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Tech Book Face Off: Game Engine Black Book [Wolfenstein 3D Vs. Doom]
After all of the heavier reading I've been doing lately—machine learning, CUDA programming, fundamental Lisp programming, etc.—I wanted to kick back and read something a bit more relaxing and entertaining. Luckily, at just the right time a friend lent me a couple of books that promised to fit the bill perfectly: the Game Engine Black Books for Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, both by Fabien Sanglard. I grew up with these games, with them being my first and second PC FPS games. I played countless hours of these and other id Software games and other games that used id Software engines like Rise of the Triad, Heretic, and Hexen. I couldn't wait to dig into these books and see what was underneath the games that pleasantly wasted away the night hours of my youth.
This Black Book starts out with forwards by John Carmack, Tom Hall, and John Romero, and then there's a short introduction that gives an overview of the game market, the PC market, and the state of video games in that era. This was the time of Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis, and the i386 processors had been out for a few years by the time Wolfenstein 3D was released. The i386DX-33 was over four times more powerful than the Super Nintendo processor, and even more powerful i486 processors were coming to the market from mid-1989 to 1992. The video game consoles were primarily sprite-based hardware designs, so they weren't set up for running a 3-D game like Wolfenstein well at all. The PC was definitely the hardware of choice for this game, power-wise, but as Sanglard goes on to explain, it had its own downsides for game development.
The next chapter went into the state of the hardware that was targeted for Wolfenstein 3D in detail. The game was designed to run okay even on an i286 CPU, but even on the i386 processors, the compromises that were made in the design were astonishing. I had forgotten how bad things were back then with no hardware floating point units, only a handful of registers, and an utter mess of a memory hierarchy with real mode and segmented addressing. The state of video cards was not much better with no direct double-buffering in hardware, an essential feature for running smooth animation in a 3-D game. These VGA video cards were not set up to run games in the least, so double-buffering needed to be hacked and kludged together. Thankfully, that was possible to do. Sound was just reaching a tolerable level of performance at the time with AdLib and Sound Blaster cards, if you sprang for the add-in card and were able to get it working. Sound cards were rarely included in PC builds at the time, and I remember many a night fiddling with vaguely understandable IRQ and DMA settings before plug-n-play. Funny, now I actually know what those things mean, and what they're used for, but it's all handled automatically by the chipset and the OS.
That chapter was definitely a fun trip down memory lane. The next chapter switched gears and was all about the decidedly small team that made the game, especially by today's standards, and they completed the game in four months! There were four full-time people that founded id Software a year before starting Wolfenstein 3D. John Carmack and John Romero were the programmers, Adrian Carmack was the artist, and Tom Hall was the creative director. Another four people contributed, but did not work on the game full-time from start to finish. These were Jay Wilbur in business, Kevin Cloud as a computer artist, Robert Prince as the composer, and Jason Blochowiak as another programmer. The development studio was none other than the first floor of John Carmack's two floor apartment. Wild. The rest of the chapter went through the development tools they used and built to make the code, level maps, artwork, and sound assets of the game.
Chapter 4 gets into the real meat of the game architecture, and it's the longest chapter of the book. It was fascinating to learn about the ingenious performance hacks and algorithms they (mostly John Carmack) implemented to achieve playable frame rates with the hardware they had to work with. The game is restricted in numerous ways so that the code doesn't have to spend much time calculating things like clipping or player perspective. The floor and ceiling were solid colors, and all walls were orthogonal. The player couldn't look up or down, jump, or crouch, so walls were always perfectly vertical and the (obscured) horizon was always dead-center on the screen. The only polygons in the game were the walls, which were rectangles. Everything else was a sprite. The maximum view port was smaller than full-screen at 304x152 pixels, and it could be adjusted down from there if needed for a faster frame rate on slower hardware. These along with plenty of other restrictions made the game playable on the i286, although the best experience was still on an i386DX or better CPU.
