About A Game: Sentinel Returns (PSX)
In a similar vein as my previous post about Slamscape, this is another game with a strange presentation and gameplay concept, interesting music, and no release in Japan. Those are some very abstract similarities though, and the games themselves are very different in most aspects.
Sentinel Returns, developed by Hookstone and published by Psygnosis, is a remake/sequel of an old home computer game. The original game, The Sentinel or The Sentry by Geoff Crammond (who also made Stunt Car Driver), came out on many home computer platforms and featured fairly impressive 3D graphics for its time. Sentinel Returns sticks closely to the gameplay mechanics of the original, mainly adding the weird visual design and atmosphere, and an ambient soundtrack composed by John Carpenter.
The game starts out with a creepy, very abstract video that does not explain much of anything, showing organ-like blobs being injected with something. The main menu has a similar weird presentation, and starting a stage is shown as one of those injections turning an organic thing under a looking glass into the stage. The stages are on some kind of wheel or spiral, and it’s a long spiral; this game has a total of 651 levels.
Playing your first level without reading instructions before will be very confusing. You start out with a first-person view from a stationary location, in a dark 3d landscape made of square tiles, with a few trees around. You cannot directly move from your location, only look around. You might manage to place some strange objects in the environment.
Here’s how to play Sentinel Returns: In every stage, there is a Sentinel, usually in the highest location of the map. Your goal is to absorb the Sentinel. The main actions you can take are to absorb objects, create objects, and to move your perspective into a special kind of object called a Robot. You can only absorb and create on tiles onto which you can look down, i.e. you have to be high enough up. Creating things costs energy, and absorbing them earns you energy; a tree is one point of energy, a “rock” (which looks weirdly fleshy with bones) is two, and a robot is three. You can create other things on top of a rock, so they are your main way of climbing upwards.
The Sentinel has a limited cone of view which rotates around slowly. When it sees you, it will start to drain your energy, so you have to hide from it and run away if you come into its vision. The landscape often has hills and troughs that help you to hide. In case of emergency there is also a panic button to “hyperspace”, which teleports you to a random spot on the map, but this is rarely a good idea.
So the main gameplay for a level of Sentinel Returns is a kind of stealth action puzzle where you absorb the naturally occuring trees to gather energy, use rocks and robots to move upwards and around, avoiding the Sentinel’s gaze until you can absorb it.
After you have understood how to play and completed a few stages, it’s actually fairly easy, and I quickly felt like the game was starting to lack challenge. A good and easy strategy is usually to quickly build a high stack of rocks from which you can snipe the Sentinel or at least get close to it. In later stages there are additional “sentries”, basically smaller sentinels, but they are usually easily disposed with the same strategy.
This is a first-person game with a lot of looking around, but by default you will have to use the D-Pad for it, which is not very accurate. It is entirely possible to absorb things from very far away if you can see and target them, but it might require tiny movements that are rather difficult with the D-Pad. Thankfully the game does support the PlayStation Mouse, which helps a lot with looking around and aiming accurately. But the mouse alone does not have enough buttons, so with the mouse control scheme you actually also have to use the controller face buttons and R1/R2. Still, the mouse really helps and is my preferred option.
I mentioned that the game has a huge number of levels, 651, but you don’t have to play every single one. Depending on how much excess energy you have at the end of a level, you can skip up to three levels ahead. This will make it much easier to reach higher level numbers, but should you actually make it to the end, the game will tell you to get 100% of “orchids” and come back. I assume that even with skipping, playing this many levels is already beyond the interest of most players, but this is where the real game completion starts. If you finish levels on the list without any skipped stages in-between, they will turn into orchids in the level list. So 100% orchids simply means finishing all stages. I only played up to around level 70, but some brave soul uploaded both the non-100% and the 100% ending to Youtube. These endings are from the PC version, which looks quite a bit higher-definition, and might be different from the PS1 version, which if I understand correctly also has exclusive FMVs and thus might have different endings.
Non-100% Ending: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0FFZe0VTPg
100% Ending: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tck_ESXakPo
I did quite enjoy what I played of Sentinel Returns. I’m a big sucker for mystery in games so starting and figuring the game out was intriguing, and the atmospheric presentation is very neat. I feel like the enjoyment can’t possibly hold up for hundreds of stages though, it seemed to get fairly samey and easy after a while (although there are some fun stage designs occasionally).
If you want to read more about Sentinel Returns and the original Sentinel, with much better writing than I can manage, check out the wonderful Kimimi’s post about it: https://kimimithegameeatingshemonster.com/2019/03/18/sentinel-returns/
Finally here’s my archived stream of playing Sentinel Returns up to around stage 70:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hu_Q2qp0N2c