Living in people's childhood memories is the best way to continue a game.
How can a large-scale game with a huge world view, plot twists and rich scenes be loaded into a Flash game with a capacity of only a few tens of meters, so that players can experience it online? More than a decade ago, a game called Warner Epic Adventures gave the answer to gamers who were new to the Internet.
It comes from Canadian game studio Sarbakan, the developer of another Flash game, Miller Hill Mystery.
If "Miller Hill Mystery" is an obscure and terrifying childhood shadow, then its "twin brother" "Warner Epic Adventure" is probably a hunting adventure that leads children to explore the "unsolved mystery".
Steppenwolf: The X-Creatures Project, originally literally translated as Steppenwolf: Project X, was released in 2001, two years after The Miller Hills Mystery, and was still released by Sarbakan Game Studios on the warner Bros. Entertainment website.
Similar to "Miller Hill Mystery", the game is still divided into six chapters in the form of chapters, 4 episodes of each chapter, 24 episodes of a coherent story. Unlike it, warner Adventures is larger in scale, with richer plots, locations, and puzzle levels. Plus, it doesn't have a bad tail.
The story is probably about a scientist with a brain as well as limbs, and a beautiful female journalist with an adventurous spirit, who explores the world, searches for legendary creatures and fights against the villain's conspiracy, and the name of the game "Steppenwolf" is derived from the male protagonist's nickname.
A few years after the game's release, it was moved to a domestic website and replaced with the now more straightforward name Warner Epic Adventures.
It is worth mentioning that the first time many domestic players came into contact with this series was through the youth website "China Young Eagle Network" undertaken by the Youth League Central Committee and the National Committee of Young Workers at that time. This place, where countless post-90s generations learned to use the Internet, had a rather popular forum at that time, and its game section was equally popular, and many famous Flash games were "popular".
Similar to the situation of "Miller Hill Mystery", the game was still not Chinese when it was moved to the domestic website, but "Warner Epic Adventure" was dominant in theme, easy to understand, and the player experience was significantly better than that of "Miller Hill Mystery".
Although it was an early flash game, Warner Epic Adventures was still unique enough compared to its peers — it controlled character actions with a keyboard, and from the fourth chapter onwards, it introduced a save mode, which gave players more of a sense of operation than the adventure mini-games that were mainly touch-based at that time.
Judging from the game's worldview, Sarbakan is certainly more ambitious. Players will see those unknown creatures in the real world at different locations around the world, such as the suspected descendants of the dinosaurs, the Mokra-Mbianbe, the Himalayan Snow Monster, the mythical sea monster Kraken, and the vampire Drobercabra, who began to attack American livestock 30 years ago, etc. On the pretext of collecting the blood of strange creatures, the player will travel across four continents according to the needs of the plot, from tropical rainforests to snowy mountains, from no man's land to residential areas, forming a span of half the world.
The game showcases regional features in its details, such as Chapter 5, a large number of slum buildings, and the customs of the Dominican region of sugar cane fields and rum distilleries
After experiencing a series of dangers, betrayals, and even murders, the hero and heroine join forces to solve many crises and defeat the boss, and the story ends. The whole plot direction and ending are not difficult to guess, but the characters are complete, there are many characters, the twisting suspense is just right, and the ending is deliberately left blank, bringing space to the imagination of subsequent players.
But to feel this Hollywood-style plot, you must be able to get through the game's puzzle levels.
Without the weird gameplay of Miller Hill Mystery, players often "die" in various poses in Warner's Epic Adventures, including unknown monsters that look frightening. The props and puzzle designs in each map of the game are interrelated, and the small puzzles are constantly presented to the whole map to present a big puzzle. In view of the fact that the early games always had few prompts, in the absence of a strategy, players still have almost no other way but to trial and error and open their brains.
The monsters that gnaw on people's heads in antarctic laboratories can also be regarded as the childhood shadow of many people
However, for flash games with a relatively simple system, puzzle solving can be done in an exhaustive manner, as long as the player is skilled enough to find props, the difficulty of the game is still reasonable, which is especially useful in warner epic adventures with rich scene maps. Players with larger brain holes will also find that there is more than one solution to the game.
For example, in the first section of the third chapter, the heroine meg of the player's operation dodges the killer in the building and looks for key evidence, and after the player is knocked down by the character next to him, he will search for the key to the drawer where the key clue is located. If the player can't think of a body search, they can also use the crowbar obtained in the elevator room to pry open the drawer to get clues.
For most players, relying on the raiders circulating online is indeed a better choice, but even if you solve a few of the small puzzles on your own, such a sense of achievement can give players a lot of happiness.
Overall, the more mature puzzle level design and complete story gave Warner Epic Adventure a high degree of completion that was rare in Flash adventure games at that time. This has brought the game a lot of loyal fans, and even a few years after its end, there are still people digging up its story.
To this day, Warner Epic Adventures has been dubbed the "AAA" of flash gaming by some. Such a statement is not an exaggeration, because Sarbakan has taken the series of games very seriously from the beginning.
All chapters of Warner Epic Adventures were not released at one time, and Sarbakan first published some chapters on the Warner official website, and only after receiving positive feedback from players did the next content.
In 2002, In an interview with the media, Guy Boucher, president of Sarbakan, revealed that the game production team has a total of 7 to 8 members, covering important positions such as designers, animators, programmers, etc., including a full-time soundtrackist responsible for the original soundtrack of the game. Attentive players will notice that from Miller Hill to Warner's Epic Adventures, the game has a special voiceover for both the protagonist and supporting roles. Even by today's standards, this is still a solid team of professionals.
Such efforts have received positive feedback for them, and the game has not only been widely praised abroad, but also become a childhood for many domestic players. But what should surprise Sarbakan the most is that in the decades after that, the Flash game, which was born in 2001, will still be loved by players.
After the six chapters of the game are all updated, the unfinished players go through the details of the game, trying to dig out each hidden dark line or plot of the production team. To this day, the ambiguous relationship between the male and female protagonists can still trigger heated discussions among the game's loyal fans.
The game's original music, titled "Episode 25" by the soundtrack, sparked a discussion among players about the existence of the game's 25th episode, and continues to this day.
The sequel hasn't arrived, but players' expectations remain. They created a dedicated WiKi for Warner's Epic Adventures, collecting characters, creatures, and items from the game for people to search.
In the past decade or so, there are still many players who create characters based on the images in their childhood memories.
There are even domestic players who create the same humanities with this world view
In 2017, a Dutch player who was crowdfunding on the crowdfunding site Patron said he intended to reset the game using a U3D engine, when the news caused a strong reaction among Warner Epic Adventure players.
Unfortunately, this seemingly ambitious project did not bear fruit, and like the end of many classic Flash game series, it seems to have come to an end. But that doesn't affect players from remembering the game.
In 2001, Flash games were only in the early stages of development, and "playing games directly on the web" was still a novelty for most people at the time. Born in that period, Warner Epic Adventures has made countless players unforgettable with its avant-garde concept, complete story and rich puzzle levels.
Twenty years later, Flash games have become the tears of history, and Sarbakan is no longer what it used to be. Like Miller Hill Mystery, Warner's Epic Adventures have become an antiquity living in video and memories, but perhaps living in people's childhood memories is the best way to continue a game.