At the time it must have seemed like a great idea: Put the creative geniuses from New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program and HarperCollins Interactive in a room. Ask them to design a fantasy adventure game like Myst, only better. Base the game on very trendy, very visual chaos theory. Call it, um, Chaos. How could it go wrong? Easily, it would seem.
To he fair, Chaos’s graphics are very classy. Not as atmospheric as Myst’s — perhaps because many images are fabricated Fractally, and fractals tend to be a bit hardedged — but classy nonetheless. Its QuickTime-based characters are pretty impressive, too... Where the game falls flat is in the playing.
Chaos fits the classic adventure-game mold: initially ignorant and empty-handed, you wander a virtual landscape finding helpful tools, unearthing useful information, and solving puzzles. Unfortunately, many of Chaos’s puzzles seem inspired less by chaos theory than by money — both getting it and spending it. That maybe Ivan Boesky’s idea of an adventure game, but it’s not mine.
Furthermore, in a game supposedly based on chaos theory, Chaos’s unrelenting linearity is disappointing. There’s only one way to start, one way to play, and one (rather anti climactic) ending; you have to solve each puzzle completely before going on to the next one. In defiance of chaos theory's most famous axiom, small changes in how you start or play Chaos don’t lead to large — or any — changes in the outcome.
Also unfortunate is that simply discovering a puzzle's solution is often insufficient. In one particularly exasperating example, once you’ve unearthed the puzzle’s secret, you must repeat the same sequence of steps 15 times. Such mindless repetition gets stale very quickly. So does pointing and clicking, the sole means of communication: you point at where you want to go, point at objects you want to pick up, jab characters in the chest to make them talk. The pointer does change to a directional arrow or hand, but it's often so slow to change that it can be highly misleading. And that pokiness is only part of the overall speed problem. On my usually nimble Power Mac 7500 and quad-speed CD-ROM drive, Chaos could be agonizingly slow. It also had some irritating glitches, crashed once during play, and corrupted my saved game twice.
The Last Word Although Chaos does have a sense of humor and imparts some basic information about chaos theory, for my money I'd rather play the more entertaining Myst and read James Gleick’s more informative hook, Chaos: Making a New Science.
Eckhardt, Robert C. (September 1996). Chaos. Macworld. (pg. 100).
HarperCollins
Games
out of 10 (1 vote)
60 / 
2014-12-19 / 
2023-05-03 / 
90e8b07fb2c6ae1cd0ec98ffadd35065e63ec787 / 
/ 
Chaos.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
