Perihelion: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

The girl on the box is entirely unexplained by the game's end.

     

Perihelion

Hungary

Morbid Visions (developer); Psygnosis (publisher)

Released in 1993 for Amiga
Date Started: 20 June 2021

Date Ended: 11 July 2021

Total Hours: 27
Difficulty: Moderate (3.0/5)
Final Rating: 41
Ranking at Time of Posting: 365/428 (85%)

  

Summary:

   

Set on a dying, post-apocalyptic planet, Perihelion offers a highly-original, moody, cyberpunk aesthetic, reinforced with grotesque graphics and a superb score. Six genetically-engineered heroes race against time to stop an invasion from an inter-dimensional entity called the Unborn. The game contrasts first-person exploration with top-down, Gold Box-style combat. Unfortunately, a completely linear story, a fixed number of combats, and a terrible mouse-only control scheme dampen the fun.

  

******

    

As I played the final acts of Perihelion, all the references and bits of lore made me think of the epigraph that accompanies Robert Howard's first Conan tale:

   

Know, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars--Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyperborea, Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered on the pastoral lands of Shem, Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs, Hyrkania whose riders wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest kingdom of the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming west. Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen- eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet.

    

To me, this is one of the most effective, efficient uses of world-building in the history of English literature. Enormously lush and evocative, it draws you immediately into the setting and makes you want to know more about this world, all while raising far more questions than it answers. Howard and later authors would make use of these proper names, but I often wonder if Howard had any idea what they were when he wrote his first short story, or whether he was just riffing. Did he already have a Hyborian Encyclopedia to draw from? Or were these just words? Is it better not to know?

    

I wonder the same thing as I read the scrolling text in Perihelion. When the game tells me that Lord Daleth is not only a crime lord but also a high priest of Carnivore, "an insanely evil entity from the Twilight Continuum," did the authors have any idea who Carnivore really was and what the Twilight Continuum really was, or were they just pulling names from novels and comics? Again, perhaps it's better not to know. I love the idea that there are more stories to be told about Perihelion--that the urgency of our quest doesn't leave us a lot of time to get into the details of history and culture, but that if we did have time, those details would exist. 

      

The Guardian is never well-explained.

    

Daleth was the ruler of NightFall, a one-level fortress that seemed bigger than it was because all of the backtracking required. We were there to get hold of the Guardian--the mysterious force or object that had banished an extra-planar entity in the past. As we entered, we immediately fell into combat with Daleth's elite insectoid guards from the "Eastern Wastelands, far over the borders of the Allied Territories." The battle wasn't hard (no combat for the rest of the game was really hard), but it was a bit annoying because enemies appeared on the map after combat had already begun. I don't think this happened in any other battle. Fortunately, the enemies were all-physical, and grouped together nicely for mass-damage spells.

   

Getting through NightFall meant finding a series of keys and marching back and forth between the doors that they opened. There was some light puzzle-solving necessary, but nothing like what was required in SoulTomb. We got some equipment upgrades in various storerooms. There was another battle with insectoids at a guard post, and a tougher one with three "witchmasters of Carnivore," trained in the "southern caverns," where they go blind, deaf, and mute, but develop extraordinary extrasensory perception to compensate. That ESP apparently doesn't allow them to become aware of the presence of their own companions, because each of them cast spells that caught the other two in their radiuses. Two of them died that way. It wasn't hard to swarm and kill the one remaining.

    

Targeting a witchmaster.

       

One corridor had the fortress's netcode--MURDER--spelled out in individual letters. In addition to the security code for a later door, the files on the net station told us more about the mysterious Guardian. Daleth's own analysis revealed that the object had the energy capacity of a "class M2" star, the psychic energy signature of a "E1 Entity," and "divine level" intelligence. Daleth was planning to sell it to the mediators in the Tower of Neon for 2 million credits. I'm still not sure why we're interrupting this transaction, since the mediators are planning to use it to banish the Unborn just like we are.

   

The Guardian was locked behind a door that required both the passcode (more specifically, a key encoded with the passcode) and a sample of Daleth's DNA. To get the latter, we had to find our way into Daleth's meditation chamber and kill him. The game did its best to build him up ("mighty, dark physical energies begin to fill the chamber around you"), but ultimately he was just one guy. He had some powerful spells, including an electrical attack, but I had plenty of characters to keep up with healing while the others shot and stabbed him. He left a wicked-looking broadsword that served my lead character until the end of the game.

   

I forgot to get a picture of the sword, but here's the DNA sampler.

