What is it?
You are Dust, a particularly talented thief of ancient artifacts. You are nicknamed for your ability to slip into anything and disappear with a breeze. Your most notorious artifact has merged itself with you—an ancient Egyptian necklace. Every time you are killed, the necklace resurrects you safely. While it sounds like a useful thing to have, you feel the pain of your mutilation each time you die. You heard rumors in a seedy Turkish bar that a group of explorers had deciphered the famous Reis map to Atlantis, and were pooling their funds to take a deep sea exploration vessel to the Atlantic. You managed to steal their sub (you are a thief after all). With a small lead on the explorers, you entered the grand city…but there was no treasure waiting. You'd entered a death trap.
Bloodlust Software may be best known for two emulators, Genecyst for the Sega Genesis and especially NESticle, the first free emulator for the NES, meanwhile outdated, but groundbreaking at the time. But the group was originally formed in 1992 with the purpose of creating games. Ethan Petty and Icer Addis, two high school students, were annoyed about the rise of movements against computer game violence. Consequently, their games were full of excessive violence. They were also humoristic, and had rather poor graphics.
But by 2000, a time when they resumed game development with a vengeance, they had developed a distinct graphical style of their own. Wrath of the Sea King is by far their maturest game. How long since we had games with such poetic titles? Dust, the thief who cannot die, is an equally poetic character, and the atmosphere of the game lives up to the expectations.
In essence, the game is a series of arcade puzzles. The objective is just to reach the next room without dying too often. While the immortality of the hero, similar to Planescape: Torment, spares you save & reload orgies, the less lives you lose, the longer the ending cutscene will be. Puzzles vary; sometimes you have to avoid things that could crush you, sometimes you have to kill a room full of monsters. At times Wrath of the Sea King felt like a dark Chip's Challenge, and often I was reminded of the equally beautiful, equally deadly world of Lemmings.
For beautiful this game is: most screens are dominated by a single color, an old trick that allows for better gradients under 256 colors but here creates a unique atmosphere, further enhanced by Dust's short comments when he enters a room.
Wrath of the Sea King was made with Click & Create, the forerunner of Multimedia Fusion. According to the developers, it may not perform correctly on the latest computers. Personally, I had no problems on my Sempron 3000+, at least so far. The game does not use DirectX, it might be a good idea to run it in compatibility mode and 640×480 under XP.
