Elegy's Eve

Elegy's Eve was a short Halloween themed game made for two competitions, one on Gamingworld and the other here on RMN, it won first prize on GW and second here, though the RMN competition seemed to fizzle a bit at the end, it was 2008 after all.

There is an interesting linguistic trick with the title of this game; the eve can either signify a foreshortening of evening or in a more literary sense, the first woman of the elegy. In the game, that would be Mia. The progenitor of the lament that follows...

This dark and haunting game starts with a scene of domestic discord. A couple's vicious bickering overheard by their young daughter Mia, the protagonist of the piece. She is a quiet child, immersed in the worlds of literature and the imagination, happiest with her nose in a book, or writing her own


Pffft to you.

Putting away childish things is an age old idea, but it's never been one I particularly adhered to, and it seems Mia does not either, no matter how much her parents wish her to grown up. Mia has taken on responsibilities suited to her age, but her parents are very much at the practical end of the spectrum, and creative endeavours have no place in their world view. They have a plan for their daughter to become a doctor and thrive financially, no matter what she wishes for herself. The conflict is inevitable.

I have to take a moment here and mention the music, it is lovely, lilting and dark with a long sorrowful melody that encapsulates this young woman's suppressed dreams and the pain she feels at her parents' constant quarrelling. It's a perfect addition to this scene and aids immeasurably in carrying across the poignancy. In fact all the music in the game is chosen with care and consideration and in almost every instance adds positively to the scenes it accompanies.

Likewise the graphics are wonderful, a mix of custom artwork and the default chipsets and used with finesse and style. There are a few passage errors but they only turn up in those places where the maps have been replaced by images, such as the roadways and lakeside. Everything else about the visual aesthetics is beautifully rendered.

So as Mia goes to sleep on this All Hallows Eve, rebuked once again by her parents for her flights of fancy and secure in the knowledge at all avenues of escape will soon be closed to her and her path set immutably, she retreats into telling herself a bedtime story, part myth and legend, part inventive. But on this night when the doors between the worlds are flung open and the veil is thin, who is to say what is real and what not?

Mia's story tells of an ancient crumbling mansion, into which no mortal man has stepped for decades, but it is far from empty, the ghosts and ghouls, shadows and phantoms walk its halls and go about their business without a care for the mortal world most of them left behind long ago, and some never inhabited. But this is All Hallows and tonight in the cavernous halls and echoing passageways they are stirring and preparing a feast, a party for all of those on the other side of the veil as befits the grandeur and splendour of the occasion. Ruling over all of this is Lord Shadow, the strongest and darkest of the denizens of this place.


Well that outfit just screams bad guy!.

Lord Shadow has in his employ a 'beast'; a creature of sharp teeth and vicious claws that answers his call and follows his bidding, a creature that strikes terror into the heart of the ghostly inhabitants who wander these halls, a creature we mere mortals know as a pussy cat.

You play as Kaye, the one-eyed pirate cat. Or he may just be a one eyed cat and the patch is giving me a pirate vibe thought his frequent use of the term Cap'n is a bit of a giveaway. Kaye has been tasked by the Lord of Shadows to perform a job for him. What that is is not made apparent from the outset but must be ascertained at various points through the game. Getting to those various points however is the problem.

Each area within the house and surrounds is a level and Kaye must navigate around the various ghosts, ghouls and spectres that are currently running around the halls preparing for the festivities in order to reach the next stage. These apparitions have an unfortunate effect on the living flesh of Kaye, a touch drains him of vitality and strength, three touches takes a life and sends him back to the beginning of the level. Luckily for our feline hero he's a cat, which means he's got 9 lives to play with. The majority of the ghosts follow a set pattern, carrying about their various chores, but a few of them will break off what they are doing to chase Kaye, perhaps they're annoyed with him getting in their way who knows, and they are the ones that can cause some problems. The chase dynamic seems to be set to corner and kill and they do it with ruthless efficiency. There is a slight problem in that the chasing spectres seem to move at the same speed as Kaye so you can't outrun them, you have to out dodge them which given the placement of some objects can get quite tricky and a little frustrating. Ok, a lot frustrating. Luckily save is always on, so you if you end up wandering into a dead end from which you cannot escape you can reset to an earlier point and try a different escape route. You'll still need to dodge and weave but at least you'll have a chance of getting out alive. If you use up all your nine lives, the game is over and they don't reset per level, so it can become a war of attrition.