      

We used a "DNA Sampler Unit," found elsewhere, to collect his genetic material. As we left his chambers, the game had a surprise:

     

Your blood instantly freezes as Lord Daleth--or better say something what once was Lord Daleth--suddenly bobs up in front of you, despite that you have killed him with your own hands and you've seen him die not even an hour ago . . . when an awful, unholy howl escapes from inside the undead creature as it begins to speak on a scornful, evil voice: "FOOLS . . . DID YOU THINK YOU CAN KILL A MEDIATOR OF LORD CARNIVORE WITHOUT PUNISHMENT? NOW YOU CAN SEE FOR YOURSELF THAT EVIL--AS YOU CALL IT--NEVER DIES, IT ONLY CHANGES FORM . . . ETERNALLY!

    

Despite all the build-up, the second battle against Lord Daleth might have been easier than the first. He had a lot of attacks per round, but there was one of him and six of us. I think the battle only took two rounds.

   

Also, despite all the talk of "changing forms," he looks pretty much exactly like the first time I met him, except now he drools more.

      

With Daleth eliminated--or just changing form, or whatever--we were able to get into the vault and retrieve the Guardian. The game described it as a "small, round-shaped thing" that glows and radiates "eternal wisdom and love." It noted that in its chamber, the party for the first time did not feel the oppressive touch of the Unborn.

    

Back out in the world, the only place we could go was the Tower of Neon, so called not because it glows brightly but because it is ruled by Lord Neon, "the most influential Entity of this world." The game noted that Lord Neon, a genius, has long shaped the world with his ideas and inventions, including bionecromancy. However, Neon is also to blame for the inter-dimensional experimentation that brought the Unborn into the world.

       

I wish the game had more time to explore how a mortal emperor manages to rule a land of living gods.

    

I enjoyed the psychedelic textures as we explored the lobby. Our way was blocked by various doors, but eventually a weird, scarred woman showed up, greeted us on behalf of Archon Monterey, and escorted us to "our quarters." She told us to wait there until the Archon was ready to receive us, and not to venture out of the quarters. We waited for a while, but when nothing happened, we wandered outside, where a couple of temple guards sent us back. This happened three times before they got fed up and attacked us. Part of me wonders if there wasn't a Far Cry 4-like alternate solution to this place where if we'd waited long enough, the Archon would have come to receive us peacefully.

   

After we killed eight guards--again, the battle wasn't hard--we began exploring the rest of the "quarters." We soon found an imprisoned Archon Darley, who admitted that he had been in charge of the "Entity Project" that brought the Unborn to Perihelion: "We were searching for new cosmic energy channels in the outer space when the Unborn detected the discontinuity in our dimension." With the breach came an "astral storm" that killed almost everyone in the tower. Archons Darley and Monterey survived as a demonic "winged beast . . . an ancient creature from the Plane of Infinitum" took the throne of the tower for himself. Monterey has recently gone to try to establish contact with Neon in the Inner Sanctum.

   

To get there ourselves, we had to find Darley's "palmprint disc" so we could bring it back to him and he could encode it to allow us passage. On the way there, we had to kill our hostess, revealed as "Chamelea, one of the deadliest assassins from the period of Interregnum," executed forty years ago. The Unborn apparently has the ability to resurrect the dead. She attacked with several guards, and we fought another long combat. As usual, a combination of offensive spells in the first round, physical attacks, and healing carried the day. I'm glossing over a lot of the battles just because there isn't much to say about them that I didn't say in previous entries. I don't mean to suggest that they aren't enjoyable, or that tactics don't matter, just that I have no new information to report.

      

A network document shows how the discs work.

       

Ultimately, we made our way to the Inner Sanctum and fought the demon there. Both its portrait and its icon looked pretty cool. For the first time in a while, I had to reload a couple of times in combat, because it was capable of killing some of my weaker characters in one round. I largely ignored offensive spells (mostly because I was too lazy to mix up one-enemy versions of the "storm" spells I'd been using up to this point) and just pummeled him with physical attacks while healing the characters he targeted. 

      

I thought this was the final battle.

       

I had gotten mixed up with the story, and I thought this demon was the Unborn, so I was surprised when the game didn't end with our victory. Instead, the dying Archon Monterey told us he had been unable to commune with Neon, as "the astral channels are totally deformed." Monterey knew where the Unborn was coming into the world: a cave in the western side of Mount Torch.

  

Back on the overland map, we marched to the mountain and entered. The Guardian did something that warped us to another plane ("this cosmic pool of tears wept by countless civilizations before their vanishing into nothingness"), where we saw the Fortress of Steel from the prophecy. I thought the Fortress would be a large dungeon with a lot of combats, so I was surprised when we were brought right to the endgame. The Unborn tried to hypnotize us into serving him, but the Guardian forced it back and made it take mortal form. 

      

Reaching the Steel Fortress at last.

      

The final battle was disappointingly easy, but it had some nice visuals. The battle canvas was a face with glowing eyes, and the Unborn itself was a winged demon. It cast a variety of spells, but nothing immediately fatal. All my characters had melee weapons going at this point, and we just surrounded him and hacked away.

