If you enjoy this blog and would like to read my other adventure game retrospectives, here's a list of my previous episodes of this series:
- Episode 1: The Dig
- Episode 2: Atlantis: The Lost Tales
- Episode 3: Loom
- Episode 4: Drowned God
- Episode 5a: Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis Part 1 & Episode 5b: Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis - Part 2
- Episode 6: The Journeyman Project: Pegasus Prime
- Episode 7a: The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time (Part 1)& Episode 7b: The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time (Part 2)
- Episode 8a: The Journeyman Project 3: Legacy of Time (Part 1) & Episode 8B: The Journeyman Project 3: Legacy of Time (Part 2)
- Episode 9a: The Legend of Kyrandia: Book One [Part 1] & Episode 9b: The Legend of Kyrandia: Book One [Part 2]
- Episode 10: D (The Game)
- Episode 11a: The Legend of Kyrandia: Hand of Fate [Part 1]& Episode 11b: The Legend of Kyrandia: Hand of Fate [Part 2]
- Episode 12a: The Legend of Kyrandia - Book Three: Malcolm's Revenge [Part 1] & Episode 12b: The Legend of Kyrandia - Book Three: Malcolm's Revenge [Part 2]
Preamble
It's been a while since I last thoroughly reviewed an adventure game, and with this edition, it's hard not to imagine this netting the lowest ratings or viewership of a blog I have ever published. Inherit the Earth: Quest for the Orb isn't exactly a name that comes to mind when people think about the "Golden Age" of adventure games, and the game's developer, The Dreamers Guild, is a primarily forgotten label thanks to its short lifespan as a company. This outcome is unfortunate because that supposed "Golden Age" was a time of genre experimentation that featured a vast diversity of art styles and narrative themes. The Dreamers Guild embodies that perfectly, and they stand as one of the most interesting developers you've never heard of before. They had a reputation for making games with an almost painterly look, primarily thanks to the company's lead artist, Bradley W. Schenck. Schenck got his start in the games industry fairly unorthodoxly, making a name for himself in the Amiga demoscene after working in the tabletop war game field. When that wasn't paying the bills, and he wanted a break from software development, he started making custom Celtic harps for orchestras and harp enthusiasts. Related to the latter of those two points, he was also a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, a living history group of reenactors focusing on Medieval European cultures.
The Dreamers Guild emphasized its art first and foremost; the second bullet point on its company manifest was its well-publicized creative process. Its president, Wolf McNally, maintained an "open, consensus-driven" business model. Some former employees claimed the company would go so far as to hold democratic elections and votes to determine which contracts and projects it would commit to or fund. The studio of approximately 90 to 100 employees was essentially an anarcho-capitalist commune even before modern indie developers made that hip or cool. While today we live in the era of self-publishing with online platforms like itch.io allowing anything to get a place to shine, The Dreamers Guild somewhat tried that in the heady 1990s while, AGAIN, attempting to employ up to 100 people. As such, the studio lasted about eight to nine years before filing for bankruptcy. You see, while we like to moan about corporate types and lawyers impugning the creativity of designers or artists in all media, they are a necessary evil for creative works to exist in a capitalist system. More importantly, The Dreamers Guild's track record for identifying possible audiences and the market for their games was an abject trainwreck. They made a moderate amount of money working with David Mullich to provide art and additional programming for "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream," and the 1996 Dinotopia adventure game was their biggest money maker, but that might be thanks to Scholastic repping the game HARD in their book-ordering catalogs. However, Inherit the Earth was a complete flop, and their last game, Faery Tale Adventure II: Halls of the Dead, was rushed to store shelves in a desperate but failed attempt to keep the lights on.
I feel safe saying that Inherit the Earth: Quest for the Orb would have done remarkably better had it been released today than in 1994. Despite using anthropomorphic animals as its cast, the game is set in a Post-Apocalyptic Earth wherein all of humanity has gone extinct for reasons never explicitly stated in the game, which is one of the MANY signs of the game having an identity crisis. The idea of talking animals reverting to a form of government similar to the High Middle Ages is interesting. Still, the way the story goes about tying its high fantasy themes with its Post-Apocalyptic ones is best described as clumsy, and the game's final act barely delivers on any of the questions it presents at its start. The game is neither a family-friendly light adventure game for those that enjoyed Disney's Robin Hood nor is it explicitly for the furry crowd wanting to see a game with darker themes on the impacts of modern human civilization on the environment. SPEAKING OF WHICH,this game is a bit of a cult classic with the furry community today, and while there's nothing wrong with that, it's obvious the team behind Inherit The Earth never had that in mind at any point, even in their periphery. The Dreamers Guild wanted to make a Middle Ages game that was ALSO a Post-Apocalyptic game, and for whatever reason, decided to make the main characters anthropomorphic animals.
