Manhunter 2: San Francisco
I need to type this out to get it out of my system. Distracting myself from my life at the moment, which I don't want to discuss. I decided to try re-playing an old point-and-click adventure game, Sierra's 1989 "Manhunter 2: San Francisco". No one cares about this game, for valid reasons, so consider this a post of pure blather.
I never played the first Manhunter, which was set in New York. And after watching videos of people playing it, I'm glad I didn't. Manhunter 2 is... easier, but still terrible. My motivation to play it... when I last played it, I was in my late teens. The game confused me a lot. I didn't understand what was happening. I was hoping that by re-playing it, it would now make sense. It doesn't.
Manhunter is an unfinished series that takes place on a dystopian Earth, our cities decimated after being invaded by the Orbs, giant flying eyeballs from another star system. Without arms, I'm not sure how they can manipulate objects, but they've got spaceships and robots and lasers and whatever.
Humans aren't allowed to talk to each other and must all wear plain brown robes, which means the developers didn't have to write dialogue, and it made the art easier to do. Even for Sierra, the pixel art is... pretty bad. And yet, even in its extremely low resolution, it's surprisingly effective. Though still terrible. They liked gory deaths here. The game uses a clunky old game engine that Sierra was abandoning; it doesn't have mouse control, which would have been immensely helpful.
The Orbs make some humans work as "Manhunters", tracking down criminals. You're given a special laptop, and each day you receive orders to go investigate something. Using the laptop, you can re-play a map of the city to see where suspects have been. It's unclear if all humans have been embedded with tracking chips, or how this works? Actually the tracking info doesn't always work, like if the subject goes underground. Also, they don't seem to retain the data for more than 24 hours.
So in the first game, in New York, you're investigating a series of serial killings by a guy named Phil. Along the way, you discover the human resistance (who get killed), and also find out the Orbs are harvesting humans to eat them. Phil eventually escapes in an Orb spaceship, and you chase him to San Francisco. You crash your ship on a street, and Phil lands at the Orbs' headquarters. Oh yeah, Phil works for the Orbs. So it makes no sense that the Orbs send you to investigate Phil's victims, since the Orbs seem to be ok with whatever Phil is doing.
Conveniently, when you crashed your ship, you landed on another Manhunter and killed him, so you assume his identity. The fact that none of the Orbs are suspicious of you suggests that either they don't care, or they can't tell humans apart. Additionally, I think the game wanted to generate drama by showing San Francisco in ruins, but because I'm Canadian and knew nothing about the city, it completely failed to have any real emotional impact.
The game plays out over a series of three or four days. Absolutely nothing is explained. You get glimpses of people and story threads, but you have no understanding of what's actually going on, or why people are doing things. Re-playing this game, I find this lack of explanation infuriating. Here's what I was able to figure out.
The Orbs have lost a device called the "Viewer". Who stole it? Why? What does it do? I have no idea. San Francisco is comprised of humans in brown robes, slave humans in grey robes, dog-rat mutants (who have a king and mostly live in the sewers), and mis-shapen green mutants (who are locked up in Alcatraz for unknown reasons). All the mutants were once human, victims of experiments.
The Orbs' first mission for you is to investigate a crime in Chinatown. (The Chinese characters are given yellow skin, which is f***ing racist.) Two dog-rat mutants break into a bank, kill a guy, and steal something. The mutants leave, then get into a fight. One of them has betrayed the other, and goes to the Orbs' HQ, then returns to his den and drinks a "remedy" which kills him. What was stolen from the bank? The Viewer? Who knows. The remaining mutant leaves a note to another mutant named Zac, confirming that something has been acquired.
The next day, the mutant thief who left the note is killed by some humans. On a boat. Why is he there? How did the humans know he was there? Who knows. The bank guy was part of a group in Chinatown who call themselves the Dragons, and I assume they've avenged themselves by killing the mutant. One member of the Dragons returns to their temple. Another member goes shopping, meets up with a friend, then disappears.
Along the way they go to an Orb place and kidnap a human slave, and deliver him to a doctor they collaborate with. Why? Never explained. The third Dragon (the friend) then goes elsewhere to talk to another slave, and is killed by Phil and a dog-rat mutant. (Why did Phil show up in the first place?) Phil and the mutant back-track to the doctor's, kill the doctor, and take the (now dead) slave's arm, which they cut off. Later that day, Phil enters the sewers, kills the king of the dog-rat mutants (who had the Viewer), and takes over as their new king. Why? Who knows.
You also discover there was a scientist named Noah Goring, the guy responsible for creating mutants in the first place, who was recruited by the Orbs to help create more mutants for their mining operations under the city. Noah was perfectly fine with this for a couple of years, then suddenly realized he was a bad guy, and wants to thwart the Orbs' plans. He writes a note to the doctor, hoping the doctor's Dragon friends can help out. Noah was also supposed to deliver a special key-card, but hasn't.
