Cadaver - Dead Good

You will have often heard me bemoan the fact that the golden era of toys is dead and one of the nails in its plastic coffin, is video gaming. Whilst I often kick this particular chestnut out of the brazier and roll it around a bit, I have to admit to being seriously hypocritical, for I am a serious gamer myself. There, I've said it, the virtual elephant is in the room. In my defence, I have to say I was lured into it many years ago and my gaming passions do not extend to the current swathe of online multiplayer bullet parties, which seem to attract the gaming faithful today. My gaming heyday was the late 80's and started with the beginning of the 16bit era and the prominence of home computing. When Commodore brought out the Amiga (and Atari copied with the ST) the colourful imaginative graphics caught my eye and I saw the chance to play the kind of games I had only seen in arcades, at home. My favourites were Nemesis, R-Type and the raft of japanese shooters that had flooded the market, with spaceships blasting all kinds of laser death at waves of aliens hordes.

One of the best games developers at the time, were the Bitmap Brothers and they were the company who assured my gaming would become a long term love affair. One of their first games was Xenon II -Megablast a scrolling shooter with fabulous graphics and a stomping soundtrack from 1989. 

It was the graphics which drew me in at first, end of level bosses in the shape of Nautiloids, waves of spiders and alien insects and a chunky interceptor to pilot, with tons of extra weapons to buy to increase your firepower. To this day, I have never been able to complete it and have maybe briefly reached the beginning of the third level. To todays gamers, it would look like a phone based game to todays hard core, but for me it was heaven. I bought the Amiga system and a portable tv, just to play it and from then it was a slippery slide.

The Bitmap Bros brought out a string of superb games following this, such as Speedball, a competetive Rollerball type game, Gods, a mythological platformer, Magic Pockets, a weird fantasy and the Chaos Engine a victorian steampunk adventure.

I was totally sold on shoot em up - space invader derivatives - and was never drawn to fantasy or dungeons and dragons type game, which were the other mainstay of the 16bit generation, so when I saw a demo of Cadaver, by the bitmaps, I assumed it would be the usual D & D fare. However, I was wrong. Dead wrong. Rather than a hack and slash running battle or a 'roll a dice make a move' affair, Cadaver was seemingly simple, but devilishly complex.

You play a dwarf, Caradoc, who must explore a castle on a quest. So far, so what ? A typical game from a popular genre. But the game demanded much more than a little fighting, each room in the castle had to be thoroughly explored and each item in it examined. The simple interface allowed Caradoc to pick up, hold or throw anything he found on the ground, or in the many chests and cabinets around the level. Rewards were also granted for killing monsters, discovering secrets and casting spells.

In order to progress, doors needed to be unlocked or ways to escape discovered and some of the puzzles were extremely fiendish and sometimes depended on items which had to be collected several rooms away.

Each room had an assortment of items in it, moveable furniture and occasional monsters, leading up to the final confrontation with a huge dragon, which is only slain if you happen to carry a certain combination of weapons and spells. Again, I can't say I have ever completed the game, or its expansion pack The Pay Off, or the three self contained level demos that came with the various Amiga magazines each month. 

The game is a huge sprawling map of connected rooms on several levels and is a massive time sink. The 'just one more go' factor kept me up into the small hours many a night.

Now that Playstation 5 and its peers loom large on the horizon and super realism and virtual reality is the order of the day, Amiga and Megadrive style games are considered ancient history and glossed over, but just as classic space toys still retain their charm, so too do these amazing games. Most titles are available to play online, so have a look at Cadaver and see what you find.

https://www.myabandonware.com/game/cadaver-13x/play-13x