Curse of Enchantia is a graphic adventure game developed and released by the British video game company Core Design for MS-DOS and the Amiga in 1992. The game tells the comic fantasy story of Brad, a teenage boy from modern Earth who was magically abducted to the world of Enchantia by an evil witch-queen. Brad needs to escape and find a way to defeat her, so he can to go back to his own dimension.
Curse of Enchantia, at first known as Zeloria, was Core Design's first attempt in the adventure genre as they set up to compete with LucasArts and Sierra On-Line. The game features several highly unconventional and controversial game mechanics and design choices for an adventure title from that era, including having many simple action game style sequences and being practically devoid of in-game text and conversations.
Nevertheless, Curse was generally well received upon its release, especially by the Amiga magazines, where the game's graphics and animation received particular praise even as its illogical puzzles and unusual design choices were often criticized. A direct sequel was briefly planned but eventually turned into a spiritual successor game titled Universe and released in 1994.
Gameplay
Curse of Enchantia uses a point and click style user interface, similar to Sierra's Creative Interpreter from the King's Quest series.Tony Gill, "Braving wicked witches and shark infested waters". CU Amiga, November 1992, pages 72-73. The player character is commanded with an icon based control bar that is accessible by pressing the right mouse button, which also pauses the game. The control bar features seven main actions: inventory, pick up/take, manipulate/use (opening up a sub-menu with eight further actions: unlock, insert, push/pull, eat, wear, throw, give and combine), look, talk (only either "Help!" or "Hi!"), attack, and jump. Usually, the protagonist has to stand in the immediate vicinity to the game's objects and characters, which then appear as icons in a separate bar, in order to interact with them. A joystick or computer keyboard input can also be used. DDF/Kate, "Bradley und die Hexe". ASM 8/1992.
Unusually for an adventure game genre, Curse of Enchantia does not feature text-based object descriptions or conversations. Its few short scenes of rudimentary communication with friendly non-player characters use only a minimalist system of pictograms in comic book-style speech balloons, usually displaying the objects that the characters need to be delivered. Instead, the game features several action-style sequences, such as dodging hazards or timing the use of items. This resulted in some classifying it as an action-adventure game. However, the character is never at risk of dying, being effectively 'immortal' no matter the dangers, and thus every such task can be repeated until successfully completed, risking only losing a few points from the score. Jewels, gold coins, and other objects of value can be collected throughout the game for a higher score.Curse of Enchantia game manual by Robert Toone and Kevin Norburn.
Plot
In a parallel universe, a fantasy world of Enchantia is suffering under the cruel rule of a powerful coven of wicked witches. Their vain and terrible queen, who managed to surpass the rest in depravity, seeks a live male child from another dimension as the main ingredient of her desired spell of eternal youth. Having borrowed magic powers from all the other witches in Enchantia on the promise to make them too young forever, she created an invisible portal connection to Earth. One day in the 1990s, Joystick 29 (8/92), page 30. a young English teenager named Brad plays a baseball practice with his sister Jenny when the witch spots him through the portal and incants a summoning spell, making him suddenly vanish in a flash of light. The game begins as Brad, dressed in medieval-style clothing, wakes up in a dungeon cell. But the boy soon manages to escape, and then sets out on a journey to return home safely. In the course of his surreal adventure, he braves various dangers, meets a host of friendly and hostile characters, and rises to become a reluctant hero who just might break the titular curse and bring down the evil's reign.Zero 36 (October 1992), page 87.
After breaking out from his prison, Brad falls into a moat before coming to a halt in a cavern maze. Reaching the surface, he arrives at a nearby village; this location is repeatedly revisited throughout the game, as Brad comes back there after traveling to the various corners of the land, encountering bizarre characters and experiencing absurd adventures: the Edge of the World cliff, the Ice Palace, and the Valley of the Lost (a place where all kinds of things lost on Earth have gone to), all while searching for an unlikely set of items that would help him emerge victorious from the game's final showdown (including a fire extinguisher and a mechanical fan). In the end, the boy enters the evil Queen's castle to find and defeat her once and for all. Once she is no more, he gets instantly transported back to the baseball field where it all had started.Tim Tucker, Amiga Power 21, 22, 23 (the game walkthrough in three parts).Keith Grabban, "Giving the game away: Curse of Enchantia". Amiga Action 41 (February 1993), pages 78-81. R. Müller, "Curse of Enchantia". BiT 06/94 (June 1994), page 11. Luis Luque, "Curse of Enchantia: Contra las fuerzas del mal. Os enseñamos a golpear a una bruja con un bate de béisbol." Micromanía Segunda Epoca issue 61, pages 61-65.