The next day, Noah and a friend attempt to enter the sewers. Why? Unknown. The dog-rat mutants chase them out and kill them. One of the killer mutants is Zac. By this point of the game, you've discovered that Zac is important... somehow? The dog-rat mutants seem to be the enemies of the Dragons, and yet, when you become a member of the Dragons, you get a scroll saying that Zac is their only hope. Why? To do what?!
I should also mention that the Manhunter you killed had a strange note in his apartment with a weird clue to the Dragon temple. It's not clear why the Manhunter had this, but it allows you to have a hallucinogenic vision with some random guy who lives next door to the temple.
Anyway, you manage to find Noah's corpse and get his special key-card. You can also visit a laundromat - no logical reason to, except you found a claim ticket belonging to a bystander from one of the earlier murders. At the laundromat, with no explanation, you're knocked unconscious and locked in a room, which you escape.
You also enter the sewers. Briefly, you get to see Phil using the Viewer; it's monitoring the mining operation under the city. Then you crash into the throne room and it's revealed that Phil is actually... an advanced, psychotic robot. And if he's still working for the Orbs, why is he hanging around being the king of some dog-rat mutants? Who knows!
Anyway, next you sneak into Alcatraz. With no reason to do so. Seriously, nothing in the game tells you to go there, it's just that you have no other options left at this point. That's where you discover the mis-shapen green mutants all locked up. Apparently they were created by Noah, and the key-card allows you to open their jail cells. Except there's a camera that checks to see if you're an Orb first. You're not, but if you hold up a miniature Orb-on-a-stick, that's apparently good enough to trick the system.
I'll just say at this point that the Orbs' have crap security. Even the Manhunter stuff is stupid. At the end of each day your laptop beeps dangerously and they demand you type in the names that your investigations have turned up. You can type in anything! It doesn't manner! This is terrible game design!
After freeing the green mutants of Alcatraz, they start a revolution, killing all the Orbs in the city they can reach. If you befriended one of them (thanks to the hallucinogenic vision), they dump you into a hot-air balloon. Why was this on Alcatraz? Who knows. Where are you going?? Who knows!
Ok, you have exactly one hint. A cryptic clue from the Dragon temple says that "The castle is the gateway to hell". Other clues from earlier are "Must reach hell to stop them", and "Stop them! They have almost reached life. Bring us to hell and we will show you freedom." The castle thing turns out to be a place called "Julius Castle", which you can only see at one other point in the game, if you happen to look out of a specific window.
Part of the reason this failed so much was that, again, as a non-resident of San Francisco, I had no idea of this place. Turns out the game had left out an apostrophe (Julius' Castle), and neglected to mention it wasn't a real castle, it just happened to look like one, and used to be some kind of restaurant. Seriously, how the heck is a Canadian teenager in the late 1980s with no Internet and no knowledge of San Francisco supposed to make sense of any of this?
Anyway, if you manage to land your balloon at the Castle (which you're unlikely to do, since the travel screen doesn't make it at all obvious, and is even deceptive), you tumble down into the Orbs' underground mining operation.
All the major locations inside the mine have inexplicable code-names, which you had no way of knowing about in advance. "Hell" is the central command room. "Slavery" is for... slaves? "Freedom" is... an important room? But you don't know why. And "Life" is the molten lava under the Earth's crust that the Orbs are trying to drill to. Maybe for terraforming? Who knows.
You rearrange slaves and robots into different rooms while opening and closing gates to control where lava goes. If you do it right, you roast all the robots, free all the slaves, and leave a path open to reach Freedom. Oh, and lava spills out onto the streets around the famous places in the city.
In Freedom, you take control of a giant drilling machine. The code to turn it on... was written on that slave's arm that got chopped off. Why did he have the code? Was his kidnapping just a coincidence? Who knows! The game ends with the most frustrating mini-game of all, trying to navigate your drill through a maze of tight caverns. The controls are completely janky, you have to constantly save-scum. So much hatred for the game at this point.
Returning to the surface, you catch Phil as he (again) takes to a spaceship to escape the city, and you hang on to its edge, your fingers losing circulation and your body probably losing oxygen as well. The third game in the series was never made.
Meanwhile, all the mutants in the city magically revert to human form. Maybe because you stopped the weird smoke the Orbs were spewing into the atmosphere? Except the cure is instant. Which means that anyone in a well-ventilated room would have been cured earlier. Anyway, now all the ex-mutants are wandering the streets naked. The horrible low resolution of the graphics is kind of a blessing here.
So... this was a dumb, terrible game. There are about ten mini-games, eight of them horrible. Seriously, use save-states, and make sure you can turn down the speed of your DOS emulator. Oh, and it's possible to make your game unwinnable. You play the game out of being stubborn, only to finish with a lack of closure. There's intriguing world-building, but nothing makes sense. The positive feelings from solving a few of the puzzles are destroyed by the many, many frustrations.
