Everyone Wants To Talk About Ripper Because It Has Christopher Walken, But I Want To Talk About Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller Because It Has An Unhinged Dennis Hopper!
Presently, Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. stands as a too-big-to-fail monolith in the video game industry. Not only do they own and operate the Rockstar Games and 2K labels, but they also own an eclectic portfolio of publishing outfits and development studios. With Microsoft's purchase of Activision-Blizzard looming like a proverbial sword of Damocles, Take-Two Interactive is moving to become the second-largest publicly traded independent game studio in the Americas and Europe, behind only their sworn sports rival, Electronics Arts. Now, some of you may wish to dispute that, considering Take-Two's current business model is that of a holding company and doesn't itself engage in internal development, but that's ignoring the fact that when the projects they fund launch, for better or worse, whole subsets of the gaming industry and community come to a standstill.
They are also very good at making money in this industry and getting their name out there, whether you approve of their business tactics or not. Their 50% stake in NBA 2K League and partnership with the NBA has cemented it as one of the more stable fixtures in e-sports, along with the Madden NFL Championship Series and EVO. Rockstar needs no introduction and 2K as well. 2K's many branches and subsidiaries are far more multifarious than its critics sometimes contend and are more than just a bunch of sports game-making factory mills. Firaxis Games is a division of 2K, and the BioShock, Borderlands, and Mafia franchises also fall under their umbrella. Take-Two Interactive is a big deal in this industry, but if we were to go back to when the company was first founded, there weren't telltale signs it would achieve such monumental heights. Sure, the company got started by Ryan Ashley Brant, who was, in turn, the son of a millionaire magazine magnate. However, it is interesting that Ryan could have inherited his father's media empire and instead decided, "Hey, I want to make video games!" His life was ripe for a real-life version of Succession. Instead, at twenty-one, he surprised everyone in his family and those following the print business by saying, "Nah!" after independently raising $1.5 million to form a company named Take-Two. Oh, and before you get too impressed, Ryan's father, Peter Brant, paid his son enough cash to buy 25% of the company to help it get off the runway. Special note, Peter Brant has a cozy relationship with Donald Trump and, in the 90s, was found guilty of tax evasion.
But rather than make this a blog about the necessity of eating the rich, let's return to the topic of Take-Two Interactive's less-than-orthodox introduction to the video game industry. The company started with Star Crusader, a 3D space combat simulation game. Like many in the PC gaming world at the time, the company started things off with a Wing Commander clone but without any of the over-the-top FMV cutscenes! The game was a modest success, but with investors and his father breathing down his neck looking for a juicy payday, owner Ryan Brant observed the PC video game landscape while planning Take-Two's next project. What he landed on was The Daedalus Encounter by developer Mechadeus. The Daedalus Encounter is an interactive movie starring Tia Carrere, and its surprise success inspired Take-Two to fund their own actor-headlining point-and-click adventure game. However, this would have Dennis Hopper, Grace Jones, Stephanie Seymour, and Geoffrey Holder and mix FMV with in-game 3D-rendered character models and environments! That game, Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller, was so successful it convinced Take-Two that the "gravy train" to success in the video game industry was FMV adventure games. That's how you get magnificent projects like Ripper and Black Dahlia, two far better-known games from the early days of Take-Two's history.
I cannot emphasize this point enough, but these FMV adventure games, while lampooned for their poor gameplay and decried for their exorbitant budgets, made a lot of money. Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller sold 300,000 units within six months of its release. Joke all you want about the cheesy acting in Ripper or at the notion that Take-Two spent $625,000 of its $2.5 million budget to hire Christopher Walken, Karen Allen, and Burgess Meredith. Ripper made back its entire budget plus a one million dollar surplus by the eighth-month mark from its release. Ripper was such a financial success that Take-Two reported to its shareholders that it amounted to 28.7% of all company revenue during that fiscal year. Scoff all you want at the FMV CD-ROM era of adventure games, but this was the "golden goose" in the PC game market, with Myst and Riven still setting the entire industry on fire. And as I have said before, contrary to popular belief, Myst outsold Diablo II, Half-Life, Command & Conquer, Doom, Doom II, and Baldur's Gate by a considerable margin and stood as the best-selling PC game of all time until The Sims.
