Spectacle

A sight for sore eyes.

Spectacle, like its sci-fi predecessor Infested, is an adventure game inspired by the old ‘MacVenture’ series, where first-person puzzles and gory deaths lurked round nearly every corner. As you might expect, it’s an old-fashioned game, with one or two dated quirks – but it’s also ambitious, huge, and somehow free.

You play as a traveller from Earth who becomes trapped in a fantasy world, after running into a sinister magician. To get home, you’ll need to stuff your pockets with items, and your head with magical spells – before bashing that head against heaps of difficult puzzles. You remember the old adventure games, before every verb was compressed to ‘use’, and all the unfair dead ends were sanded away? Spectacle adds them back in, but in a way that, largely, works. There are a load of grisly deaths to discover, from snake attacks to deadly traps. Where Spectacle excels is with its whimsical, Middle-East-themed fantasy world, which is brought to life with pixel art and chiptunes. There’s a lot of, well, spectacle crammed into the game world, from those enjoyable monster encounters, to a handful of impressive set-pieces.

TOM SYKES

Spectacle does more than enough to escape its shadow.