By Kurt Kalata
As the intro to the first game tells us, it's the year 2002 (which must've seem so far away back in 1988) and a mysterious alien race called The Orbs have invaded Earth. The Orbs themselves are nothing but floating eyeballs, but they can only interact (i.e. kill) by commanding droids. Humans are allowed to live in the decayed remnants of their civilizations, but only by wearing druid-like cloaks. Communication is also completely forbidden, under the penalty of death. In this dready existence, you play the role of a Manhunter, a detective that works under the Orbs to track down criminals and other such insurgents. Both games take place in the real world locations of New York City and San Francisco, each using replications of authentic street maps and featuring recognizable landmarks.
Manhunter differs from the typical Sierra titles in a number of ways. A majority of the game takes place from a first person viewpoint, with a third person perspective for cinemas and action sequences. The text parser is gone too, with all actions controlled by a single cursor. This might seem pretty progressive, but it's controlled by the keyboard or joystick, so in reality it's very slow and awkward. (Some versions of the game support mouse input, but even then, that only tells the cursor where to go, as opposed to controlling the action directly.)
The traditional lock-and-key puzzles in most adventure games have mostly been replaced with actual detective work. Each game is divided into several days, with each day involving a new crime. Since the orbs can monitor the locations of the humans, your computer will track their exact movements, allowing you to track them down. Their transmitters tend to stop, though, usually if they've either gone underground, or been snuffed out. This same computer also holds a database of every human in the city. Half of the game revolves around investigating crime scenes, using the clues to figure out their names, running searches on them, and opening up new locations. Apparently the chips aren't particularly well designed and won't transmit their identities, hence, the need for Manhunters.
Manhunter also has more mazes per capita than your average adventure game - the idea is, you're supposed to analyze the targets, make a map, and then follow their footsteps. This is really cool, in theory, but it doesn't always work out in practice. In the first game, you need to trek through the Museum of Natural History, which is now apparently a huge maze of identical looking corridors. It's technically pretty easy, but the challenge comes from remembering which direction you're facing, and a single wrong turn means you need to start the whole thing over. It's even worse when you need to navigate through a minefield (!!) in Central Park - each screen technically has at least a dozen "exits", but it's never really clear what direction you'll be going in when you click on one. Even though you've properly analyzed your target's route, it's immensely frustrating to actual trace it in game - you'll find yourself getting blown up a lot.
The other major elements are the bane of adventure gamers everyone - arcade sequences.
On paper there's nothing wrong with arcade sequences in these types of games, but the engines are rarely optimized for it, leading to several annoying sections with exceedingly poor control. Manhunter is particularly vicious and unforgiving, overflowing with poorly planned segments that do little but infuriate. In the first game, you need to fight your way, one by one, through an army of punks. You can't actually walk forward - you can only jump, duck, and punch. You need to dodge a never ending series of knives (and eventually gunshots), creeping across the screen pixel by pixel, with a single screw-up resulting in death. And you need to do this FOUR TIMES. The only upside is that you can save anywhere in the middle of these, otherwise they'd be unplayable. The kicker is, once you finish with this segment, you have to find a certain person in the crowd. There's no clue on who's the right person - you just have to guess. If you guess wrong, you get tossed out of the club and need to fight your way through again.
At least it's pretty progressive about its death sequences. Every time you're killed, you meet the game's developers - Barry Murry, Dave Murry and Dee Dee Murry - clad in the same cloak as everyone else, giving you some smarmy comment about how you screwed up. These get less and less clever each time you see them (as if they were even clever to begin with), but at least it restarts you from right before you died, so you don't need to obsessively save your game every few seconds. But it is possible to find yourself in unwinnable situations if you miss some items, so you'll still need to keep some bookmarks of your progress.
It's a real shame that the "game" part of this "adventure game" is so terribly implemented, because the atmosphere, the artwork, the world, is impeccable, especially for its time.
Manhunter runs on the early Sierra AGI interpreter, meaning super low res 160x224 pixellated graphics with 16 colors. And yet, it's unquestionably one of the best looking Sierra games from that era. Most games, even modern ones, define "post apocalyptic" to mean "lots of browns and greys", but not so in Manhunter. The sky is a permanent red, also the coloring of its foreboding packaging. When you look at someone's face, beneath their robes, they're grey or blue or other another off-putting shade to signify some level of inhumanity. Colors are used in ways that colors shouldn't be - perhaps, a result of the limited color palette, but unique all the same. Everything is either falling apart or has already collapsed upon itself.
