After a planecrash we awake on a mysterious island, seeing a wooden door floating, some fun ripple effects that were quite impressive for the time, and a shrunken down airplane tail that absolutely could not have been from our large plane.
Welcome to Trespasser, the 1998 game that semi-inspired Half-Life 2.
Turning around and looking into the nearby shrubs and trees we hear birds chirping in the distance. We're alone on this island and nobody else survived the planecrash.
We are playing as Anne, voiced by Minnie Driver, and one of our arms broke in the planecrash, so we're one-arming this whole game. Fortunately she's eerily strong as we'll find out soon enough.
See that loveheart tattoo on Anne's copious 'tracts of land'? That's our healthbar, it'll fill up when we're hurt and this game actually features a regenerative health mechanic. Neat!
If there's one thing you learn while playing Trespasser, it's that the movement system feels really strange. Not particularly terrible but it's a skill to master. Anne is technically a big cube that rolls around using inverse kinematics and there's no sprint function. Smashing Q to jump around does speed you up however.
So going up a hill and jumping up some rocks, we come across an interesting sight, the 'jungle gym'. A series of obstacles and items to pick up and play around with. It's really just a tutorial area you can skip if you want to. So that's what we're going to do! Nothing too fun here anyways. Well maybe just one thing...
Anne shows off her superhuman abilities as she trivially one-arms a huge steel girder like it was nothing. If she had two arms the game would be far too easy. The real reason she only has one arm is because programming two into the game was just not going to work, it already requires a keyboard and mouse for ONE arm, two would require a human to have four arms to operate. Most fans just say she injured the other in the crash.
Using our breasts we smash a wooden door down. Yeah so another thing about this game, it doesn't really have much friction calculations. Every item in the game is 'frozen' in place until touched, where it'll endlessly slide off other objects until it falls to the ground, which is the only way for items to 'stop'. There's also sort-of no real physics shapes other than cubes or rectangular prisms, so you'll notice every item's physics-box is...A box!
We finally find some firepower in the form of some revolvers, a desert eagle, and a SPAS-12 shotgun (called the Bell Shotgun ingame for some reason). Now you might have noticed this game doesn't have a hud, so we get told how much ammo we have by Anne's inner monologue instead. She'll remind us the guns feel 'half full' or 'about ten' or however much the gun has.
There's also no crosshair, so we have to actually aim these bad boys manually and line the sights up.
As far as I can tell the guns don't have spread, so as long as you're on target, you'll hit. But good luck getting on target without practice. And yes, you can hold the gun 'gangsta style' or shoot yourself.
Anne shows off more of her superhuman strength, using a shotgun one-handed to shoot an aggressive wooden box. Her words on the matter? "So THAT'S what that feels like!"
After dealing with the box, we come across an ominous sign. We...Might not be on a very safe island. Good thing we grabbed those guns then!
Anne hears John Hammond's memoirs in her mind as she recollects them. She read his book a while back and they actually got Richard Attenborough to read a script. He does a great job at it too. A lot of people think that it's literally Hammond speaking to Anne psychically or something, but its just her inner monologue.
We come across the most basic box-puzzle ever invented...Just shoot the boxes and use them as a surface to walk on. But we hear a roar in the distance, a loud bellowing roar. That can't be good, right?...