The other common optimization was to code critical loops and code sequences in x86 assembly. Quite a few code listings in the book are just lines of assembly code, mostly of moving values around in various registers. Dropping down to assembly was necessary because compilers at the time weren't the best at outputting even remotely optimized code, and a smart developer could arrange assembly code much better than any compiler could. This deficiency in the compiler shouldn't all be blamed on it, for x86 assembly was truly horrendous. I am at the same time in awe of John Carmack for doing what he did with the code and eternally thankful that I never had to do x86 assembly programming like that myself. Even today it's something to be avoided because the complexity is now nearly unmanageable and compilers have made huge strides besides, but oh my gawd, that assembly programming must have been the most awful, tedious exercise in memorizing and recalling useless instruction set trivia.
This whole chapter was pure gold, covering everything from the renderer in detail to the enemy AI to the audio programming and sound effects. The writing wasn't always the greatest, but explanations were at least insightful, and I could always parse out what Sanglard meant, even with numerous typos and grammatical errors. Normally these kinds of mistakes would be obnoxious, but the book was so full of great pictures, diagrams, and information that was completely engrossing to me that I was willing to overlook that shortcoming.
The last few short chapters were also quite interesting, and a nice way to wrap up the book. Chapter 5 described the sequel to Wolfenstein 3D, Spear of Destiny. Chapter 6 covered a number of ports to other systems, including Super Nintendo (heavily compromised), Jaguar, iPhone, and VR ports. Chapter 7 concluded with a little information about the successors to Wolfenstein 3D and where each of the designers and developers are now. The whole book was an excellent tour of a classic game that changed the video game industry forever, and if you're at all interested in the details of one of the games that started the FPS genre, you have to read this book.
 | VS. |  |
Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D
I quickly realized what a beautiful book this was going to be with nearly full-page, glossy color pictures of the game and die photos of the Intel 80386-DX processor that ran the game when it first came out on May 5th, 1992. It was incredibly fun to just page through the book and look at the different pictures, and peruse the various explanations surrounding the pictures about the game engine's design. It took a little while to settle down and actually start reading through the book.This Black Book starts out with forwards by John Carmack, Tom Hall, and John Romero, and then there's a short introduction that gives an overview of the game market, the PC market, and the state of video games in that era. This was the time of Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis, and the i386 processors had been out for a few years by the time Wolfenstein 3D was released. The i386DX-33 was over four times more powerful than the Super Nintendo processor, and even more powerful i486 processors were coming to the market from mid-1989 to 1992. The video game consoles were primarily sprite-based hardware designs, so they weren't set up for running a 3-D game like Wolfenstein well at all. The PC was definitely the hardware of choice for this game, power-wise, but as Sanglard goes on to explain, it had its own downsides for game development.
The next chapter went into the state of the hardware that was targeted for Wolfenstein 3D in detail. The game was designed to run okay even on an i286 CPU, but even on the i386 processors, the compromises that were made in the design were astonishing. I had forgotten how bad things were back then with no hardware floating point units, only a handful of registers, and an utter mess of a memory hierarchy with real mode and segmented addressing. The state of video cards was not much better with no direct double-buffering in hardware, an essential feature for running smooth animation in a 3-D game. These VGA video cards were not set up to run games in the least, so double-buffering needed to be hacked and kludged together. Thankfully, that was possible to do. Sound was just reaching a tolerable level of performance at the time with AdLib and Sound Blaster cards, if you sprang for the add-in card and were able to get it working. Sound cards were rarely included in PC builds at the time, and I remember many a night fiddling with vaguely understandable IRQ and DMA settings before plug-n-play. Funny, now I actually know what those things mean, and what they're used for, but it's all handled automatically by the chipset and the OS.
That chapter was definitely a fun trip down memory lane. The next chapter switched gears and was all about the decidedly small team that made the game, especially by today's standards, and they completed the game in four months! There were four full-time people that founded id Software a year before starting Wolfenstein 3D. John Carmack and John Romero were the programmers, Adrian Carmack was the artist, and Tom Hall was the creative director. Another four people contributed, but did not work on the game full-time from start to finish. These were Jay Wilbur in business, Kevin Cloud as a computer artist, Robert Prince as the composer, and Jason Blochowiak as another programmer. The development studio was none other than the first floor of John Carmack's two floor apartment. Wild. The rest of the chapter went through the development tools they used and built to make the code, level maps, artwork, and sound assets of the game.