Never play Manhunter.
I never played the first Manhunter, which was set in New York. And after watching videos of people playing it, I'm glad I didn't. Manhunter 2 is... easier, but still terrible. My motivation to play it... when I last played it, I was in my late teens. The game confused me a lot. I didn't understand what was happening. I was hoping that by re-playing it, it would now make sense. It doesn't.
Manhunter is an unfinished series that takes place on a dystopian Earth, our cities decimated after being invaded by the Orbs, giant flying eyeballs from another star system. Without arms, I'm not sure how they can manipulate objects, but they've got spaceships and robots and lasers and whatever.
Humans aren't allowed to talk to each other and must all wear plain brown robes, which means the developers didn't have to write dialogue, and it made the art easier to do. Even for Sierra, the pixel art is... pretty bad. And yet, even in its extremely low resolution, it's surprisingly effective. Though still terrible. They liked gory deaths here. The game uses a clunky old game engine that Sierra was abandoning; it doesn't have mouse control, which would have been immensely helpful.
The Orbs make some humans work as "Manhunters", tracking down criminals. You're given a special laptop, and each day you receive orders to go investigate something. Using the laptop, you can re-play a map of the city to see where suspects have been. It's unclear if all humans have been embedded with tracking chips, or how this works? Actually the tracking info doesn't always work, like if the subject goes underground. Also, they don't seem to retain the data for more than 24 hours.
So in the first game, in New York, you're investigating a series of serial killings by a guy named Phil. Along the way, you discover the human resistance (who get killed), and also find out the Orbs are harvesting humans to eat them. Phil eventually escapes in an Orb spaceship, and you chase him to San Francisco. You crash your ship on a street, and Phil lands at the Orbs' headquarters. Oh yeah, Phil works for the Orbs. So it makes no sense that the Orbs send you to investigate Phil's victims, since the Orbs seem to be ok with whatever Phil is doing.
Conveniently, when you crashed your ship, you landed on another Manhunter and killed him, so you assume his identity. The fact that none of the Orbs are suspicious of you suggests that either they don't care, or they can't tell humans apart. Additionally, I think the game wanted to generate drama by showing San Francisco in ruins, but because I'm Canadian and knew nothing about the city, it completely failed to have any real emotional impact.
The game plays out over a series of three or four days. Absolutely nothing is explained. You get glimpses of people and story threads, but you have no understanding of what's actually going on, or why people are doing things. Re-playing this game, I find this lack of explanation infuriating. Here's what I was able to figure out.
The Orbs have lost a device called the "Viewer". Who stole it? Why? What does it do? I have no idea. San Francisco is comprised of humans in brown robes, slave humans in grey robes, dog-rat mutants (who have a king and mostly live in the sewers), and mis-shapen green mutants (who are locked up in Alcatraz for unknown reasons). All the mutants were once human, victims of experiments.
The Orbs' first mission for you is to investigate a crime in Chinatown. (The Chinese characters are given yellow skin, which is f***ing racist.) Two dog-rat mutants break into a bank, kill a guy, and steal something. The mutants leave, then get into a fight. One of them has betrayed the other, and goes to the Orbs' HQ, then returns to his den and drinks a "remedy" which kills him. What was stolen from the bank? The Viewer? Who knows. The remaining mutant leaves a note to another mutant named Zac, confirming that something has been acquired.
The next day, the mutant thief who left the note is killed by some humans. On a boat. Why is he there? How did the humans know he was there? Who knows. The bank guy was part of a group in Chinatown who call themselves the Dragons, and I assume they've avenged themselves by killing the mutant. One member of the Dragons returns to their temple. Another member goes shopping, meets up with a friend, then disappears.
Along the way they go to an Orb place and kidnap a human slave, and deliver him to a doctor they collaborate with. Why? Never explained. The third Dragon (the friend) then goes elsewhere to talk to another slave, and is killed by Phil and a dog-rat mutant. (Why did Phil show up in the first place?) Phil and the mutant back-track to the doctor's, kill the doctor, and take the (now dead) slave's arm, which they cut off. Later that day, Phil enters the sewers, kills the king of the dog-rat mutants (who had the Viewer), and takes over as their new king. Why? Who knows.
You also discover there was a scientist named Noah Goring, the guy responsible for creating mutants in the first place, who was recruited by the Orbs to help create more mutants for their mining operations under the city. Noah was perfectly fine with this for a couple of years, then suddenly realized he was a bad guy, and wants to thwart the Orbs' plans. He writes a note to the doctor, hoping the doctor's Dragon friends can help out. Noah was also supposed to deliver a special key-card, but hasn't.
