Game Review: Kobyashi Naru (aka Kobayashi Naru) (Commodore 64, Mastertronic)

Kobyashi Naru is certainly an adventure game with an identity crisis. Although the cassette inlay and instructions state it is Kobyashi Naru, the loading and title screens, and in fact the name on display during play clearly states Kobayashi Naru.  The cassette just calls it Kobyashi to make it even more inconsistent. The origins of the game’s name are a lot easier to trace: Kobayashi Maru is the name of a training exercise in Star Trek, designed to place Starfleet Academy cadets in a no-win scenario and see what they would do. It was invented for the film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. It is clearly a case of slightly amending the name to avoid copyright, but in effect have a similar trial of tests.

Entering the Naru

The game is the first of what would be known as the Trilogy series of adventures, later put together on a compilation in by Mastertronic US on disk. Kobyashi Naru was followed by Shard of Inovar (released on the Bulldog label) and then Venom, all with a similar icon-driven interface controlled by the joystick. The game loads with a nice loading screen, noting one of the three parts of the game but with no reference to the cassette inlay image, and then a small tune plays with the logo showing Kobayashi Naru present. Pressing fire commences play.

You start at the small games room with three portals, which are marked knowledge, wisdom and understanding. The plot states that you are in the world of Ygor, sent here by the Overlord of All, you need to complete all three phases of the Naru.  Each of the doors leads to a closed portal, and will not open until you have obtained the required objects from each in order to succeed. The wrist terminal you have can analyse certain items too, and this can prove useful for each location. You can enter the portals in any order: to do so, use the select icon and you can then select the correct word in the paragraph shown on screen to go to that door.

Icons a Plenty

It is worth knowing what all the icons do, and in some cases, they have a secondary option. From the top left, the top row shows as: select, swim, examine, ascend, West, North, inventory, South, East, descend, analyse, dive and activate. The second row has pull and push on the left, then get and drop on the right, and the final three icons going down vertically are on the left, throw, cut and quit, and on the right, use, jump and load/save. Most of the icons are thankfully self-explanatory but it is good to know what is where.  Some of the icons will place you into what is the object window: where the graphic location clears and shows an object. You can scroll through with up and down and fire to select the object with the action.  In addition, throwing an object places you then in the text description window, so you can select what word to throw at (for example throw scimitar at plant)

It is also well worth noting, and mentioned in the instructions, that examine only works with any objects in your inventory, and analyse will perform an analysis on anything not in your inventory. This may throw the more hardened adventure game player who is used to examine being used in either case rather than just one, and does take some getting used to. Some actions will take you straight to the text window to use a word within the descriptive paragraph which you can select and use with the joystick and fire.  Although the icon driven joystick only idea is nice, and it is much better executed here than in say, Zzzz, which was hybrid, you do wonder whether all the icons were worth it and maybe improving the parser for text input instead was a better use of resources.

The Font of Knowledge

The first portal to select on the left is knowledge. This in effect takes you to a fertile plain where the scimitax appears, which feels like a powerful weapon to have, so you collect that. This is in fact the object you take with you to exit, but before you do that, you’ll encounter a plant with a maw and tentacles that you may be heading towards. That is of course, unless you find a way to stop that happening. Analysing all locations is key, as you may find that there is a tree nearby that will offer you some knowledge and also some useful items heading forward. There are not that many locations in this portal at all, and the difficulty is often the obscure way you need to work out some of the puzzles.

Yes, you can throw the scimitar at the tree branches or you can throw it at something else in the tree too, so that may offer a different outcome. And once you have a certain object, would you know that you would need to throw something at the plant’s maw rather than the plant itself? Absolutely not. It is this kind of illogical thinking that seems similar to other games that Clive Wilson and Les Hogarth made before this, so you may need to think more obscurely as a general rule in order to try and resolve some of the puzzles.

Pearls of Wisdom

The wisdom portal has two main puzzles – the first of which is that there is a tunnel which leads to water, but unfortunately it is also full of poisonous gas. You will need to analyse everything and be able to find the necessary object which may allow you past. And of course, there is a case of how you manage to get the solance from the opening location – yes, you can activate it and it glows all well, but a get command does not work – you have to use another command to be able to get it instead. That is poor game design unfortunately – a get in those circumstances should either tell you a hint as for the command to use, or that you accept that you’ve asked to get it and the resulting text will show that you manage to get it. It may be not too hard to work out but the logic again is flawed here.

Once you have managed to get the right object to get past the gas, you then need to get past a creature, descend into the water to locate a clam (spelt as klam here too for some odd reason) and find its contents, before getting back out of the tunnel and descending out and back to the start location, where you can now exit with your objects in tow to complete that part. It does get quite limited here again in that the number of locations seems relatively low, with the obscure way to complete some of the parts being the thing that takes the time. The key appears to be analysing key words within the description and see what the analysis comes up with.

Understanding

The portal of understanding has its own set of puzzles – the main one being that you can appear to jump over to a section, but the section warns you that stepping on any yellow area is fatal – and that means game over. It is worth noting that even if you do not work it out from the text displayed from a description following an action, the border does go red to indicate death, and fire starts a new game from scratch. When you do reach the pit, carefully do note that it is a certain length and width and that may help you work out what to do here. However, you only should go here if you worked out what to do with the megaunit from the opening screen.

Once you do manage to work your way over to the yellow area, there is a computer, but unfortunately any contact with that may result in some lasers being fired at you for death, so finding a way to deactivate that may be the way forward. Again, once that is done you can head back to the start point, hopefully with relevant objects in tow, and that is the portal here completed. And if you have done all three, you will complete the game, although it is worth noting that if you do die on any of the three portals, you have to complete all three from scratch. Unless of course, you have saved the game. One nice feature here is that you can save to memory as well as cassette or disk, meaning that you can easily recall the load back in to memory as you need.

Graphics and Sound

The graphics in Kobyashi Naru are functional, with some reasonable use of colour for the descriptions for each location, all in high-resolution graphics. The icons themselves are in white and are highlighted in green when you move over them, and the next part of the command such as selecting a word from the text has that word highlighted in green too as you move, so at least it is obvious what you are doing. There is no sound within the game itself apart from a small introductory tune which is quite morbid and depressing as you enter, definitely not the best use of the SID chip by a long way. When you consider the likes of Kentilla having an epic Rob Hubbard soundtrack, it does make you wonder if a trick was missed here.

Final Thoughts

Kobyashi Naru is a nice idea of having three separate parts, almost mini adventures, to complete, with the common goal of getting all items you need to escape. The separate portals do seem quite small in terms of number of locations, and it is the somewhat more obscure logic used in some of the puzzles which means that at first you will die – a lot. Once you master the initial puzzles in each of the three portals and get reasonably far, the game is consistent with how it operates – although sometimes entering a command as throw takes some time to locate the command, then select the item and select the word which is what you want to throw at. That can be quite clunky at times and the convenience of joystick is perhaps overshadowed here by the overall usability. The separate use of analyse and examine is also one to put adventurers off rather than enhance the gameplay, and with some of the game puzzles being too clever for their own good, you may find that it either becomes too frustrating or boring. The game has some promise but needed some more substance to deliver. Decidedly average.

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