CHAOS: A FANTASY ADVENTURE GAME

You wake up from a bad dream - a VERY bad dream... Only to find yourself in a chaotic nightmare.

Let's just say your situation looks grim. Very grim. You're living in a trashed little shoebox where almost nothing works - the clock spins crazily, your answering machine gives you the raspberry every time you try to play your newest message... But the final slap in the face is the hired goon the virtual environment of the month club has sent to "extract payment" from you using any means necessary. The only problem is, your cred account is holding at minus thirty-six!

But, there is hope!

You're finally able to retrieve a mysterious message from your eccentric - and rich, Uncle Prospero, beginning a wildly scenic journey through eight more environments along the way to winning your inheritance. But, there's trouble ahead. You must solve dozens of mind-bending puzzles while outwitting the hell-bent collection agent, an unscrupulous doctor, an uncooperative nurse, a crazy gas station attendant, and several other intriguing - well, okay, obnoxious characters that you'll meet on your erratic adventure up the coast. And who know? They might drop a clue or two. Think you're up to the challenge? Then jump into the world of Chaos - the only interactive fantasy adventure game loosely based on chaos theory! (WOW!)

Chaos Theory:

A really complicated and fascinating concept about the order hidden in the irregularity of the real world. If you know someone who says they understand it, they're probably lying.

~ from the back of the box

Chaos Theory is one heck of a theory. With its talks of butterflies and hurricanes, it sounds like philosophy but going by the little research I'm able to understand, it's more like poetic maths. Small changes - that butterfly flapping its wings a certain way, a decimal rounded differently - can lead to massive, unpredictable outcomes. It's been used to explain weather patterns, the economy, traffic jams, and even the impact of cloning dinosaurs (thanks Jurassic Park!). And in 1996, a group of brainy creatives from NYU (New York University for non-yanks) decided it would also make a good backbone for a CD-ROM adventure game. The result was Chaos: A Fantasy Adventure Game, a Myst clone that transposes those isolated island ruins with fractal coastlines, neurosurgery, and a smarmy gas station attendant.

The main premise is, rather ironically, absurdly simple. Your eccentric Uncle Prospero (a wry Shakespeare reference) summons you to his mansion, but you can't just drive over and knock on the door. No, you've got to prove your worth by solving puzzles that dabble in meteorology, music theory, botany, stock trading, and a bit of DIY medicine. And to top it all off, the brooding silence of Myst is exchanged for a chaotic cast of comedians who crack jokes at fast as you can blink.

Graphically, Chaos can't compete with that game I keep comparing it to. The environments aren't as lush or immersive, and its landscapes feel a bit harsh and artificial by comparison. Not a good look for a game that came out three years later. But there is one area where it outshines that classic. Where Myst strands you in a series of static postcards, Chaos stitches its slides together with short animations much like The 7th Guest. The camera will swoop between every node giving it more motion than many of its peers and thus making the world feel a little more like an actual place.

Your PDA contains a lot of useful features, including your bank statements, Prospero's diary, and a 

quick-travel map (left). If it displays a phone symbol in your inventory, you have a new video call (right).

As you'd expect, all the puzzles play around with this main chaotic thesis and the first big one is meteorological. At a weather station, you launch balloons and rockets to gather data, then plug numbers into a computer until the lake outside freezes solid. It's quintessential chaos theory where rounding numbers differently drastically changes the outcome. And while you're technically just fiddling with dials, the satisfaction of literally walking across your solution (an icy lake) is undeniable. Plus, the lab assistant's constant bumbling provides decent comic relief.

Next, you're shoved into the shoes of an unlikely pop producer. The music puzzle at KAOS Radio requires "detuning" bizarre instruments then recording them to a track. But each instrument, from a weirdly shaped harp to chiming fractal snowflakes, "detunes" differently. And part of that is why I've put quotation marks around the word "detune". Strum that harp too hard, and it will transform into leaves. Play enough of those chiming snowflakes and they'll break, and the less said about the two-stringed cello the better. It’s confusing, chaotic, and just plain odd. And the song that comes out of it sounds like the discarded demo of an Aphex Twin wannabe. The fact that you win money and a car by producing the worst sounding song imaginable feels like the game is gently trolling the music industry.