Finally, Inherit the Earth was not intended to be a standalone title. Many people who worked on the game have claimed that it was planned to be the first part of a trilogy. I will not spoil the exact details, but the game ends with "To be continued" as credits roll after the game drops a last-minute cliffhanger. With this being a title from 1994, you'd probably expect me to say there's no hope of any closure with the game and its characters, but we live in a strange world, and this is a peculiar game. In 2000, a former employee of The Dreamers Guild, Joe Pearce, started Wyrmkeep Entertainment and used it to purchase the rights to many of the former's original in-house titles. Pearce also provided the game's source code to ScummVM in 2004 and started porting the DOS version of the game to modern platforms, devices, and operating systems. Upon noticing a resurgence in the game's popularity, Pearce and Wyrmkeep Entertainment attempted to fund Inherit the Earth 2 through Kickstarter. Unfortunately, they failed to reach their fundraising goal by a wide margin. A second Kickstarter campaign with revised fundraising goals and retooled donation tiers failed in 2014. Undeterred, Wyrmkeep started a Patreon page to take donations to fund the game, but with it currently sitting at 48 patrons and $180 per month, it's safe to say this game is not coming out soon. But the good news is that by donating, you can follow what the characters from the game have been up to in the form of a webcomic!
But Wait, What Kind Of Adventure Game Is Inherit The Earth?
We must discuss Inherit The Earth's director and design lead, David Joiner, to answer that question. Joiner was a computer programmer fluent in Assembler, Fortran, and COBOL, and that last one allowed him to work in the US Air Force's Strategic Air Command for four years. For those unaware of what that means, Joiner was an officer attached to the United States' roving fleet of B-52s carrying nuclear payloads ready to make a beeline towards the Soviet Union in the event the Cold War became decidedly not cold. One thing I hope you pull from this blog is that there was an INSANE amount of artistic and programming brainpower at The Dreamers Guild, the likes of which we will never see. After leaving the military and bouncing around a few software and tech companies in the 1980s, Joiner settled down and decided to make The Faery Tale Adventure: Book I, an isometric action role-playing game in the same style and vein as the Ultima series. Even though it was his first game, it was a moderate success and briefly held the record for "largest game world" with over 17,000 screens. Despite being a one-person passion project, it caught The Dreamers Guild's attention which promptly offered Joiner a full-time position. Also, if David Joiner's name is ringing any bells, you might know him as the assistant composer for Defender of the Crown, an engineering lead for SimCity 4: Rush Hour and The Sims 2, and an interface design lead for Google+.
The Faery Tale Adventure is vital to Inherit The Earth because Joiner and his team were more accustomed to making isometric CRPGs than classic point-and-click adventure games. Hence, why Inherit The Earth uses the isometric perspective when navigating towns and larger settlements and even has an overworld you need to navigate when moving from one set piece to the next. With the overworld and isometric screens, you can even hold your mouse click to move your character as if it was an action RPG like Diablo. To further highlight how the design team had CRPG roots, most of your missions and quests involve fetch quests wherein you need to find far-off trinkets and hand them to NPCs that give you another item that needs to be delivered to a different recipient. The puzzles in the game feel vanilla or even amateurish because, with so much of the game displaying content as if you are playing a CRPG, the designers didn't give themselves enough workable room to put in a ton of expected adventure game tomfoolery.
However, only some locations or screens you encounter look like they are trying to put up their best Ultima act. Upon entering buildings or migrating to some of the story critical set pieces, you get the expected static medium shots you'd see from Sierra or LucasArts. The transitions between these opposed camera angles are far from perfect, and sometimes my eyes needed time to adjust to the game's awkward juxtapositions. One thing I will give the game credit for is that its proprietary engine, SAGA, is incredibly user-friendly and divides your actions into verbs that apply to NPCs and verbs that apply to objects or parts of the environment. That delineation and the simplified inventory system, which rarely puts more than five inventory items in your possession at any given time, led to an overall breezy experience I feel I can recommend to anyone who wants to play a "classic" adventure game that feels unlike any they have ever played or ever will. There are certainly better adventure games than Inherit The Earth, but none with such stunning production values and all its weird and disparate parts in a single package. But before giving my final assessment, let's review some puzzles!