           

Is that the Guardian in the background?

       

Eventually, the Unborn "died" and was resurrected in the form of a literal fetus, with the game labeled "the CHAOSEMBRYO." Attacking it felt a little messed up, but it was capable of all its previous incarnation's magical and physical attacks, so we had no choice. I was prepared to lose a character or two in the final battle, but I didn't have to worry.

      

From 2001's alternate ending.

   

When it was dead, the final cut scene appeared. Against a backdrop of the sun-scorched Perihelion, our SandGlider sailed away from the final battle. The scrolling text read:

   

After reaching the outside world again, you immediately ignitiate [sic, but what a great word!] an emergency launch sequence on your SandGlider ship's computer to get the Guardian out of the critical zone before the dying Unborn attempts to destroy it with a final, desperate strike. Checking your sensor readings, you realize that you cannot put enough distance between you and the collapsing Steel Fortress to save your own lives as well. The background radiation level is so high that no living organism--including you--will remain alive within more than 200 miles of radius. The world will survive. You won't. But it doesn't really matter now . . . you're just standing proudly, silently, watching the rear sight, watching as a second sun is rising on the horizon . . . 

   

A somewhat triumphant, somewhat bittersweet composition plays over the ending graphic. Presumably, the Guardian will be recovered from the wreck of our glider once the radiation subsides.

      

The party zooms away, although apparently not fast enough.

        

I end the game still feeling positively about it, and I expect it to GIMLET relatively high, but it does have a few problems. Names and allusions aren't the same things as a well-drawn backstory, and it's going to be hard for me to give a very high rating for the game world despite the rich atmosphere. Second, the game didn't last long enough to justify its complex approach to magic. There are between 20 and 25 combats, far fewer than the 40 spells the game supports. The extremely linear nature and lack of replayability will also cost points. Nothing is more annoying than the all-mouse interface, however. Having to click a bunch of buttons needlessly prolongs combat (which would otherwise get high marks) and makes mechanics like mixing spells, trading inventory, and analyzing weapons and armor tedious and cumbersome. 

   

I give it:

   

• 5 points for the game world. If I told you in a vacuum that the game is set on a world called Perihelion, ruled by Emperor Rex Helion, with gods named Toxic Waste and Carnivore, you'd probably roll your eyes. The atmosphere established by the cinematics, graphics, and music almost makes it all work, but at some level you're still entering the SoulTomb Mines to talk to PearlBlood.

• 5 points for character creation and development. I like the originality of the classes and attributes and the way attributes develop through use. It is a little bit uneven. My fighters made great strides in all physical attributes except constitution, which nothing ever seemed to increase. The same goes for my mental characters and "6th sense."

       

The final stats for my party leader.

     

• 3 points for NPCs. This is one of many games in which I can't give a high score to NPCs because they don't actually exist in the game's environment until you step into their squares; they're thus more "encounters" than NPCs. You learn a lot from them, but the game really undervalued its ASK command; hardly any NPCs respond to keywords.

• 5 points for encounters and foes. Perihelion has an original selection of enemies with a variety of special attacks. I give some credit for the varied "encounters," including the net stations and the inventory puzzles. Where the game fails is any sense of role-playing or choice in those encounters.

• 5 points for magic and combat. I want to give it more, as the system is based on the tactical, turn-based Gold Box model, but the magic system is more complicated than it needs to be--too complicated for the number of battles you actually fight--and the controls are tedious.

      

Aldhabi looks over his mixed spells.

      

• 4 points for equipment. You get a variety of weapon and armor upgrades, a lot of which I missed or didn't care about because I never got the sense that it made a big difference. I ended the game never having used any of the dozen or so grenades I found. I like that the game offers you an ANALYSE option to get specific statistics about your items; I hate that it takes so much time and clicking.

• 1 point for the economy. You start with a lot of credits. You slowly deplete them through net services. Even spending them liberally, you're never in danger of running out. You only gain more once, from a single credit card. There are no shops. 

• 2 points for a main quest with no choices, no options, no alternate endings, no side-quests or even side areas.

• 5 points for graphics, sound, interface. It gets all of that for graphics, sound effects, and music, which are all just perfect for this era and scope of game. It gets nothing for the cumbersome interface.

       

I love the psychedelic textures of the Tower of Neon.

     

• 6 points for gameplay. Extremely linear and not very replayable, but also pitched at the right challenge level and length. 

     

That gives us a final score of 41. I was thinking that if I rated the game on an ABCDF scale, it would deserve a solid B--extremely promising but too flawed to be excellent. A rating of 41 puts it at the 85th percentile, which is right in the middle of "B" territory.

