Kronolog - Won (And Final Rating)

Written by Morpheus Kitami

Welcome to 1942, we have a crackerbox-style house behind us, housing Livingston, our target. There's a rainwater barrel next to Hoffmann, empty because there's no rain, and more cacti on the corner. I can peak in through the window, but alas, the curtains are drawn. I can go to the left, though.

"I've been shot, which is why I'm going to stand like I'm trying to reach a high shelf!"

And it's Livingstone, just after having been shot by Schmidt. Hoffmann tells him not to worry, and to go back to his own time, because he has this. He doesn't quite understand, but does so. If I were inclined to think this game might have a cruel ending, I would think I have just guaranteed that time is a loop rather than things changing and creating new timelines.

Getting closer to the house, it changes to the front porch. The fishing gear and swing are flavor. While I can see in through the windows, I don't see anything of interest. The chest and door are locked. The answer is surprisingly easy at this point, because of that well-known cliche of hiding a key where you can find it if you lose it. Where is it? In the mouth of the fish on the left. This allows me to open the chest, which has a piece of orange cloth with two grommets (those ring things you tie things into, not a noob skateboarder) and nothing else. The key does not unlock the front door.

Checking a walkthrough after, this is what causes the pilot to appear. I mean, I did it, but I didn't know what it was doing at the time.

The cloth is a flag, it turns out, which I can put on the flagpole from earlier. Which also has some rocks I could pick up if they were glued to the ground with concrete. I don't know why this was needed. I also find another room by going right from the entrance, leading here...for seemingly little purpose. It then turns out that I need to use one specific stone in the formation to grab, and then look inside it. This causes a plane to appear.

I wonder if there's a very vulgar joke here or if I just read too much about comic books.

The very straight-laced pilot of the plane comes out to speak with me. Hoffmann asks for transport, and he asks for 15 clams. At first I think this is the purpose of the gold cross, but it turns out I just picked up a twenty dollar bill from under a stone. I'm sure Livingston will be glad I robbed him to save the world, and that Hoffmann is going to buy a drink with the remaining five.

We travel...somewhere, and my pilot goes off to the watering hole as I try to find Schmidt. First, I suspect there's something in the plane. There's a suspicious cargo compartment, which has a flare gun and some dynamite. Sorry, the flare gun is inaccessible to the pilot? Is that wise? Then again, I'm not sure why I'm asking that question when he has a box full of dynamite in such a small plane. That's it for the plane, sadly, now off to the mission nearby which seems to be my destination. I double check my inventory after going past a rock...

Interestingly, this is actually less cruel than it could have been, it's a guarantee you'll examine your inventory quickly.

That had the potential to be very cruel. It blew up my inventory, the whole thing. I guess I just need the flare gun. This room is also challenging in another way, it's a pain to navigate through, because it expects you to find a specific spot, then click on the doors to the church.

Inside we have this room. There's a door Hoffmann is in front of, and then the expected stuff you'd find in a church. Nothing you can actually use, mind you, except a coffin you can open and close. No, there's nothing inside. Going through the door leads to a room with a locked door and a staircase down.

Four characters on-screen at once...you know...technically.

If I don't go into this niche away from the door, the priest, Father Emilio, will pop in and shoot me. If I wait, in comes in three men, Emilio, the Reinhardt from this time and a Reinhardt from the future. Present Reinhardt is going to stand back and let future Reinhardt do whatever it is he was going to do to get the bomb. Future Reinhardt is going to go in the coffin, while the priest and present Reinhardt go into a secret passage behind the bookcase, which was opened using a gold cross. FINALLY, I can use this damn cross. Wait a minute, what about that gas line there? What if I turn it open and leave? No, returning to the main room causes future Reinhardt to get out of the coffin and kill me.

Interestingly, turning on the gas causes an explosion on its own, according to my death message, and I can turn it on before the trio come into the room. Which means that even if I don't actually win this game, I'm counting it as a win because I stopped the Nazis. When you're using a time machine to stop a group of people from controlling the world, and you stopped the event that causes that rise, you've won even if you're dead. A better game would recognize this. I'm actually interested if someone can argue successfully against this reasoning, 10 CAPs if you can.

Afterwards, I kind of get why I had to do this, a delaying mechanism, but gosh, in the moment it felt like adventure game player logic, where you do something even if you don't understand why.

So what I'm actually supposed to do is, put the condom on the gas pipe, turn on the gas, then look at the shelf where Father Emilio put his cross and lock it. Then and only then does Father Emilio say that the door is jammed and I can get past future Reinhardt without instantly getting killed. I can also get a blank death message if I open Reinhardt's coffin, because I'm expecting to fight him somehow.