Puzzles In The Known Lands
Collecting The Necessary Items And Information To Leave The Starting Market - [Rating: 5/10] - The beginning of Inherit The Earth does a miraculous job of setting the scene and giving you a good sense of its impeccable production values. The opening cinematic and introductory establishing scene at a Medieval fair are significant technical achievements, considering the programming team exclusively used DOS. The premise is simple: you play as Rif of the Fox Tribe, who stands accused of stealing a high-tech orb the animals use to control the weather, hence the game's subtitle. The animals of the present revere humans like gods, as humanity's genetic engineering gave animals the ability to talk and achieve sapience. The remnants of human technology are steeped in myth and legend despite the animals using many of these objects for their daily goings-on. That aside, the first task the game presents you with involves collecting information from the fairgoers and gaining the resources necessary to exit the market.
This task is not in and of itself problematic, but it's when the isometric design will either make or break this experience. Your ability to adapt and come to terms with the awkwardness of the movement and aimless wandering associated with finding quest items all but determines if you will finish Inherit The Earth. With NPCs moving on their routes and your field of view more limited than you'd like, gathering the critical story leads the game wants you to acquire is challenging. Also, none of the NPCs necessary for you to talk to are marked or listed to you in the game or through dialogue trees you have with quest givers. You are on your own in that regard. Likewise, with Inherit The Earth having weird CRPG trappings but no quest log, its more abstract quests are an utter chore. For example, the second phase of the marketplace requires you to find a random merchant who will buy a medal Rif got from his girlfriend for 15 gold pieces. Figuring out where this merchant lives involves a lot of aimless wandering around. It's an incredibly rough start to a game that otherwise is designed to be a breezy narrative piece meant to show you good art.
Gaining Entry Into The Sanctuary - [Rating: 3/10] - Alright, it's time to talk about the other two design quibbles that often cause people to burn out on Inherit The Earth! When you exit the market, you discover that navigating between significant locations involves you exploring the world using an RPG overworld. Like a typical adventure game, you can still manually click on monuments, buildings, and discernable objects to transport your characters into villages and environments. Still, there are times when you need to wander about the sprawling overworld to locate unmarked locations or hidden screens that require you to discern single pixels from a field of green or brown. Luckily, your first target is simple enough: the Sanctuary. When the legendary orb is first stolen, Rif is told to consult with nuns that live in isolation in a Vatican-inspired city-state. However, the head priestess informs Rif and his party that they will not be permitted entry until they acquire a sign that they come in peace and will abide by the nunnery's rules and customs. This request requires Rif to leave and locate a forest containing the deer folk's kingdom. After consulting with the king in the woods, he provides a golden apple you must present to the priestess. All of this requires you to hop back and forth between these two particular locations, and the game does not teleport you automatically when you acquire a key item necessary for a quest.
As I mentioned, the first handful of fetch quests are "fine" mainly because the simple quest design allows the story to introduce its major players and factions and allows you time to adapt to its wonky design choices. The issue is that this mission and puzzle design amounts to more than half of what you deal with throughout the game, sometimes making it feel barebones. And trust me when I say this, but the default walking speed is the worst. THE. WORST. In this case, you only need to move between TWO locations, complete three dialogue sequences, and pick up and deliver a single one-off trinket. Nonetheless, thanks to the max walking speed, that still amounts to about fifteen to twenty minutes. Oh, and I cannot forget to mention that the dialogue prompts are failable, and if you decide to be a goofy jerk to any of the people you interact with, you'll get kicked out and forced to restart entire chains of conversation to find key terms and clues! I feel like the start of this blog made a clear case that this game is ambitious and creative but not everyone's cup of tea, and by this point, two quests in, you likely already know if this is something you want to see all the way through.
