Dr. Chaos (NES) Playthrough
304A playthrough of FCI's 1988 action-adventure game for the NES, Dr. Chaos.
Dr. Ginn Chaos, a physicist, has been researching how to create warp zones at his mansion in a remote village. Several months have passed since anyone last heard from him, so his brother Michael decides to investigate.
When he arrives, Michael discovers that Ginn's efforts had succeeded, but the warp zones have been overrun by monsters. Worse yet, these monsters have begun spilling into the real world and have kidnapped Ginn.
In order to save Dr. Chaos, Michael must enter the warp zones, search for the scattered pieces of his brother's laser gun, and use it to destroy Canbarian, the monsters' leader.
Michael's adventure is split between a few different primary modes of play. The corridors of the house act as the primary hub that links everything together, and the doors all lead to rooms that are explored from a first-person perspective. These rooms can be searched for doors that lead to areas that can't be reached from the main corridor, as well as weapons, curative postions, and hidden portals that grant access to the mansion's eleven warp zones.
The warp zones are made up of a collection of jungles and caves teeming with bats, slimes, and skeletal creatures, and a boss (who guards a special item and a piece of the laser gun) waits at the end of each. You can choose the order in which you tackle these warp zones, but many feature obstacles that can only be overcome with certain upgrades - like the helmet and the jump boots - from a boss monster.
Though more straightforward and not nearly as polished, the gameplay is similar to what you'd find in Konami's The Goonies II (https://youtu.be/mdpmDqR4ZDc).
It's confusing at first, but the mansion is fairly easy to navigate once you've found your bearings. In the 3D spaces, doors on the south walls lead back to the mansion's corridors, doors and hidden passages on the east and west walls lead to adjacent rooms, and warp zone portals are usually found on the north walls. The hidden passages are revealed by punching through weak spots in the wall, but as long as you keep in mind your location relative to the doors in the corridor, you can avoid spending an eternity blindly clicking on everything in sight. It's a good thing, too, since whenever you're in a room, monsters can randomly appear to drag you back into the hall for a fight.
Dr. Chaos is a cool concept for a game, and it's a plenty ambitious one for a title originally released in 1987, but it's uneven in its execution. The graphics are plain and the music is uncomfortably discordant, but together, they do a nice job of establishing the haunted house vibe. The nonlinear structure of the game encourages exploration, but the lack of guidance often frustratingly leads you into dead ends, and the constant need to search for ammo bogs the pacing down. The platforming feels stiff and enemies often respawn right next to where you're standing, but the action generally feels fun and fair.
Dr. Chaos was Marionette's second game for the Famicom Disk System, and its clear that they wanted to create something special here, but their lack of experience shows. Fortunately, the lessons they learned during Dr. Chaos's development paid off, and they managed to avoid repeating the same mistakes while working on Phantom Fighter (https://youtu.be/moxOU2fihpg) which released thirteen months later.
Dr. Chaos is unique and playable enough to be worth a look if you're looking for an obscure bit of NES creepiness. It also feels like an unlicensed adaptation of the 80s horror classic House, and for the right person, that alone will be reason enough to take the plunge.
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