Galapagos Review

8.0

Format PC

Developer Anark

Publisher Electronic Arts

Genre Unknown

When we told Patrick McCarthy we wanted him to look at Galapagos, he thought he was going on a lovely trip to see lots of interesting fluffy animals. Sucker.

It's the far distant future (although by the time you read this, it will be slightly closer to being the present). Jeremy Beadle is dead, but his re-animated right hand has its own show. (Although television watchdogs have complained that it's too near the knuckle.) Artificial life forms are de rigeur: all small children now want a robot puppy dog for Christmas, but parents know that once the novelty wears off it's they who'll be down in the kitchen, cleaning up the pools of battery acid. Into such an environment comes Mendel, a small, creepy crawly thing with a mind of its own, a smile on its face and a jolly song for everyone it meets. Alright, I made all that up. I can't concentrate long enough to make any sense of the intro sequence. I admit it: I'm thick as shit. Let's pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and...

Start all over again

It's still the future. And we'll forget the hows and whys, but you're in charge of a robot called Mendel, who has infra-red sensors to see by, simulated servo-motors that operate his legs, and an adaptive controller for a brain. He looks like a spider and the object of the game is to guide him through a hostile, three-dimensional platform environment.

Galapagos is unusual in that you can only control the platforms and objects around Mendel. He makes the decisions, you just provide him with the options. For example, right at the start of the game is a passageway consisting of a number of suspended platforms that move from side to side. One moves left as the next goes right. Once he gets on the first platform, your aim is to click on the adjacent platform, reversing its direction of movement until it's aligned with the one he's already standing on. Hopefully, he'll move onto that next platform. You have to then quickly click on the one he's just left (so that he doesn't move back onto it) and align the next one. And so on, until he's down the end of the passage. The process is extremely simple in theory; in practice, it can be incredibly frustrating.

Walking the plank

For a start, when you first load the game Mendel is only seven hours old, the equivalent of a toddler. That phrase with 'plank' and 'thick as a' in it comes to mind. He'll walk off the edge of platforms, plunging to his doom; he'll walk the opposite way to the one you'd like; and so on. (You can actually start with a new-born Mendel, but you'll have to play the game for seven real-time hours to get him to this state of stupidity.)

Still, even Einstein failed his 11-plus. Mendel will learn, making decisions more quickly as he gets older. Developers Anark claim that he'll develop according to how well you handle him. If you keep making him fall into the abyss, he'll mistrust both you and his environment, and grow up timid; whereas if you manage to avoid harming him too much he'll be quicker and bolder in his decision-making. It's hard to judge this in practice, because it's inevitable that he'll fall off the platforms - there's no way anyone could get him through the levels without making mistakes - without playing through everything twice with different Mendels, treating them differently. And who can be bothered to do that? It's hard enough getting through once. You have to take a certain amount on trust, then.

What's going on?

The reason I say it's inevitable that he'll die many (many, many) times is because often you find yourself in an environment in which you haven't got a clue what's what, which way is up (answer: all ways), which bits are clickable and which aren't. Just getting your bearing takes a few moments and while you're finding out, Mendel may well be moving around - usually on a shelf that's about to become flush with a wall.

Some of the platform layouts are so complex you'd feel pretty pleased getting through them in a traditional platform game, never mind in a game in which your character moves about as he sees fit. Alright, so he's less likely to just walk off the edge of something as he gets older, but when you add lasers firing at you, pads that give electric shocks or explode, pads that launch you into the air, puzzles that need to be worked out (pads in some areas open up other areas of the game and so on) and a number of other variations into the equation, you'll realise that it's a very challenging game.

Monitor blizzard

The game treads a very thin line between frustration and reward. By its very nature, it's a trial and error thing; there are save points, but they're not there in what you'd call over generous helpings. What you get out of it may depend on your personality. If you're the impatient sort, I wouldn't bother going within a hundred yards of this game. If you do, it'll only be a matter of time before you find the red mist fading away and yourself standing among piles of broken glass, with a claw hammer in your hand and a nice beige plastic storage box where your monitor used to be. I'd even avoid it if you're a patient vicar, keen not to be heard screaming foul and abusive language by your congregation. You'll love Mendel at times and at times you'll wish you could smash the little sod to death with a paperweight. This is a game that you'll either become more and more engrossed by and determined to succeed in, or that you'll find the biggest wind-up in the history of computer games. If it's the latter, you'll be pretty upset. I quite like it. But you might just hate it.