Development and release
Core Design's original concept for the game had been to make it more of an action title rather than an adventure one,"First impressions: Curse of Enchantia", CU Amiga 29 (July 1992), page 43. initially being envisioned as an isometric-view role-playing action role-playing game in the style of Core's own 1991 Heimdall, before the project has evolved into a more classic, completely 2D, side-scrolling adventure game (yet still sometimes being described as a role-playing game). It was proposed as "an adventure for people who hadn't played that kind of game before." The protagonist's effective invincibility was a late demand by the executive producer Jeremy Heath-Smith. The game's co-designer and the Amiga version's chief programmer Rob Toone said that their idea was to make these parts of the game "interesting without being difficult." Co-designer and the PC version programmer Ian Sabine stated that the lack of text "speeds up gameplay".Computer Gaming World 99, page 84: "Over There: enCore! enCore!". Regarding the decision to keep the onscreen text to a minimum, Toone said that "too much reading can slow the game or kill it, like The Adventures of Willy Beamish," with the main artist Rolf Mohr adding that "hopefully, a picture will say a thousand words and make this system easy to use.""Work in progress: We need a hero! Curse of Enchantia", The One Amiga 47 (August 1992). According to Toone, "Lucasfilm gets most of its humour out of its text, whereas we hopefully get ours from comical animations and daft happenings." Core's Richard Barclay described it as "a huge icon-driven epic of the Sierra On-Line/Lucasfilm ilk." Mohr named Sierra's King's Quest and Space Quest series as his big influences.
It took a month for the project to be storyboarded before any actual art and programming work started on it. Mohr recalled: "Back then there was not much in the way of 'game design', much less 'concept art'. I was shown extremely brief paragraphs or diagrams of each scene/puzzle and given full latitude to make up pretty much whatever I wanted. It was a lot of fun, although I found myself questioning some of the gameplay choices." The two versions of the game, for the PC and the Amiga, were developed separately and simultaneously, in order to make the best possible product for each platform rather than a quick port from one system to another. A version for the Amiga CD32 had also been planned. The game mixes backgrounds hand-drawn with acrylic paint and then digitized by Mohr, and sprite bitmap graphics made in Deluxe Paint and Brilliance on the Amiga with some rotoscoped animations. The animators Billy Allison and Stuart Atkinson created "huge" DPaint-made character sequences but they had to implement them in game in more efficient way due to computer memory limitations.Stuart Campbell, "Things to come: Curse of Enchantia". Amiga Power 17 (September 1992), page 20. In addition, the PC version used the full 8-bit color of a 256-color palette, but the Amiga version had to be downscaled to only 32 colors (including 24 colors for the background and eight colors for the main character; the other characters had to be drawn with these colors)."Life, Core Design and everything", The One Amiga (January 1994), pages 36-37. The game also uses various digitized sound effects.Amazing Computer Magazine Volume 8 Issue 3 (June 1993), pages 83-84.
The game's design and plot evolved during development, including the title change. Several revisions resulted in some of the already made some graphics and other content being cut from the game, in particular in the final area of the castle's interior (which at first was intended to be much larger and to feature monsters that would guard it, but in the end was reduced to a small area with the task basically limited to finding a secret chamber). Allison said, "there were whole sections that never made it in, like a roller skating frankenstein, that shattered into loads of tiny versions of him if you 'killed' him, I did the sprites etc, it just never made it to the game." Its working title had been at first Zeloria,"Verhext", Power Play Magazine 10/92, p. 17-18. which later caused some confusion as a number of video game magazines have continued to use "Zeloria" as the name of the world in the game;Jonathan Maddock, "Let's do the time warp...", Amiga Computing 55 (December 1992), pages 129-130.The One Amiga 46 (July 1992), page 119. some other magazines also incorrectly assumed "Enchantia" to be the name of the game's antagonist, Génération 4 52 (pages). Michael Anton, "Curse of Enchantia: Im tiefen Tal der Bösen Hexe". ASM Special 18, p. 16-20. who is actually nameless (some articles feature also other names such as "Malizia" or "Meilbrum"). Some articles also featured an earlier and slightly different version of the plot, which involved a castle of three witches, who needed to drink a special potion every hundred years or else they would turn to dust, Volker Weitz, Power Play 11/92: "Hexensabbat: Curse of Enchantia " (Kultboy.com). and the protagonist Brad's original task involved a rescue of his captured sister Jenny. "Lo historia de una antigua maldición", Micromanía 53. In 1991, Zeloria was described as "a mystical and fantastic land, full of lost objects and witches - in fact, Zeloria is the land of the lost where all those loose socks and TV remote controls go." The name "Enchantia" was only proposed by Mohr late in the development as more fitting, to which the producer added "Curse of" to create the title (Mohr would later "accidentally" name Killzone as well).