What is AMBER: Journeys Beyond?

Ever since the critical and commercial success of 7th Guest, there’s been a slew of scary-monster CD-ROM games, some genuinely creepy, others just cruddy. So what else is new? With AMBER, quite a bit. It’s well-designed, it’s full of genuine thrills, and it’s got lots of style.

The opening is delightfully noir. A haunted house — nothing new — but a haunted house with an edgy twist: cool gear. Roxy, your first-person persona, is an intrepid poltergeist researcher, and she’s loaded the joint with paranormal measuring devices worthy of the designers at Porsche.

The AMBER (Astral Mobility Bio Electromagnetic Resonance) unit is a device designed by Roxy to let people project their spirits out of their bodies, onto a different plane. Problem is, Roxy got fragmented like a sorry hard drive by a glitch in the imaginary Bio-Psi Technologies software. As a result, gameplay follows the traditional adventure pattern of exploring and collecting inventory (here, it’s through each ghost’s world of private obsession) but what you’re collecting is fragment after fragment of Roxy. It’s not every game that lets you rack up pieces of a lead character.

The house that’s the real world base of the game is so tastefully decorated and well-rendered that your own real world gets depressing after awhile. In fact Hue Forest Entertainment — the North Carohna startup that developed AMBER — has such a command of what it takes to make good monitor art that the CD is practically a clinic on the subject.

Every effort has been made to keep things plausible, with an involving backstory, rich art, and a good degree of interactivity. While the makers restricted themselves to what made sense for the story, they also used the freedom of a supernatural premise to its fullest advantage. Each ghost’s domain (these have to be found and can be played in any order) has its own unique style, crafted to suit what got the spirit stuck haunting this world in the first place. After you rack ‘em and sink ‘em, you will be thinking sequel and left wanting more.

The puzzles along the way aren’t as memorable as the overall game experience itself, but AMBER is best regarded as one big puzzle filled with diverse elements and styles. It’s got comedy, creepiness, numbers, pseudo-science, geometry, mazes, and a roller coaster; it’s even got Christmas. You may grow a bit tired of walking the house and grounds, but the speed of navigation is part of the plausibility. The whole story is the puzzle and the experience of solving it is rewarding and dramatic.

Merrill, Philip. (November 1996). AMBER: Journeys Beyond. MacAddict. (pg. 76).

Download AMBER: Journeys Beyond for Mac

Architecture

68K + PPC (FAT)

System Requirements

From Mac OS 7.0 up to Mac OS 8.1

Compatibility notes

Minimum Requirements

• MC68040 or PowerPC processor
• System 7.0
• 16-bit color display
• 5 MB RAM available (8 MB recommended)
• QuickTime 2.1 or higher
• Sound Manager 3.1 or higher

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II