Torin's Passage

The Short


Pros
- Funny, bizarre story by Al Lowe of Leisure Suit Larry fame
- Hand-drawn art and animation looks good, made by an animator who later quit Sierra to work at what is now Pixar
- Voice acting is well done throughout
- Sidekick "Boogle" adds some flavor to interesting puzzles
- Weird, hilarious characters. Nobody in this world is freaking normal.
- Travel into the planet through five unique worlds
- Standard adventure-game fare at a time when the genre was coming to an end

Cons
- Some puzzles have stupidly obscure solutions
- Love story is tacked on and completely dumb
- Two of the worlds (three and four) consist almost entirely of puzzles with no story elements whatsoever
- Was touted by Sierra as a new series, never saw any games past the first one

Strata is a weird planet. TO THE CORE!

The Long

1995 was a weird year for adventure games. King's Quest VII: The Princeless Bride (which would be the last true adventure game title in the King's Quest series) had come out a year before, touting great hand-drawn animation and a simpler style. For a genre that had started with sentence text commands, it had then moved on to point-and-click but with lots of options (think LucasArt's Secret of Monkey Island games), then was streamlined further by Sierra to have simply "speak," "look," "walk," and "use." King's Quest VII dropped this all for a simple, one button interaction interface, which has remained in use to this day with the adventure games revival.

The point of that history lesson was that King's Quest VII essentially marked the final attempt of adventure games to modernize, and despite being a good game it essentially failed. Adventure games died out, never to be seen in full force until TellTale would pick them back up just a few years ago, bringing back a genre that was both beloved and completely forgotten.

Torin's Passage, created by crude-humor master Al Lowe as a game his 9-year-old daughter could play, was essentially the game that turned off the lights and shut the door on the way out with regard to its genre. Released almost a full year after King's Quest VII, it had similar graphics and interface, and was intended by Sierra to be a new game serious. However, since the market for adventure games crashed, it took whatever hope Torin's Passage had for a sequel down with it. That's too bad, because Torin's Passage is a pretty dang good game. 

It even had a full-on parody of black-and-white, awful sitcoms in the middle of it. Yes, this game is weird. 

The story is a simple one. Torin, a blonde-haired dude with a popped coller and questionable attire, lives on a farm with his parents. One day the evil Lycentia, a sorceress from "the lands below" shows up and freezes them in carbonite (essentially), whisking them away beneath the planet's surface for unknown reasons. Torin, not one to take this sitting down, grabs his purple, shape-shifting pet Boogle and goes on a world-delving adventure in an attempt to rescue his parents. Simple enough stuff.

The game's interface is unique. You have two sets of inventory: Torin's, which contains expendable items, and Boogle's, which (as seen above) contains everything he can shapeshift into. Boogle's antics are entertaining and goofy, though in truth you don't really use him as much as one would hope. This is Torin's story (and his "passage," apparently), so most of the game will be spent using, well, Torin. 

Each world has a distinct flavor about it, and while you carry a few items between worlds, most of them are self-contained with regards to items and the puzzles you use them on. A weird trick is that if you play the game straight through (rather than warping to a particular world), you keep an axe you get on The Lands Above throughout the entire game, though you never use it past the first world. Huh, alright. 

"RAWR I'M TORIN LOOK AT MY POPPED COLLER AND DESPAIR!"

The game looks pretty decent, even running at just 256 colors. While Torin and co. do look a bit like they were drawn in MSPaint, the animation is fluid and the characters delightfully odd. The animation was handled by James G. Murphy, who now works at Pixar, so it's quality stuff throughout. The long movie sequences that start off each chapter are also well rendered, a mix of CG and art that could have come straight from a 1995 Disney movie. Every object can be rendered and looked at in 3D, adding a little depth to some puzzles, and while the UI box at the bottom is freaking massive (look at it! It takes up 1/3 of the screen!) it doesn't hinder gameplay any.

Speaking of the characters, there are loads, and they are weird. From a King whose wife badmouths him constantly, to an insane "borderguard" who has been waiting twenty years for a replacement, to two talking snails who engage in leaf-boat races around a moat, to a depressed tree that cries sap, just about everything in this game is totally off the rails. It makes sense why nobody wants to go down to the lands below; as the borderguard warns: "Them worlds is filled with nutsos, psychos, malcontents... politicians!"