What's notable is how Take-Two used their FMV-derived mother lode: they pivoted as a business and left the market they helped steamroll. Unlike others banking on the continued success of FMV adventure games, Take-Two saw the writing on the wall as 3D technology improved and used its revenue to forge a publishing deal with Acclaim Entertainment to achieve better distribution, especially overseas. They also completed a licensing deal with Sony to bring its games to the PlayStation. Less than three years after Ripper, the company would purchase DMA Design, which would later go on to become Rockstar, and gave a project by Sam and Dan Houser called Grand Theft Auto the greenlight using this treasure trove of adventure game money. And, as we often say in these parts, the rest is history.
What Exactly Is Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller?
Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller is in the weird middle ground between being a multi-media game and an adventure game. Like Myst, your tasks are often basic as they involve navigating between two locations and affixing something you picked up or learned from a prior one to a new one. Unlike Myst, Hell relies heavily on password and cipher-based word problems rather than environmental-based ones. There's one incredibly terrible dexterity puzzle I need to review on its own, but it is the only part of this game that deviates even slightly from the conventions of a SCUMM-based point-and-click adventure game. Everything you do in this game involves going from one environment to the next, hearing someone out, and getting them a random trinket so they hand over an item necessary to progress the story. Sometimes you get a hint about a new location instead of a physical object. It's simply riveting stuff. The one novel idea that this game has is its party management system, and it is one of MANY parts of the game that feel tacked on and partially realized. Throughout the story, you will encounter various possible teammates with the tools and resources to complete puzzles or overcome barriers. The problem is that you have a limited number of party slots, which requires you to dismiss some members to make way for others, and, as we will discuss, if you are not following a guide, you can screw yourself.
The development of Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller is notable and worth reviewing as well. Take-Two was still an upstart label when it was interested in getting in on the PC adventure game boom during the 90s. So, they did what anyone seeking to burn millions of media mogul money: they bought an entire development team from a rival! However, in this case, they purchased the team behind MicroProse Software, Inc.'s 1993 cyberpunk RPG, BloodNet. But Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller isn't an RPG, and as a result, you get a tale as old as time: a development team entirely out of its element because its producers are looking for a specific type of game they are not accustomed to making! Also, the demands of Take-Two to make a game with Hollywood actors limited the story and world the Bloodnet team was capable of producing. As I mentioned, the game stars Dennis Hopper, Grace Jones, Stephanie Seymour, and Geoffrey Holder. Fully rendered 3D characters represent Hopper and Jones, while Seymour and Holder appear in FMV cutscenes. Was this a technical limitation of early CD-ROM technology, or was the Bloodnet team uncomfortable with their mandate? I don't know the answer to that, but the live-action FMV is used sparingly, which makes the game a weird contrast with Take-Two's next two 90s adventure games (i.e., Ripper and Black Dhalia).
And if you are looking for actors going over the top with their line reads, you don't get that in Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller like you do in Ripper and Black Dahlia. Dennis Hopper is in two scenes where you feel like he's in his most potent form, but his scenes amount to about ten to twelve minutes of the game's playtime. Stephanie Seymour plays Cynna Stone, a virtual reality assistant that chimes in whenever she has something to add to what's happening to the story. However, her lines and dialogue must have gotten thrown into a paper shredder because her presence is only felt for about ten to fifteen minutes during the first half of the story. Geoffrey Holder speaks to you in a monotone voice while reading encyclopedia articles. Grace Jones has her moments as the story's primary antagonist, Solene Solux. However, considering she's one of the most vivid and explosive personalities in the entertainment industry, having her be a cackling pro-fascist villain seems like a waste. Instead of striking Hollywood actors chewing through scenery like their lives depend on it, you instead get primarily dry and dull line deliveries by Gideon and Rachel, the game's two playable characters, one of which you select as the primary character, though you often need to switch between the two to complete tasks. And let me tell you, their voice acting IS NOT GOOD!