In our timeline, Hoffmann is a famous black metal musician.

I just walk out, and the place goes on fire. A rock goes by on the left. This is surprisingly...mundane? It's not over, so I guess I should go to the left.

Reinhardt's unflappable if he's getting into a plane after that ordeal.

Oh, Reinhardt is in the plane. In this mostly realistic and serious game he was shot out of the church in the coffin, that was the rock, and survived. I guess I should shoot him with the flare gun I have. Or...not and instead hit the plane.

Yep, a shareware action game explosion, think I saw this one in Skunny.

The plane blows up because I hit the dynamite. Ah...somehow not as satisfying as it should be. Oh, well.

He's so happy he's breaking the fourth wall!

Cheesily, Hoffmann walks into the sunset and we get credits. Many actors representing the characters, for whom I hope this was a handsome payday, and many playtesters of whom I hope got nothing because of this shoddily done travesty. After the credits we get a single line of text on a black screen. "Philip, is that you?" Which is a bit creepy until I have to ask the question if Philip actually died, because I don't remember that.

And then it quits to DOS with something that looks like an error message even if it's legitimate.

This Session: 1 hours 30 minutes

Total Time: 13 hours 00 minutes

Let's just get straight into the rating.

The typical death screen, made blank because they forgot to put in text for when you open Reinhardt's coffin.

Puzzles and Solvability

Now, you would expect me at this point to complain about Kronolog's difficulty and design, which frustrated me to no end, but I'm conflicted on it. I don't think anything was wrong in theory, just execution. A secret button on a random panel, a relief on a wall, and getting into an air vent system aren't terrible ideas and work within the context of the world. Or a limited inventory system where you have to chose what you carry everywhere.

The problem is the game leaves out any reason why you would do these things. It's not interactive enough for you to believe that what it wants done can be done, and what can be done only works because the game was made to allow that to be done. It's perfectly logical to climb up a desk and enter an air vent that way, but do I think that the developers of this game could do that? No, since the game doesn't even have the common decency to throw a "Don't use that item here, you fool" at me for using something I shouldn't be using there.

I daresay that anything complex is beyond the capabilities of the developers. Because the puzzles they did implement don't always work the way they want. Looking at a walkthrough afterwards, you're supposed to sharpen a tomahawk to kill Grossman, but it works unsharpened. Those stones earlier in this entry? You're supposed to use the canteen to move them to get the money, I don't remember doing this. Finally, the ending sequence only works if you do things in a specific order.

Which gets away from the overarching crappiness of the game's puzzles. You need to carry a lot of seemingly useless items for a long time. I'm taking a lot on faith here that this condom I went out of my way to get is going to get me something compared to a pair of gloves which serve no purpose. There's so much more I can do and so much more that I could get that it seems like the puzzles were designed in a world where only the items you could pick up exist, and sometimes those aren't the only legitimate answers to the puzzle.

But I will say that I really liked the pipette puzzle, which rewarded you for paying attention to the game world and then using that knowledge to get something in the game world.

2

Interface and Inventory

The game's exclusively mouse interface, or as near exclusively as to make no difference, is fairly typical. Four actions, cycle through them with right click, activate them with left click. Various buttons. The issue is that it only works well when there's no pressure on the player, and the game puts pressure on the player. It's possible to cause multiple text boxes to show up, obscuring the text on most of them, and in certain conditions break the game entirely.

It's also a pain to move around. Not just up and down through the "layers" of the map, but left and right can be tricky because it isn't always obvious where you can and can't go. It's also true that the layer effect would not be worth it even if this were the best-looking game ever made. It simply creates too much trouble for little benefit.

The inventory screen is somewhat annoying. You get two actions divorced entirely from the rest of the game, and the way it works seems somewhat janky. Every time you enter the inventory, your equipped item is unequipped, so you have to use the hand to get another. Also, you combine items with the hand icon, which if you didn't have the manual would be impossible to figure out as there's no indication you're doing anything but swapping items in your inventory.

3

Story and Setting 

A great deal of effort was put into making the game world feel believable, and it does so, unfortunately, we kind of don't seem much of that. There wasn't really much effort needed into making a game where you mostly just spend time in unpleasant grey boxes and the odd desert. It feels like wasted effort. The in-game story is mostly solid, unremarkable but not bad. Except for some out of place mysticism which might just be why there's a plot to begin with.

6

Sound and Graphics

Outside of a few rare sound effects and the voices, the game is deathly silent. It's unnerving, more so than intended, it's just enough to prevent me from listening to music most of the time, but too little to actually feel like there is anything here.

