Archipelagos

Archipelagos is a puzzler/strategy game created by Astral Software initially for the Atari ST in 1989 then ported to Amiga and MS-DOS.

Inspired, at least in part, by The Sentinel - the famous 3G game by Geoff Crammond - Archipelagos take the players in a surreal world (dystopic, in the US version) made of islands. The goal is to clean those islands from evil stones, the obelisks left by The Visitors when they killed the Ancient ones to take control of the planet.

In the US version, man has poisoned the world with radiation, and the player must clean the island from the radiation to make them inhabitable again.

In both cases, your life will be complicated by several terrifying enemies that will try to stop you. This is not a shooter, so you will have to stay away from these creatures while doing your cleaning job.

The game was programmed directly in 68000 Assembler to make it faster. Anyway, even if the game is in 3D, the third dimension is not part of the gameplay: the terrain is flat. This is a pity because it could have made the game more interesting.

The developers created the first 100 levels manually, deciding the islands' shape and the objects' position. The rest of the levels (10000 in total) are generated by the computer. It's even too much because completing 100 levels already requires several hours. It would have been a nice achievement for players that like to finish their games. But apparently, the programmers didn't want us to complete the game too soon.

Said that Archipelagos is a nice and unusual title, well-executed, and enriched by the fantastic music composed by David Whittaker. The soundtrack makes the experience more rewarding and more creepy. It's worth alone some minutes of play.

In 1991 the full game was distributed as a cover disk of the Amiga Format magazine.