I was a child of the 90's, and one part of my childhood I remember fondly was the games I played on the big, beige PC my parents had in the basement. On Saturdays, I'd get up early in the morning and play games on it while my parents slept, usually until breakfast was ready. It was a pretty strong machine for the time and it ran 3D games like Descent just fine, though I always preferred Commander Keen and the shareware episode of Doom (My parents didn't let me get the retail version at the time.)
There was one game in particular I remember that I haven't been able to track down since then, though I remember everything except the name pretty vividly. I've been looking for it for quite some time, even asking around online. This is where I find you, maybe you can help me out here.
It was a full 3D game where you played a young boy exploring an old castle. It began with a pre-rendered cutscene of the kid walking up to this huge iron gate with his dog, the dog getting agitated at the site of a raven and chasing it through an opening in the gate, with the boy running after it. I can remember these strange runes glowing on the iron gate as the boy pushed it open, then slamming shut on its own as the boy runs after his dog, calling its name. I think the dog was named Bone though I'm not sure.
After the cutscene, you got the title screen which only had a couple of options for the graphics, sound, and controls, it was really bare-bones. The game begins with the boy in this huge, empty courtyard with the castle itself looming straight ahead. Curiously, the game had no music, just the sound of the wind blowing. It was just eerie how empty the game felt, with no music and the colors being so muted. The stone pathway was more of a bluish-gray and the grass looked sickly, that's the best way I can describe the texture, like when your lawn starts dying during a bad winter.
Going forward down the path, I discovered the front door to the castle was locked. The screen even displayed the text 'THAT'S NOT THE WAY' along the bottom. The controls were really weird, the kid being controlled like a tank where you turn with the right and left arrow keys and go forward or back with up and down. If you've ever played Tomb Raider, the controls worked like that.
Taking a detour left, I found this garden-looking area with thin trees. There, I found the game's first enemy: A monster made of stone with a head that looked like those Easter Island statues. The first few times I tried to get past the thing, it raised its chunky, low-poly arm and killed the boy with one punch. Even though it was bitcrushed, the sound of the kid's neck breaking from the blow was uncomfortably real-sounding. A hard thump from the impact, a gross-sounding *crack* and the boy fell limp. The words GAME OVER danced across the screen in big block letters, and I'm back to the start menu.
After figuring out a way to outrun the deceptively fast stone man, I found a wooden ramp that leads up to an open window, where I finally got into the castle. After a few seconds of loading, I was met with another pre-rendered cutscene, even for the 90s the CGI was really janky looking, the boy looked more like a marionette being dropped as he leaped down from the open window. The scene cut to a thin old man with wild gray hair digging up a skeleton mumbling something about 'bringing her back to me' and I was back in control, having been given no answers as to what the hell was going on.
The interior of the castle was very 'Halloweeny' if that makes sense. Dark stone walls, red carpet floor, windows with iron bars in them etc. It all looked like a stereotypical haunted castle. Still, there was no music, only ambient sounds like the distant rattling of chains, the crackling of lit torches on the walls, and the occasional creaking floorboard. The next few minutes of gameplay was pretty slow-paced, with block-pushing puzzles and minor enemies like bats, spiders and so on.
I was making good progress, having unlocked an art gallery room when one of the suits of armor came to life and ran the boy through with its lance, prompting another detailed death animation where his impaled body twitched as the knight lifted him up by the lance before going still and sliding down a bit on the lance. Despite this, there wasn't any blood for any of the deaths I saw. Maybe it was to keep the game from being withheld from release, maybe it was an option I didn't see in the menu somewhere. And after I got through the art gallery and the killer armor, I saw plenty of deaths as the game spiked in difficulty. So far, I witnessed:
- A gargoyle breathing fire on the boy, making his body turn black and shrivel up in a heap on the floor.
- A werewolf chasing the boy down and mauling him to death
- One of the sliding blocks crushing the boy flat
After many quicksaves and notes taken, I finally made it to a graveyard section outside the castle. There were skeleton enemies wielding swords wandering but they weren't any trouble, though this is where I got stuck in the game and never figured out how to progress further. There was a locked gate next to a row of headstones. Only two of the headstones could be interacted with, one of them was a list of how many times the player died, and for me it was quite a long list. The other made me quit the game for a bit, it displayed a message reading my actual name, with the date of death marked as the day I was playing the game.
No. No no no, I was not in the mood to play the damn thing after that, not for a good while. Though later I assumed that the game just had a line of code that read the user name on the PC but then I remembered something:
Because my parents used the PC before giving it to me, it was in my dad's name, not mine.