Chapter 4 gets into the real meat of the game architecture, and it's the longest chapter of the book. It was fascinating to learn about the ingenious performance hacks and algorithms they (mostly John Carmack) implemented to achieve playable frame rates with the hardware they had to work with. The game is restricted in numerous ways so that the code doesn't have to spend much time calculating things like clipping or player perspective. The floor and ceiling were solid colors, and all walls were orthogonal. The player couldn't look up or down, jump, or crouch, so walls were always perfectly vertical and the (obscured) horizon was always dead-center on the screen. The only polygons in the game were the walls, which were rectangles. Everything else was a sprite. The maximum view port was smaller than full-screen at 304x152 pixels, and it could be adjusted down from there if needed for a faster frame rate on slower hardware. These along with plenty of other restrictions made the game playable on the i286, although the best experience was still on an i386DX or better CPU.
The other common optimization was to code critical loops and code sequences in x86 assembly. Quite a few code listings in the book are just lines of assembly code, mostly of moving values around in various registers. Dropping down to assembly was necessary because compilers at the time weren't the best at outputting even remotely optimized code, and a smart developer could arrange assembly code much better than any compiler could. This deficiency in the compiler shouldn't all be blamed on it, for x86 assembly was truly horrendous. I am at the same time in awe of John Carmack for doing what he did with the code and eternally thankful that I never had to do x86 assembly programming like that myself. Even today it's something to be avoided because the complexity is now nearly unmanageable and compilers have made huge strides besides, but oh my gawd, that assembly programming must have been the most awful, tedious exercise in memorizing and recalling useless instruction set trivia.
This whole chapter was pure gold, covering everything from the renderer in detail to the enemy AI to the audio programming and sound effects. The writing wasn't always the greatest, but explanations were at least insightful, and I could always parse out what Sanglard meant, even with numerous typos and grammatical errors. Normally these kinds of mistakes would be obnoxious, but the book was so full of great pictures, diagrams, and information that was completely engrossing to me that I was willing to overlook that shortcoming.
The last few short chapters were also quite interesting, and a nice way to wrap up the book. Chapter 5 described the sequel to Wolfenstein 3D, Spear of Destiny. Chapter 6 covered a number of ports to other systems, including Super Nintendo (heavily compromised), Jaguar, iPhone, and VR ports. Chapter 7 concluded with a little information about the successors to Wolfenstein 3D and where each of the designers and developers are now. The whole book was an excellent tour of a classic game that changed the video game industry forever, and if you're at all interested in the details of one of the games that started the FPS genre, you have to read this book.
Game Engine Black Book: Doom
This Black Book followed a very similar format to the Wolfenstein 3D book with the same result of an incredible experience digging through the game engine of one of the most influential PC games ever made. I went through waves of nostalgia as I paged through pictures of the Doom game world and explanations of how it calculated and rendered the intense game that consumed hours upon hours of my free time growing up. It was fascinating to see how all of it was implemented, and on such meager hardware, too! id Software achieved an incredible amount of performance and features with their idTech 1 engine that they created for Doom.
The book starts off with forwards by John Carmack and Dave Taylor and a short introduction just to wet your appetite. Then it jumps into the hardware that Doom was designed for in chapter 2. Doom was able to run on an i386, but by 1993 when Doom was being developed, the i486 was becoming affordable and was over 2x faster than the equivalent frequency i386, so that was the new target system. Everything else was improving rapidly as well. Video cards took a big step up in performance with the VESA VL-Bus and tighter component integration on the cards. Sound cards became even more fragmented, unfortunately, but sound quality was improving by leaps and bounds. Networking was also becoming possible by this time with multiple ways to connect PCs for multiplayer co-op and deathmatch play. Finally, compilers had improved to the point where it wasn't necessary to do nearly everything in assembly. The Watcom compiler allowed id Software to code Doom almost entirely in C, freeing the developers to think at a higher level and implement more features more rapidly.
