What is it?
If you define a true puzzle game as one where you have all the time in the world (as opposed to Tetris, Minesweeper, Chip's Challenge, and many others, where time is an issue and quick reaction sometimes as important as logic), then Darwin's Dilemma is the first true puzzle game I really played.
In any case it is the first Macintosh-only game I ever played, though not the first I played on a Macintosh (that was SimCity 2000).
OK, but you're probably not interested in which order I played my games, but what the game is all about. The screenshot shows you the situation of the start. There will always be the same number of animals, though their position is, of course, random.
Darwin can now walk around the screen and kick the creatures. A kicked creature will slide in the direction it is kicked until it hits another animal. If it is a different one, it will simply stop, if it is one of the same kind, the two will merge. If it slides off the screen, it will emerge on the other side. If it does not meet another creature on its way, it will return to its original position.
The point, of course, is to get these creatures to merge. Usually it takes four of them to reach the next stage of evolution, but that varies during the game. When all of the creatures have merged into one, the level is finished.
You will not be able to do this just with simple kicks. Darwin has a limited amount of swaps, you start out with eight and get two more with each new level. If you click on a creature while holding down the apple key, it will change place with Darwin.
The trick, of course, is to use as few of these swaps as possible. Not only do you have a limited amount of them, each use lowers your score considerably.
In the beginning this is very, very difficult. But you learn. I have been up to flamingoes by now, and I nearly got a penguin. Just be warned: Once you start, it's very hard to stop.
System Requirements
Darwin's Dilemma fills up 600k of memory, so it probably needs a Mac with at least 1M. It plays at any color depth, including black & white, though that's not very pretty. I suggest setting the display to at least 16 colors when possible. It does display well on a 512×342 screen, as I tested on my Macintosh SE.
It ran fairly well on an LC II, even at 256 colors (and the LC II does not handle a desktop of this color depth well), and very well on a Macintosh IIcx. On the other end of the scale, I played it on a Performa 6400 without problems. On its 1024×768 display it would simply run in a window.
PC-98
The only platform I know to which Darwin's Dilemma was ported is the NEC PC-98. Graphically, this version was vastly inferior, though it's not quite understandably why.
Links
- Interview with Darryl Peck
- Wall Street Journal 1999-07-12, an article about Cyberian Outpost, the company Darryl Peck later founded, and how he penetrated the Japanese market.
- Home
of the Underdogs
One of the most unique and addictive puzzle games I've ever come across but also sadly one of the most obscure, Darwin's Dilemma is slightly derivative of the old Evolution game, but is much more complex and interesting. The goal is for you to "push" matching creatures together. Make enough matches, and the creatures evolve in to new ones, which must then be further matched to evolve into a more advanced creature up the evolutionary chain, and so on.
Similar Games
Oxyd is a puzzle game for many platforms (the Mac version is one of the best) with similarily low system requirements. It tests more your skill and your patience than your logic, but, similar to Darwin's Dilemma, time is not an issue.
You might want to try Soko-ban if you haven't done so yet, and though it does involve a strong element of time, I guess people who like Darwin's Dilemma should like Chip's Challenge. Unfortunately, this game has never been ported to the Mac, but there are Atari Lynx emulators.
