop-experiments, that did not went too deep into detail. Somehow similar is the gaming-experience. The concept may be divine, the game is not – so far. Maybe setting up a team and getting more into the game-design issues would be a way, to make really a “the biggest game ever made”. Chris announced, that we will create the next games after historic novels, like “The Divine Comedy”, “Apeiron”, “Julius Caesar” and many more.

Dirty Split

For me, a great adventure game just looks a little bit more like: Dirty Split. (here is an German interview with Uwe Sittig, the game designer of Dirty Split.)


Intro Dirty Split

Blog - Date published: January 2, 2009 | Comments Off

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