Chapter 3 is entirely new because id Software used an entirely different development environment for Doom. Instead of developing everything on unstable DOS PCs, they took the chance on using expensive NeXT workstations. Even a fairly basic NeXTstation cost $4,995 in 1991, and a NeXTcube ran $12,395! It turned out to be worth it, though, because these workstations were rock-solid and allowed John Carmack and the other developers to make incredible progress instead of constantly fighting with crashing machines and a poor development environment. This chapter did a great job going through the architecture and benefits of the NeXT systems, and how id Software used them to full effect.
The next chapter was about the team and tools, like chapter 3 in the Wolfenstein 3D book. Things had changed dramatically, with the team moving to Dallas, TX and growing to fourteen people by the end of development. The tools were evolving, too, with some of the character sprites and animation done using stop motion capture, and the map editor (DoomED) taking on new features to support the multitude of new capabilities in the game engine. Walls in the game no longer needed to be orthogonal, although they still had to be vertical for rendering to be fast enough. Floors and ceilings could change height to create steps, platforms, and other environmental features. Various kinds of traps and ambushes were also possible now. It's quite amazing how many features were added to idTech 1 when compared to the Wolf3D engine. These new features, especially the non-orthogonal walls and varying heights, required a more efficient data structure for the maps, and the BSP (Binary Space Partitioning) node tree was commandeered for the job.
Nearly half of the book is taken up by chapter 5 on the idTech 1 game engine. This chapter is just a monster of awesome information about the engine. It goes through every detail from the game tic design and use of fixed-point arithmetic to sound propagation and enemy AI. The section on the 3D renderer was especially interesting and detailed. There are great explanations on how the environment was drawn with its additional complexity, texture mapping with perspective correction, sprite clipping and animation, and diminished lighting to give the game its intense horror movie feel. This renderer section in particular was so interesting that it made me want to go implement a bunch of the algorithms myself just to be able to recreate them and see them in action. It looks like it would be immensely satisfying.
The last chapter described in fairly good detail how a number of ports of Doom were done on other game consoles. The console ports included the Atari Jaguar, Sega 32X, Super Nintendo, Sony PlayStation, 3DO, and Sega Saturn, and both the system architectures and Doom engine implementations are described. I was in high school during this era of the great console wars, although I never played Doom on any of them, just the excellent experience of the PC. I had forgotten how different these console architectures were, and some of the design decisions that went into those systems were truly remarkable...and strange. The sections on the Super Nintendo and PlayStation ports were my favorites. The Super Nintendo would have never been able to run Doom on its own, but with the extra power of the SuperFX chip that was used in Star Fox and a few other games, it was able to pull it off reasonably well. The PlayStation port was the most faithful of the ports, and even added some cool new features like colored ambient lighting. Of all of these systems, the PlayStation was exceptionally powerful for making great games. Even though other systems might have looked more powerful on paper, they all had disadvantages and unfortunate design decisions that handicapped them while the PlayStation was so easy to develop for that its potential could consistently be achieved in practice.
I enjoyed this book as much, if not more than the Wolf3D Black Book. From the beautiful full-color pictures to the detailed explanations of technical feature implementations to the well-chosen code listings sprinkled throughout the book, this was an incredibly fun guided tour of a legendary game engine. I devoured this book, and through it all, I wanted to do two things: go back and play through Doom again and re-implement some of those rendering algorithms for myself. I can't think of higher praise for a book, so if you've ever played Doom and want to know how it works, you need to go treat yourself to this book and the Wolfenstein 3D Black Book, too.
