What is it?
Feeling you are no longer alone, you turn, with just enough time to shoot, killing the mutation charging mercilessly toward you.
You begin to sense an eerie feeling of fear in the air, but your skin crawls as you realize it's your own…What was that thing?
Again and again you shoot, battling more strange beasts; all grotesque mutations of creatures you once knew. Suddenly the inexplicable becomes clear. Time channels have formed in the Earth's atmosphere, turning once normal life forms into something they were never meant to be. As part of a special commando unit, you must not only ward off and eradicate the beasts, but destroy the time channels to finally rid the Earth of these deadly mutations.
The problem with Chasm: The Rift was probably just that it was released to late. It would not have compared so badly with Duke Nukem 3D and the other Build Engine games. But it came out a year after Quake, and it didn't support hardware acceleration, and didn't render higher than 640×480, in 256 colors only. So it got mostly ignored and is known today only as a curiosity, if at all.
One aspect that gets completely overlooked is that it was in a way the first serious FPS developed outside the US. The Hidden Below remained very obscure, Bad Toys, which ran on Windows 3.1, is mostly a curiosity, and the rest were attempts to recreate the FPS experience on the in Europe still popular Amiga (or, in the case of Running, on the Falcon). Chasm: The Rift was none of these things. As such it can be seen as a forerunner to Serious Sam, with which it shares a predelection for Egyptian decors.
Right after Chasm: The Rift, Ukrainian developer Action Forms produced Carnivores and Carnivores 2, which got a much better reception, due both to an uncommon theme and a vastly improved engine.
The Demos
There were quite a number of demos for Chasm: The Rift. The first
one, according to MobyGames, was released 1996 and still had the name
Chasm: The Shadow Zone.
I've never seen it.
Then there is a three-mission demo containing a selection from two of the four episodes of the full game. It was released about half a year before the full game, and some details are different. It will most likely not run under XP. When I tried, it played the intro, even with sound (something that wouldn't work for Descent, for example), but then it crashed. It works fine in DOSBox, and I took a lot of screenshots.
Finally there is an updated version from 1998 that supports multiplayer and runs fine under XP. It does not contain the cinematic intro and has only two levels, the Egyptian level and a deathmatch level. You can download this and the three-mission demo at the link below.
