South American history tells us that the Inca Empire was brought down by Spanish conquistadors. What the history books won't tell you is that the Incans also had access to space crafts, and routinely ventured into the sky to do battle with the magnificant floating galleons of the Spanish Armada.

That's the story from Coktel Vision, anyway, the French studio was which bought by Sierra in the early 90s. Inca, along with Gobliiins, was one of its most (relatively) well known series, if mostly for how avant garde it is. It's also a strange genre mash up, combining elemeants of space combat, puzzle solving and first person dungeon crawling. 

Inca puts you in the role of the Incan god El Dorado, as he ventures from planet to planet, explores Mayan ruins (apparently they were space travelers too) and does battle with his nemesis Aguirre. You have a limited number of lives, which is weird for a game of this type, but that's not the only aspect that makes this feel like a console game. The adventure is divided up into sixteen stages, and it uses a password system to keep track of progress, instead of allowing you to save your game. How bizarre.


The starts off with a space combat section. Let's be honest - this is no Wing Commander. The controls aren't as tight and the AI isn't as smart. And apparently while the Incans were smart enough to uncover the secret of space travel, they weren't smart enough to develop targetting or navigation systems. Your goal is always off in the distance - just point yourself in the general direction until it gets really big, and you're set. In the meantime, fighting off enemies (or dodging asteroids) is made difficult because your radar is so damned small. Your arsenal is limited to lasers and some kind of harpoon missiles (GET MORE OF THESE) but at least your ship can take a ton of damage.

After the first stage, there's another space section where you fly through a canal, which is basically one big rip off of the Death Star from Star Wars. Although there are enemies here, and you can shoot them down if you want, it's actually a race, and the goal is to simply beat them to the finish line.

Once you jump out of your ship, you've got some puzzles to solve. They're mostly abstract puzzles, requiring that you futz with buttons and switches, and uses items where appropriate. They seem obtuse at first, but once you fiddle with them, they aren't too hard, especially since your inventory is pretty limited. Many of the objects are strange, but your home base has a glossary 

Many of these puzzles are interconnected with first person dungeon sequences. When delving through these corrisors, occasionally you'll be ambused by Spanish soldiers. At this point, the game becomes a shooting gallery, as you fight the same set of guys over and over and over. The mazes aren't big, and there is an automap, but it's full of dead ends, and you can spend a lot of time stumbling, fighting, stumbling, then fighting some more, before you come across the next puzzle.

Coktel obviously fashioned Inca to be something of a multimedia spectacle, based on the copious use of digitized actors - who all appear in a golden hue - and computer rendered cutscenes. Even the disk version has some voice acting. The CD version features a full redbook audio soundtrack, and includes a thoroughly ridiculous song called (GET NAME). Its absurdly cheesy tone fits the nature of the game, but the rest of the soundtrack is legitimately excellent. It's all new age, with plenty of authentic Incan instrumentation like GET FLUTES. 

The separate sections of Inca are unremarkable, and while the sum doesn't exactly exceed the whole of its parts, it's not unplayable either, and the general wackiness of it makes it worth checking out, if just for a bit.

Inca 2