Those of you who are squeamish in nature point your browsers elsewhere, for this is the week of blood-curdling nightmares! To celebrate halloween, The Joy of Sticks will devote itself to Atari ST games that make the blood run cold, palms sweaty and hair stand on end. Tonight’s ghoulish game is The Ooze, a text adventure that will give you the willies from those gruesome fellows at Dragonware.

The quick and dirty research I undertook before beginning this feature informs me that the vast majority of horror titles for the Atari ST are adventure titles, a large chunk of which are text adventures (or interactive fiction to give the genre its more lofty moniker). I guess this is because it isn’t easy to scare a player with only 16 colours and 64,000 pixels – but maybe I’m wrong, after all, Rescue On Fractalus was shat-your-pants scary with less colours and pixels on the humble Atari 8-bits.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that horror is far more effect as a function of suspense. And suspense is easier to manage in adventure games than action games; adventure games dictate pace in ways that action games cannot. Which is why its a shame that Ooze spunks its load way too quickly.

Alien (the movie) was brilliant because it builds the suspense until fever pitch with glimpses of the beast, keeping the viewer guessing and imagining the lurking horror that awaits. The fear of the unknown is always more potent than that of reality. Just ask Edgar Allen Poe (you can’t, he’s dead).

The problem with Ooze is that its skeleton leaps out of the closet within five commands of the opening prose. And once you are knee deep in the supernatural, its effect is annulled. Surely it would be preferable to hold back, have your avatar explore the mansion and the possibility that the spooky goings-on have a rational explanation before hitting you with the disturbing reality.

Also, it is nigh-on impossible to emote when so utterly confused by some of the most oblique puzzles this side of a MENSA application form. For example, upon entering the mansion, the game offers:

>It is pitch black, you can't see a thing.

The solution of which is not ‘strike match’ or ‘feel for light switch’ or ‘open curtain’ (after all, your protagonist sees perfectly well outdoors) but ‘make light’. Buh. Maybe this and problems with the parser are due to the game’s translation (from German, I believe) rather than the fault of the original authors.

It’s a real shame, as I have fond memories of this game. The high colour pictures (sadly missing from the cracked version I downloaded) are super, and some of the writing is quite evocative. I would like to explore this game further, but its unintuitive nature is an impassable obstacle.