The game looks too good to be amateurish, but too bad to be professional. It's in that weird middle ground I don't really see much of showing that there is something between amazing and crap. The odd thing is, I would apply most of this down to poor design choices rather than actual quality. So much gray. Even if it is the apocalypse, you'd think the Nazis would make their buildings look less like a place you'd leave prisoners in and more like someplace someone would live in. Given that one of their stated aims was extreme distaste for ugly things seems quite counterproductive to what we see.

3

Environment and Atmosphere 

There's an absolutely miserable atmosphere filling the game. This crosses over, in my opinion, from merely being dark to becoming too dark to properly enjoy. It does ruin the nature of the game to be hit over the head that hard that the world is screwed and only your eventual use of time travel can save it.

But that's something you could say works in the game's favor in some opinions, what doesn't work is how little the game bothers to explain what's going on in a given screen. It's usually blunt, with the occasional bit of explanation. I think the big failure can be illustrated with the Lakona section, where you get a bunch of their stuff with no explanation of it. It doesn't even tell you what it is, just a mention that it's an object you have no context for. Explain it.

The game also does an incredibly poor job of showing your interactions with anything, sometimes actions will work, sometimes they won't with no explanation of what it is you did wrong, not even insulting the player. It's bad game design that I'm thinking more fondly of a game that would call me an idiot because at least that showed that I did something instead of the game possibly breaking down!

2

Dialogue and Acting

 It's fine. I have nothing to really praise, but nothing ever annoyed me. I just sort of don't think about it. Might be a consequence of the voice acting feeling very soft-spoken, which is then a consequence of the game being under 20 mb despite having an entire game's work of voice acting.

4

2+3+6+3+2+4=20/0.6=33.3 or 33. Minus 1 point for having too many death screens that were just the same backdrop giving an overly complicated description of how I died. That's 32. Michael gets the CAPs for the closest guess.

Period reviews and previews

Hey, you wanna know why the game feels like it's missing something? Because it is!

At worst, this is an entire new screen with two different UI elements, at best we're seeing an entire player character removed from the game. Clearly this game needed more time in the oven, because I can't imagine they left out something like this because it didn't work.

Reviews are all over the place, we've got one from Electronic Entertainment, which is positive, but was clearly written by just the first fifteen minutes of gameplay. Also, they called it a RPG along with Walls of Rome, CyberRace, Gabriel Knight and Leisure Suit Larry. More of an explanation than a real review.

Computer Gaming World, meanwhile, takes umbrage with how the game doesn't really show the Nazis as being...well, Nazis. Instead they're mostly just guilty of letting the environment die. The author seems to have fatigue of ecological aesops, especially badly injected into computer games. Which isn't an observation I see a lot of from most people these days, who seem to like games based exclusively on whether or not it agrees with them, especially if you write for a website.

But it does bring up an interesting observation. I read all the in-game internet stuff, so it's not just ecological, it's just the part that gets the focus. We are told about its other atrocities, but everything in-game could be said of anyone. Since as a player all our deaths are things that would happen in any government, fascist or not. After all, what government isn't going to arrest a suspected terrorist who is currently inside a government building he shouldn't be in? (And also, the game was released with the commies as the bad guys with 0 difference between the two)

Italian magazine K in their 58th issue has a review that goes in depth, but my Italian isn't that good. They like the story and the FMV, but found the interface poor and thought the sound effects could be improved. They gave it a 840, which is apparently what they get when they give out four scores averaging 7.5. They also compare it to Lucasarts games at the time, which I don't think is accurate outside of this and Indiana Jones having Nazis.

Cost, at its debut it cost $69.95, no doubt because it had to come on a lot of floppies. This quickly went down to $42, but it was still sold until the late '90s at the highly enticing pricepoint of $19.

And with that, I think I've got all I had to say about Kronolog. Kind of interesting, but too many flaws to follow up that interest.

CAP DISTRIBUTION

100 CAPs to Morpheus Kitami

• Timesplitters Award - 100 CAPs - For blogging and playing Kronolog for our enjoyment

40 CAPs to Ilmari

• Assistance Award (X2) - 20 CAPs - For answering my requests for assistance.

10 CAPs to Michael

• Psychic Prediction Award - 10 CAPs - For getting the closest to correct guess for Kronolog

5 CAPs to Patryk

• Plum Spirit Award - 5 CAPs - For singing the praises of several Central European games.

5 CAPs to ShaddamIVth 

• Rambo III Award - 5 CAPs - For mentioning that one of the Afghanistan wars fulfilled the criteria of defeating a European power before Japan.

5 CAPs to Eddie

• 1984 Award - 5 CAPs - For pointing out a 1984 reference I didn't get.