Wrath of the Gods 

The Muses in Greek mythology glorified the spirit of the arts and history through poetry and song. Not one could have predicted that several thousand years later, a grainy adventure game with stilted, public-access-quality acting would take up their mantle.

You have to hand it to Joel Skidmore and the small team at Luminaria: Wrath of the Gods is a fairly compelling attempt to cram the entirety of the Greek myths into a digestible, entertaining, and educational format. The game desperately needs a facelift and a tuneup, but in terms of raw effort, it’s hard to top.

Wrath of the Gods is a traditional third-person adventure game (in the vein of LucasArts titles) that tries to incorporate every last Greek legend, scene, and character into the story. In a nod to the famous tragic character Oedipus, you play as the heir to a throne, abandoned by the king after the Oracle predicted you would replace him. After being raised by a centaur, you set across Ancient Greece in search of adventure.

What follows is the mythological equivalent of a mashup. By the end of the game, you will have killed Medusa, slayed the Minotaur, flown in Hermes’s sandals, gained the Midas touch, stolen the Gorgons’ eye, found the Golden Fleece, escaped the Sirens, climbed Mount Olympus, met Zeus, outwitted the cyclops, tamed Pegasus, played flute with Pan, and traveled both ways across the river Styx. Jason and Theseus ought to be humbled.

That’s wildly untrue to the Greek myths, but it’s in the name of quality education. Each character or situation you come across greets you with an exaggerated “HELLOOO! MY NAME IS DIONYSUS, THE GOD OF WINE AND GOOD SPIRITS!”, and on each screen, you can press an info button that gives you a detailed background and history of each scene and its place in the Greek pantheon. By forcing you to learn how all the Greek myths unfolded in order to solve puzzles, it teaches the information without reading like an exercise. In that respect, after years of Oregon Trail‘s dreary deadpanning, the game deserves some serious credit.

As far as adventure games go, this one is alright. Puzzles mostly involve matching inventory items, which is functional if somewhat dull. Rather than inflicting death, wrong solutions cleverly send the player to Hades, where an additional set of educational puzzles leads to the exit. The world is vast and interconnected enough to keep exploring fun. To its benefit, this lets players solve sections non-linearly and possibly avoid some unwanted parts altogether, but the convoluted map system makes losing track a little easier than desirable.

In an interesting point of departure from other adventure games, instead looking like a cartoon, Wrath of the Gods opts for realism whenever possible. Each scene uses photos of the Greek countryside, even if that means showing ruins (an anachronism the game acknowledges, but you’d never catch it on your own. Greece always looked like that, right?). The effect is surprisingly authentic.

The same philosophy applies to the characters, who are represented by live-action actors in flamboyant costumes with frizzy 80s hair. But it doesn’t work nearly as well for them. Clips of dialogue are stitched together with limited animation and snappy cuts to save space, and the results look closer to one of Terry Gilliam’s Python animations than a movie. It’s jarringly weird, so much so that it becomes entertaining and eventually part of the game’s appeal.

Wrath of the Gods earns some cred its effort and breadth. The game manages to educate while still entertaining, which is quite the feat on its own, even if the mechanics and aesthetics feel a bit off.  At least it has a sense of humor about itself (slot machines in Ancient Greek airports = laughs).

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Tags: 1994, 90s, CD-ROM, historical, Joel Skidmore, live action, Luminaria, Macintosh, still sold, third-person, video, Windows, Windows 3.1

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