You’ve inherited an exotic artist’s retreat, an ornate Pee Wee’s Playhouse-style hotel equipped with a fabulous Muse Machine designed to restore the creative impulse. Unfortunately, the place has fallen into disrepair, and a couple of poltergeists that look like Cusano Rojo worms have taken up residence and begun to redecorate. In order to save the joint, you’ll need to build your skills as a custodian, disc jockey, mechanic, and session musician.
That’s the fanciful premise behind 9: The Last Resort, a playful, surrealistic new title from Robert De Niro’s Tribeca Interactive. Packed with hundreds of gorgeous hand-painted images and propelled by a charming, ebullient soundtrack, 9 is a slick, cool, and goofy click-and-wait game with some nifty original touches, challenging puzzles, and a fun musical angle.
Once you enter the Last Resort, you’ll explore, then find and solve puzzles. The game is sort of like Freak Show meets the Daedalus Encounter, with a double shot of recombinant postmodern ambiance. You must hone your drum-programming chops with the aid of the Tiki Bongo God, learn to decipher and perform cryptic musical passages on the keyboard, build a bass guitar from spare parts, win a slot car race, and solve myriad other puzzles. Your final goal is to reassemble the far-flung parts of the Muse Machine and defeat the evil Twins, whose voices are supplied by Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and Joe Perry.
Rumor has it that 9 was developed from the aftermath of an aborted Aerosmith multimedia project, and sadly, their stilted character voice performances, plus those of fellow ex-celebs Cher, Christopher Reeve, and James Belushi, are the only aspects that detract from this otherwise sterling effort. The rest of the audio elements — especially the voice of the Drum God, reportedly that of one of the programmers — are not only smooth but also utterly endearing.
There are lots of things to find and do in 9, and the puzzles are somewhat difficult. You can easily suss out much of the game by just mousing around in the 360-degree world, and the characters offer some useful clues; but other parts are fairly daunting. Here are a few tips that should enhance your gameplay (those of you who don’t believe in cheating, or who are so hard-core that you don’t need help, skip to the next paragraph):
- If you can’t get in the front door, check the envelope with the “will” that accompanies the CD-ROM.
- The Voodoo Mask display in the Drum Room is a puzzle — similar masks want to be near each other, and they’ll giggle when they’re in the right order. The solution reveals a clue you’ll need to repair the jukebox in the next room.
- The door with the sound-effect hot spots is a concentration game. Click on the matching pairs to get through to the Muse Machine.
- Once in the Dali Room, you’ll need to tune Lucille’s strings. Make sure you’ve read that “How to Play Guitar” book in the Tapestry Room.
- To get into the final scenes, you’ll need to play sequences on the monkey’s organ from notation found in four different rooms.
The game 9 balances the Myst-derived enigma-ware concept with the sheer dopey fun of hearing neat sounds when you click on-screen, all wrapped up in a lavish piece of art direction. It’s the grooviest Made-With-Macromedia-Director game yet, and although it’s not an action-packed twitch-fest, the combination of artsy tom-foolery, good-natured pseudomyticism, and K-A rated brainteasers give 9: The Last Resort all the markings of a prestigious cult hit.
Souvinger, Todd. (January 1997). 9: The Last Resort. MacAddict. (pg. 80).
Tribeca Interactive
Games
out of 10 (3 votes)
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2014-04-14 / 
2023-04-29 / 
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thelastresortimage.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
