The Endless Forest Maze Of Secrets

In some games in the past, graphics were drawn in ASCII text. In this game, the plot varied slightly from the typical plot of the era. In most Roguelikes, you played as an Indiana Jones like character. But in this one, you played as an exposed spy in search of an exit through a midnight forest. But the secret service is on the trial, seeking to hunt you down. Instead of an @ sign, the graphic is a person drawn with a collect ion of asterix marks in the shape of a stick figure. This would animate in frames.

The character would ride canoes in the river, and hide behind trees. And you had to hide rather than shoot back, in order to avoid the barrage of bullets aiming at your head. The object of the game was to reach the end of the midnight forest path. It had alternate ending based on whether you helped other exposed spies, who would give you various awards and tips. What often went missing in game reviews at the time, was how they spoke a mixture of French and Japanese. Something that people either barely payed attention to, and only met with a laugh. Often excluded is the fact that river flowed in weird direction. You even had speed boosts to avoid more easily hide against those that wanted to shoot you, and you could also moved your canoa in front of stones in the river. Also when you reached the end, you would not met with a congratulations on reaching the end. Rather the game restarted, and you would play it over with a slightly amped up difficult.

With this game with slightly more advanced ASCII text, obviously the goal was to make sure that you will absolutely lose at some point. And when you died death was permanent for that session. But every new playthrough kept the old difficulty in place, as if you never restarted the game at all. As if the world you played it removed every single failure you ever made. This used to freak me out at the time, before I became aware of games called rougelikes, where the developer would choose what things would be removed or kept in cases of perma death mode. It made things like New Game+ mode a tricky prospect, because you had to make sure the rewards went beyond the standard replay-ability that came with Roguelikes more generally. There were rumors of a secret level you could only find by rescuing a random order of exposed agents, which made finding the secret level impossible to write a walk through for. But I had found this level by accident, and what I found was that it I got temporarily invincibility when I was aiming my gun, with the exception of environmental damage. I used this in order to shoot at enemies at points that would intended originally to be chase scenes. The only parts where I did not have this ease of difficulty was when the entire Bolivian Army surrounded me in one level. But I was able to keep all the rewards, and somehow managed to be able to unlock the secret level again.

Then it became apparent I figured out how to find the secret level each and every time I reentered the world. Characters that were marked as most needing to be rescued at the moment were marked with a red asterix. I didn’t take note of this in previous sessions, but when I started following that method, I was able to find the secret level every time, and at some point outright prevent some chase scenes from happening.

But I also noticed something strange in these levels. Something others who found the levels never mentioned, presumably because they were not able to find the level consistently: these level were decorated with a different set of ASCII characters. It was different from the standard ASCII fare. The characters implied that the character was a character character in a game world, within the context of the game world. That they were only a simulation within the continuity of the game, and that the designer had no idea that one would figure out how to find every single clue about to the nature of their existence.

I met a secret NPC, who had dialogue. Bare in mind at this point in time dialogue was unheard of in games in this genre. Here, I found that the NPC always said the same thing: You’re not suppose to be here. This puzzled me at the time, before it became apparent that the layout of the game was different. Also there was a whole other collection of NPCs that one needed to rescue in a specific order. What this almost suggested was I had only unlocked the first stage of an entire secret game few knew about, but had not consistently uncovered before.

I just needed to find the colored dots. If each NPC did not begin to notice my ability to find these dots, and change it around so I had to only rescue ones without dots. Or make everyone have colored dots and I needed to find ones with black dots. It seemed almost as if the game was alive.

And the game was playing me.

My addiction was like puppet strings, stringing me along in a gradually unfolding story.

The story of my own adddiction to secrets.

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