In a steel bird, the sky will come …
In between those ten years of technological infarction appeared Veil of Darkness , specifically in 1993 . It was not yet ready to be used natively in Windows and we had to play it on hard drives through MS-DOS but it was compatible with the new audio cards as well as using the internal speakers of our PCs 286. This work of the already extinct Event Horizont Soft
ware (1979-1993) with Strategic Simulations Inc.As a distributor, she was ahead of her time when she masterfully combined the action, the rpg genre and the graphic adventures in an environment of terror and mystery. One of the most striking d
etails of his introduction was listening to our speakers unintelligible words in which, at the end of the sequence, were narrated in our language with real voices. A good example of how video games could benefit from technology.
Veil of Darkness proposed to put us in the skin of a pilot of cargo planes that in a routine flight over the sky of the Carpathians suffers a supernat
ural accident and as a result of it, ends with his airplane crashed in Romanian lands. A mysterious girl named Deidre with the help of Ivan, the servant of the family, rescues us and puts us safely in his mansion so that, when we w
ake up from the commotion, we will be the protagonist of a prophecy that will kill Kairn , a powerful vampire that governs the valley. The video game was presented in an isometric perspective with a careful narrative full of mystery and ve
ry well spunthat stood out from what was played until the moment of conception. And this that we affirmed was complicated due to the mixture of genres that Veil of Darkness harbored in its entrails. We have already mentioned that he drank of the genre role or action but also of the various ramifications of the graph
ic adventures. In addition to using objects from our inventory with other elements of the stage and talking with the populace of the village, we could ask our whim about any subject. In some cases the options were quite small, but as the story progressed, the range of possibil
ities widened considerably. If you wanted to ask about an object to recover it was enough to write the name of that in the chat attached to the interface and so, with everything that we had doubts.a masterful game as far as history is concerned .
To the Dark Lord repose he will deny …
The adventure was divided into chapters formed by the verses of the prophecy and each of them offered clues about how to advance in the game and served
to give us an idea of what had to be done at each moment. Resolving murders, acting as a messenger, dealing with werewolves, vampires or zombies, getting silver bullets, redeeming the soul of a hanged man or curing the m
adness of a poor child were several of the multiple missions entrusted to us. We talked about 1993, a golden age in which the internet did not exist and where g
ames like this one were not easy to complete if we were not smart or if we did not have some of the limited guides that were around then. MeriStation has a guide available to readers about Veil of Darkness but even to this day and without using a road book, the game can become difficult in what moments.
The rpg part came through the character card attached to the bottom of the game screen and its equipment. Voodoo dolls, weapons, amulets or keys cou
ld be equipped to advance the game or to distribute wax to the enemies. Each one had its own weaknesses – like silver in werewolves – and they had to be knocked down in the right way or we could perish in the attempt. There
was an inventory limit established in the kilos that we could carry on our backs so it was also vital to know what to take when facing tough challenges such as, for example, entering the vicinity of Kairn Castle. Altered states such as aging by curse, weakness, poisoning, var
ious spells or death itself are another type of details extracted from the role plays that were presented in Veil of Darkness.
Another of the wonderful characteristics of this -for many- unknown game was in its gloomy atmosphere, the gore and the rawness that its characters distilled . Graphically it was not a title in which it stood out except in its video scenes and in the amount of details that the scenarios possessed, but it managed wonderfully to, with its color palette and artistic
design, feel the yoke of prophecy under our gulletand distill a sense of mystery and terror throughout the adventure. The inhabitants of the valley were not sparing in words precisely and the dialogues were quite strong for the time, as well as the
amount of blood that was seen in the software. To all this we had to add the feeling of semi-freedom offered by the game, which allowed you to visit man
y places even before having to access them, something not very advisable if we wanted to stay alive and that offered more suspense if possible. to the plot.
At that time the realistic graphics as we are used to today did not exist and as in the case of Alone in the Dark (1992 – PC), the setting, the artistic direction and the soundtrack were responsible for Veil of Darkness got, with little technology, to cause the impact
he wanted on the players. The good work in the other aspects of the video game made by Event Horizon Software (which later would give birth to titles like Menzoberranzan under the name of DreamForge Entertainment) did the r
est. If we had to put a hit on it, we would do it, without hesitation, in two aspects; object search and inventory control. The first of them because the items that we had to look for were dwarfs and even activating the visual aid offered by the videogame – they increased in
size – sometimes we could escape from our vision very easily. The second because in order to open bags from our inventory or use an object, we must first equip it in the left hand and then use it. This in itself seems a minor problem, it was a certain death if we went into battle and wanted to use potions or ointments from our reserve.
