Ludography
72/100
Players10 ratings
More scores
GameFAQsTough
3.5/5
Player reviews
82% positive115 reviews
Steam Deck
Playable
Runs on
Windows, Mac, Linux
Price
US$9.99

Where to get it

Noctropolis cover

1994 · Adventure · Point-and-click adventure

Noctropolis

In a world where comic books are real - The final issue is Evil!

Released
1994
Platforms
LinuxMS-DOSWindowsmacOS
Genres
AdventurePoint-and-click adventurePuzzle
Developers
—
Publishers
Electronic Arts
Modes
Single-player
Perspective
Bird view / IsometricSide view
Themes
FantasyHorror
Country
United States
Age ratings
ESRB M
Languages
English, French, German, Spanish (Spain)
Time to beat
4hmain story5hcompletionist

About

Noctropolis is a 1994 MS-DOS third-person adventure game by Flashpoint Productions and published by Electronic Arts. The player assumes the role of the character Peter Grey, a lonely bookstore owner who winds up in the world of his favorite comic book. Grey discovers that he is destined to assume the role of his former comic book hero.

›Story

In a world where comic books are real - The final issue is Evil!

In the City Of Darkness, where the spirit of the times is an insatiable lust for flesh and blood, a hero stands alone. You are Darksheer, and your nemeses will stop at nothing: the vampiric Succubus, Tophat the Magician, the masochistic Master Macabre and their demonic allies have joined forces to indulge in fantasies of carnage worthy only of the end of time.

Players say

Media

The articlegameplay, story, development, reception

Gameplay

This style of gameplay is mostly third-person point-and-click, with some cut scenes. The player not only has to locate items but carefully choose dialog to gather information to help them progress through the game.

Characters in the game were digitized from analog footage, allowing for real life characters to be placed in 2D digital environments.

Reception

Charles Ardai of Computer Gaming World, while approving of the game's visual style and detailed art, criticized that the game has a simplistic interface and uses juvenile shock value in the form of gratuitous violence and sexual content in order to distract from the lack of substance to the story. He added, "It's also highly derivative, both of actual comic books and of other computer games." A reviewer for Next Generation highly praised the game's story, abstract and challenging puzzles, comic-book style backgrounds, digitized character animation, soundtrack, and dark atmosphere. Though he remarked that some of the dialogue is silly for a Mature-rated game, and that many of the puzzles require illogical leaps of intuition, he concluded that "Those not requiring the utmost in realism will find this to be one of the best graphic adventures of the season."

Legacy

In 2015 Night Dive Studios acquired the rights of the game and was able to recover the source code from the original developer. The game's assembly code was ported with the help of the original developer to C++ to port the game to modern platforms. com. The remastered game features full compatibility with contemporary computers, a remastered soundtrack, improved keyboard/mouse support with rebindable keys/buttons and several bug fixes, and removed dead-end situations that would render the game unwinnable.

Night Dive Studios released Linux and macOS versions of its port on 27 October 2017. Players who pirated a copy of this version of Noctropolis will see their character imprisoned on the game over screen instead of the standard animations.

Releases by platformdates and regions as published

PlatformReleasedRegions
MS-DOS31 December 1994Europe · North America 31 December 1994

Editions and related releases

Remastered as
Noctropolis
Built on it
Noctropolis

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Collections2 collections

Description adapted from its source, CC BY-SA 4.0.