Collecting Evidence At The Sanctuary - [Rating: 4/10] - Okay, with mini-rants and grousings about Inherit The Earth's structural and design choices out of the way, we can be a bit more "brief" with the rest of this game and its puzzles. When Elara, the head priestess from earlier, allows Rif the Fox to enter the Sanctuary, she reviews recent events at the nunnery and reveals the one item she could have used to help Rif has been stolen, and the thief is still at large. Nevertheless, she encourages you to search the premises for clues. When you find a vineyard to the left of the main complex, you'll discover discarded berries and a footprint. However, to use the print, Rif will need plaster to make an impression of it. For that, you will need to back out and find the Ferret Village, and while there, find a hardware store. The vendor sells plaster for 15 gold pieces, and that's your sign to pawn the medal to progress further in the game. When you head back to the Sanctuary, you need to find a bucket in the garden and fill it with water in a fountain. You can combine the plaster with the water bucket, pour the mixture on the footprint, and then collect a cast to present as evidence.
The issue with this puzzle and any mission that requires you to discover merchants or stores, is that every building or monument with an interior has incredibly difficult-to-locate doors or entryways. There's a slight 45-degree angle with the isometric camera, which means doors, which are vertically aligned, can be a pain in the ass to identify. Additionally, a monotony to each village's building design makes telling apart critical locals from ancillary ones impossible. In fact, of the handful of merchants and store owners you need to find, their storefronts' locations are barely discernable from their surrounding environments. For most, this ends up with you checking every door and building until you find quest givers or item recipients to progress the story. Given how slow the dialogue and walking animation progress, that's not a riveting experience for most.
Finding Sist In The Rat Caves - [Rating: 5/10] - The game becomes slightly open-ended at this point, with two possible locations to explore before you need to go further into the overworld. Your choices are the Boar King's Castle and the Rat Caves. It's not crucial to do one or the other first, but the rat caves are the more involved choice. When you first enter the caves, a bookkeeper prevents you from moving further unless you successfully confuse him. This task requires you to select a series of dialogue prompts in the correct order, and when you do, it's time for you to buckle up for some isometric dungeon crawling! While in the caves, you need to find a library and a doorway blocked by a copyright protection question that may or may not be removed from your version. Eventually, you move South until you find the leader of the rats, Sist, who welcomes you and gives you a better picture of who you are looking for when you present him with the berries and footprint. There's some fun lore-building here, but the game's top-down CRPG-like dungeon bits are entirely out of place and among the more annoying bits to butt up against when you play Inherit The Earth. The rat caves are not the most extensive environment, but the floor plan is serpentine enough that it is easy to lose your sense of place which can inevitably lead to you walking around in circles and not even knowing it.
Getting A Ring From The Boar King's Mud Pit - [Rating 1/10] - When you decide to visit the boar king, your boar companion vouches for you and allows you to walk past a couple of guards. When Rif meets with the boar king, he's forced to wade into a mud pit, much to his disgust, and upon exiting, he finds a ring caught in his fur. This item is necessary to complete a future puzzle. This bit ultimately ends up being a forced cinematic you need to see to pick up a MacGuffin. There's no way to fail this sequence, and you need to trigger it, preferably before you meet Tycho, the hound. As such, I can't get too angry at it.
Fixing Tycho's Telescope - [Rating 8/10] - After wrapping things up with Sist and the Boar King, you learn about a bloodhound named Tycho, that also happens to be an astronomer and map-maker. Sist directs you to him as he muses the next part of your journey will involve your party needing to cross over into the "Wild Lands." However, without a map, your trip will most likely meet doom. When you talk to Tycho, he offers to make a map, but only on the condition you fix his "light catcher," which to you and me is obviously a telescope. Mercifully, he states that he needs a new glass lens and that there is a master glassmaker in the ferret village. When you find this glassmaker and show him the broken lens, he exclaims that he cannot help, but he thinks the leader of the ferrets might know what to do. When you seek counsel, the head ferret pulls out a different human-made orb which they present as a deity of sorts, but as you attempt to use it, you and I discover it's a search engine like Google or Bing. The player's realization of this fact, while the characters act impressed by the orb, is one of my favorite scenes in the game. Unfortunately, the search engine cannot help Rif because he doesn't know that the proper name for Tycho's object is telescope" and should not refer to it as a "light catcher." As such, he needs to return to the rat caves, and when you talk to Sist, he uses a tome he brags about being one of the most impressive texts that he owns, but in reality, it's a human thesaurus, to discover the correct word; again, this is a good bit. When you use the search engine and utter the word "telescope," it provides the dimensions for a new lens and spouts a recipe. The ferrets jump for joy, saying that while the formula is complex, they should be able to get the job done.
