Successful games like Zelda, Ultima, Baldur's Gate and others dazzle us with an atmospheric fantasy world, challenge by fighting against hostile forces and offer a lot of experience for further survival. The top-down perspective – i.e. moving on a kind of world map – is a striking common feature of the aforementioned classics. The player has a top-down view of the environment and his avatar, but without taking over the avatar's field of vision and thus his role – as is usual in 3D shooters. In this kind of flight over the actual scene, the player is a bit further away from the action and gets a more abstract picture of the game's progress. The mentioned game titles nevertheless manage to captivate the player without much effort and integrate him into the story. This is achieved by the perfection of the well-known technical elements like graphics, music, game mechanics and also the psychological incentives, which reward a fight with progress in the story and increase the experience points.
Among the point & click adventure games of the mid-1990s, Master Lu has become one of the most obscure ones. You'll be hard pressed to find records of its existence, let alone more current testimonials of any players from the time of its release or more recent experiences. All that in spite of having scored high marks all across the board when it was new. My personal experience with it wasn't all that far from that. I played it, but never very far. The very few, unspecific recollections I kept were all positive, so it became a bit of a mystery to myself why I never got further than the second major location. Is there anything to this game which makes it universally forgettable? Let's rediscover and test this hypothesis!
Hunger Daemon is a game about the search of a long-time veterinarian student for a heart, a girl and something to eat… not necessarily in this order. His journey is linked to his uncle, who wants to take over the world by summoning an elder being into his body. Of course this cannot be for real, so the only serious question he has to ask himself is: When are you going to get your hands on some food?
Probably the best way to describe this text adventure would be as an interactive horror spoof fiction set in the world of the Cthulhu Mythos. It pokes a lot of fun at inane gibberish chanting, gathering obscure items or tomes for overly dramatic rituals at tastelessly decorated altars, very narrow minded monster beetles and digging up otherworldly artefacts in places where anyone could have stumbled upon them ages ago. What is especially nice is the stark contrast between the comparatively 'normal' everyday adventure game action, you will have to do to finish the game, and the somewhat strange things which are going on in that cellar.
