A hero is needed, and one is found in the unlikely human mercenary, Kyle. So, the planet Tuul has been overrun by the pesky ka’dra, who are wholesale slaughtering and enslaving the andorthi. It’s a plodding, pondering action platformer, not so much concerned with twitch-based battles and pixel perfect leaps (though certainly not above employing them) and more about the slow exploration and taming of an alien planet. Released initially on the Super Nintendo, Blackthorne’s later 32X port threatens to be the best entry within the system’s cruelly circumcised library of games. They teamed up with Blizzard and Paradox, and thus came Blackthorne. Heart was (and still is!) probably one of the best games you’ll never get around to playing, and it infected Interplay with the thoughtful cinematic platformer bug. You might want to believe that Delphine Software’s next game, Flashback serves as its sequel, but you’d be wrong! It was actually a little known game called Heart of the Alien released exclusively in North America for the SEGA CD, and developed by Interplay, who had been responsible for the obligatory home console ports of Another World. The player was required to share the same plight as his digital counterpart in what’s gone down as a landmark entry in virtual storytelling. No button prompts, no heads-up display, not even any way to communicate with the very hostile alien forces that routinely zapped you into a crumbling skeleton. It was a computer game that didn’t really want to be a computer game, forcing you to learn about the four million ways its alien planet could murder you, then putting the onus on figuring out how to survive solely on you. Designed by Delphine Software for the Amiga and Atari ST, it was a very cinematic affair, ensnaring its protagonist on an alien world, and then compelling you to suffer the same fate. I’m okay with that, because I love Another World, even if it was one of the early influences for that ostentatious “games = art” argument that sometimes crops up. Weirdly, before talking about Blackthorne, it seems I’m going to have to talk about Another World. "Kolibri’s only real contender to the “Best 32X Game” crown."
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