What does it mean to be in a dream? Is it defined by the vividly indescribable surroundings? Is it the disjointed and bare thread connections of a narrative? Or maybe it is an unnerving sense of reality gone uncanny? Whatever the case may be, dreams are a stream of consciousness that have the capacity to delight, terrify, or even confuse an individual. Much like a dream, Cryo Interactive Entertainment’s 1994 adventure game, Commander Blood encapsulates all the elements of a dream. In this entry to the Video Game Obscura, we take a deep look into this science fiction madhouse in hopes of finding purpose and meaning within the cosmos.
I had always been aware of Commander Blood. While perusing an infinite library of MS-DOS games, I would always stop to stare at the box art and screenshots and add it to my immense mental list of games to play, only for it to sit dormant for years. It wasn’t until my good friend, Mike from the Adventure Game Club Podcast brought it back up to my attention that it really took hold. He said to me only two words, “FMV Puppets,” and instantly Commander Blood became deeply rooted into my psyche as a necessity to experience.
FMV PUPPETS
For some context, I have an absolute adoration for full motion video in video games. The use of live actors in a variety of genres just hooks me in right away. It can be in the so-bad-it’s-good category, or genuinely earnest, FMV has always delighted me. I also am a humongous fan of puppets. Growing up with the Muppets as a staple of my everyday life, whenever I see a puppet I am instantly transported to a world of childlike wonder and allure. So when Mike poured that figurative fuel to my emotional fire, I fired the game up and had to know for sure if it was for me.
To break down the plot, you are Commander Blood, in charge of transporting the world's oldest human, Bob Morlock, through the cosmos on a state of the art ship known as the ARK. Your task? Locate special black holes that will transport you back in time to the point of the birthing of all existence, the big bang. You see, ol’ Cap’n Bob is the wealthiest, most successful businessman in the universe and wants to see the big bang once and for all to provide purpose and meaning to their life before it inevitably comes to an end. You aren’t alone in this journey either. With you is your computer assistant, Honk who provides insight in the world, endless commentary and also serves as an in-game hint system for players stumped on where to go next. You also have the help of a psychic space dolphin known as ORXX that is your liaison for your planetside interactions with aliens. Teamed with Olga, your ship's translator, you are able to use ORXX to safely interact with aliens without fear of bodily harm. You see, the entirety of the game takes place on the bridge of the ARK. You never leave, but why would you? You have everything you possibly need at your fingertips. You have a video phone for long distance interstellar calls, a cryobox to store all your items/people safely and heck, you even have a TV to watch all the latest shows like Scrut Channel.
Every ship needs a psychic space dolphin.
The gameplay itself is actually incredibly basic. The bulk of your gameplay time is dedicated to navigating from one planet to the other and conversing with alien lifeforms through a basic topic-based conversational system. You simply talk to everyone about everything to trigger the next event somewhere amidst the stars and repeat the process ad nauseum. On an incredibly rare occasion, you will need to enter the mind of a robot to collect resources called Bionium that some aliens will require, but mostly serve as the currency needed to get hints from your assistant, Honk.
The act of collecting Bionium is without question, one of the most bizarre pieces of gameplay I’ve come across. You are thrust into cyberspace, in the first person perspective as you use your hand to fly through the stars and collect polygonal shapes with faces on them to feed to floating neon manta rays. Once you collect the shapes, you are immediately beset upon by a variety of enemy types such as buzzing space bugs, or flying cannons that will bump into you constantly in an attempt to break free the bionium from your grasp. This segment is tedious, frustrating and absolutely bizarre as there are lots of spinning, whirring polygonal machinations that defy all real description. A multitude of tiny satellites orbiting enormous planetoid faces with rictus grins, spaceships with ribbons of bionium trailing behind them like ribbons dancing across the sky. While the gameplay itself may be basic, its presentation is absolutely awe inspiring.
I can't tell you exactly what this is a screenshot of.
And that can be said about the majority of the game. The ship itself is pulsing with purples and blues; with mechanisms that ache to be interacted with by your virtual fingertips. The music and ambient sounds capture a sense of existential unease with moments of brash metallic clashing. The characters you come across are overflowing with personality as the actual puppets themselves are truly alien and dripping with craft.There is a unique identity to the world of Commander Blood, that it is not easy to ignore the siren call of the game. It is a prime textbook example of French visual aesthetics in games during that time period.
To be very honest though, personality and presentation are the laurels this game rests on. Its narrative is where the game begins to show cracks. Plot is disjointed, with puzzles and goals that are difficult to parse and understand. Characters will seek specific items with no prompts to inform the player their need for them. Moments will occur where you are left roaming to each individual planet over and over again in hopes of the next event to trigger and for you to continue. There are even moments where major plot point problems get solved off-screen by other characters for no particular reason, leaving you scratching your head as to the point of the conflict in the first place.
As a player, your one job is to ask an alien every single possible dialog option in order to trigger the next event which may or may not be telegraphed and there is a lot of dialogue. You will be subjected to a barrage of information that commits one of the largest faux pas in game design; for a quiz. Not just one quiz, mind you. Oh no; two separate quizzes. And they are not simple quizzes. They will ask you questions about the history of the world. Who was responsible for painting a certain painting during a certain era? How many creatures are involved in a mating ritual? Do you need to know this information outside of the quiz? No! Do you know that a quiz is coming? No! These quizzes get thrown at you in the last quarter of the game. Don’t know the answers? Well GOOD LUCK!
As if that wasn’t frustrating enough, the game has one of the most anticlimactic endings I’ve ever witnessed. It happens very suddenly, makes zero sense and has you wondering if you ultimately wasted your time. Nothing gets settled. There is no closure to narrative threads as you, the protagonist, achieve nothing in the game. Instead, you watch other characters do the heavy lifting of the game while you run basic errands for the sole purpose of… something.
I am not interested in your cyber wares, comrade.
You are introduced to characters that serve no purpose, are given dialog and information that hints at some larger game you never get to play and never really do what the game promises. You are told that you will be traveling through time to witness the big bang and… you go through a single black hole and travel to a time period that gives you a new set of planets to do a new series of fetch quests that somehow push the plot forward and put you back to the original timeline you started in.
To give you an idea of this feeling of futility, there is a puzzle in the game where you need to provide an explosive to help a criminal escape prison. You find the bouncer of a club that somehow knows the prisoner and knows of the explosive. When you first select the dialog topic of the explosive, he tells you it is really easy to make and provides a list of ingredients that are all available at the suprastore planet. Do you go to that planet and buy the materials to make it? No. You have no way of making money, even though you are introduced to an NPC who wants to pay you for bionium and never does. Instead, you click the dialog topic three more times and he eventually gives you the explosive and you free the criminal.
Please don't kiss me.
Commander Blood is a game all about style and really no substance. It feels like a fever dream with truly creative concepts that never get to reach their full potential. It is a shame, because you can see where they are going, but they never get to reach the goal. It feels unfinished, mismanaged and underfunded and that hurts, because there is so much it could have done better to make the game feel more like a game.
Final Verdict - Yeah, no.
Commander Blood is a Yeah, No.