Then there are the white super-grobo clones from the asylum who start suffusing the landscape, sending you back to jail again and again (though by the second island, the slap-in-the-face cinematic shows Twinsen with a plaster and a huge bruise already evident… will he be a complete wreck by the end of the game?). The clones, as noted, are mostly invulnerable, and some will even resist the magic ball once you’ve found it. As well as being emotially distressing, the introduction is bloody difficult. It’s also not an easy game to get to grips with, mechanically. You can't go anywhere without running into SOME kind of military installation. If I wasn’t a stronger man, I’d have quit in tears by this point. Suddenly that title Relentless makes a whole lot more sense. The world of LBA, in stark contrast to its more happy-go-lucky (but still capable of being underhanded and sinister when called upon) successor, is incredibly, incredibly bleak. I never heard the tag “dark fantasy” applied to LBA, but from this opening it fits it far, far better than (say) Dragon Age‘s slightly forced obsession with racism and contrived moral grey areas. This world is a police state and the rule is shoot-on-sight. You find that Citadel Island is under martial law - a nigh-invincible army of clones patrols the streets, and there are tanks and sandbags and barbed-wire fences everywhere. The horror doesn’t end once you escape the asylum, though. Twinsen looks suitably disgruntled by this (but not cowed). Caught like this, you are treated to a short cinematic where Twinsen is slapped hard by a mysterious figure. You have to get through the asylum, where if an alarm panel is hit an orderly that shoots homing missiles teleports in to put you back in your cell. Okay, you beat the guy back harder and use his floating platform to escape, but that’s not all. Stuff crash-landing into a Strogg-infested base in Quake II, or Jon Irenicus’ mad dungeon in Baldur’s Gate II - LBA starts with Twinsen in a jail cell, arrested just for having a recurring dream, with an orderly coming in to beat him for tossing and turning in his sleep. LBA has perhaps one of the most brutal introductions I’ve ever been put through in a game. Just scant weeks ago, GOG.com fulfulled that wish. So I’ve been waiting about ten years for its prequel, the original Little Big Adventure ( Relentless: Twinsen’s Adventure according to some screens), to be somehow re-released so that I could bask in the series’ origins. It took a couple of tries to get into (for my brain that hadn’t quite grasped how to games yet), but once I did it was a delightful experience that just kept on giving. Little Big Adventure 2 came with our first computer, as part of the “family pack”.
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