Production unevenness is a common issue with this game. From the handful of screencaps I posted, you might have noticed that Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller is a hideous-looking game. Running the game on modern technology allows for some shader options, but even they cannot stop the pre-rendered backgrounds from looking like shit and being incredibly dark. You see a lot of random 90s PC game design stand-ins that add to the game's inconsistent tone. For example, there are a TON of giant skeleton statues that resemble the ones from the Halloween-themed fixtures in Rollercoaster Tycoon. This issue leads me to the point that every single environment in this game is garish and over-the-top. The game attempts to convey a cyberpunk dystopian future but does so with levels like a bar that tries so hard to emulate 90s-era grunge sensibilities it's embarrassing. Things get worse when you enter the environments in Hell, which eschew the game's ordinarily mature tone of needing to topple a totalitarian state. For example, at one point, you find yourself in a classroom with a hellish teacher barking quiz questions at you and, on another occasion, a dentist in an operating room that would be fit for a nu-metal music video circa 1999. I almost want to say that it is a case of the development team getting new state-of-the-art design and programming tools and not knowing what to do, but then why does the game's framerate, especially during FMV cutscenes, drop to the single digits? And before you ask, running the game on an emulator or with modern processors doesn't help because they were programmed that way! If you want things to speed up and play at an average framerate, the game directs you to click the left mouse button, and only then will cutscenes play at 30 FPS. WHY WOULD ANYONE DO THAT?!
You Need To Play Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller Using A Guide
Playing Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller sucks. The inventory system is clunky, especially when you need to use one object from a supporting party member with an item in your primary character's inventory. The map you use to navigate the world is endlessly frustrating as it is hard to look at, and various environments have multiple layers or alternate locations in the same spot. To highlight, the Federal Triangle is a location, and there's a part where you need to hop back and forth between the Bureau of Records and Transgressions Entrance. Each time, because the game doesn't connect its environments, you must complete a task, pick the "dcmap" part of the screen to select the Federal Triangle AGAIN and then scroll to the sublocation you require next. That might sound par for the course in an old-school adventure game, but by the mid to late 90s, that was falling out of favor. Likewise, Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller has the added "bonus" of having hundreds of possible ways to get a "game over." Not solving a puzzle within a finite amount of time? Your game is done. Did you pick the wrong location to go to next? You're dead. Did you select the wrong NPC from a party of five in a bar or interact with patrons in a club in the incorrect order? I hope you saved your game recently because you hard-locked yourself to get the bad ending! Most of your interactions in this game involve you thinking about where you need to go and praying that you picked the correct location, and that's not exactly "fun."
These game-overs mask the fact that everything Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller wants you to do is relatively simple. Here's a convenient guide that saved my attempt to play and complete this game. Notice how many steps or puzzles the guide writer summarizes in a sentence or two. Worse, the game has a time limit that it doesn't tell you. Mark my words, if you attempt to explore the ridiculous world in this game and all of its larger-than-life NPCs, you will end up in a fail state where you will not have enough time, or in this case, fast travel warps to complete the game. Again, this is a core mechanic the game outright NEVER TELLS YOU! To compound the punishing time limit, you need to be precise and careful about your mouse clicks, and this being an adventure game in the 90s, many of the objects you need to find are almost impossible to notice without some third-party help. It also doesn't help that the game's production values are everywhere. I can excuse the pre-rendered backgrounds, considering Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller was made in the 90s, and 3D modeling was a daunting enterprise at the time. The FMV cutscenes were an industry norm, and you just had to "be there" to understand why they weren't a big surprise. But for the vast majority of your time, dialogue scenes are presented flatly with close-up shots of characters repeating one of three possible canned animations, with the most common ones being simple hand gestures and head tilts that lead to frowns or scowls. Furthermore, none of these shots or dialogue scenes takes up the entirety of the screen. Outside of the star power, this game feels like a budget title.
More alarming, there are so many concepts and mechanics the game forgets about. Collecting party members is a big deal during the first hour. There's even a bit with that virtual reality FMV companion expressing shock that you can recruit "Scub Stevens" into your ranks, and ultimately, you use his hacking abilities thrice. A telepath also joins your team, and after a cheesy introduction wherein his girlfriend tells him to beat it after he kills her corrupt teacher, you only use him twice. The core problem here is that because the game has a mountain of one-off mechanics, it becomes impossible for you to develop fluency when it expects you to explore new environments or get through roadblocks. You have a hacker AND demolition expert in your team, and the game is incredibly inconsistent about which of those two you need to use to unlock security panels or chained doors. Likewise, the game's combat is nonexistent. What it does is tell you that you need to fight someone at a specific location, and your success depends on if you have all of the required items in your inventory to complete a combat skill check. The issue here is that the game provides no clues as to what any of these items are, and when you do pass them, they are in-game cinematics where you don't have any control over the action. You sit back and watch the goofiest action sequences I have seen in a long while.
