#32: Damocles (Novagen, Amiga, 1990) 

For a time as a young child, I was obsessed with space. I loved reading factual books about the Solar System and I was delighted when a teacher once set the task of creating models of the planets out of different coloured tissue paper. They hung in the classroom and I would take plenty of chances to show off my knowledge when people came in to look at them.

[…]

Go to the wrong floor of one office and you lose all your money to a lawsuit defeat catching up with you. Another building contains a file of political proposals, including one where the President suggests a poll tax and “believes this will be electorally popular”. It may be an alien planet, but where better for some contemporary British political satire. People create a lot of nonsense, the message sometimes comes across.

That whole area often feels like a minor part of Damocles, though, not least because any conversation is delivered through one small line of written message space. Together with the general emptiness, the lack of visible people supports another aspect of the first person view, which is that it gives a freedom of characterisation that wouldn’t be possible if you saw who you were talking to, or especially whose perspective you were seeing from. You’re told you’re a mercenary, and beyond that you can fill in as you wish. Apart from the humanoid-suited furniture you can pick up and sell off as you travel, there’s no strong reason to assume that you’re even human, never mind any particular gender or race or anything else. You can explore as you see fit and fill in the gaps as you see fit.

In truth, the flipside of its size and freedom is that Damocles feels like it reaches for a lot more than it can comfortably achieve. That’s partly me speaking as a modern player, though — I had trouble even navigating through its clumsy automatic doors and found myself reflexively trying to use a second stick to control the camera, which isn’t a problem players at the time would have faced. Life has moved on and left me lacking the patience and methodical approach needed to do more than skim the game’s surface. But I can think of a six year old with a shelf full of books on space who would have loved Damocles.