Peter Sinclair: An all consuming game

By PETER SINCLAIR

It's an odd game with an odd name: Majestic.
And it's not a game you play. It plays you.

Majestic is a Myst-like suspense thriller which is the ultimate in interactivity. The environment it offers is not so much immersive as invasive — it infiltrates your life at home and at work by fax, phone, even the internet.

You may decide it's time to pack it in and go to bed but Majestic may have other ideas. You can power down the computer, turn the light off and snuggle down all you want — but you might need to take the phone off the hook.

For Majestic doesn't turn off.

It plunges you into a shadowy world of conspiracy, of covert organisations into whose furtive activities you are relentlessly sucked whether you feel like it or not. Your convenience becomes secondary to the demands of the gameplay.

And if it all makes you feel a bit paranoid you may have good reason to be, for the storyline seldom runs true and things are hardly ever what they seem.

Some readers may find it hard to work out if they're having fun or just being tormented. Where, they may well ask themselves, does entertainment end and harassment begin?

One or two of the overseas reviews have a badgered tone.
"Majestic really is a handsome game, but ... don't get fooled by its beauty," grouses one. "The graphics are attractive enough, the story is engaging and well-thought-out; but the weak link in the whole ordeal is the convoluted puzzle-structure."

Translation: I couldn't work it out.

Majestic is the ambitious first effort of three students at Maryland's Loyola College and it shows a few traces of amateurishness. Most of the game is spent in total solitude searching for clues and solving logic puzzles unconnected to the overall story.

Newly launched in the US, Majestic has a "mature" rating — only adults are supposed to play. You have to enter your birth date to access even the website but the webmaster appears to be unfamiliar with the concept of lying.

Needless to say, when the kids hear this they're all over it. But young or old, players "are just pawns in the game," according to its producer Neil Young (no, not that one) when the game was launched in Britain recently, according to the Electronic Telegraph.

To find your way through its dense conspiratorial thickets you need eyes in the back of your head, for the game is rich with cryptic remarks and unobtrusive clues; and — this is a distinctive feature of Majestic —you have to work out who is a character and who are other human players trying, like you, to make sense of it all.

I was unable to find out if and when we'll be able to play it here with the full interactivity it demands — international toll-calls costing what they do, you could be in for a few nasty surprises not actually thought up by the director.

But at the rate it's spreading across the English-speaking world — there's already a sequel in the works — my guess is that you'll be able to numb your brain with Majestic about the time you're doing the same thing with Windows XP ...

petersinclair@email.com

Links

Majestic

Myst

Neil Young

Electronic Telegraph