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Agartha
Platform: Dreamcast
Developer: No Cliché
Developer No Cliché whittled Agartha off the enormously huge and profitable survival-horror block established by Capcom years back with Resident Evil. The company spent years working on Agartha, with ever-changing time slots on retail release lists, all while keeping the real meat of the game, the story and gameplay, tightly wrapped.
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Agartha was a historical game set in an unassuming Romanian village in 1929 Eastern Europe. The sleepy town was far from ordinary, though; it was also the supernatural gateway between Earth and a dimension of total pandemonium and malevolence. As the game began, a violent earthquake rocked the town, breaking the seal containing the evil forces. Your character, Kirk, an aging specialist in strange phenomena, was dispatched with his sister-in-law, Juliet, to search the ruins of the town for survivors and to make a determination on what exactly had occurred. You found the answer when you uncovered the entrance to the underworld, Agartha. As the game opened, you were confronted with the choice of working toward resealing the hordes of demons and undead that had sprung forth or (in a bold twist) helping the bad guys to accomplish their goals--namely, the enslavement and destruction of humankind.
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In the course of your adventures in Agartha, you found yourself knee-deep in monsters, soldier monks, priests, archangels, and other demonic minions. Controlling them all was the mysterious Sentinel. Early on, you were offered the choice of working for "good" to destroy him or succumbing to "evil" to serve him. This was only the beginning of the options Agartha gave you. An online mode let you engage others on SegaNet in old-fashioned deathmatch hack-and-slash. Also, you could download special add-ons through your VMU for the single-player game. More radical than either of these options, though, was the way the game dealt with puzzles and obstacles, which had multiple solutions, depending on your approach. Agartha also offered total freedom in interaction with other in-game characters. You could help survivors of the catastrophe to safety, or you could just as easily kill them where they lay. You could even do away with main characters if you felt so inclined. Above anything else, No Cliché wanted to give you control over the storyline, which continually modified itself to suit your decisions--a concept rare enough to PC games and altogether foreign to consoles.
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Visually, Agartha was unique as well. Character and location designs were like a page out of an H.G. Wells book: fantastical, yet accurate for the time period they represented. Characters donned white bio-suits trimmed with brass piping and other gearlike gadgetry. Environments varied too, from the foreign landscapes of Eastern Europe, to the dark inner sanctums of Agartha's underground hell. Unfortunately, the screenshots to the side reveal that much of Agartha's forbidding catacombs were of the typical industrial anonymous-warehouse variety, with plenty of decorative bolted plating and nonfunctional steaming pipes that we've seen since the days of Quake. It all looked enticing enough, though, for the world of Agartha was detailed and dark. Excellent lighting, in particular, helped underscore an atmospheric uneasiness--a must for any survival-horror game, which was at least realized.
Agartha attempted to turn the typical survival-horror game on its head with a massively open-ended plot and multiple conclusions, wherein lies the rub, we assume. No Cliché wasn't in any hurry to rush the product to store shelves--so it said; instead, the company claimed to be taking its time to focus on fine-tuning its ambitious and unique gameplay.
Agartha met its end when developer No Cliché confirmed speculation about the company and the game's livelihood when it announced that it had stopped all game development and had laid off most of its staff in June 2001. However, the managing staff and original founders of the company decided to stay intact and are currently investigating several options, including the company's rebirth at some point in the foreseeable future.
"Due to Sega's decision to stop development in Europe, No Cliché has stopped its activity," the company said in a statement on its Web site. "Almost all employees have been made redundant. Agartha, the horror-adventure game, is also canceled."
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