Morpheus revisited

 

Replaying Alida reminded me of Morpheus. The CDs do not install on Win10. Guess we’ve finally reached a point where the Win9x kernel is too old. A fan has bundled an emulated version of Win95 with the entire game, and it works, but I had to spend hours fixing the glitchy sound. The graphics flicker and stutter, too, but it’s stable.

Tinkering with the sound sampling rate and the block size yields a good compromise between sound sync and stuttering. It’s imperfect, but it’s playable.

I remember on my first playthrough back in 2003 or 2004. I had to use compatibility and set quicktime to safe mode, and the game barely ran on WinXP. It’s an obscure title. I am not confident the current keeper of the game will ever deliver a rerelease, so this is the only way I can replay it.

In a few more years, Alida won’t work, and then where will we be? Will these games become lost media? It seems wrong that things that ran on XP should become “lost.” WinXP was the best OS Microsoft ever came up with. It’s not lost.

 

Morpheus on emulator is not perfect, but it is playable. Morpheus—NOT The Seventh Guest!—should be preserved in HD! Until then, I accidentally began an emulated playthrough.

 

Accidentally, meaning I’ve spent the whole day just getting the damn thing to work.

Wandering around, testing this thing and that.

....ended up solving ONE puzzle.

.... so now I'm obligated to keep going.

 

 Morpheus takes place on a ship with a compliment of the most disturbed passengers this side of a Hitchcock movie. When I first played the game, back in 2004 or so, I had to make a list of who was who, and how they relate to one another.

Jan, a child born out of wedlock and given up to an orphanage by an uncaring mother and father, tormented by the people around him due to his physical deformity. Adopted by a man who turns out to be equally uncaring and unloving, nonetheless the boy grows up into a scientist who invents a machine he claims restores the body and mind.

But what are Jan’s real motivations for creating such a device? As you explore the ship stuck in the ice, it becomes clear Jan has ulterior motive for inviting these people to be the first subjects of the neurographicon, and all of this links to you, the player, and what happened to your father 30 years ago.

It’s a tragic tale of a mistreated child seeking revenge against the people who tormented him in his youth, and attempting to seize a chance to be normal. To have happiness. To rescue not only himself from a physical deformity, but the love of his life from the effects of polio.

His plan would have worked had two of the people in Jan’s life not gotten wise to Jan’s scheme, and this is where the player joins the events.

A conspiracy frozen near the point of completion.

It’s a compelling story, told in fragments spread all around the ship, and the gameplay frames everyone in sympathetic terms, showing flash scenes of the characters interacting. Everyone has issues to work through, and the player takes on the role as the person who helps them work through all of their issues, releasing them from the limbo of the dream worlds they have been condemned to inhabit.

Perhaps closure is possible for everyone, including the player.

The puzzles you must solve are closely tied to the story and the personalities of each passenger. Each one is discernible within the game. I needed no walkthrough at any point. In hindsight I realize the game takes after The 7th Guest. I generally disliked it, not just for its bad acting rather for the randomness of its puzzles and the incoherence of its story. Morpheus takes the setup and fixes all the wrongs. The characters are well-defined, and the puzzles are closely related to their respective roles in the story.

Presently, on my second playthrough, the first passenger’s dream world I happened to venture into was Billy Mexler’s. Lots of memory cheats for this one. It has some of the cleverest puzzles in the game, while gaining some insight into where he came from. I remembered where most of the clues were, but I still had to figure them out.

 

I remembered only where the clue for one of the door codes was. For the others, I had to pay attention to clues found around the ship.

Every passenger’s room has something in it that helps you get to know them a little better.

A former circus performer who comes to grips with the reality that he is just as fake as the circus exhibits on display...

A caged bird that wants to fly free and sing...

An Irish boxer who doesn’t remember the fights, only the women he slept with in each city he had a match in... (his puzzles gave me a real run for my money, temping me to consult a walkthrough on my second playthrough if not for taking a moment to explore again and find more clues I missed)

A woman who locked numerous orphans in “the box” for discipline, and it may have led to at least one of their deaths...

 

A boy, born with a physical deformity, who yearns for love and acceptance only to find ridicule, until a certain doctor discovers a certain ancient tribal ritual that happens to restore youth and vitality to two people in exchange for a sacrifice of six others. 

 

 

Very disturbed people.

 

Perfect for a sacrifice.

Everything is right in front of you. The player merely has to put the pieces together, and that’s why I enjoy Morpheus so much. It is Myst meets The 7th Guest, and it elevates the genre by taking the best elements of both, so much so that I caught myself taking deliberate breaks to delay my completion of the game.

I wanted to savor this replay.

While I’ll never recapture the feeling of awe the game’s conclusion left me with after I first played it, this replay is close.

I hope it sees a proper re-release someday. It deserves one.