    

For once, my rating is perfectly in line with contemporary reviews, which were almost universally in the 80s, whether from ASM (83%), Score (83%), Amiga Games (83%), Play Time (82%), or Joystick (80%). There were some in the 70s or lower, though, including from the one English review that I could find, in the June 1994 Amiga Computing (60%). The rating is a bit mysterious. The author, Simon Clays, has nothing but praise for the complementary graphics, sound, and music, but still rates them at 68% (graphics) and 70% (sound). He doesn't like the combat system--specifically, the breaking of immersion necessary to take the player to a separate, third-person combat system. I guess real-time Dungeon Master clones are the only combat styles that Amiga Computing likes. Overall, the rating is far too positive to end at a score of 60.

   

Perihelion was written by Gyula Szentirmay (programming), Edvard Toth (graphics, story, and dialogue), and Zoltán Végh (music and sound) while they were still in high school. Toth has some recollections about game development on his site, including the John Harris painting that inspired the tone of the world. (Note that nowhere does he refer to the game as Perihelion: The Prophecy.) I wrote to Toth hoping he'd answer some questions--I particularly wanted to know if he'd played the Gold Box games or Sentinel Worlds--but I never heard back. [Ed. I corresponded with Toth after this entry first posted. The material between asterisks below is new information based on that conversation.]

    

****

Toth said that he had never heard of Sentinel Worlds: Future Magic (which was a long-shot; I thought there were similarities between the Guardian and the Key of Thor), but he had absolutely played some of the Gold Box games, which serve as a base model for Perihelion's combat. "Those games usually looked like crap and were quite terrible from a technical point of view, but they had fantastic combat design and team-based strategy." He was also an admirer of other games from Psygnosis and Cinemaware, particularly It Came from the Desert (1989/1992), an atmospheric action game.

   

He confirmed that the names and places dropped throughout Perihelion were not just words; he had extensive lore, sketches, and short stories for the game's various creatures, locations, people, and factions. Carnivore's avatar was a "vile, bloated, cadaverous baby with razor-sharp teeth," for instance, and he had written a short story about "a procession of Carnivore priests moving through a city slum, their life-draining auras inadvertently affecting the residents, setting off a series of crazy events." He mentions trying to write in the nature of Robert E. Howard, which was ironic given that I used a quote from Howard in my coverage.

  

Toth had planned to set several sequels in the world of Perihelion, perhaps with a unique focus on psychic powers and the toll they take (which was a minor feature of Perihelion's backstory):

    

I'm . . . quite obsessed with the premise of emotion-based psi powers and the dramatic (often tragic) potential in [them]. The sacrifices that practitioners have to make, the traumas they have to endure, and the discipline they have to develop to experience, recall, and sustain sequences of emotional states is very powerful material. I have the 'metaphysics' worked out, along with several pretty impactful personal stores. Maybe one day . . .

      

Toth doesn't see much hope of a direct sequel at this late date, though. He sees the original Perihelion as "too simplistic, stale, and one-dimensional." He noted that one of the "hooks" of the original game was "the very high production values, execution, and atmosphere," something that requires a lot more investment of time, labor, and money today, after 30 years of development in graphics and sound.

   

Nonetheless, he thinks about it, and he has some models in mind:

     

I'm a huge fan of George Miller's Fury Road [the 2015 Mad Max film], an unbelievable achievement that conjures up a lush and intricately detailed universe utilizing minimal dialog and exposition. Another great piece of poetic world-building is China Miéville's Perdido Street Station [a 2001 novel]. A new Perihelion would certainly be more along the lines of these sensibilities.

         

Part of me wants to disagree that a "modern" game would require anything more than the graphics, sound, and music of the original, but I guess I'm a rare player. And even I admit that the idea of exploring a world like Perihelion's in a contemporary first-person interface is thrilling.

 

****

   

It's too bad we never saw a sequel in the setting. It ended up being Morbid Visions' only game, although all three developers went on to work for Philos Laboratories, where they worked on Theocracy (2000), a strategy game set during the height of the Aztec Empire. Toth moved to California in the late 1990s and has worked for a variety of game studios, though he never got back into RPGs except to do "additional graphics" on Cleveland Blakemore's Grimoire (2017). Szentirmay has also remained in the business, most recently doing programming for the Mafia games by Hangar 13. Végh, judging by his IMDB page, seems to have gone into music and editing in the Hungarian film industry.

       

I was curious what game would come next from Hungary, and it turns out to be a Commodore 64 title called Newcomer (1994), a seven-disk epic that, according to the C64 wiki, "pushes the C64 to its limits." It sounds like it has a bizarre, Prisoner-like plot. I'm enjoying the backstories from these Hungarian games. That coupled with the fact that I'm currently in love with a Hungarian jazz band called the Hot Club du Nax has made me more eager than ever to visit the country.