The book starts off with forwards by John Carmack and Dave Taylor and a short introduction just to wet your appetite. Then it jumps into the hardware that Doom was designed for in chapter 2. Doom was able to run on an i386, but by 1993 when Doom was being developed, the i486 was becoming affordable and was over 2x faster than the equivalent frequency i386, so that was the new target system. Everything else was improving rapidly as well. Video cards took a big step up in performance with the VESA VL-Bus and tighter component integration on the cards. Sound cards became even more fragmented, unfortunately, but sound quality was improving by leaps and bounds. Networking was also becoming possible by this time with multiple ways to connect PCs for multiplayer co-op and deathmatch play. Finally, compilers had improved to the point where it wasn't necessary to do nearly everything in assembly. The Watcom compiler allowed id Software to code Doom almost entirely in C, freeing the developers to think at a higher level and implement more features more rapidly.
Chapter 3 is entirely new because id Software used an entirely different development environment for Doom. Instead of developing everything on unstable DOS PCs, they took the chance on using expensive NeXT workstations. Even a fairly basic NeXTstation cost $4,995 in 1991, and a NeXTcube ran $12,395! It turned out to be worth it, though, because these workstations were rock-solid and allowed John Carmack and the other developers to make incredible progress instead of constantly fighting with crashing machines and a poor development environment. This chapter did a great job going through the architecture and benefits of the NeXT systems, and how id Software used them to full effect.
The next chapter was about the team and tools, like chapter 3 in the Wolfenstein 3D book. Things had changed dramatically, with the team moving to Dallas, TX and growing to fourteen people by the end of development. The tools were evolving, too, with some of the character sprites and animation done using stop motion capture, and the map editor (DoomED) taking on new features to support the multitude of new capabilities in the game engine. Walls in the game no longer needed to be orthogonal, although they still had to be vertical for rendering to be fast enough. Floors and ceilings could change height to create steps, platforms, and other environmental features. Various kinds of traps and ambushes were also possible now. It's quite amazing how many features were added to idTech 1 when compared to the Wolf3D engine. These new features, especially the non-orthogonal walls and varying heights, required a more efficient data structure for the maps, and the BSP (Binary Space Partitioning) node tree was commandeered for the job.
Nearly half of the book is taken up by chapter 5 on the idTech 1 game engine. This chapter is just a monster of awesome information about the engine. It goes through every detail from the game tic design and use of fixed-point arithmetic to sound propagation and enemy AI. The section on the 3D renderer was especially interesting and detailed. There are great explanations on how the environment was drawn with its additional complexity, texture mapping with perspective correction, sprite clipping and animation, and diminished lighting to give the game its intense horror movie feel. This renderer section in particular was so interesting that it made me want to go implement a bunch of the algorithms myself just to be able to recreate them and see them in action. It looks like it would be immensely satisfying.
The last chapter described in fairly good detail how a number of ports of Doom were done on other game consoles. The console ports included the Atari Jaguar, Sega 32X, Super Nintendo, Sony PlayStation, 3DO, and Sega Saturn, and both the system architectures and Doom engine implementations are described. I was in high school during this era of the great console wars, although I never played Doom on any of them, just the excellent experience of the PC. I had forgotten how different these console architectures were, and some of the design decisions that went into those systems were truly remarkable...and strange. The sections on the Super Nintendo and PlayStation ports were my favorites. The Super Nintendo would have never been able to run Doom on its own, but with the extra power of the SuperFX chip that was used in Star Fox and a few other games, it was able to pull it off reasonably well. The PlayStation port was the most faithful of the ports, and even added some cool new features like colored ambient lighting. Of all of these systems, the PlayStation was exceptionally powerful for making great games. Even though other systems might have looked more powerful on paper, they all had disadvantages and unfortunate design decisions that handicapped them while the PlayStation was so easy to develop for that its potential could consistently be achieved in practice.
I enjoyed this book as much, if not more than the Wolf3D Black Book. From the beautiful full-color pictures to the detailed explanations of technical feature implementations to the well-chosen code listings sprinkled throughout the book, this was an incredibly fun guided tour of a legendary game engine. I devoured this book, and through it all, I wanted to do two things: go back and play through Doom again and re-implement some of those rendering algorithms for myself. I can't think of higher praise for a book, so if you've ever played Doom and want to know how it works, you need to go treat yourself to this book and the Wolfenstein 3D Black Book, too.
