Black Dahlia – A Fair & Balanced Retrospective

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Features by Adventure Game Hotspot staff
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You'd be forgiven for thinking that Black Dahlia – if you think of it at all – might be about Elizabeth Short, who was given the moniker after her brutal death and mutilation in the 1940s. But while Short does have a minor role in Take-Two Interactive's 1998 FMV thriller of that name, the game is really about a bunch of crazy cultists descended from Germanic knights who seek to raise the Norse god Odin to usurp his power for themselves, all set against the backdrop of a series of grisly killings closely resembling the real-world Cleveland Torso Murderer that may or may not have anything to do with it.

If that has your face scrunched up in a look of pure puzzlement, then you'll know exactly how players felt – and not just because of its seemingly inexplicable disconnect from the famous case it's named after. Which of course makes it the perfect target for a wonderful new video retrospective from the Space Quest Historian.

If you equate the 90s FMV craze with cheesy acting, implausible stories, and barely-there gameplay, Black Dahlia is pretty much the opposite. Well, implausible story, yes, but with "phenomenal acting" (ironically, the worst belonging to its biggest Hollywood headline stars who make only short, memorable-for-the-wrong-reasons cameos) and an "intriguing plot that veers gleefully between historical accuracy, carefully researched mythology, and wildly imaginative insanity." The live-action film work is excellent, the visual effects impressive for the time, and on that basis alone, Black Dahlia deserves a place as one of the best FMV games ever made. It's too bad, then, that they did everything they could to make sure no one saw it.

Limited, "bewilderingly lackluster marketing" helped consign Black Dahlia to the scrapheap of obscurity, but what prevented even many interested players from embracing it is the game's excess of "impenetrable puzzle design" throughout its astounding eight CD-ROMs. Puzzles are everywhere, for any and all reasons, and they are HARD. Most are of the logic variety, and yet some seem to defy any logic at all besides the moon variety. Some even include – gasp – math! And runes... So. Many. Runes.

Fortunately the developers included a cheat code, because the Space Quest Historian's enthusiastic praise for the game's better elements may just convince you to try digging up a copy for yourself. Or you could save yourself the elevated blood pressure and just sit back to enjoy SQH's whopping four-hour "movie cut" of Black Dahlia's abundant cutscenes, in either original or upscaled versions.

If all that has you yearning for even more background of a "bonkers, unhinged" adventure SQH compares to being "like Gabriel Knight on crack," he's gone even farther above and beyond the call of duty by providing a compiled video interview with the cast and crew of Black Dahlia, with links on the YouTube channel to the full interviews behind it.

Whew! It's a whole lot of Black Dahlia goodness. But then, the game deserves better than to be forgotten, and finding out why is just a click away.

The Space Quest Historian is part of the Adventure Game Hotspot Network, a collective of talented, dedicated content producers who work entirely independently but have joined forces to promote each other’s efforts. All opinions expressed belong solely to the original creators.