Evil Spectres! Go back to the hell from whence thou came...erm sorry Push off ya legless land-lubbers!

Oddly the first level is the hardest, and once you've managed to make it past that the remaining ones seems a lot easier to navigate without brushing up against the ghosts, or perhaps once I'd made it through that hell of a Library nothing could frighten me anymore.

The English used in the game is peppered with errors, but Happy, or Rei as he was called back then is not a native English speaker so it's to be expected. It does detract somewhat from the flow since the interactive portions of the game are set as a story within a story so narrative clarity is imperative and it does fall down quite a bit in that area. I knew what the characters were trying to say, it's just at times that's not what they actually said. Still though less than stellar it gets the job done and lends itself to some striking imagery.

The various ghosts within the game all stick to a specific movement type, whether that is patrolling a certain stretch of ground, materialising and dematerialising at set positions, or chasing you around. You can tell at a glance what their pattern of behaviour is going to be. In addition there are the occasional one-offs who have unique abilities, such as the blinking spectre in the library that requires you to time your movements to when its eyes are closed so it does not detect you and toss you paws over ears half way across the room.

You know that myth about the ghosts being frightened by this terrible beast of a kitten is becoming less and less believable all the time.


Now that's how you insult someone.

As our courageous kitty traverses the expanse of this ancient mansion, you soon learn that the mission he has been entrusted to perform is to find some missing invitations and deliver them to their respective invitees. This whilst seeming trivial is fairly important, after all if people don't know about a party and therefore don't attend it's going to end up being a flop and all that spectral food will go to waste. So it's off into the wilds beyond the mansion gates...and that is where we are introduced to Mr Hollows, the scarecrow who has never in all the years of his existence abandoned his fields for even a moment, certainly not an entire night to attend the Halloween party. His role in life is to protect his field so that it may one day flourish and bloom, a forlorn hope since the land is blasted and lifeless, but he waits just the same, fighting against the malignant crows that pester him. After a brief conversation with Kaye the POV shifts and you then play as Mr Hallows, defending his field from crows as they seek to pilfer what little life still exists in that desolate place, and also steal his straw stuffed head and use it as a bowling ball.

For the remainder of the game you shift main characters from Kaye to Mr Hollows and Fluffy the silent wolf pup as the animals and one Francophile pumpkin, I kid you not, all of his conversation is in French without translation, seek to work out just why it is that Mr Hollows never attends the banquets thrown each year. Bracketing each of these interactive levels is Mia's story, the 'real world' where she lives and is subjected to her parent's disapproval of her interests and imagination, but the boundaries between what is real and what she imagines are not always as impermeable as they appear.

There is unfortunately a small game breaking bug between levels three and four where the transition point to the next stage is missing. If you don't have a copy of RM2K3 you won't be able to continue. *cough* If you know someone who does then just put in a transition from the cedar woods region to the witch's house and the game continues from there. *cough*

In the end this was a remarkable game, full of imagination and rife with verbal imagery. None of the characters are commonplace, even the bickering parents and slightly oddball rural relations had aspects in their personalities which made them stand out, and of course Mia was a constant revelation, even with her strange habit of referring to herself in the third person. Kaye and Mr Hollows and Fluffy all brought an interesting and refreshing perspective to their specific sections and roles which made them both delightful and occasionally confusing to play. The game does have its faults; the difficulty of the earlier levels which I'm sure could make some players rage quit, the somewhat archaic and occasionally incorrect language, the framework of a verbally abusive parental model and there is a definite need to cut down on the moralising in the penultimate sequence but if you can get past or at least bear with those you are in for a wonderfully offbeat lyrical journey, well worth taking.