Download Tekken 6 Full Version For Pc
Download Tekken 6 Full Version For pc
Tekken 6 Full Review
Tekken 6 Full Review
Welcome to Tekken 6 is one of the best fighting game especially for fighting lovers that has been developed and published by Bandai Namco Games.This game was released on 26th November 2007.
Screenshot
System Requirements of Tekken 6 For Windows PC
- Operating System: Windows XP/Vista/ Windows 7 ( 64 Bit )
- CPU: Intel Pentium 4 or later.
- Setup Size: 700 MB
- RAM: 1GB
- Hard Disk Space: 1GB
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The 5Th Anniversary, Oceanhorn 2 And A New Website
We know, we know – there hasn't been a blog update in a long time, but we're making up for it! Today marks the 5th anniversary of Oceanhorn first launch on iOS, the perfect occasion for a few things. First of all, we'd like to say 'thank you' to our incredible community – over the years and for each platform release we've seen an incredible amount of passion and support for the world we created. We wouldn't be here without you, and we'll always keep that in mind.
 |
| Solve the mysteries of the ancient Arcadians in Oceanhorn 2 |
It's also an excellent time to talk about Oceanhorn 2: Knights of the Lost Realm. The game is coming along great, and we're confident it will be worth the wait! We are targeting 2019 for the announced iOS release. Over the next few months we'll have updates on various aspects of the game, but for now, you can feast your eyes on the brand new Oceanhorn website we are launching today. It features never-before-seen screenshots and info about Oceanhorn 2, with more to come. If you'd like to cover the game in one of your channels, head to the Press page and download our Press Kit.
Oh, one last thing: we're also setting up an Oceanhorn newsletter, where we plan to send updates on the game before they become public and celebrate the fifth anniversary this whole year in one way or another. If you want to be the first to know what we are up to, make sure you sign up on oceanhorn.com homepage!
Until next time!
oceanhorn.com
 |
| Oceanhorn 5th Anniversary label! Let's celebrate the whole year! |
Rucksack, Game Review
Have you ever thought what it would be like to be like MacGyver? You dump out your rucksack to see what you have available and then make it through whatever situation you are faced with. You might not have all of the characteristics of MacGyver, but then again, he was a made up character for a TV show (wiki link). But Grumpy Spider Games gives you a way to get through a sticky situation with a rucksack full of odds and ends.
Rucksack is a story telling game designed by Joel David and published by Grumpy Spider Games (website). It is designed for 4–8 players of ages 12+. A game is expected to last 30–60 minutes. I was given a copy of Rucksack for review purposes.
 |
| Scenarios |
Everyone is presented with a scenario. There are 50 scenario cards. The situation the players are surviving are determined randomly at the start. The variation of events can be grand adventures like, "Journey the entire length of the Amazon River" to more direct events like, "Survive a plane crash." Everyone is working on the same story scenario, but the items they have in their rucksack are different.
There are 100 item cards in Rucksack. You get a little bit of say in which items you have, but just a little. The first player draws a card from the top of the Items deck, without knowing what that card is. They can keep the card or put it face up in the discard pile. When a player discards their draw they draw and keep the next card off the top of the top of the Items Deck. That unknown card may or may not be a good one, but that is what is in your rucksack.
The next player now has an additional option. They can take the top card from the discard pile or draw the next random item. If they take the discard, their turn is over. If they draw, they have the same option of discarding and taking the next card.
Play continues in this manner until all players have five Item Cards. Now the storytelling begins. You tell how you accomplish the scenario by using all five items.
 |
| Some Items |
You have a captive audience because everyone gets a concealed vote on who told the best story. You do this for three rounds of tales and then tally up the votes.
I pulled together a group of writers and gamers to see what they would come up with in this game of creative planning designs. Some of those plans were quite outrageous and everyone enjoyed what came out of the challenges.
On another occasion, we had a group of younger players, below the suggested age. We didn't worry about voting on who had the best story, just enjoyed the crazy ideas that came from it.
