No Grail, but What a Quest!

MicroProse’s wonderful new “Darklands” is not your typical mock medieval fantasy-adventure game. It is light-years beyond.

The game makers have tried, and mostly succeeded, at presenting a historically plausible simulated quest through the mysterious, dangerous, infinitely curious cities and countryside of Central Europe in the 15th Century. The game is a kind of flight simulator through the late Middle Ages.

Interactive (read: computer) entertainment lends itself especially well to the linear, episodic narrative conventions of The Quest. There is no plot, as such, other than to travel from Point A to Point Z and to encounter along the way a series of mini-stories, each with its own beginning, middle and end. It’s a storytelling formula that is at least as old as Homer.

It’s also a perfect--and by now brainless--formula for computer gamers. You direct the hero’s search for the magic potion, pick up some clues, fight a few bad guys, encounter the baddest of the bad in the finale, win and get the loot and the girl.

But “Darklands” upends the whole formula thing and reinvents the quest genre. The game tells its story in a new, non-linear fashion that could be possible with only interactive media.

“Darklands” is fiction, filled with a menagerie of mystical creatures, priests, merchants, alchemists, heretics and saints. Aided by a terrific manual, you create your own band of characters--males and females are totally equal here, by the way--and cruise through the country and its 120 or so cities. There are bad guys to fight, but there is no one object, no Holy Grail, that ends the story.

There are only episodes that you combine into your own unique saga. The possibilities are endless.

Darklands

Rating: *****

IBM and compatibles; 2MB RAM; VGA; mouse. List: $69.95.

Computer games are rated on a five-star system, from one star for poor to five for excellent.