Anacrothe's Adventures - Et Cetera - Legacy of Kain: The Lost Worlds

Anacrothe's Adventures

content by Divine Shadow, article by Ben Lincoln

Several years prior to the extremely-elaborate Doll Reaver - Legacy of Turelzevir, Divine Shadow had put considerable effort into an even more ambitious project - an April Fools jokes which would also have been perhaps the first fan-made Legacy of Kain game: Anacrothe's Adventures^[1]. As with Legacy of Turelzevir, I feel that my own words would be grossly inadequate for the task of describing this work of comedic art, so here is Divine Shadow's own description:

During 2000-2001, when I was part of the Nosgothic Realm mod team, I came up with a crazy idea for the first LOK fangame. It started as a joke in the Moderator Friday Night chats, about who would be the most unlikely LOK star to have their own game. Influenced by comedy point-and-click adventure games such as Monkey Island, Zak Mcracken and Discworld, I started a game.

I put in six months of work into learning the Adventure Game Studio engine, and making art assets. Four betas were produced, the fourth a quantum leap over those that had came before. The other mods were enthusiasitc playtesters for the releases, and feedback and advice and ideas kept bouncing back and forth.

The final demo created had a uniquely made world map (in the style of the BO Map) and twelve vistable locations from the Blood Omen period, made through new art, or manipulated artwork from other games. There's also some cutscenes, and dialogue prompts for when examining objects (ie, Anacrothe tells a story about Each Pillar).

This has never been seen outside of the old mod-circle before (and has been buried away for eight years). It was, I believe, the first LOK fangame. Unfortunately, my university degree required much more attention than I expected, and the project was sidelined. When I had the free time again, I'd completely forgotten the programming language.

It still runs fine, via DOS (acdos.exe) or Windows (acwin.exe). Slight compatibility problems exist: The Dos version lacks the atmospheric MIDIs for each section, which included a cool slow-jazz rendition of the Doctor Who theme for the Oracle's cave! The windows version is running at a tiny resolution, and I've forgotten if you can increase the size.

The storyline context (forgive the overly long intro): Set during Blood Omen, the game follows the adventures of the cowardly sorcerer Anacrothe. Kain and Raziel (from the future) end up disrupting his own personal timeline, and hijinks ensue. The original intention was for Anacrothe to see visions of his future, wear a rubber vest and not get killed when Morty shocks him. Faking his death, he would stand behind the Balance Pillar while Kain is making his fateful choice, and use a hacksaw to saw it (like a tree) down so it falls on Kain, killing him.

Between Anacrothe's Adventures and Anacrothe's Balls (see the "Case" section of Doll Reaver - Legacy of Turelzevir), I was curious as to why that particular character had caught Divine Shadow's interest. He explained that:

Anacrothe is interesting. In Blood Omen, there is a substantial gap between his introduction and eventual end. Whereas we get some context on what say, Malek, Mortanius, Moebius and Ariel are up to in between their appearances, we get NOTHING on Anacrothe. Tremendously powerful sorcerer and major player doing, well, what exactly? Despite the mystery, he is very much ignored by the fanbase and indeed the developers themselves.

All we can assume is his cowardice (running away), resourcefulness (summoning Malek), self-importance (his final speech) and idiocy (taking on Mortanius). I felt there was enormous comic potential there.

Divine Shadow put an amount of effort into this project that would be unbelievable to anyone who hadn't browsed through the Legacy of Turelzevir website, and several detailed script/screenplay documents for portions of the game are available at the end of this article.

Despite its doom of remaining unfinished, the fourth beta version mentioned above is available for download as well. I highly recommend giving it a look. Most of the humour is split across multiple subtitles, and so can't be adequately represented using screenshots. It's full of in-jokes for fans of the series, and even features a corrected version of the "Malek! To our aid!" line from Blood Omen.

Screenshots

Introduction Screen

Credits

Not one, but three

Dark Eden

Wolf's Tavern - Exterior

Wolf's Tavern - Interior

The Pillar of States

Ariel's Tomb

The Oracle's Cave

Stann's Sarafan Store

Vorador's Mansion

Avernus Cathedral

The Fortress of The Nemesis

Willendorf

Azimuth discusses Kain and Anacrothe with Hash'Ak'Gik

Various screenshots from the fourth beta version of Anacrothe's Adventures. The credits are a who's-who of Nosgothic Realm members from the early 21st century.

Various

Avernus in better times

The corrupt Pillars

Intro Idea

Map 1

Map 2

Map 3

Sprite sheet

Various artwork from the unfinished production of Anacrothe's Adventures.

Download
File	Size	Version	Release Date	Author
Anacrothe's Adventures	14 MiB	Beta 4	2002-11-02	Divine Shadow, et al
Unzip and run ACWIN.EXE under Windows, or ACDOS.EXE under DOS (or DOSBox, etc.). ACWIN.EXE might need to be closed using Task Manager when you're done playing. The README.TXT file includes a list provided by Divine Shadow of places to go and things to do in the game world.

Download
File	Size	Version	Release Date	Author
Anacrothe's Adventures - Scripts and Notes	12 KiB	N/A	Unknown	Divine Shadow
Includes a script for several scenes, an overview of the entire game, and Divine Shadow's "what I need to get around to doing" list.

Footnotes

1.	"Anacrothe" is spelled alternately as "Anarcrothe" in some official Legacy of Kain material, and Divine Shadow's work preserves this ambiguity by using both variations.