Overall
Rucksack is a great game for anyone interested in creating plans that you usually only see coming from fictional characters in outlandish situations. Being the size of about three decks of playing cards Rucksack is easy to pack away and have available as a cabin game (something to break out when stuck inside while camping, etc.). You don't need a lot of space to play so it is easy to set up and start sharing how you MacGyver'd the situation.
More Items
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Spirit Of The North Review (NSW)
Written by Patrick Orquia
Title: Spirit of the North
Developer: Infuse Studio
Publisher: Merge Games
Genre: Adventure, Platformer, Puzzle
Number of Players: 1
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Release Date: May 07, 2020
Price: $24.99
Spirit of the North is an adventure game where you play as a red fox following the titular Spirt of the North in a big adventure that will have you solving puzzles in order for you to traverse a land and solve its mysteries. It has beautiful visuals in its backdrop and overall aesthetics and has a hauntingly relaxing musical score. The game has been released on other platforms already and this port on Switch is not the best-looking and not smoothest in terms of performance, as expected, but it still is a worthwhile game to play.
The game doesn't use any form of voiced narration; the storytelling presented mostly in symbols and hints in the environment. The game is also very linear, but with the lack of signposting, could be a bit confusing and will make you get lost, but you will surely find your way again if you know where to look at and what to look for. The game is divided into 8 chapters, and each of them can be selected on the main menu and replayed once you have completed them.
At the start of the game, you meet the Spirit of the North which encourages you to go through a journey across the land that is probably inspired by some old Scandinavian country with its glaciers and mountains and rivers with a few broken down stone fortresses scattered throughout. Your goal is to reach a faraway mountain top that emits a red fume that slowly poisons the land. You start on a wide open snow field and soon transition to other types of environment, like caverns, grasslands, rivers, etc. On the way to the mountain, you will have to solve area puzzles for you to be able to progress from one area to the next. You can run and jump and bark, and as you progress further into the game, you get to acquire new abilities, like ability to carry and transfer light, rid certain areas of corruption, ability to conjure ice spirits, dash, and ride the wind. The light transferring mechanic is the main ability that you will learn early in the game. You carry and transfer light to pillars, murals, switches, and doors that comprise the area puzzles. The chapter gets completed when you have solved all the puzzles within it, and you transition to the next chapter right away.
The main gameplay is very similar to that of the Zelda games but with a big caveat: there is no combat in the game. Despite that, solving the puzzles can be quite fun and could be a bit challenging at times, especially in the latter chapters. The puzzles are not too difficult to figure out in general, despite the lack instructions and narration. You just have to be very observant of your environment and let your deductive reasoning skills work overtime. Aside from the puzzles, you can also try to unite staffs found on your journey with their dead shaman owners scattered across the land, most of them hidden. There are 28 in total, and you get unlockable skins for the fox. The skins are purely cosmetic, but this is the only collectible in the game and it could give you a respite from the puzzles, since they can get really tricky due to the lack of handholding in the game.
Overall, Spirit of the North is a beautiful game, with its breath-taking visuals and hauntingly beautiful musical score. I felt happy and relaxed upon finishing the game. I didn't really get what the story is about, but I guess it is the journey and not the destination that matters. This game is quite an experience for me, and it is easy to recommend to others. Well, maybe wait for a sale, as it is quite expensive for its length (the game can be completed in about 5 hours) and this version on Switch has quite a few technical issues here and there and is not as good-looking as the versions on other platforms. But regardless of how you get it and where you play it on, I hope that you have a wonderful time playing the game like I did. Let the fox in you roam free!
REPLAY VALUE: Medium
PROS
- Beautiful, sublime visuals
- Hauntingly relaxing musical score
- Challenging puzzles
- Short in length but well-paced
- Unusual yet engaging storytelling
- Button prompts are presented to assist the player in interacting with the environment
CONS
- Frequent pop-ins
- Frequent frame rate drops
- Quite expensive for its length
- Floaty controls
- The animation look rough at times (at least on the Switch version)
- Frustrating platforming sections
- Wide open spaces are wasted since the game is very linear
RATING: 3.5/5 Foxes in ice and fire
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