Today’s post was going to be on another topic entirely. But we were at a retro game store, as we often are, and Kasul pulled out this PlayStation 2 game, a game I’d never heard of: Pryzm Chapter One: The Dark Unicorn. The store had three copies. This puts it squarely into Madden1 territory.
I was flabbergasted. Did potential buyers not see that each copy came with its own official DC comic inside, explaining who the Dark Unicorn was? Did potential buyers not sit and wonder what Chapter Two was like? (Answer: There was no Chapter Two. And there’s no Half Life 3, either, so stop asking).
I had to have it.
And I played it.
And it was definitely a game that ran on the PlayStation 2.
Ran pretty well, too. Had cutscenes and voice acting, so, you know, it had pretty much everything. And also the comic book.
The included comic book explains that, in this world of five nations, the Elves war with the Nymphs, and the Trolls war with the Gnomes, and only the peaceful Unicorn nation remains as a beacon of hope for the world. And then mysterious flowers appear, spreading corruption that turns anything it touches into monsters. The subtitular Black Unicorn is somehow involved. Perhaps this is his twisted method to bring peace to the land.
Refugees begin to stream into the country of the Unicorns, who aren’t able to handle such an influx. Karrock the Troll brings further news of the corruption plague to the rulers of Unicorn-land. They make the difficult decision to send their daughter, Pryzm, to find and defeat the source of the corruption. With her they send Karrock, a powerful mage, as her rider.
The duo will have to visit each country in turn and free them from the corruption before they will be able to discover the ultimate source.
The clip above shows a portion of the first level of Troll World. You can see from the video clip that Pryzm is an action-adventure game with some light platforming elements. The duo have a variety of powers they can use; Pryzm has a charge, a beam attack, and a hover-AE (area effect) push away attack. Karrock has a magical melee attack and a targeted AE attack. He can also use his staff to find the next miniboss.
To free the denizens of each island in each world, you have to cleanse all the corrupted flowers. Those flowers, though, are protected by magical shields so long as the monsters linked to them with red lightning remain transformed into monsters. The basic game loop is to find the boss, find the linked monsters, hit them enough to cleanse them, then cleanse the flower before it can corrupt them again.
There’s a bunch of other monsters, and you can spend all day cleansing them, but the flower will just corrupt them again. Probably, if I’d read the manual instead of just closing it once I’d read the comic, it would have explained this to me. Since I was too impatient to be smart, I just spent some long period of time spinning my wheels until I figured it out.
Even knowing what you’re really supposed to do, it’s tough. I discovered, in the clip above, that mobs wouldn’t cross the lava river, but I could, and I’d be in range of its linked monster, too. So I’d dash to my spot, cleanse the monster, and then I’d have maybe fifteen seconds to do some platforming to get to the flower before it recorrupted the monster. It looks so easy in the clip. I’m not showing the dozen earlier attempts. This game wants you to speedrun it.
As a platformer, the game isn’t that great. Pryzm takes time to speed up and later stop, so many times she’ll just land and keep going, usually falling off the platform. Since the camera isn’t on the right stick — that’s Karrock’s “point me to the enemy” control — it’s nearly impossible to keep track of your target while moving. I eventually just used Pryzm’s horn attack to freeze a monster, Karrock’s AE attack to set it on magic fire, then run up and whack it until it transformed, circling it and occasionally using Pryzm’s AE push. Same with the flower, but easier since it doesn’t move. It does exude corruption occasionally, but there’s no time to lose on these things, so it’s better to eat some corruption than risk it re-corrupting its leashed monsters and having to start over.
There’s a sense of accomplishment once you master a level in Pryzm. Each of the levels takes maybe ten minutes, maybe even less, once you know what to do and where to go. The first level took me an hour, but I could do it again much more quickly, now that I know how everything works. The combat is annoying, but since the levels are really more puzzles than killing fields, there’s not that much combat to worry about.
The environments are nice. The music is decent. I would have liked more hints on where to go, but I guess Karrock’s compass magic is all they want us to have. I really dislike the camera. I’d like to twin stick moving and targeting. Saving the right stick for the compass magic that is rarely used seems like a bad replacement for being able to look in a direction you aren’t currently traveling.
I’m also not sure why they made Pryzm a winged unicorn, since they explain she can’t fly while Karrock is riding her. Best she can do is her hover attack. They’re unicorns. You don’t need to have wings to explain the hover attack. Just say it’s something they can do. Maybe they’re just big Chibi-Usa fans.
I wouldn’t call this game a “must have”. I might finish it, but I think the gameplay would get a little repetitive unless, again, you’re speedrunning it. Having the winning strategy require ignoring all the monsters to get to the next boss/miniboss seems weird. Why wouldn’t you want to kill them? But they don’t stay defeated, so it’s pointless. No xp, no loot, just put there to waste your time.
The lack of a Chapter Two implies that the corruption plague won’t be resolved in this game. I’d love to see someone speedrun this game, but it won’t be me.
- Nobody buys the old same game, new year sports games, so they tend to accumulate until some crafty kid has the bright idea to sell the disks as coasters. ↩︎
