Qu'est-ce que c'est?

(DOS/Commodore CDTV, Delta 4 Interactive, 1993)
Interactive Movies.
That should run a chill down the spine of any gamer in their mid-thirties.

The dawn of CD based gaming was instantly seen as a way to supplement real video footage in place of doing any actual work designing graphics, characters, backgrounds and such. The early 90's was drowned in such entertainment (questionable word choice) on fledging new CD consoles such as the 3DO, CDi and Sega Mega-Cd.
All terrible machines. Fact.

£15 for the lot, You pay me.

In 1993, I would have been about thirteen years old, and I was more than interested in the concept of "Real Video" games, already being a disciple of Don Bluth's laserdisc trilogy and the American Laser Games shooters, of which I'm an unashamed fan.
I remember reading short, forgotten reviews about an interactive movie that appeared around this time on the PC and the first ever CD based console, the Commodore Amiga CD-TV

Ever used one of these? Liar.

The game was called "Psycho Killer" which tied it in with another interest of mine, as I was obsessed with Slasher movies as a young 'un.
A scary pair of eyes stare out from behind the game's title logo, sinister stuff indeed.

You know it's a real game because it's ADULT

The game never got large reviews, or much coverage in general by the gaming press, as it was a small scale release, and for such an obscure format to boot. But I often wondered about it, as this game sounded right up my particularly dark alley.
Fast forward twenty years later and, whilst browsing a site for DOS abandonware, my eyes set upon a title, a title that literally unlocks a memory long since buried under stacks of old gaming magazines and episodes of Knightmare in my brain.
Psycho Killer is here..
and I can finally play it..
and Fuck Me is it rubbish.

If this picture excites you, you're gonna LOVE Psycho Killer

My first realisation is that it's a British game, a very British game, and more than likely a bedroom developed one at that. My second realisation is instead of being Full Motion Video, it's more camcorder footage, converted to photographs, then slide-showed next to one another which gives a bizarre stop-motion look.
Also, on the PC release, all the colour has been compressed out, giving everything a fugly, one tone palette.

The narrative is as simple as this: Three people, A geeky protagonist, the anorak-sporting PSYCHO KILLER and some girl as a damsel in distress, chase each other around a muddy field in an area we Brits refer to as "The Home Counties" that is to say, very sparse farmland moors, completely lacking in life, animals and interest.

Gameplay consists of moving through a series of locations/photographs, choosing whether to go one way or the other. Every so often, our completely unbelievable Psycho Killer will attack, and you have to click on something on the screen to avoid death, such as his weapon or his bored looking oik face.

"Eat my Reeboks, Freak-Face": ACTUAL DIALOGUE

Our hero narrates each scene with his poindexter voice, his husky breath heaving and popping on the soundtrack as he records the dialogue too close to the mic jammed into the AUX socket of his Amiga, exclaiming "Sugar!" when in a near-death struggle so as not to offend the audience.
Occasionally, the killer speaks, and he hilariously sounds just like a walkman when the batteries are running out.

There is little to no direction given to the player as he stumbles through endless sequences of tree photography, or even a heads up on what to do when danger strikes. Thus, much death will occur as the player fails to realise when they were supposed to perform an action, or that those four grainy pixels in a murky photograph were actually an essential item that needed collecting.

Psycho Killer presents its myriad of gameplay options

I persevered after several deaths, and eventually found my way through the grotty fields to a jetty, where I simply sparked PSYCHO KILLER the fuck out with a pointed stick.
And that was that.

I'd completed the game. Less than forty five minutes after booting it.

On release, Psycho Killer cost around £30. I had finished it in a little over a half-hour, like you would a browser game on a rainy afternoon. This is hilarious today, when people now constantly bitch because some Blockbuster Xbox game was "only" 15 hours long.

Admittedly, I have been a bit mean to Psycho Killer, because at the end of the day, it was just a low budget production, and it at least deserves praise for having the inspiration to quickly latch on to the just-birthed Interactive Fiction market. A market that is still going today in its own form, with games such as Hotel Dusk and Virtue's Last Reward.
So I'm not bashing the game's developers for their work, though they should have known better than to cast some guy who looks like the school playground weed dealer as their machete wielding homicidal lunatic.

Seconds later, he fell into the river and drowned... OR DID HE? (yes, he did)

But Psycho Killer is a terrible game, far too expensive for its short and tiring experience. I would have been furious to have dropped that much cash on this back in the day.
It's probably the worst Interactive Movie ev....

..oh...never mind.



(From the internets: The game in its entirety, including Tutorial and death scenes)