The Collection Chamber: AREA D (aka DANGER ISLAND)

The ultimate action adventure DANGER ISLAND!

During an expedition in an unexplored area of South America, disaster strikers........

A research team has disappeared in mysterious circumstances. Your client, a genetic engineering company, wants answers. Your task is clear: protect the research and save your team.

"An incredible world full of danger, excitement and non-stop action."

Features:
Impressive graphics and realistic sound.
Breath-taking computer animation.
Film sequences with professional actors.
No installation required, just insert the CD and play.

~ from the back of the box

There is a certain charm to naff, low-budget adventure games. Some are so catastrophically bad that they become entertaining in spite of themselves - the Troll 2 of the gaming world if you will. I got that feeling from Titanic: A Mysterious Undersea Adventure, an objectively terrible game that I nevertheless found myself enjoying in much the same way one enjoys a particularly ill-advised B-movie. So when I discovered that the same German developers, Dosch Design, had previously ventured into prehistoric territory with Area D, also released as Danger Island and Dinosaurs: Danger Island in some territories, I was intrigued. Instead of Titanic fever, we have dinosaur fever: an expedition into the Amazon has gone horribly wrong, and apparently the only sensible response is to send one person in to sort it out. The question, then, is whether Area D lands on the right side of bad, where its shortcomings become part of the fun, or whether this particular expedition should have been cancelled before take-off.

The story is heavily inspired by Jurassic Park. A team of researchers has disappeared somewhere in a mysterious area of South America, and you are sent in to locate the missing scientists and get them out alive. Naturally, there are dinosaurs everywhere, because otherwise this would be a very different sort of game. The story is presented through a mixture of pre-rendered CGI environments, rudimentary computer-animated dinosaurs and live-action FMV sequences. The latter feature German actors dubbed in English, and with no attention to lip-syncing it's completely obvious. The dinosaurs themselves are similarly rough around the edges, roaring and stomping through scenes with all the grace of a cardboard cut-out being dragged across a television screen. You can probably guess the rest of the plot - there isn't really much more than what little I've outlined. It's incredibly shallow, but mercifully it does not hang around long.

I wonder how I'd cross this super hot river of lava... (left).

... I know! I'll use that mildly treated piece of plastic tarpaulin I found. That'll do (right).

In fact, Area D as a whole is so short that calling it an adventure game feels like a bit of a stretch. It is essentially a Myst-clone with a series of first-person locations to explore, objects to collect, and puzzles to solve. Some involve combining your inventory with things in the environment while others test your codebreaking skills. The puzzles are few and generally easy, although every so often they veer into the wonderfully illogical. Want to cross a river of lava? Naturally, the solution is to drag a specially treated tarpaulin over it and use it as a makeshift bridge. To use an item, you simply drag it from the inventory along the bottom of the screen onto the scenery. A tick appears beside the cursor when you've found a valid interaction, which is about as much feedback as you're going to get. Some encounters are time-sensitive too, such as dragging a gun onto a charging triceratops. That's a perfectly reasonable idea in principle, but the game gives you so little indication of what you're supposed to be doing that failure can feel less like a mistake than a programming error.

The worst offenders are the sections built around trial and error, particularly the jeep sequence that takes place in the final third of the game. On paper, having to navigate a dinosaur-infested jungle by vehicle sounds like the sort of thing that might finally justify the game's marketing as an "action adventure". In practice, it's essentially a maze in which choosing the wrong direction can result in an instant death at the teeth of a charging velociraptor. There are several junctions and only one correct route, meaning the solution is largely a matter of memorising which arrows to select and reloading when you inevitably get it wrong. The more conventional challenges such as that aforementioned code-based puzzle are the most rewarding, but none are particularly inventive or memorable. The game's brevity means you can simply plough through the whole thing in under half an hour once you know what you're doing, although a first attempt will take longer thanks to all the deaths.

The jungle section includes a map the fills out as you explore (left).

One of the researchers you bump into. It seems like he doesn't want to be saved, the ungrateful git (right).

The locations don't help matters. The first half takes place in a dense jungle containing far too many nodes to traipse through. Each one allows you to turn and face the four compass directions, and precious few offer anything other than static vegetation. The problem is that the scenery rarely makes it obvious where you can actually go. Instead, you have to wave the mouse around and wait for the cursor to change, hoping that you've discovered the path forward. Thankfully, you are given a map, which doubles as a useful fast-travel system and saves you from repeatedly stumbling through the same prehistoric foliage. Eventually you reach the researcher's base of operations, a handful of decidedly un-Jurassic-looking buildings where things become slightly more interesting. Here you'll encounter some of the game's more memorable challenges, relatively speaking, including a confrontation with a gigantic metallic-looking mosquito that requires a makeshift flamethrower to defeat, and that computer-based code puzzle I keep harping on about ('cos its arguably the only puzzle that even resembles something good).

Your mileage may vary with something like Area D. Is it so bad it's good? Perhaps. The wonky FMV, dreadful dubbing and hilariously janky dinosaur encounters certainly make it worth a quick look for anyone with an appreciation for the stranger corners of 1990s CD-ROM gaming. But unlike Titanic: A Mysterious Undersea Adventure, which somehow manages to mildly transcend its ineptitude, Area D often just feels unpolished. The sparse puzzles, confusing navigation and trial-and-error deaths make it difficult to recommend as an actual adventure game. What's worse is that the back of the box apparently bills it as an "action adventure", presumably in the hope of conjuring up images of Lara Croft rather than a man dragging a tarpaulin across a lava river. This is unmistakeably a point-and-click adventure game, and it is a pretty mediocre one at that. Still, there is something irresistible about a game this cheap, strange and thoroughly committed to the whole dinosaur nonsense. Area D is a disaster, but sometimes a disaster is exactly what you want to witness.

To download the game, follow the link below. This custom installer exclusive to The Collection Chamber uses the DOSBox-X build of DOSBox 0.74 running Windows '95. Read the ChamberNotes.txt for more detailed information. Tested on Windows 11.

IMPORTANT - Remember to shut down the emulated version of Windows before exiting DOSBox. This could potentially result in errors, lost saves and corrupt data. Press Ctrl-F9 only when it is safe to do so.

File Size: 361 Mb. Install Size: 784 Mb. Need help? Consult the Collection Chamber FAQ

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