r/dosgaming • u/Neutrois-Boy • 2h ago
Drakkhen Horrors
galleryOK, been meaning to post about this for awhile. Drakkhen haunts me. First played it as a rental when I was maybe 12, and I can't forget how pervasive the general sense of "wrongness" is throughout the game.
Language issues (the game was translated from French to Japanese to English) make the already cryptic plot seem borderline nonsensical. Normally, this wouldn't be too remarkable for a game of that era, but the story's opacity causes the Drakkhen's many surreal, unsettling eccentricities to land that much harder. There are a lot of things I could talk about, but I want to focus on the aspect that haunts me the most.
I'm referring, of course, to the constellations.
Imagine walking at night (the game has a beautiful day/night cycle with wonderfully atmospheric music to boot) when suddenly the stars themselves begin to shake and writhe while panic-inducing scare chords play. The dialog box pops up at the bottom of the screen and just as quickly vanishes. You hear an inexplicable popping noise. And then a big, terrifying monster swoops down out of the sky and fires lasers at your party. A weird droning effects plays as it flies around attacking you. All of its hits either miss entirely or one-shot kill you. There is no rime or reason.
This kind of thing would scare the bejesus out of anyone the first time it happens, but it's stayed with me for 30 years for a bunch of reasons.
1, look at them! They're demonic looking. Far more unsettling than anything else I've seen on the SNES (though admittedly Drakkhen was originally an Amiga game).
2, there's no motivation, no context. The game never explains the damn things. They're just another part of this hostile alien world that wants to kill you at every turn.
3, they are alien-looking yet they resemble familiar things--bats, crows, snakes--just enough to be uncanny.
4, there's something sadistic about the way they look. The bat-thing with BLOODY BLADES for wings. The snake with the deep-set eyes. The crow that looks like it's wearing a phantom of the opera mask.
5, nobody ever mentions these things in the game world. There is an exceedingly brief allusion to them in the short story that came packaged with the Amiga manual, but it reveals nothing. What the hell are they? What's their relationship to the Drakkhen and the residents of this island? Why are they attacking you? The monsters are living constellations. There's gotta be lore there, right? Nope. And I've scoured the internet looking for insights and found almost nothing.
This last point gets at the whole problem of the game itself. Everywhere you go, you get the sense that there is a logic and order to the world of Drakkhen. Characters and found texts allude to individuals and events. Peasants give you cryptic hints. There's much political intrigue among the Drakkhen princes and princesses. There's gotta be context for the constellation monsters and the hellhounds that pop up when you bump into a gravestone and the giant shadow humanoid that crawls out of a hole in the ground in the icy regions and the dancing female silhouette that moans "I love you" in different pitches as it attacks. But YOU the player DO NOT HAVE ACCESS to this context. The information is withheld.
This violates the unspoken contract between developer and gamer. The world of the video game is supposed to exist for the player to explore, understand, and master...but in this case it doesn't. Drakkhen doesn't care about your feelings. Even if you manage to beat the game, the feeling remains that this world is NOT FOR YOU.
What do other people think? What was your experience of Drakkhen and its horrors? Did you have any theories about where this crazy stuff comes from?
