What can I possibly add to the many voices that have cried out about the sinking of this famous vessel 109 years ago? So many people have honored this tragedy in their own way, there's little I can say that hasn't already been said. We have the accounts of passengers and crew, the entire transcript of the communications between the Titanic and the various other ships in the area as she desperately cried for rescue, many documentaries, books, and two blockbuster films.
The entire thing plays out like a Greek tragedy: the hubris of man is dealt a deadly, humiliating blow by the offended gods. Like the Alamo, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the collapse of the World Trade Centers, the tragedy of the Titanic will never be eroded away by time. It will forever be subject to new analysis, reinterpretation of events, and theories.
Now, as the team behind the VR hyper-realist simulation Titanic: Honor and Glory comes streaming back to prominence as they attempt to create the most historically accurate recreation of the doomed vessel yet, I want to take a look at an older attempt to recreate this incredible ship: Titanic: An Adventure Out of Time.
Coming out on the heels of James Cameron's masterpiece, this game gives us a point-and-click mystery retelling of the Titanic. It featured a smaller-scale but incredibly faithful recreation of the luxury liner, filled with intriguing characters and a storyline that would allow players to drastically alter the course of history with multiple endings available.
The Story
Your character, Frank Carlson, is a wash-up former British Secret Service member living in a cheap apartment in London. The depressing room is littered with the evidence of his disgrace, the player being able to see the letter informing him of his termination, postcards from friends filling in some of the personal gaps in his life, and even tickets to the Hindenburg. You can also see that the world is in the midst of World War II and the Germans are happily bombing everything they can.
The air raid siren suddenly blares loud and clear, but before you can do anything, a German bomb comes crashing down just outside your apartment. In a whirl, the blast pushes you back in time to April 14, 1912, the fateful day the Titanic sank and the day Frank's most important mission spectacularly failed, setting him on the path to personal ruin and the world on the path of one of the darkest periods in history: a streak of war starting with the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, World War I, and finally World War II.
Frank narrates that he was on the Titanic, remaining in his cabin the entire voyage as he waited for instructions from his contact. Unfortunately, he left once on the night of April 12, having received word from an old flame of his, Georgia. That's when it came. He missed the meeting with his contact and the ship sank before he had a chance to correct his error.
“What if the past could be changed?” he asks as the RMS Titanic appears on screen, the haunting soundtrack blazing in the background.
Your mission: obtain a necklace and a copy of the Rubaiyat, which will be used to finance the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria; a painting by Adolf Hitler that he may become famous for creating the only painting to survive the shipwreck and live out his dream as a famous artist instead of genocidal dictator, and a notebook containing the names of key Bolshevik leaders who are trying to stir up a revolution in Russia and install a communist regime.
Gameplay
The game is a first-person point-and-click adventure game. You traverse large portions of the ship from its decks all the way to the boiler rooms. The ship is full of interesting passengers, many with their own subplots that you can choose to partake in, in addition to the main plot: the Lambeths, whose marriage is crumbling; the psychic Leyland Trask, Edgar Trout, a pastor and missionary returning to the States; Georgia and all the crazy drama in her life, and the shenanigans of Andrew Conkling and his maid Shailagh Hacker (no, not an affair).
A lot of the game involves talking to people and doing some social engineering, but there are some maddening puzzles throughout. The boiler room and Russian doll puzzles are particularly frustrating to me, on the levels of Myst!
Time doesn't move in real-time until the Titanic actually strikes the iceberg. Instead, for much of the game, every time you talk to a character, it speeds up time. This means that, especially when engaging in various subplots, you have to try and make sure you don't talk to too many people when unnecessary.
Once the Titanic hits the burg, the sinking sequence starts in real-time. This leaves you just enough time to finish everything up, sewing up all loose ends and managing to snag a lifeboat at the very last second.
Where This Game Shines
This game is really amazing, especially for its time. For starters, the soundtrack is really good, and the composer has uploaded it to YouTube. The opening music as Carlson's narration gets you caught up to what's at stake is particularly striking. If James Horner's score for the Titanic film was awe-inspiring, melancholic, and apocalyptic, then I'd describe this soundtrack as haunting.
The characters are all interesting, leaving you unsure of who trust as you work out who the antagonists are. Each character feels like he or she is caught up in his or her own drama, whether it has anything to do with your quest to avert a revolution and two major wars or not. All of them lost in their own personal quests, unable to comprehend that their time is so limited.
The RMS Titanic itself looks amazing as well. The ship is very detailed, looking as close to the real thing as they could possibly make it. It was so well-done, that I rewatched the James Cameron film after beating it and found that I could constantly pinpoint exactly where the characters were in each scene.
And you will have to know how to get around the ship on your own, as the lifts are out during the sinking and the story will take you all the way to the third class and boiler room!
The Game's Problems
The downsides to this game all stem from the technological limitations of the day, and it's unfortunate that many of these limitations haven't been wholly overcome today. For example, Titanic: Honor and Glory has been forced to cut down its ambitious goal of 2,200 NPCs (to represent the number of people on the ship) because there aren't many computers that could load all of that, the memory it would take up would likely be extraordinary.
The graphics for the game, specifically the character animations, which look like stills of photographs taken in succession, are very dated. Even Myst managed to pull off flawless character videos!
The sinking also leaves something to be desired. The decks are nearly as crowded or animated as they should be, being little more than the key characters of the game standing around, waiting for a boat. Since most of them are men, you get no sense of the women and children being loaded onto lifeboats first.
The ship never tilts, nor does the stern rise dramatically out of the water. I believe that if you're late to do some things, those rooms will be flooded and inaccessible, but you never see the water come crashing through the boiler room or flowing through the corridors of E deck, for example.
There's a Documentary!
Tonight, April 17, 2021, a documentary about the making of this amazing game is debuting on YouTube! I'm very excited about this, and I hope you all check it out, whether you've played this game or not.
Remember the Titanic! Those aboard didn't die in vain, for huge improvements in safety and communication came about in response to this epic disaster.
