Orion Burger (PC) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
376A playthrough of Sanctuary Woods' and Eidos's 1996 graphic adventure for PCs running Dos, Orion Burger.
I remember playing a demo for Orion Burger that came with a PC Gamer demo CD back around the time that this was getting ready to come out, and I played it over and over again. It was just a short scene (if I recall, it was limited to the gerbil cage test), but I couldn't get enough of it. It looked far more like a cartoon than just about anything I had seen on the PC before, succeeding in ways that King's Quest VII never could have two years earlier, and falling only just short of the quality on display in the 1997 LucasArts masterpiece The Curse of Monkey Island. Unfortunately, I never once found it in a store, so a long time went by before I ever got to play the game in its entirety. Much later I found out that hardly anyone could find it in stores - it had some epically low sales rates and virtually no media exposure.
Once I'd gotten to play the whole thing, I certainly wasn't disappointed. It's certainly not the perfect adventure game, but it was a very good one at a time when the genre was beginning to wane. It features Wilbur, a random young guy, who is abducted by aliens. These aliens are representatives of Orion Burger, the biggest fast food franchise in the galaxy, working for the "protein procurement division."
Because apparently intelligent life is a "scarce commodity" in the universe, there are laws prohibiting harvesting such life for profit, and as a result, tests have to be administered to potential "resources" to determine sentiency. Wilbur is the human representative, and therefore has to complete a battery of five tests to prove without doubt that humanity is too intelligent to eat.
Things go wrong during the test, and as Wilbur is being sent back to Earth to await its imminent destruction, the teleporter malfunctions, giving him a chance at redemption. Each test takes place within a limited window of time, and Wilbur must complete it before time runs out to move on to the next test. If he doesn't, he's abducted again and must start the time block over.
It's a really cool concept in theory, but it gets frustrating pretty quickly. Many of the puzzles test the limits of "logical deduction" and will take a lot of time and trial-and-error to figure out, and while you can never lose, if time runs out, the entire test resets itself. This alone wouldn't be too bad (although it feels like a contrived way to work around dead-end scenarios) except that cinematics and conversations can't be skipped, no matter how many times you've seen them before. If it was just a bit of exposition, it wouldn't be so bad, but some of these chunks can run upwards of ten minutes. That's painful when it's the fifth time seeing them.
Besides that, though, Orion Burger has a lot going for it. The graphics are fantastic for a 1996 game - especially one not designed for Windows 95. It all runs in SVGA (640x480, 256 colors), and everything is well drawn, fluidly animated, and the garish colors are pleasantly over-saturated. The sound is well done for the most part - the limited background noises are effective, and the voice acting is usually pretty good - except for that of Wilbur himself... ugh. Why does he sound like Mickey Mouse? There are some 80s/90s cartoon luminaries in the cast, though, including Rob Paulsen (Ninja Turtles, Thundercats, Transformers, and millions more) and Jim Cummings (Animaniacs, Darkwing Duck, Chip n Dale, among tons of others).
The puzzles and interface are pretty good - the interface is taken directly from the studio's previous adventure game effort (The Riddle of Master Lu) and makes things nice and simple. The puzzles always make sense, but there are extreme few hints for some of them, so if lateral thinking is not your strong point, good luck here.
Overall, if you can live with the time shifting mechanic and the annoyances it brings with it, Orion Burger provides a solid, memorable (though lamentably forgotten) adventure with extraordinary production values and a really cool story.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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