All of this grousing suggests you must play this game with a guide. The game engages in virtually zero signposting and piggybacking, which, if you attempt to solve by playing it blind, can result in you falling into traps and red herrings. As I said, you might have insufficient turns to reach the final location if you are not careful. What can also happen is quest critical NPCs can die if you fail to find them quickly enough. In one case, the main characters overhear a gang discussing a plan to murder an older man who happens to be connected to the government conspiracy your characters are trying to unravel. If you hop to even one disconnected environment or level that is NOT this guy's apartment where you warn him about the assassination attempt, he dies. However, if you forget to do this or misclick, the game continues as if you haven't screwed yourself over. It's like when you fail a primary mission objective in Perfect Dark or Goldeneye, and the game continues to let you mess around for a bit. Nevertheless, in this case, you continue exploring plot threads, not knowing an unsolvable roadblock will present itself five to six hours after the fact. Oh, and did I mention that the game has broken puzzles that are impossible to solve because this game wasn't adequately play-tested? Do you want to learn more about that juicy tidbit? Well, I'm more than happy to regale you with tales about why this game is straight-up BUSTED!
There Aren't A Lot Of Puzzles In Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller, But The Ones That Are Here Are AWFUL OR BROKEN!
When the puzzles in Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller work as intended and don't have a horrible bug or design flaw, they are overwhelmingly vanilla-ass password or cipher-based puzzles. Often, an NPC shouts a line or drops a note with clues on how to process computer code or shift alien scripts to translate them into discernable English. For example, when you break into the Federal Triangle, and your characters attempt to piece together why the current dictator decided to burn them, a critical data entry requires the password "Foggy Bottom," and a nearby note on a desk reads "ggyttom." That's fine and dandy, but there are also times when the game relies on esoteric riddles as the crux of its puzzles. On one occasion, you must rescue a freedom fighter from a demon torturing them in a music room. When you talk to them about how to proceed, they say, "Murder the dumb, torture the meek with the scent of death and the gnashing of teeth." That's your cue to have your character click panels on a musical device but only the silent ones. Unfortunately, that hint doesn't tell you the correct order, which is a problem. Also, the five muted keys are found on a 4x4 grid!
There are plenty of other occasions when the game needs to give you more information to reach its intended conclusions, but it doesn't. One that threw me for a loop was its final puzzle, wherein the game presents ten candles, and you need to light them in a specific order. That order is untold, and with ten candles, there are thousands of possible combinations to input. The password-based riddles also suffer from massive inconsistencies, and I must emphasize they are the lion's share of puzzles in the game. When inputting a password, you don't fan through a menu of possible options and instead need to type an answer into the game's parser. Using a parser isn't a weird choice in and of itself, considering Infocom was still making Zork games around the time of Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller. What drove me batty with this game is that sometimes the passwords are case-sensitive, and other times they aren't. And this issue doesn't necessarily stem from whether the password is based on a proper noun, as some passwords need sentence casing, others require proper casing, and some none at all.
When people give me a hard time that my adventure game blogs and videos occasionally use guides, I have to roll my eyes when I get to games like this. Plain and simple, you can only complete this game using a guide because several puzzles are broken. This statement is not hyperbole. The first example of a bug that shouldn't exist occurs shortly after your second visit to Hell. The game wants you to return to Mr. Beautiful's (i.e., Dennis Hopper) office and pick up a random pool cue. Next, you need to talk to a goon named Seceddine Marto, who gives you a hint indicating "R=23." Under normal circumstances, you would use this to apply to a series of phrases you earlier encountered to translate them into "Fruit Death," "Hell Road," and "Oil." This series of terms would, IN NORMAL CIRCUMSTANCES, inspire you to click on a jukebox and know to locate the albums or music groups named "Orange Martyrdom," "Damnation Avenue," and "Viscous Fluid" and select them in that order. Doing this action would NORMALLY allow you to enter their corresponding codes, E3, E8, and D9, into a computer to unlock the door to a secret room to receive a new device and continue the game. There's one problem. The programmer responsible for this puzzle spelled "Fruit Death" as "Friut Death" and "Oil" as "Oiv." The first of those spelling mistakes is no big deal, but the second one results in a nonsense word, and with hundreds of albums to select from, the puzzle quickly becomes impossible to solve. If your game relies on password-based puzzles, having game-breaking typos is an unconscionable error.
