Angel Devoid: Face of the Enemy (PC) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
304A playthrough of Mindscape's 1996 FMV graphic adventure for the PC, Angel Devoid: Face of the Enemy.
Played all the way through the ending getting (I believe) every scene except for the death scenes. Make sure to watch it at 720p so the scanlines are rendered properly - at the lower resolutions they look way thicker than they should
I really liked this game. Sure, it's largely fluff like most interactive movies were, but this one tried a bit harder than most to be an actual game - rather than merely clicking from one video to the next, there are a fair number of (albeit easy) puzzles, and a story line that's pretty interesting. It reminds me a lot of Commander Blood in this way :) It was developed by Electric Dream, whose only other title, NeuroDancer: Journey into the Neuronet, was released two years prior for the 3DO.
Now, if only they'd splurged and shipped on a couple more CDs - though granted, it already shipping on four, maybe they could've given the plot a bit more in the way of substance. Either way, the game looks fantastic - the video quality is top-notch for a Dos game (the scanlines in the video were forced by the game - I'm guessing the video was only half it's rendered vertical height to save disc space? That way was pretty typical when CPUs weren't powerful enough to drive heavy video compression like we have now). The acting is mediocre (there are only a few cringeworthy moments), the tone is nicely done in the dystopian 90s CG cyberpunk style with lots of metal, shadow, and neon lights, and it all stays extremely entertaining all the way through it's fairly short run time.
An obscure one to be sure, but for fans of interactive movies, it's a gem. I did include all three endings at the end of the video. I finished the game initially with the best ending, then following the credits are the videos showing the two fail scenarios. There's a fun easter egg shown a 1:27:57.
If you want to play this, it does run just fine through DosBox. However, you'll need to install a patch (it can be found easily enough by Googling) that fixes a couple of issues with hardware conflicts. Without it, I couldn't even get the game to start - it would just show a black screen (Vesa driver initialization issues, I'd imagine, since this is indeed running in SVGA). There were, oddly enough, Sega Saturn and Sony PlayStation ports of the game, but they were released only in Japan and are dubbed over, not subtitled. The game was re-titled "DeathMask" for its console iterations.
There are also a few spots with technical hiccups in the video that probably should have been patched but weren't as far as I know. Since it keeps the video true to the original experience (I played the game on a P200 as well just to verify that it was a game glitch, not a Dosbox issue), I've left these issues visible in the video. They don't interrupt too much.
1. In the bar, when the woman gives you the grenade, you have to diffuse it to move forward. The game locks-up as soon as you've solved it. The installed patch provides a save game named "workaround" that gets you patch this hitch, but it does mean that you miss the video where she gives you the skeleton key.
2. The elevator that leads up to the art gallery kills the game's framerate and causes all sorts of distortion and stuttering if you don't restart the game after going into the elevator. There are probably two or three spots where this happens. So, in those elevator scenes, you'll see me saving just after each, and if you notice any slight jumps, it's because the animation panning from the elevator door and the control panel should really only last about two-three seconds, but with the weird glitch I ran into, these transitions become 10-15 second long second where the sound distorts and the video crawls at maybe 1-2 frames a second.
Great game overall, and well worth a play. It's worth putting the effort into patching it though, and knowing about these couple of issues ahead of time hopefully will save anyone that is interested in playing this a few headaches. For reference, the game's minimum required specs were pretty heavy for a game in early 1996 - at the very lowest it needed a 486 DX2/66 with a 1meg SVGA VLB accelerator card (though obviously, a Pentium with a PCI card did a much smoother job). This video quality definitely didn't come cheap, and you weren't likely to find better in Dos without an expensive (and nearly useless with how limited support was) MPEG-1 decoder card.
Hope you enjoy the video!
...and please forgive my egregious spelling mistake in my save file :D for some reason, I typed "sirly", not "surly". Oops.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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