Ancipital

Overview

Ancipital is a Commodore 64 game by Jeff Minter. Players are cast into the role of the titular goat-creature (inspired by Brian Aldiss's Helliconia novels) and tasked with navigating a 10x10 grid of rooms, linked together by doors and weakened walls to form a maze. Players must navigate the maze, blasting the increasingly-surreal inhabitants of every room, looking for Camel Keys with which to open locked doors and figuring out how to destroy certain "weak" walls, trying to ultimately visit and deactivate all 100 rooms.

The player has three abilities: Jumping, Shooting and the Body Bomb. Jumping allows the player to travel semi-controllably across the room from one of the four walls to the opposite side, via a multiple-gravity system. (With a little practice, players can bend their jump in mid-air and land on a different wall than the one directly opposite them.) Shooting fires out a room-specific and often nonsensical projectile. This is usually fired out of the player sprite, but depending on the room it may be fired out of a remote object, or firing may simply be disabled in the name of a puzzle. The Body Bomb is a "last resort" in the event of a player getting irreparably stuck, blowing open the damageable walls of a room and sacrificing a life.

Story

The game does not include a story in and of itself, but a lengthy and silly backstory was included with the Yak's Progress compilation collection a year later. To loosely summarise:

Plagued by climate change and a losing war with the vicious Goatoids, the Ancipital race leave their home planet in a starship (provided by the passing galactic hippie Yak-Shoggoth XXVII) in search of a new place to prosper, and almost immediately fell into the clutches of recurring villains the Zzyaxians, an alien race responsible for everything evil in the galaxy (up to and including the H-Bomb and the Baiters at the end of a wave in Defender), and forced to fight in the Zzyaxians' war against humankind (as documented in Sheep Space). A small group of Ancipitals escape, join the human resistance, and set out to destroy a Zzyaxian weapons-research outpost that's been flooded with hallucinogenic gas as an anti-human security measure, in a battle "vital to the future of man, goat, half-man, half-goat, and Mutant Camel..."