Unfortunately, they lack red clay, which is needed to polish the lens to the correct aperture. Your boar companion is apt to point out that this red clay is what the boar king uses in his mud pit. Thus, you must backtrack to the boar king's castle and seek his company again. The clay is automatically added to your inventory when you finish a quick conversation in the mud pit. Handing this over to the glassmaker lets you fix the telescope and get the map needed to explore the Wild Lands. First, I must admit that the worldbuilding during this sequence is when I became absorbed with Inherit The Earth's story. Watching the characters struggle to comprehend an object as simple as a telescope, as contrived as it may sound on paper, ended up reinforcing the game's post-Apocalyptic themes. Similarly, the bit with the ferrets wherein you discover their "god" is a search engine is INCREDIBLY GOOD! Secondly, your conversations with Tycho build up a mystery that keeps you going even as you process this multi-step quest.
Unfortunately, this last point highlights that this is the most involved puzzle in the game. Even during the back half of the game, when you think it would most make sense for Inherit The Earth to ratchet up its difficulty, this sequence still stands as the biggest hurdle, short of one more, that blocks your progress. What I HATED about this sequence is how you need to trigger sequences in a particular order. For example, if you attempt to skip a step and head directly to Sist before you interact with the orb in the Ferret Village, which seems logical enough given Sist offers to be a source of knowledge, he isn't able to do jack. As a result, there's a precise sequence you must follow the game doesn't make clear, and WORSE, the exploratory bits in the ferret village are still a complete pain. I struggled to label and remember which building was the storekeeper's and which one had Google, and HOT DAMN are there way too many pointless buildings that simply exist as filler. And again, the amount of backtracking in this quest is BRUTAL! Needing to do the rat cave maze again was not appreciated.
Wild Lands Puzzles
Escaping The Dungeon In The Dog Castle - [Rating: 7/10] - The middle act of this game is its most beautiful and lore-heavy act but its most annoying one as well. When you first attempt to march into the Wild Lands, your party runs into the castle of the Dog Kingdom. When Rif encounters sentries at the castle's gate, this is the one time when he'll need to use his comedic dialogue prompts. When Rif's attempts at stand-up comedy fail, the king promptly throws Rif and his companions into a dungeon. To get out, you need to summon a guard by using a food dish on Rif's jail cell bars, and upon getting a meal, request a spoon. Using the spoon on a brick in the cell allows Rif to escape into a catacomb dungeon. I have already mentioned how out of place the dungeon crawling sequences feel in this game, and this is by far the worst offender. Figuring out the correct sequence and items to break out of jail is simple enough, and the game doesn't punish you if you need to call the guard a second or third time. However, the isometric dungeon sequence here, wherein if you get caught by guards, you must do things all over again, is incredibly frustrating. Likewise, you have no idea which exit you are aiming for or if you are moving in the right direction as you explore the catacombs. It's a labyrinth sequence that is very much "of the era," but that doesn't excuse how little piggybacking the game provides.
Helping The Chieftess Of The Cat Village Cure Her Daughter Of A Fever - [Rating: 8/10] - It's time for ANOTHER highly involved fetch quest! This quest is slightly worse than the previous one involving the telescope because this one involves you needing to interact with the overworld and manually finding random one-off levels to pick up crap! However, I'm getting ahead of myself. Rif can escape the castle but realizes he'll need assistance releasing his companions from their shackles. North of the tower, you'll find a village populated by cats, and when you interact with the village's leader, she agrees to help Rif on the condition he finds a cure for her daughter's fever. You'll run into a cottage north of the village, and if you examine it close enough, you'll figure out that it is the residence of Elara's sister. As you have a letter to deliver to her that Rif got after finishing his business with Tycho, you need to use the note on the door to the cottage three times before it opens and Rif begins talking to Alamma. When you relay the sick child's condition, Alamma, a witch or alchemist, can discern a treatment from Rif's short description. However, and I bet you know where this is going, you must find ingredients for this potion. These items are a needle and thread, honey, and catnip. When you accomplish this and cure the sickly child, the cat people prepare Rif for a nighttime prison break.
