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Playlist: • Playthrough: "Ring, the Legend of the Nibe... Developed by: Arxel Tribe "Ring, the Legend of the Nibelungen" is a love-or-hate-it affair. When the game was released it received more bad reviews than good ones. If you don't have a basic knowledge of the mythology this game is based on you have a tough time to make sense out of the story. Even the complicated frame story Arxel Tribe created themselves is told in cryptic dialogue. Figuring out the story is a puzzle in itself. It's there for those who are persistant. But there's more to this game than just story. It's feeling and atmosphere. The visuals, inspired by the artwork of Philippe Druillet, are out of this world. Strange, different, epic, colorful and fascinating. Add to that the heavy-handed dialogue (rarely heard in games), Wagner's fantastic music and you have a cinematic experience for both eyes and ears. It's far from a perfect game, but more of an experience. If you treat it like that, Ring is a very enjoyable adventure... The text below, which can be found in the game-manual, helps the player to get a better grip on the frame story. INTRODUCTION Much more than a Character: ISH ----------------------------------------------------- One character will act as our guide through the Wagnerian labyrinth - our link, our motivation and our reward. ISH, the Metascient, the human survivor, who has been entrusted by a Goddess to search in the treshold of his memory for the threads of the legendary opera. You are going to embody this Metascient from space and take control over four different key characters who will allow you to revive the great saga. The great book of ISH, excerpt ------------------------------------------------- Future generations will luckily never experience the anxiety and emptiness that haunted us from birth. We were Earth's orphans. Poor indeed was humanity deprived on its planet, of its archives. Crushed under the tyranny of the FOUR, the universe itself, was a little consolation. Today, one wonders how we could sacrifice our lives to this daunting task of reconstitution rather than trying to improve our sorry living conditions. Learn that nothing is worse for a man than being born without memories. And so we worked as desperate slaves for our own utopia, seeking the faintest traces of our culture, therebye our very identity. Thanks to 'Mnemogenetics', a science for which the origins and creators we still ignore, we embarked in our own memories as pilgrims looking there for the heritage of humanity. I don't know how we had the intuition that we would find ourselves again in rediscovering our legends. No doubt ERDA had patiently prepared the way. The Four let us pursue our efforts in exchange for the theatre performances; for them it seemed like an innocent way of keeping their populations entertained. I understood only much later why I had been chosen to put back together the RING cycle. The FOUR saw it as an apology of power, vindication for the force that would convince me to take a part in their game. I now recognise the subtle influence of ERDA in this error. As I played both parts of hero and villain, I was but an empty page upon which one would print humanity's faults and virtues. ERDA wanted me to understand Evil in order to fight it and to choose Good for myself so that I might know how to defend it. May the generations to come remember that the greatest threat lies primarily in forget. Any horror, any catalysm can repeat itself. Each and every one of us is a Keeper of the human temple. (Source: manual) © Arxel Tribe & Cryo Interactive Entertainment