The art style plays a careful balancing act between grotesque and comical - there's certainly a lot of darkly humorous gore, but you're never sure to be disgusted or amused. There's a lot of weirdly conflicting humor too - one moment, you're looking at the close-up of a bloody, maggot infested corpse, and the next, you've flushed yourself down a public toilet to investigate a sewer system. At the beginning of each new day, an Orb takes an elevator up to your room to give your orders. Exactly why do floating beings need to use elevators anyway? Why can't it just float up to your window, or even just send you a message on your computer? It's all a bit silly.
The tone of game world is also completely different from what you'd expect. There's almost no dialogue, and no real character interaction - you occasionally see your character, although never their face - leaving you isolated from the rest of humanity, if not its world. After all, one of the edicts of the Orbs' rule is to complete forbid communication. Altogether, it's remarkably creepy, and it foreshadows some of the elements used in far more advanced games, like the subtle, visual storytelling of Half Life.
Of course, the AGI engine also didn't support sound cards, at least on the PC, so most of the game is silent except for obnoxious PC speaker noises. Ugh.
Manhunter: New York
Manhunter: New York
Manhunter: New York
Manhunter: New York
Manhunter: New York
Manhunter: New York
Manhunter: New York
Manhunter: San Francisco
Manhunter: San Francisco
Manhunter: San Francisco
Manhunter: New York - PC DOS / Apple II / Atari ST / Amiga (1988)
The story is broken up into four days - while each day, you're ordered to investigate various crimes against both humans and orbs, there's an overarching commonality amongst all of the murders. You'll investigate landmarks like Times Square, Grand Central, Coney Island, Central Park and the Museum of Natural History. The game also ends with you flying a ship over the island, destroying many of its landmarks during your pursuit of the culprit. Suffice to say, this one probably won't be remade any time soon.
Manhunter: New York
Manhunter: New York
Manhunter: San Francisco - PC DOS / Atari ST / Amiga (1989)
The big problem with Manhunter 2 is that it doesn't really improve on its predecessor - it plays exactly the same, just with a new scenario. The only real improvement is the difficulty select for the arcade segments, but they're still pretty obnoxious. Did we really need a sequence where we spin around the empty Vaillancourt Fountain? The game even uses the same AGI engine, which was already outdated when it came out in 1989, and was competing with far better looking (and playing) games like Kings Quest IV, running on the vastly superior SCI0 engine.
The posters throughout the series implied that Manhunter was meant to be a trilogy, teasing a third installment called "Manhunter: London". For whatever reasons, this never happened, and the developers moved on to their own company. It would've been cool to see where they went, at least. Most of the Sierra games really hit their stride with the SCI era games, and seeing the world fleshed out without the aggravating mazes or arcade sequences would've been great.
Manhunter: San Francisco
Manhunter: San Francisco
Manhunter: San Francisco
Sierra's Manhunter series is saddled with an unfortunately generic name - it is not related to the Hannibal Lector novel or comic book or any other property - that completely betrays its unique place in field of ancient adventure gaming. It's certainly not one of Sierra's best series - in fact, it might actually be one of their worst. But it does exemplify one of the greatest tragedies of interactive fiction - the developers have created a thoroughly intriguing world that's just no fun to actually play in.
American Cover
Manhunter: New York
Manhunter: New York
As the title openly suggests, the first game takes place in New York City, specifically Manhattan and Brooklyn.
American Cover
Manhunter: San Francisco
Manhunter: San Francisco
The second installment picks up where its predecessor left off - with you chasing your opponent all the way across the United States. Both of you crash - he gets away, while you accidentally end up killing another Manhunter. Apparently, in this society, you need to take up his job as a replacement, so the chase starts anew as you investigate more crimes, which once again, all tie back to the original perpetrator. This time you'll see famous San Francisco landmarks like Coit Tower, Embarcadero Center, the Transamerica Pyramid and Alcatraz.
