Drowned God

Drowned God: Conspiracy of the Ages is a 1996 science fiction adventure game developed by Epic Multimedia Group and published by Inscape.

The player attempts to uncover the truth through the course of the game by traveling to a variety of different worlds, interacting with historical and fictional characters, and solving puzzles.

After facing legal trouble and fines when he attempted to sell the text, Horse shelved it until playing Myst and The 7th Guest in the mid-1990s, whereupon he decided a first-person adventure game would be the best way to tell the manuscript's story.

[4] The true history, according to the game, is that aliens from the Orion area of space seeded humanity on Earth thousands of years ago and have since guided its development.

The library of Alexandria housed much of what game writer Harry Horse called "forbidden knowledge" before it was destroyed; the Knights Templar, whose membership included luminaries such as Leonardo da Vinci and Isaac Newton, preserved the information for centuries.

The Globe is a giant brass cylinder full of gears, fronted by a clock face made of sliding and rotating plates comprising twenty-two Roman numerals, which represent the Major Arcana, with the Kabbalistic tree of life in its center.

Above and below the central chamber are two other areas, called Kether and Malchut respectively, each of which houses a display screen with a mask-like face that provides the player with information about the next task.

The player must enter four different worlds[8] through the Bequest Globe, each of which is an amalgamation of historical and fantastical elements and is named after one of the sefirot on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life.

Choosing either of the two doors results in an ending in which the player is trapped in a dystopian world: either Kether's, a technological police state, or Malchut's, a society of forced genetic manipulation.

If the player instead chooses to open the central chamber, a scene with a group of grey aliens approaching is briefly shown, wherein they say, "We are coming, for we are Legion."

[4] The story which became the basis for Drowned God was originally a phony manuscript Horse wrote in 1983, ostensibly describing events after the destruction of the lost city of Atlantis.

Horse's initiation into the concept of an alternate history came in the early 1980s, when he first encountered professor Ian Halpke, who explained to him that information from the Kabbalah and ancient Jewish texts "hide and encipher the secret", namely, human evolution was aided by extraterrestrial intelligence.

[4] After his hoax was discovered, Horse held on to the text for the next decade, until he played Myst and The 7th Guest and decided the point-and-click adventure genre was a good match for his conspiracy theory-inspired ideas.

[13] It was one of the top ten best-selling video games in United States during the first month after its release, but bugs and poor support from the developers caused it to fall out of favor with gamers by December.

The new version of the game was assembled via a collaboration between Horse's two sisters, Emma Blackler and Kay O’ Hanlon, and some former members of the original Drowned God creative team, including producer and co-creator Algy Williams, art director Alastair Graham, and one of the developers, Mike Gamble, who also co-founded Next Path Media.

[19] Drowned God received mixed reviews, with many critics complimenting the game's ideas and imagery while giving a less favorable response to its audio, puzzles, and execution.

GameSpot reviewer Vince Broady wrote that the game sounded very promising, and might "also raise awareness of the thread of deception that runs throughout recorded history.

"[9] T. Liam McDonald of PC Gamer wrote that he was "fascinated by the strong sense of style and the intellectual approach to terrific subject matter".

Hughes wrote that the game was one that could be played from start to finish "without having any idea what the hell's going on", noting its references to a wide variety of subjects, including Egyptian mythology, The Man in the Iron Mask, and the Bermuda Triangle.

"[11] GameSpot considered the game one of the most disappointing of 1996 in their annual recap, writing "the great premise is buried like the mysteries of the ages themselves under a mediocre Myst clone".

"[21] Mark Reece and Brooke Adams of Deseret News also had mixed feelings about the game, calling it both "clever and deep" and "frustrating and difficult".

There is a pedestal in the center of a room with a sculpture of Albert Einstein's head on it, facing forward. On the front of the pedestal is a clock-like panel with a large button labeled "NOW" in its center. In the background, there are an image of a partially eaten apple to the left, two white doors in the center, and a chalkboard to the right.
The Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton dialogue puzzle, described as "brilliant" by critics [ 9 ] [ 11 ]