Tips and Tricks

• Press X to see what you can interact with in a room.
• While Assil or Thara is walking somewhere, double-click to make them run.
• Go into the game’s settings and switch on fadeable inventory, which makes it easier to access items.
• Press the tab key to see current tasks.
• Skip film scenes with the spacebar; click the mouse during conversations to skip to the speaker’s next sentence.
• Don’t forget that Thara and Assil can talk to each other while you’re in control of one of them. Initiating some banter between them may give you clues if you’re stumped.
• If you get stuck, check out this handy walkthrough to figure out what to do next.

The History of Adventure Games’ Twisty Little Passages

The first computer adventure game was the text-based Colossal Cave Adventure, also known simply as Adventure. Based on Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave system and created by experienced spelunker Will Crowther in 1976, Adventure ran on mainframe computers and inspired many players to modify its gameplay. It later appeared on various home computers; you can even run it on Mac OS X or on a clickwheel iPod through the Notes function.

Adventure was the catalyst for the adventure game sub-genre known as interactive fiction, the most popular of which was the Zork series and Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The game also inspired many software developers who would go on to leave their mark in the adventure genre, including Warren Robinett, who created the popular Atari 2600 title Adventure, and Roberta Williams, who founded On-Line Systems, later known as Sierra On-Line, with her husband Ken.

Sierra helped popularize graphical adventure games, including the classic King’s Quest and Leisure Suit Larry series, paving the way for a pair of important events during the late 1980s and early 1990s: LucasArts’ introduction of the ability to click on words and objects to produce results, rather than having to type commands into a game, and Cyan’s publication of Myst, which took adventures into a photo-realistic world full of lush, exotic environments.

As computers’ graphical capabilities improved during the years since then, adventure games have produced increasingly elaborate worlds and stories for us to explore and experience. The Ankh series, Jack Keane, The Abbey, and A Vampyre Story, among other similar titles, have continued to expand the point-and-click gameplay — and funny stories — introduced by LucasArts, while Myst V: End of Ages, the Penumbra series, and other adventures have further developed the gameplay style introduced by Myst.

Horus vs. Seth: A Twisty Little History

Ankh: Battle of the Gods’ tale of dueling deities has a basis in Egyptian mythology, with stories found on walls, coffins, and other relics of the ancient world detailing the conflict between Horus and Seth (also known as Set). In most of the myths, Horus is the son of Osiris, a wise king who was married to his sister, Isis, and had brother named Seth.

Seth was jealous of Osiris and killed him by various means, depending on which story you read. (Tricking him into lying down in a coffin and then sealing the box with lead and throwing it in the Nile River was a popular version of the assassination.) Isis, however, was able to resurrect Osiris for a brief while, and he impregnated her. She gave birth to Horus, who decided that his father’s enemy was his enemy. Thus the mythological feud between Horus and Seth was born, and Osiris went on to become god of the dead and history’s first mummy.

Like many such stories, that conflict likely had some basis in historical fact, since Egyptian mythology says that Upper Egypt was given to Set and Lower Egypt was bestowed on Horus, with all of Egypt eventually handed to Horus. However, when Upper and Lower Egypt fought, the former conquered the latter, although it’s possible the myth was actually describing a conflict between followers of Horus and Set in Upper Egypt. After Upper and Lower Egypt united, Horus and Set were typically shown as allies who jointly crowned new pharaohs.