Who's riding so late where winds blow wild?
It's not the father grasping his child.
It's a lonely horseman galloping through a chill summer night,
wolves howling and owls hooting in the distance.
He pauses for a moment,
watching the medieval town that's slumbering deceptively calm in the distance
and contemplates the horrors that await him.
He bears up, rowels his horse and enters the godforsaken village.
His quest is to rescue his princess.
... how original!
Oh and... he looks like he's a living balloon-animal!
Welcome to Ecstatica
An unexpectedly cruel and sinister Horror Adventure.
That has... over time... faded a bit into video game obscurity.
Which makes it one of my favorite
Forgotten Gems.
I remember buying Ecstatica pretty much at the same time as the first Resident Evil.
And although those games are set in completely different worlds,
they felt surprisingly similar in how they played and, especially felt.
In retrospective, even though the game came out 2 years prior,
and Resident Evil is considered the one to have coined the term,
Ecstatica bears all the marks of a classic survival horror experience.
It's controlled in the tradition of Alone in the Dark,
which also served as a heavy influence for Resident Evil.
The protagonist moves through pre-rendered backgrounds with fixed camera angles
often staged for dramatic effect in favor over perfect controllability.
Reminiscent of cinematic games like Another World,
its focus lies heavily on immersion.
No heads up display, no menus.
We only have the items we carry in our left and right hand
and our health status is solely indicated through the way
the character carries himself,
limping in pain when we're close to death.
What I didn't expect,
especially from its rather comical, ellipsoid visual stlye,
was how sinister and frightening it was.
The seemingly quiet town is haunted by a horde of evil creatures,
that have pillaged, tortured and massacred the town's population
with sadistic ferocity!
It's a wild pastiche of nightmarish fantasy monsters.
Giant, man-eating spiders,
brutish minotaurs,
an outright army of pesky goblin-demons,
undead skeletons,
ghost warriors,
guardian statues,
an inspirtied .. table... come to life.
And at the center of it all, the sadistic and cruel werewolf.
He's one of the first villains we encounter
and one of the main reasons that makes this game so terrifying.
The werewolf is easily one of the strongest foes in the game,
and he doesn't wait until the end,
when we're experienced and outfitted with good weapons,
but he toys with us from the moment we enter the town.
Luring us into traps and torturing us just for the joy of it.
Ecstatica draws its frightening atmosphere from its unforgiving pacing.
Instead of easing you in with a hidden tutorial,
teaching you its mechanics in a safe environment,
it unleashes its most vicious enemies within the first minutes
- and that immediately drives the point home that we're stranded
in a truly menacing nightmare.
We start out with no weapons,
with lethal demons and insidious traps waiting around every corner,
leading us through a gauntlet of deadly hazards.
I remember being terrified and overwhelmed when I played it for the first time
and shocked by the unexpectedly graphic nature of the violence
imposed on the innocent townsfolk depicted.
And since the werewolf appears to be virtually invincible to our attacks,
I spent dozens of tries trying to bury him in a furry of perfectly timed blows
without taking damage myself.
And after minutes of continuous beating,
I actually managed to kill the fucker.
And this was the point where the tide turned.
Ecstatica has, just as a good survival horror game should,
an inverted progression curve.
Starting out with a severely underpowered player
that has to overcome impossible odds in the beginning
- but which are followed by a fast and gradual buildup of strength,
courage and familiarity should we stand through the initial onslaught.
We find weapons and useful equipment,
grind out breathing room to explore
and begin to understand the town a bit better.
And before we know it, we venture forth into the heart of evil
- entering the catacombs of the dark magician,
who's responsible for the abominable plague
until we, the hero forged in flames,
take him on and hopefully emerge victorious to ride home with our loved one.
Ecstatica is not a long and also not a very deep game by any means
- but it's a very honest and straightforward tale.
Its strikingly memorable, elliptoid graphic style,
that was a workaround for the hardware limitations
of the very early age of 3D graphics at the time,
made it a game that, sadly, few people have come across
- but those who did, remember it as one of those games
that sticks to your memory like glue.
It was developed by Andrew Spencer and published for MS-DOS in 1994 by Psygnosis
- and it received critical praise at the time.
And... it sold apparently well enough that it was blessed with a sequel 3 years later.
Because the story's not over
as when the hero returns to his home castle,
he finds it ravaged by an even more vile army of hellish demons.
Ecstatica 2 iterates and elaborates on the formula of its predecessor,
keeping everything that made the original great and expanded it logically.
A greater cast of unique and freakish monsters
with a diverse range of attack patterns to learn and master.
More weapons and equipment and a more elaborate inteface to manage your loadout.
More intricate puzzles,
more of that grotesquely out-of-place cartoon violence and,
first and foremost,
an enormous medieval bastion that turns out to be a challenging, and surprisingly...
metroidvania style playground for this dark and unforgiving surival horror adventure.
Thinking about it
- it actually managed to emit a very early version of Dark Souls flair,
both in level design and scenery.
Ecstatica and its sequel are not easy to obtain these days
and generally considered abandonware.
They run perfectly with DOSBox if you're interested in giving them a try.
Though I don't know how their strangely unusual mix of angsty
and also weirdly comical survival horror atmosphere holds up when you approach them,
unpreventably spoiled by 2 decades of video game evolution in between
- but I hope that I could convey a tang
of what made it memorable for me when I discovered it.
Indy: "This should be in a museum!"
I hope I could make it a little less
of a Forgotten Gem.
Thank you guys for watching.
I hope you enjoyed this little excursion into video game oblivion.
Let me know if you want to see more Forgotten Gems in the future,
and if you have any suggestions
of intriguing titles that have fallen off the radar at some point.
If you'd like to support my channel,
then I'd be very grateful if you joined my Patreon
- and as always, my gratitude goes out to all the people
who already support me there,
with a special thanks to these top tier supporters:
Kelvin Bombach
Kristopher Kolish
Nicholas Stephenson
Ronny Meinert
Ian Melancon
Dewi Wahyu Hendrayani
Michelle Stoliker
Marissa Martinez
Carlos Vega
Milan Vujinovic
Tiago Pereira dos Santos Silva From Porto, Portugal
Darkblue1
Caroline Mills
Danny Sendel
Luke Johnson
James Lynch
Even Tekro
Travis Deng
Lucas Porter
and last but not least
Simon Andersson