For the needle and thread, it's time to have your first encounter with the traveling merchant, Kylas Honeyfoot. On this occasion, he's locked to spawn in a clearing directly north of the cat village, and you'll need to trade the ring from the boar king's mud pit to get the needle. The catnip can be found in a mountain stream northwest of the field and is easy enough to add to your inventory. The honey, on the other hand, is an entirely different deal. First, you need to find a pixel on the northwestmost portion of the overworld and bump into it to find an oak tree with a bee nest. Finding this pixel, and I do mean "PIXEL," is dumb. Second, while noticing the nest is easy enough, you must create a fire to ward away the bees so Rif can collect some raw honey. To do that, you'll need to find a piece of flint near a cave system on the far eastern portion of the overworld. This item is on the complete opposite side of the map from where you use it, and that's what I call a "Dick Move!" It also does not help that using the flint on a bundle of twigs you need to place in a specific spot to smoke out the bees is incredibly fiddly, besides it being a minuscule object you can easily miss or not notice.
Rescuing Your Companions From The Dog Castle - [Rating: 9/10] - I want you to guess how this game adapts a prison break sequence. If you thought, "Have the player navigate a monotonous maze sequence," then you win! Worse, the game screws up by having every screen in this maze be a medium-side shot rather than a top-down or isometric shot. With the latter two, you better understand when the screens present you with options of going forward, left, right, or down. And this being a maze sequence gives me an excuse to jot down the exact button prompts to complete your mission post-haste. From the entrance, you must direct Rif to move forward, left, right, forward twice, right, forward, left, and forward before moving into a hallway and starting a SECOND maze sequence! Yup, there are two mazes, one for each castle floor! On the second floor, the best route, at least according to the two guides I consulted, is left, forward, right twice, forward twice, left twice, and right. I cannot emphasize enough how the game repeats one of four possible screen templates, making tracking where you are in the castle almost impossible. Eventually, you'll find yourself in the dog king's bedroom and must navigate a creaky floorboard to nab a key in his hand. If you make even one squeak, the king closes his hands, thus forcing you to restart the puzzle. With no visible signs indicating which floorboards will give away Rif, this is a trial-and-error navigation puzzle the game expects you to map out using graph paper. That's what I call bullshit! Oh, and to use the key to free your companions, you must backtrack through the maze and figure out how to find the prison cells on the first floor. Like the first time you explored this maze, your experience of trying to find the prison cells will likely be shitty, and I think you can already guess why I rated this sequence reasonably high.
Boarding The Ferry To The North Islands - [Rating: 7/10] - After breaking your friends out of prison, the cat tribe directs Rif to find passage to the North Islands to complete his quest. Unfortunately, the only ferryman willing to take him there requires proof that your party is ready for the dangers ahead. Kylas Honeyfoot happens to be the person with such evidence, but you'll first need to find a means to pay him, which you can conveniently find by exploring the interior of the cave system near where you found the flint to smoke out the bees from earlier. That's simple enough, but the real kicker involves tracking down Kylas Honeyfoot. To mimic Kylas being a traveling merchant, the game randomly spawns him in one of eight possible clearings in the overworld. Finding these clearings, and there are eight in total, is an absolute pain in the ass, and there's no real "trick" to make your experience easier. The patches of greenery are spread all across the wildlands, and the only nice thing is that there aren't random encounters. The rules for Kylas alone are why I bumped this score up a notch. It's far from being what I would traditionally call "hard," but the design and implementation of this puzzle are perplexing, especially given the enormity of the overworld.
North Island Puzzles
Escaping The Wolf Camp And Collecting A Bunch of Quest Items - [Rating: 2/10] - Did I mention how top-heavy Inherit The Earth feels? The start of the North Island involves two non-interactive cutscenes, virtually back-to-back. The first two acts feel, regardless of my nitpicks, like full-fledged chapters of a fantasy epic. The final act, however, is clear evidence that The Dreamers Guild either ran out of money or realized they needed to ship this game to meet a deadline. While I certainly enjoy the atmosphere of the North Island, as it is where you interact with remnants of human civilization the most, what you end up doing here is far from being the most interactive exercise in the game. For example, when you walk in on an exiled female wolf person bathing and learn about the power struggle on the North Island, Rif and company are captured almost immediately after they bid her farewell. This second cutscene formally introduces the raccoon you've been attempting to locate, who happily relays his evil scheme.
After no less than two prison sequences, you might be surprised to find out that Shiala, the female wolf from earlier, breaks you out. The only "trick" is to remember to pick up a trophy you need to use to sell to Kylas. This cool and exciting backdrop boils down to you needing to pick up a single one-off item, which is an all too common issue with the design of the North Island. In one case, when you encounter a derelict air hanger, all Rif needs to do is open it and pick up a spool of wire. Even the comments he makes when you try to observe parts of the background or foreground are far more basic than his musings from earlier. There's an exquisite seacliff screen on the North Island; all you need to do there is to use the cable to pick up a key card. There's no lore-building, and the interplay between the three characters is minimal. Therefore, buckle up for many adventure game gear checks wherein the only impediment is if you have the correct item!
