Albion (1995)
Science Fiction/Fantasy as it should be done
Happy 2022 to everyone reading this. Let’s hope this year is better than the last.
I had a whole slate of blog posts to go up last year and embarrassed to say that did not happen. Not even nearly, haha. Who knew 365 days could go by so fast and yet so slowly?
This post is going up on my Mum’s birthday. I lost my Mum in October 2019, but it feels like just yesterday we were talking about Star Trek or Black Lightning or the latest game I was adventuring through after a long day at work. I wanted this post to honour her in some small way. Like many gamers, she bought me pretty much all my games until I was able to buy them myself. She bought my first PC, a Windows 3.1 box on which I played Wolfenstein 3D, Duke Nukem II, Blakestone: Aliens of Gold, Hangman and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego.
Mum, without you I wouldn’t be a great many things. I certainly wouldn’t have been a gamer!
Yes, we were both also in Toastmasters!
Albion is one of my all-time favourite games! It was one of the first RPGs I ever played, and it’s world-building has left an indelible mark on me.
In 1997 my Mum bought me a shareware CD from a computer store in Hastings Plaza. There were plenty games on there, but the ones that stood out were: Tomb Raider, Exile: Escape from the Pit (nostalgic review upcoming), and, of course, Albion.
A young Brian picked up a few words from the in-game descriptions.
You play as Tom Driscoll, a pilot who has crash-landed on the planet Albion. The company he works for believes the planet to be barren, so they sent the ship Toronto there to mine the planet for resources. But Tom finds a lush and vibrant world populated by sentient aliens known as the Iskai. What follows is a epic adventure across continents, delving into the darkest dungeons, meeting many friends and making enemies, tactical combat, an engrossing magic system, solving mysteries and unraveling a detailed and moving story.
I’ve never been a stickler for graphics in games, having come up playing text-based games (and games with graphics that would take the processing power of a watch to run), but I remember being blown away by just how beautiful and detailed Albion’s world was rendered.
Honestly, it’s like gazing into a painting.
Albion’s world is depicted in both 2D in 3D. I loved the 2D aspect, but the 3D was enormously anxiety-inducing for me back then. It carried with it a sense of claustrophobia that I haven’t experienced in games since. What was particularly cool was that you could find parts of the interface that we today take for granted. Need to know the time? You could find a clock. Need to know where the hell you were in a dark dungeon as your party members are bleeding out and the light from your torches is failing? You could find or buy a compass.
But let’s talk about the sound, shall we? The minimalist score that sounded like actual instruments native to this alien world being played, the rich calls of birds and monsters in the over-world, and the blam! of explosions, grunts and the like all melded to immerse me like I was taking a sea-bath.
Looking back, what I found great about this (and other RPGs of this era) was the lack of voice acting. This gave the developers the latitude to construct detailed dialogue trees, allowing me to really role-play.
All NPCs could answer those 3 general questions.
And this freedom with dialogue led to NPCs sharing so much detail about their world it wasn’t funny. I learned what they ate, how they cooked, how they grew furniture from the earth, their politics, religion, superstitions and grudges. Very few games since have been this affecting for me.
A grand tour of one of the Iskai’s guild houses.
Alas, like most games I played back then, I never finished it. And it wasn’t because Albion became harder or boring or anything like that. I just couldn’t bear the thought of the adventure coming to an end. Even today that is the case—I’ve picked it up many times since on DOSBox, and will work my way through it to a certain point before putting it down. Maybe this year I will finally see what the end holds.
A wonderful RPG all round. Not much more to say!
To the developers of this game—thank you. This got me not only into RPGs, but into science fiction in general, and stoked an early interest in game development.