I’ve been mainly slowly making my way through Tsukihime, but I took a break to play through Koei’s 1984 adventure game, Corridor!
Eiyuu Densetsu Saga
Corridor is an adventure game where you play as one of three princes competing to have the best journey to become king. The one you play as is searching for a cursed castle. This game feels like another slightly earlier adventure game that’s trying to create an RPG with adventure game mechanics, Eiyuu Densetsu Saga. That game tries to create a dungeon crawler experience with menu-based adventure game mechanics (the first to have such mechanics, depending on your definition lol). While it’s a historically important game and interesting, it is also a miserable play experience. Corridor on the other hand isn’t as flashy, but I think it gets closer to hitting its goal.
The game is controlled solely through a menu interface. You’ll sometimes get an image and then a screen of text describing what’s happening and the actions you can take.
The RPG aspects come in with those actions including gaining weapons and battling. Fights feel mostly random, with no control other than maybe picking your weapon or healing yourself, which I didn’t realize you could do until much later in the game… You also get tired fighting along with any other action, which I guess makes you more liable to take damage. This encourages you to find suitable places to rest, but I’m not completely sure how variable that can be. Fights end up being a matter of deciding what’s worth your limited resources. There’s also a food/hunger system apparently that I think might also affect tiredness, but I never did anything with it so I’m not sure.
Aside from that it’s typical adventure game exploration and puzzles, with some fights being able to be skipped if you have/use the correct item, though I wonder if those avoidable fights are winnable without those items. You also gain points depending on your actions, meaning there’s some variability in what you can finish the game with, but I can’t confirm since I only played through once.
There’s more writing than I expected, but it does get a bit monotonous. Standard fantasy RPG stuff, mostly focused on characters giving you hints, place/item descriptions, and lots of “you got ….”.
Mainly the thing I liked is the perceived variability in playstyle that the adventure/RPG mechanics seem to allow for. I used a walkthrough for all of it, but there’s some screens I didn’t even see. Someone told me to watch out for vampires, but I never came across any. Was it a lie or just something I didn’t see? This is mainly why I think the game is more successful than Eiyuu Densetsu Saga. While that game feels extremely constrained and purely up to chance, here it felt like there’s more here to keep track of and do, even if in reality it probably doesn’t amount to much difference.
Note: I first wrote this in Cohost and then accidentally closed the page, deleting everything. I have learned my lesson, and will now write somewhere that saves frequently before pasting here lol
Corridor/01.png)
I’ve been mainly slowly making my way through Tsukihime, but I took a break to play through Koei’s 1984 adventure game, Corridor!
Corridor/02.png)
Corridor/03.png)
The game is controlled solely through a menu interface. You’ll sometimes get an image and then a screen of text describing what’s happening and the actions you can take.
Corridor/04.png)
The RPG aspects come in with those actions including gaining weapons and battling. Fights feel mostly random, with no control other than maybe picking your weapon or healing yourself, which I didn’t realize you could do until much later in the game… You also get tired fighting along with any other action, which I guess makes you more liable to take damage. This encourages you to find suitable places to rest, but I’m not completely sure how variable that can be. Fights end up being a matter of deciding what’s worth your limited resources. There’s also a food/hunger system apparently that I think might also affect tiredness, but I never did anything with it so I’m not sure.
Corridor/05.png)
Aside from that it’s typical adventure game exploration and puzzles, with some fights being able to be skipped if you have/use the correct item, though I wonder if those avoidable fights are winnable without those items. You also gain points depending on your actions, meaning there’s some variability in what you can finish the game with, but I can’t confirm since I only played through once.
Corridor/06.png)
There’s more writing than I expected, but it does get a bit monotonous. Standard fantasy RPG stuff, mostly focused on characters giving you hints, place/item descriptions, and lots of “you got ….”.
Corridor/08.png)
Mainly the thing I liked is the perceived variability in playstyle that the adventure/RPG mechanics seem to allow for. I used a walkthrough for all of it, but there’s some screens I didn’t even see. Someone told me to watch out for vampires, but I never came across any. Was it a lie or just something I didn’t see? This is mainly why I think the game is more successful than Eiyuu Densetsu Saga. While that game feels extremely constrained and purely up to chance, here it felt like there’s more here to keep track of and do, even if in reality it probably doesn’t amount to much difference.
Note: I first wrote this in Cohost and then accidentally closed the page, deleting everything. I have learned my lesson, and will now write somewhere that saves frequently before pasting here lol