The next day, Noah and a friend attempt to enter the sewers. Why? Unknown. The dog-rat mutants chase them out and kill them. One of the killer mutants is Zac. By this point of the game, you've discovered that Zac is important... somehow? The dog-rat mutants seem to be the enemies of the Dragons, and yet, when you become a member of the Dragons, you get a scroll saying that Zac is their only hope. Why? To do what?!
I should also mention that the Manhunter you killed had a strange note in his apartment with a weird clue to the Dragon temple. It's not clear why the Manhunter had this, but it allows you to have a hallucinogenic vision with some random guy who lives next door to the temple.
Anyway, you manage to find Noah's corpse and get his special key-card. You can also visit a laundromat - no logical reason to, except you found a claim ticket belonging to a bystander from one of the earlier murders. At the laundromat, with no explanation, you're knocked unconscious and locked in a room, which you escape.
You also enter the sewers. Briefly, you get to see Phil using the Viewer; it's monitoring the mining operation under the city. Then you crash into the throne room and it's revealed that Phil is actually... an advanced, psychotic robot. And if he's still working for the Orbs, why is he hanging around being the king of some dog-rat mutants? Who knows!
Anyway, next you sneak into Alcatraz. With no reason to do so. Seriously, nothing in the game tells you to go there, it's just that you have no other options left at this point. That's where you discover the mis-shapen green mutants all locked up. Apparently they were created by Noah, and the key-card allows you to open their jail cells. Except there's a camera that checks to see if you're an Orb first. You're not, but if you hold up a miniature Orb-on-a-stick, that's apparently good enough to trick the system.
I'll just say at this point that the Orbs' have crap security. Even the Manhunter stuff is stupid. At the end of each day your laptop beeps dangerously and they demand you type in the names that your investigations have turned up. You can type in anything! It doesn't manner! This is terrible game design!
After freeing the green mutants of Alcatraz, they start a revolution, killing all the Orbs in the city they can reach. If you befriended one of them (thanks to the hallucinogenic vision), they dump you into a hot-air balloon. Why was this on Alcatraz? Who knows. Where are you going?? Who knows!
Ok, you have exactly one hint. A cryptic clue from the Dragon temple says that "The castle is the gateway to hell". Other clues from earlier are "Must reach hell to stop them", and "Stop them! They have almost reached life. Bring us to hell and we will show you freedom." The castle thing turns out to be a place called "Julius Castle", which you can only see at one other point in the game, if you happen to look out of a specific window.
Part of the reason this failed so much was that, again, as a non-resident of San Francisco, I had no idea of this place. Turns out the game had left out an apostrophe (Julius' Castle), and neglected to mention it wasn't a real castle, it just happened to look like one, and used to be some kind of restaurant. Seriously, how the heck is a Canadian teenager in the late 1980s with no Internet and no knowledge of San Francisco supposed to make sense of any of this?
Anyway, if you manage to land your balloon at the Castle (which you're unlikely to do, since the travel screen doesn't make it at all obvious, and is even deceptive), you tumble down into the Orbs' underground mining operation.
All the major locations inside the mine have inexplicable code-names, which you had no way of knowing about in advance. "Hell" is the central command room. "Slavery" is for... slaves? "Freedom" is... an important room? But you don't know why. And "Life" is the molten lava under the Earth's crust that the Orbs are trying to drill to. Maybe for terraforming? Who knows.
You rearrange slaves and robots into different rooms while opening and closing gates to control where lava goes. If you do it right, you roast all the robots, free all the slaves, and leave a path open to reach Freedom. Oh, and lava spills out onto the streets around the famous places in the city.
In Freedom, you take control of a giant drilling machine. The code to turn it on... was written on that slave's arm that got chopped off. Why did he have the code? Was his kidnapping just a coincidence? Who knows! The game ends with the most frustrating mini-game of all, trying to navigate your drill through a maze of tight caverns. The controls are completely janky, you have to constantly save-scum. So much hatred for the game at this point.
Returning to the surface, you catch Phil as he (again) takes to a spaceship to escape the city, and you hang on to its edge, your fingers losing circulation and your body probably losing oxygen as well. The third game in the series was never made.
Meanwhile, all the mutants in the city magically revert to human form. Maybe because you stopped the weird smoke the Orbs were spewing into the atmosphere? Except the cure is instant. Which means that anyone in a well-ventilated room would have been cured earlier. Anyway, now all the ex-mutants are wandering the streets naked. The horrible low resolution of the graphics is kind of a blessing here.
So... this was a dumb, terrible game. There are about ten mini-games, eight of them horrible. Seriously, use save-states, and make sure you can turn down the speed of your DOS emulator. Oh, and it's possible to make your game unwinnable. You play the game out of being stubborn, only to finish with a lack of closure. There's intriguing world-building, but nothing makes sense. The positive feelings from solving a few of the puzzles are destroyed by the many, many frustrations.
Never play Manhunter.