Sinking feeling

Just before the summer holidays started, I attempted to film my first (okay, technically second) impressions of the 1996 PC game Titanic: Adventure Out of Time. My laptop had a meltdown, and the game, unable to cope with my recording and playing at once, crashed so many times I had to give up. A familiar problem.

I finally finished the game with my husband a couple of weeks ago. Since then, I've been mulling over what I want to say about it. So here it is: why I think this game is actually pretty great.

When I was little, my best friend Theresa went to see Titanic at the cinema with her parents. (Theresa was a good head taller than I was. She was often mistaken for being older than her years and was a comical contrast to me, tiny and much younger looking than my actual age. People used to call us Little and Large, which was unfortunate for both of us.) Afterwards, we had an emergency debrief. I wanted to know the whole plot. The naked drawing, the steamy sex in the car, the dramatic and gruesome deaths. No detail left behind: she told me everything.

For a brief period, we became obsessed with the Titanic in general, both the movie and the concept of the sinking itself. When the Scholastic book fair came around, I bought a book called 1998's Hunkiest Boys (or something like that) purely because it had a big picture of Leonardo DiCaprio on the cover (in hindsight: ugh). It also had a big section on Matthew Perry, which was a bonus.

At some point, Theresa's parents bought her the game Titanic: Adventure Out of Time, and of course, we had to check it out. You could just ... wander around the Titanic! Nose in all the rooms! Run around on the deck! Finally, a chance to explore this thing that we'd been mildly obsessed with.

And for half an hour, we did so. We poked around on the ship, had a fun time, and then ran off to do something else.

Every now and then, I remember playing that game. I remember how haunting it felt to be there, running around on the deck of the Titanic, suspended in time, moments before doom struck.

My brain, in my kid wisdom, filed Titanic: Adventure Out of Time as 'weird Titanic simulator' and left it there, untouched, for decades. It turns out to be an epic time-travel adventure including (but not limited to): Russian spies, stolen jewelry, murder, intrigue, psychics, steel magnates, baby kidnapping, and religion. And Hitler. So a bit more complicated than I remembered it.

To set the scene: you are a failed British spy, and you are thrown (literally) into the past to redo a failed mission on board the Titanic. It's your job to retrieve key items from the ship before it sinks, and the consequences if you don't are dire.

The game plonks you on the ship on the evening of April 14th, 1912. You're in a pretty nice cabin with a few items stashed in a locked trunk. There is an insistent knocking on the door. Answering it brings you face-to-face with this guy:

I have to divert and talk about the animation here, because my goodness. There's a whole backstory behind how these characters came to be (and it's actually impressive, the amount of dialogue there is to uncover). But the final result of the animation is so strange that it made me go slightly hysterical. Their faces move as though being pushed and pulled, eyebrows moving up and down like their faces are made of clay. It's quite uncanny, and something I never quite got used to.

Accidentally terrifying animation aside, it's your job to meet with a contact on board ship (the pleasingly named Penny Pringle) and receive instructions on what to do next.

The game does not hold your hand. At all. The Titanic is huge and slightly confusing to navigate, and it took me a stupidly long time to realise you could fast travel between areas using the map. You're given the occasional hint, but the main task is to just listen to people. Really listen. Talk to them, try to find out what's happening with the main players on the ship and what their motivations might be. As well as the obvious impending doom, there is the real possibility of death (including in some of the eight possible endings). As you get deeper into the game, accompanied by heavy, dread-inducing music, you start to feel a bit unsafe. Like you're not sure who you'll bump into in the depths of the ship.

And just at the point where all the back-and-forthing becomes a bit tedious, something comes along to break things up a bit. You'll find yourself fixing a boiler, for example. (A job that the protagonist is vastly underqualified for, but still.) Or you'll be challenged to a fencing match. Or engaged in a conversation that suggests that you're treading on very thin ice indeed. Time passes only at key moments, and eventually, the iceberg hits. At this stage, the game passes into a real-time escape mission.

