As any fan of anime (Japanese animated films) can tell you, demons are a lot of fun. Since demons get to indulge in every one of the seven deadly sins, anime often uses them as an excuse to show things that normally don't get shown in cartoons: gratuitous nudity, rampant lust, and bizarre sexual acts are a few of the most popular. Any time you're watching anime and you see a demon with lots of prehensile tentacles, you can be sure that those organs will be put to good use later in the film.
Looking at the box art of Zeddas: Servant of Sheol, one suspects that this will be an adventure game in the same tradition as those adult anime classics. A strange menagerie of demons and huge-chested demon babes greets the unwary gamer, inviting him to venture into a virtual carnival of depravity. It's all in the name of good fun, of course (nudge nudge wink wink). However, the problem with Zeddas is not its content but its relative lack thereof. Like so many games and movies that lure the consumer with the suggestion of provocative material, Zeddas turns out to be inconsistent, amateurish, and perhaps worst of all, rather dull.
You see, it goes like this. You're Just Some Guy who happens to discover a magic mirror. With the help of this mirror, you become capable of seeing the invisible Rodvydel Castle, a keep that long ago fell into the grasp of Zeddas, King of Demons. You start the game right outside the castle. From here it's just a question of strolling inside and watching as the fireworks begin.
This isn't much of a premise, but then again, some of the best games have next no premise whatsoever. More troublesome are certain problems with the game engine and interface that become readily apparent from the moment you boot the game.
All the action is seen from a typical first-person adventure game perspective. You walk step by step through the game by clicking on a set of on-screen arrows. Your options are limited to left, right, and forward, which is quite a nuisance because it forces you to click the mouse a lot more than is really necessary to get from point A to point B. Sidestep buttons would have helped immensely.
Zeddas is a Windows title that has not been optimized for Windows 95. Like many such games, this title was put together with Macromedia Director and uses QuickTime movies to depict the various characters and animated situations you might encounter. After dealing with several games that were built with these common tools, I've become convinced that they aren't appropriate for game construction. The 640X480 video runs only in 256 colors, yet movement was sluggish on a fast Pentium. The colors looked washed-out, perhaps a result of rendering the original artwork in high-color modes and then reducing them down to 256 colors at a later date. Furthermore, the animation is clumsy and ineffective: spot animation such as eyes peering out of the darkness or bats flying across the sky is well-done, but the 3D modeled characters are jerky and awkward.
Also, the game does not offer a feature-rich environment. There aren't tons of items to pick up, manipulate, or look at-just lots of barren walls and static scenes.
The game interface is similarly unimpressive. The viewing area is small, and it's framed with useless buttons and objects that all add up to a lot of nonsense. Controls such as Save/Load and Volume Adjustment are slapped right onto this main screen, instead of being tucked away unobtrusively in a configuration menu.
Picking up and carrying objects can be a real pain. At the start of the game you must tear out a page from three different books and carry them to a sorceress so that she may interpret them. Very well, but why do you have to tear out these pages one at a time? Why not take the whole stack of books to the sorceress instead of tromping back and forth? The answer is simple: you haave no proper inventory, and can only hold one thing in your hands at any give time. This sort of chopped logic will dissuade gamers as quickly as the interface.
As a result of these problems, the game quickly loses any sense of urgency. It takes so long just to walk through a room that most gamers will be asleep before they've made it through the castle doors.
If you manage to look past these deficiencies, Zeddas does have some interesting situations to deal with. There's a girl trapped in a mirror, and you have to get her out. There's a torture chamber, which no good castle can do without. And there are indeed a few scenes of "temptation," though there are fewer than the lascivious box art would suggest. If you want to buy this game so you can "get it on with them demon chicks," then you'll probably be disappointed.
There's are pieces of an adequate adventure game buried somewhere within Zeddas, but I'd suggest that the primary failing of the game is its inability to live up to its own box cover. By this I don't mean that it needed more nudity or sexually explicit themes: rather, I mean that the interface, artwork, and overall design of the game fails to create a compelling environment. This is a problem in any sort of game, but it's especially damaging in a game that wants to deal in rich, sumptuous settings and provocative situations.
Zeddas is not a horrible game, but it definitely comes close. Still, who knows? Perhaps a few of you might reap a bit of enjoyment out of this unusual game. There are precious few games that even try to be provocative these days, so if you're hungry for a little bit of tease-and extremely patient-Zeddas might be the game for you. For the rest of us, however, it's just an exercise in tedium.
