Game 140: Black Sect (1993) - Introduction

 By Ilmari

I have no idea why this game was made.

Well that sounded a bit harsh, especially as I haven’t even played the game yet. It just seems a curious choice for Lankhor to remake and upgrade a low budget text adventure, which by all indications had no particular fan base and was old-fashioned even when it was published.

An even more curious creative choice is that the new game was never published in English. Mobygames tells me that an English translation was at least partially made and hidden somewhere within the game files – why see all that effort and not use it? Well, at least the existing translation has helped fans later in making an English version of the game. I’ll still aim for the most authentic experience and so will play the original French version.

Checking the manual, the framing story hasn’t changed a bit: a spellbook protecting a village from demonic forces  has disappeared and your task is to find it. The manual is still of interest, since it contains a long essay on the sociology of sects. Well, you might have to take the essay with a grain of the salt. One of its two sources was authored by a Catholic priest who thought that New Age movements were a Jewish conspiracy for world domination, while the other was written by a sensational journalist, who just lumped wildly different ideologies like Scientology (oppressively totalitarian hierarchy invented by a failed scifi novelist turned into a money grubbing fraud) and Hare Krishna -movement (bunch of vegan, Hindu-loving hippies who like to sing) into the same category of sects.

For some reason, the copy of the game I’ve picked starts without the intro animation. I checked it on Youtube: basically, it just shows a blackrobed person killing someone and stealing a book, so nothing new there. I am also not hearing any music or sound effects, although there should be such, but I guess I’ll have to listen to them from Youtube later.

I can already say that the graphics have made a great leap forward from the original. Text parser has also had to make way for an icon-based interface. There’s no less than sixteen actions (found within the clapboard on the right side) I could do:

• Look
• Take
• Drop
• Lift
• Press
• Break
• Open
• Close
• Turn
• Speak
• Give/show
• Use
• Search
• Pull
• Put
• Hide

This seems a bit unwieldy. To make things worse, you can’t really use some of these actions (like use, put and give), unless you hold some object in your hand. Since I haven’t picked anything yet, I really don’t know how that works in practice, just like I have no idea about the whole inventory system.

It will be interesting to see whether having played Le Secte Noire will in any manner help me in solving Black Sect. Well, at least if I get stuck, I can use the hint system (the lifebuoy), which seems as helpful as in the original text adventure (“search and you’ll find” it tells me in the first room of the game). There’s also a time limit - after three days of waiting the sect runs away with the spell book. This seems a bit anticlimactic: I thought the spellbook was required for protecting the village from the cult and then they just go away. Oh well, I guess any motivation is good motivation. Let the game begin!