As time ticks by, the ship starts to break down. Suddenly, you'll be sprinting down the deck at a distinct tilt. And when the water starts flooding in, some areas will become inaccessible. It's possible to get a terrible ending if you don't do this bit right. (We got the best ending, but only because we followed a no-nonsense walkthrough on GameFAQs, as God intended.)

You can't prevent the ship from sinking. This is something I find quite interesting. You can magic away wars, but you cannot, under any circumstances, let the crew know about the iceberg in advance?

But the knowledge of what is about to happen hangs heavy as you play. There's a good chance that everyone you interact with, from the captain to the lift attendant, will be dead by the end of the night. The empty corridors, the blank stares of the passengers, and the eerie music combine to create an all-encompassing doom. And occasionally, when you're in the midst of a quest or you're lost on the ship and getting frustrated, one of the passengers will say something like 'Has the ship sprung a leak? I'll scare myself to death!' and it rockets you right back to the moment.

When I was a kid, it was the emptiness of the Titanic that creeped me out. The endless, daunting corridors. The stillness. As an adult, it's interacting with the people that gets under my skin the most. They can talk to you. They can tell you their dramas, their life stories. And because of the strange animation, they're a little bit uncanny. Not quite human. They're like ghosts: blank, aimless, frozen in time, watching you as you rush by. You'll make it out alive, but you'll have to leave them all behind.

I've spoken before about being fascinated by empty spaces. If I could wander around everything after it shut, I'd be happy. I often look at the now-abandoned building where Chris and I met (the department store where we worked as teenagers) and wonder if I could pop in there and have a look around before it all gets converted into flats. Every time we're at a family attraction, I wonder: what is this place like at night, when the lights are out?

In Titanic: Adventure Out of Time, you can run around and explore the ship (without the pressure of preventing wars and dodging assassination) in Tour Mode. As you wander, you'll bump into some of the characters, but they'll serve you Titanic facts, photographs, and information about the people on board. It feels like a giant, floating museum of a ship that no longer exists intact. I watched an excellent video by Rotoscopester on the making of the game. The sheer amount of research it took to make this game is remarkable. Right down to finding an ancient swatch catalogue, so as to ensure colour accuracy despite having no colour photographs of the Titanic itself.

Often, we'll take the kids to the SS Great Britain. (If you buy a ticket, you can visit as many times as you want in a year. Obviously we want to make the most of this.) My daughter, super into history, loves every bit of it. Once, we made it to the dining room and a museum volunteer told us, in great detail, how they came to find the correct carpet when they were refurbishing the SSGB after it was salvaged; it involved a complex hunt for any remaining evidence of the carpet company they used back in 1850s. Wandering around the ship feels like walking into the past. 'Can you imagine being here?' I say to the kids. 'Can you imagine staying on this ship for months on end?'

I do kind of get why people are fascinated by the wreckage of the Titanic. There's a dark part of me that longs to see inside it. I want to see the grand staircase, the sunken dining tables and chairs, the plates and the cups and the cutlery. The evidence that humans were here. The proof of the sudden, pointless suffering they endured. It's a time capsule down there, in the depths. And while I can't help but blanch at the hubris of billionaires with money to throw away on (deadly) trips to the bottom of the ocean, I understand why people want to see it for themselves.

The game itself is a time capsule. CyberFlix made incredible progress. And Titanic: Adventure out of Time came around just when adventure games were falling out of favour. I'm sad that they didn't get to make a game about the Hindenburg, as they wanted to. I mentioned in the video that something about this game reminded me of poking around in Encarta as a kid. At the time, the interactive exploration felt genuinely fascinating. And, as I've said far too often, I miss those times.

But you know. Life moves on. CyberFlix is no more. The Titanic will decay eventually. The building where Chris and I met will become something else entirely. I'll keep playing weird old games for kicks, though, and attempting to record them despite my growing frustrations. That much will remain the same.

On a serious note - Titanic: Adventure Out of Time is a ridiculously cheap £0.71 on Steam at the moment. It's a genuinely fun, mysterious game and I think the price is crazily cheap for the amount of love and work that went into it. Go pick it up and enjoy it for yourself. Just watch out for Smethells.

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