It’s a real shame that almost nobody seems to have heard of this game. It is quite a long time since I first played this but it remains a favorite of mine. Obviously the graphics are very dated now - they were a little dated when it first came out but they still do their job fairly well and the aliens still look good.
The plot begins as a fairly standard sci-fi premise where you are investigating a base on an asteroid. No-one has heard from the base for a while so you’re sent to investigate and of course there are a lot of aliens there. The story is actually good though and very fast moving, it will keep you hooked while you try to discover what happened at the base and how to save the Earth, until the, fairly clichéd, ending.
The gameplay is standard for the time and uses text input, it takes a while to get used to it but it works fine. It's mainly an adventure game with a lot of puzzles mostly these are excellent. They range from fairly easy to very difficult but in general they can all be solved if you think about them. Sadly a few are completely illogical and require a lot of trial and error. You can also die in this game and you almost certainly will die a lot the first time you play it because the aliens are very tough, you can kill yourself too, unusually.
But the really amazing thing about the game is how much fun it is to play and to die. It has to be one the only games where it is so much fun to die. You can get eaten, dissolved, stabbed, dismembered and chopped up and it very funny and still great to watch – there is a lot of blood and gore is this game. The fun continues through out the game – it constantly has black humor interspersed with sci-fi and this is an excellent combination.
Overall, Earthrise wasn’t perfect when it came out and it has dated a lot, but it still remains a great game for anyone willing to give retro classics a try.
Written by:
~grainne6