And this guy, who complains that he only has "10 meg" crystals to hold his sound clips in

The funny characters really help bring the game to life, which is why the third and forth worlds are so disappointing. World three has little plot aside from a horribly tacked-on "love" story that both starts and ends in that world, and aside from that simply shuttles you from puzzle to puzzle. World four is even worse: an uninhabited lava world that is essentially a massive maze with nobody to talk to or interact with save Boogle (who can't actually talk). Considering worlds one, two, and five are so completely nuts and hilarious, it's odd that they totally skimped out on putting any interesting characters in two entire chapters of their game. It really hurts the games pacing, and makes it seem like it was rushed out the door unfinished (which it wasn't, oddly enough).

The gameplay itself is standard adventure game fare, with a few tricks to keep it from getting boring. As you can see on the pictures, there is a timer on the right with a question mark. If it is down, you can click it for a "hint" at a cost to your overall score. It normally is on a timer (every five minutes or so), but you can have it so hints are always on or off if you so desire. 

My bane of adventure games - walking everywhere - is also fixed by two very simple options. You can up Torin's walking speed to an insane level, making him look extremely goofy as his animations show him leisurely walking but he is hauling around the world. Or you can simply right click anywhere and Torin will "warp" there, cutting down all walking completely. It's an appreciated gesture, though it does mean on repeat playthroughs I sort of just warp everywhere. 

The back of the box even has Al Lowe's face on it. And there's a totally secret death message you can get personally from him, but I'm not going to tell you how to get it, mwahahaha!

The puzzles are a mixed bag. Some are very straightforward, with what item you use on what making perfect sense. Others are completely random. For example, you need to find the biggest leaf in a group of leaves to give to the (previously mentioned) speedboat moat-racing snails. There's an area full of leaves, but how do you measure which one is the biggest? The solution is...obscure. You go back to your house, where an inchworm is hiding in a basket. After finally catching him you use it on the leaves until you find the biggest leaf of all (get it? Because it's an inchworm, it knows which one is biggest. That...makes total sense). What?

This difficulty fluctuates frequently. That puzzle I just mentioned was in the first world, but many in the second world are pretty straightforward. Though there is a part where you are supposed to climb down a cliff face that gives no indication that you are supposed to go down it (since it has a different path on the top of it that is more straightforward), where my poor eleven-year-old brain got stuck for days until somebody at school was nice enough to drop me a hint (we didn't have internet until Windows 98, and even then I had no idea sites like Gamefaqs existed, even if they were sort of bare-bones). Then you have the third world, which is basically a "romantic" cutscene followed by some really easy puzzles you can just brute-force your way through if you don't like to think. This sort of fluctuating difficulty is a staple of the genre, I suppose, but it also shows why these games fell out of fashion as game design became more refined.

This world sucks. No questions. 

Despite these many complaints (which only indicate that the genre this game was a part of hasn't aged gracefully), I still have a lot of love for Torin's Passage. I played it around the same time I played King's Quest VII, having just gotten off what many consider to be the greatest adventure game of all time, King's Quest VI: To Heir is Human. I liked this game a lot more (probably because it had a guy main character and a purple transmorphing dog vs King's Quest VII, which stars a bunch of ladies) even though both share a similar art style and approach to puzzle mechanics. As an end to an era, Torin's Passage wasn't the best note to end on, but it was certainly a passable one. The weird humor of Al Lowe makes up for a lot, and I still find myself awed by both the great animation and the funny, adult jokes that went completely over my head when I was eleven. So in that respect, the game certainly has found new life in my older, more dirty-minded self.

I don't know what this guy is on, but I ain't touchin' it. 

This is one of the few retro PC games I've reviews that isn't on Good Old Games yet. I still have my original disc and manual (though not the box; this was back when PC games came in those massive paper boxes) and you can actually get it to run on Windows 7 if you do a lot of compatibility changes. Used copies go for about $5-10 on ebay, which if you loved these old-school adventure games and thought Al Lowe was a funny guy, that's certainly worth the price. Despite some niggling flaws I'd give this game a well deserved four out of five, which I admit is rose-tinted by my nostalgia, but if I gave it any less I'd be doing my entire childhood a disservice.

Yes, that's Darth Vader and Yoda over there. Copyright infringement much?