However, the most notorious mistake in this game happens when you reach "Hell's Schoolroom" near the end of the story. While there, a demonic schoolteacher demands that you complete a pop quiz where all of the questions are in a code. The exam topic is state capitols in the United States of America. Translating the questions is easy, but if you input the state capitals for their matching states, you'll STILL fail the puzzle! That's because the answers are programmed to be case-sensitive AND require the name of the city AND the name of the state they are located in. However, the teacher states in-game that they only want the name of the cities and for you to omit the names of their respective states! So, whoever programmed this puzzle did not talk to the person who wrote its directions and script. For example, after you translate the text in the quiz, the first question asks, "What is the capital of Iowa?" the correct answer in-game is "Des Moines Iowa." Still, if you type "Des Moines," which is the answer that follows the in-game directions, that is detected as an incorrect answer! That design flaw should have failed the game during the certification process and sent it back to the development team. However, with Take-Two still getting its feet wet, it's unlikely they had any formalized Q&A process within their ranks. Also, a fun fact for Borgmaster, there are no commas in answers for the MS-DOS version, but they are required with the 3DO port!
I Need To Talk To You About A Single Minigame
Complaining about a single minigame in a video game sounds petty and childish. And you know what? It is petty and childish, but I'm still going to do it! This single arcade game sequence took me damn near two hours to complete, and I'm still fuming about it. Near the middle of the game's second act, you learn about different factions unrelated to the religious dictatorship running the United States. One of these factions is a club of telepaths, another is addicted to neural implants, and another is obsessed with plastic surgery and body modification. You know, the usual stuff you see in a cyberpunk game! One of these factions tasks your intrepid duo with breaking into a morgue they suspect is improperly processing the bodies of recently departed group members. The issue is that the only entrance to this crematorium is guarded by a series of oscillating laser grids that will immediately alert the police. Oh, and the ground is mined, but the mines hop across the playing field you need to navigate while avoiding the laser grids! It's a goddamn NIGHTMARE!
The spawn positions of the mines are randomly generated each time you attempt this puzzle. The fact they move means that when you think you have found a safe place to try and gauge when to time your hops between the lasers, a mine could spawn underneath your character and immediately result in a "Game Over." The default camera angle could be better as it doesn't provide a great vantage point to determine where the laser grids bottom out. The edges between the puzzle's parts are hard to figure out, and the lighting makes seeing the mines a pain. Worse, the laser grid's speed makes it an almost impossible task to complete. And it's not as if they move in an easy-to-notice pattern where you can time yourself or do a countdown to finish it. I do not know how I got past this puzzle, but I did. If you want to see what this minigame looks like in motion, here's a quick ten-minute video clip of me explaining and showing what the game wants you to do.
This Story GOES PLACES!
Why would I play a questionable FMV-based adventure game that is not fun in any way, shape, or form? Well, for the same reasons I played MTV's Club Dead! Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller is a magical snapshot into 90s Americana. When you review it as a time capsule, you realize it is a work of art worthy of inclusion in the National Archives. The characters engage in a tech speak that crosses Star Trek's technobabble with leetspeak and forms a potent 90s-era linguistic baby. As you can already likely tell from my screenshots, this game is an artistic disaster, but it embodies a specific era of the 1990s to a T. And have I mentioned what some of the names are for the characters in this game? I don't think you're ready for this, but here's a list of some of the most notable, and be aware this is not a joke. These are actual names for NPCs in Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller!
- Solene Solux
- Scub Stevens
- Brett Carew
- Thomas Meaculp
- Wicked Stick
- Cyber Schmyber
- Drip (no last name)
- Electric Sex
- Barbara Bacchus
- Dr Clean (no period on the title)
- Aldous Xenon
- Derek Literati
- Senator Erin Burr
- Professor Coronary
- Suzy Toast
- Columbus Spatola
- Steele Jack
- Chastity Bene
- Milwaukee Jack
- Splits Magnola
- Eddy Commerce
- Grinda Dove
- Conklin Danforth
- Phyllis Dancing-till-Daybreak
But what's the story like in Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller? Well, it's a hot mess in the best way possible. The game starts with your two playable characters, Gideon Eshanti and Rachel Braque, being attacked by elite commandos from the current government of the United States of America, even though they are officers in the military in good standing. If you read the manual, you will discover during a previous election cycle, after a portal to Hell appeared and unleashed havoc on the world, American voters elected a far-right religious government that promised to guarantee people's safety. However, this government suspended all future elections and installed Imperator Solene Solux as ruler for life. Yeah, that part of the game hits differently these days. While our protagonists investigate why they have been burned, they encounter an underground resistance front trying to topple the current dictatorship and the forces of Hell. When Gideon and Rachel hack into the Pentagon and uncover files on how the government operates, they toss their lot in with the resistance group.