Exploring The Ancient Ruins & Dam - [Rating: 4/10] - It is time to explore some human ruins, but before you do that, you need to track down Kylas again and offer to barter the trophy from the wolf tribe village for a lantern. With that out of the way, return to the airstrip and find a hangar Rif says is rusted over and impossible to open. Use the oil lamp to eliminate the rust and open the door. Find a workbench and pick up a screwdriver. Finally, navigate to the southwest part of the airstrip to find a building with a door that can accept the metal card Rif picked up from the seacliff. It's time for ANOTHER MAZE SEQUENCE, but at least this one is short and has no annoying loops that can cause you to run around in circles.
While in a computer room, find a glowing triangular device and pick it up. When you leave the building, exit the airstrip and find the dam's entry point. Find a ranger's station on a hill next to the dam and then open the door to the station using the screwdriver. While inside, pick up a digital alarm clock and examine it. As much as I complain about the mazes in this game, the one here is not the end of the world, and with the number of explorable locations on the North Island minimal, it's not that hard to figure out what the game wants you to do. The only tricky part is figuring out there's a building on the lower portion of the airstrip and which door you need to use to enter it. Beyond that, it's nothing too complicated.
Defeating The Evil Trash Panda - [Rating: 3/10] - It's time to return to Shiala's hut, and if you spend some time exploring her quaint living arrangement, you'll find an automatic door. To open it, you must use a powered-up version of the triangular device. First, take the screwdriver and apply it to the alarm clock. When Rif does this, he will note, "A cylinder has come out of this strange human object," and you should be able to figure out it is a battery. Next, you must combine the battery with the triangular device and apply it to the door. As you explore a tunnel system, you quickly discover you are inside the dam, and to progress the story, you only need to move forward. However, I recommend exploring the optional routes to get some additional worldbuilding. When you reach the end of the tunnel and climb a ladder, Rif ends up in a mini-chase sequence with Chota, the thief that took the orb at the start of the game. You only need to follow his movements; there's no way to fail this sequence. The puzzle with the alarm clock to open the door to the dam is undoubtedly fiddly and not intuitive, but again, the game does an excellent job of limiting the number of items in your possession. Hence, figuring out what to do with the door is straightforward. Overall, Inherit The Earth is one of the few adventure games I have covered that, at the least, ends well with a spectacular end sequence, even if its story feels half-complete.
Should You Play Inherit The Earth?
This following statement will sound weird, but hear me out on this one. Inherit The Earth is not a great adventure game, but it is still a great game overall. I was not enthused by any of its point-and-click trappings. This game and its odd stylings and gameplay are not newcomer friendly, AND some of its design is bound to piss off genre purists. There are better bones to toss at parser-based or SCUMM-engine adventure game fans. I would, at best, refer to it as an "intermediate" experience for those who have already exhausted their previous mid to late-1990s adventure game standbys and wouldn't mind something "different" from the SCUMM-based norm. Even then, the awkward stitching of its conflicting design choices so that it can provide you with handcrafted background visuals shows that its priorities were never remotely connected to providing a compelling gameplay experience. The first handful of fetch quests are okay, as they are simple exercises to get you accustomed to the game's unorthodox format. The more complex activities are often too abstract for their own good. By the time I got to the sixth fetch quest, I was done with this game's inability to bring anything new or novel to the adventure game formula.
Nevertheless, I was utterly enamored by its luscious environments, oddly compelling setting and themes, and honestly came around to its story and characters. The world it conveys is unlike any I have ever seen, with an odd mixture of comedic fantasy and stark reality. The only thing that comes to mind as a narrative or tonal equivalent is the movie Willow which has a similar mix of high fantasy adventure with dark and mature drama. For any of you interested in a slightly more mature bent on the fantasy formula of King's Quest and are willing to tolerate some annoying game design, Inherit the Earth is worth a casual exploration. It's still incredibly disappointing the story ends as it begins to get interesting, and the odds of that changing are slim. However, I still consider the game a diamond in the rough and a bit of an adventure game hidden gem. If embracing a growth or forward-thinking mindset doesn't seem like a complete reach, then there's something here for you.
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