That car, of course, immediately runs out of gas kicking off the tiresome yet bizarrely memorable driving puzzle. You must refuel at identical gas stations a grand total of 15 times, carefully scaling a fractal map so each stop is exactly five squares away to make sure you'll never run on empty again. It's dull and repetitive, yes, but the gas station attendant's fourth-wall-breaking banter ("Are you clicking on me out of hostility or friendship?") turns the whole act into the ultimate surreal comedy. It's like being stuck in Groundhog Day with a very sarcastic mechanic.

Prospero's diary contains pages and pages of interesting info about Chaos Theory (left). 

It also hides clues and answers for some puzzles, such as this weather monitoring system (right).

The game perks up again in the garden maze, where you collect scattered pages for a botanist. Navigation is clumsy and yes, this is a dreaded maze, but the following puzzle (which has you assembling leaf fragments into fractal patterns) is clever and visually satisfying. For once, the educational side of the game feels at its most elegant. You're not just solving a puzzle, you're recognizing how order can emerge from randomness, leaf by leaf. It's easily one of the game's puzzling highlights.

By the time we get to the theory's other most famous application - Wall Street - the game begins to lose steam. Weather patterns, music and plants are all intriguing subjects, but the stock market just plain bores me. The satire of the get-rich-quick schemes and yuppie culture is astutely present, but the way they interpreted stocks and bonds on a computer screen felt like work within work. Probably because you're stuck in front of a computer screen inside a computer screen. Still, the fact that this essentially makes you a Wall Street wizard is hilariously on-brand and the following set pieces - which sees you zapping Uncle Prospero's chest with a defibrillator, mixing cartoon microbes under a microscope, and injecting glowing serum into his nervous system - are so unforgettable to make this blip forgivable. All of this turns what could have been a dry educational CD-ROM into something closer to an experimental art piece. With puzzles.

A lot of the puzzles look like applications, and can be a little hard to understand at first.

On the left has you record a new tune in the music puzzle. The right lets you bet on the stock market.

And then there's the humour. Chaos doesn't just wink at the player, it flat-out heckles you. Characters break the fourth wall, scold you for wasting time, and occasionally mock your clicking habits. Even the game's debt collector, who shows up like clockwork to drain your funds, feels like a parody of 90s gaming's obsession with punishing players for no reason. Where Myst wants you to be awed, Chaos wants you to laugh.

Of course, it's not all beautiful butterflies and factual fractals. Navigation can be painful, with hotspots tied to the position of the screen rather than what is displayed on it; click on the top quarter of the screen to move forward, not the horizon in front of you. You may find a computer cannot be clicked on, only to find you have to walk up to it first by again moving the mouse to the top of the image. Hotspots can be placed in such unconventional spots that you can easily get lost, particularly in the garden maze. But that's also partly the point. Chaos theory says small changes can have huge effects, and here, a single wrong click can lead to debt collectors, a fall from a great height, or endless wandering in the woods. It feels appropriate.

Chaos: A Fantasy Adventure Game is a fascinating time. Sure, it doesn't look as good as Myst, but it embraces its ethos in new ways few games ever have. If you like your adventures weird, this game is for you. You'll be surprised by how much chaotic fun you'll actually have.

To download the game, follow the link below. This custom installer exclusive to The Collection Chamber uses the DOSBox-X build of DOSBox running Microsoft Windows 3.1 to get the game working on modern systems. Read the ChamberNotes.txt for more detailed information. Tested on Windows 10.

File Size: 465 Mb.  Install Size: 692 Mb.  Need help? Consult the Collection Chamber FAQ

Download

WINDOWS 3.1

WINDOWS 3.1

Chaos: A Fantasy Adventure Game is © HarperCollins Publishers
Review, Cover Design and Installer created by me

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