Discovering the spiritual son of Alone in the Dark - "Agartha" on Dreamcast
With Alone in the Dark, Frédéric Raynal refuting the sequels (not sufficiently original to sum up), which nevertheless placed for the first time an individual in a 3D universe where the dynamics of the camera placed the player in a cinematographic vision and this done in stressful situations, we were an actor for the very first time!
Everyone was waiting for a sequel, the return of the precursor but many inspirations will quickly hit the market ( Resident Evil , Silent Hill ...). Yet under the label of a new studio No Cliché (affiliated with Sega ), Raynal and his team want to renew the genre and exceed the competition. This is the key element of the title. If we come to the point, Alone in the Dark invents the concept of simulation, it creates a framework where the player interacting with the environment will feel what the developer wants.
How to go beyond this vision? Some will choose the technique, others the originality ... and Agartha too, but not only because it is based on an innovative concept "the choice"!
It is you, as an individual who will decide and suffer the consequences, the environment is no longer an imposed framework, it becomes flexible. The player becomes the avatar and thus the video game will go beyond a new evolutionary stage of gameplay still heavily used today.
This article is a complement to the one about the history of No Cliché and its three Dreamcast games: The history of the French development studio No Cliché and its original Dreamcast games, from Toy Commander to Agartha... without forgetting Toy Racer
The discovery of the different prototypes
"Agartha" was for me one of the most important canceled games of the Dreamcast. Its cancellation left all of us unsatisfied. Being able to get my hands on a beta version remains one of my greatest discoveries.
I still remember the first time I launched the game and said "I'm one of the privileged few who can play it". This feeling of playing Unreleased and being one of the only ones in the world who can do it is a unique experience, a mixture of ecstasy and pride.
We are bringing our stone to the edifice of machine history by silencing more than 20 years of rumors. In the case of Agartha, we were at one point talking about a game that was complete, and then about a game whose development had not started. I've read a lot about him.
In 2011, a video was leaked on the internet. It had not taken more to relaunch all the hypotheses about him.