But what about the demons of Hell? Well, they have a pseudo-peace treaty with the far-right government of the USA. When someone breaks the puritanical rules and laws of the government, police from the dictatorship research the offending person's worst fear and then match them with a demon or devil that tortures them to their heart's delight. You also have monsters like Dennis Hopper's character, Mr. Beautiful, who carve out slices of the United States and act like gangsters protecting their turf. Or that's what we think at the start of the game. As you begin to investigate Hell and the government, your characters sign up to participate in an adult film directed by Asmodeus, who is styled to talk and look like Ron Jeremy. When an undercover marine from the resistance comes to the rescue and shoots Asmodeus, we find out he's an android. You then warp to a secret pocket dimension to talk to a man named "Deep Throat" because even in the 90s, it was cool to reference Watergate. Deep Throat reveals that Hell is a simulation operated by the far-right government to cement its power and justify subverting democracy. This plot twist is completely bananas. The demons scaring people into supporting the evil government, including Satan, are androids. How did the far-right nutjobs make this happen? Well, they blew up a big hole in the ground, claimed it to be Hell, and had all the demon androids ready to scare people into voting for them on standby!
There's a second plot twist almost as crazy as the one about Hell. As Gideon and Rachel try to investigate why the government wants to kill them, they notice that they mutter Latin phrases randomly or in their sleep. They find a leader of one of the factions in the world that can read Latin, leading them to an archive in the Pentagon. In this game, you hack and break into the Pentagon and Federal Triangle about four or five times, and it's no big deal. The future sure seems safer and more secure. Regardless, Gideon and Rachel find a record that explains that everyone on the scrub list, including themselves, were targets of an earlier government operation named "The Night of the Re-entombment." This operation snatched dozens of freedom fighters and then mindwiped them before redesigning their bodies and programming them to think they were law-abiding officers in the government. Despite early successes, the government fell into a Blade Runner issue of some early recipients breaking from their programming and causing chaos, so an order was sent to terminate everyone. I find it hilarious that the game says all this to you and then fobs it off almost immediately. Rachel declares that the report doesn't make sense and, if true, seems like a waste of time compared to simply killing them upon their first capture. Gideon ends up agreeing with her, and they shrug the entire matter off, and nothing more is said about the topic.
Then you fight the forces of Satan. Much like the earlier combat sequences, these boil down to skill checks wherein the game sees if you have all the materials in your inventory to beat a demon. If you do, you watch a cheap in-game action scene where the characters kill the monster, and if you don't, you get a "Game Over." The same thing happens when you fight Satan himself. You need an odd assortment of trinkets to beat him, and there's a fun puzzle where you need to write the words "God is dead" on a wall to summon him. After defeating the forces of Hell, Gideon and Rachel turn their attention to the evil dictatorship and try to hack into the server operating the androids to cause the program to break and reveal the ruse to everyone else. This event is the one time when your choice of who the primary character is plays a role in your playthrough as the volunteer to complete this task is the character you did not select, and after things don't pan out and Solene Solux breaks their mind, they die. With your remaining character, you break into the Pentagon and then fight Solene Solux in a fist fight which is the goofiest-looking thing in the world. Please don't take my word for it; here's an archive of me experiencing the end of this game!
This game is a rollercoaster, and you shouldn't play it. However, with Take-Two Interactive set to become one of the world's biggest independent video game companies, it's fun to look back at their rocky and wild start. It would be a licensing issue to bring these games back to the forefront, considering they all feature the likeness of huge names in the entertainment industry. Still, their trio of FMV adventure games (i.e., Hell, Ripper, and Black Dahlia) set them up for their meteoric rise to prominence, and they deserve more recognition than they presently have. At the very least, Take-Two should openly acknowledge that they would not exist without their early success in making these cheesy-ass adventure games. So, if anyone from Take-Two is reading this blog, I WANT YOU COWARDS TO ADMIT YOUR PAST! ACCEPT YOU MADE THIS GAME BEFORE TRICKING TEENS INTO SPENDING HUNDREDS ON NBA 2K LOOTBOXES! And one more time, here's the game's INCREDIBLE introductory cutscene!
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