
	Platform NES Genre Adventure Publisher ICOM Simulations Developer Seika Games Released 1990
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Deja Vu

He has been pushing slowly but surely deeper into the bowels of the foreboding Castle Shadowgate for the last several hours. Perhaps only his knowledge that he is the last surviving member of an extinct line of “warrior-kings” has so far kept him from succumbing to the traps and demons beneath every floor and around every corner – but just as he is about to collapse, he suddenly emerges into a moonlit garden. All the pent-up weariness and frustration fall away as he catches a glimpse of a golden flute borne aloft on the crystal spray from a fountain at the enclosure’s center. Moments later, upon hearing its sweet melody, he drops into a deep sleep, to the soothing splash of the nearby fountain. Across untold dimensions of time and space, a mysterious man wakes up in a filthy bathroom, to the droning white noise of a toilet overflowing in the next stall, with the same melody ringing in his ears. With a sudden start the person realizes he has no idea who, or where, he is. Full credit is due to Kemco/Icom’s in-house musician. (The real surprise is how the tune is equally convincing as a medieval melody and a saxophone riff.)

So what’s going on? Your clothes are covered in dried blood, but no part of you seems to be cut. A sharp pain in your left arm reveals a needle’s puncture wound; have you overdosed on your favorite pastime – or have you been poisoned? Most of the items in your pocket are monogrammed with initials that match the name on a business card (no profession): J. Siegel. Can you stand? Time to leave. Seems you were in the rear washroom of a bar – Joe’s Bar – closed and locked for the day. Is this your place maybe? But the lone key in your pocket doesn’t fit the entrance; maybe you keep the right key secure in a private office upstairs? The key is your office key…but someone else is already inside, and he seems to have fallen asleep at the desk…a long sleep; he has three holes in him. The chamber of the six-shooter that was with you when you woke up – it contains three bullets. Were you responsible for this? Yet even more disturbing than that is a large poster with your picture on it – a boxing poster: the name reads “Ace” Harding. You don’t feel like a boxer…or a murderer. And why would a boxer, a lethal weapon in and of himself, need to carry a gun anyway?

Hopefully you can already see the appeal of Déjà Vu. The game tells you absolutely nothing other than the traditional “You are standing…” speech and doesn’t shepherd you through a “plot” that does all the work for you; it’s up to you to carefully examine every room and object and deduce for yourself the overall situation, its connection (if any) to your life, and what it means. If you can’t do it, no one else can help you.

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Déjà Vu was actually the first of a series of point-and-click games developed for the Macintosh in the mid-80s, but when part of the series was ported to the Nintendo towards the end of the decade, Shadowgate was the first developed and released. I don’t blame them in any way for this decision – dungeons and dragons sell much better than dicks and

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dames – but it makes a lot more sense for Déjà Vu to have been made first, for it exploits the interface – a series of still frames – better than its sister games. Shadowgate, released for the Nintendo in 1989, worked as an edgy fantasy-picture book for “advanced readers”, but with the idea of amnesia, Déjà Vu turns into a photo-album for the mind. By poring over this series of photographs one at a time, perhaps something will spark your memory. Have you been here before; did you know this person; does that belong to you?

1990 was arguably the best time for the 8-bit Nintendo system, seeing the releases of Super Mario 3, the first Final Fantasy (in America, at any rate), Maniac Mansion, Startropics, Castlevania 3, Crystalis, Mega Man 3, Ninja Gaiden 2…and at the time, Déjà Vu had no trouble taking pride of place alongside them. And it kills me to think that, although each and every one of these other games plays as great now as it did then, Déjà Vu has aged catastrophically. It’s not quite unplayable yet, but I wager inside another five to ten years, it will be. Ironically, Shadowgate has aged quite a bit better since it’s ultimately little more than an obstacle course, one room and challenge after another, after another.

Part of the problem is the interface, the other part the design. In a situation such as this, it’s necessary to “pixel-hunt” your way across every image, as you never know what could be an important clue to either your past or the murder. Never a problem with a computer and mouse, the cursor here fails not only because it crawls slowly across the screen, but has the tendency to “leap” into the menus when you edge the finger too close to the side of the frame. And let’s not forget that it never informs you what objects are important and which aren’t: admirable on a certain level for not giving anything away, until you find yourself repeatedly examining what looks like an important dresser or bureau only to have to click through the same generic “It’s just as it appears” staple.

It’s a problem common to many other games…but then too, a game like this requires reading, lots of it: newspapers, files, journal entries…and the section of the screen reserved for text is cramped and laboriously spells out its sentences only a few lines at a time. Can you picture the horrific scene in a doctor’s office with twenty tiny bottles of medicine on the shelves, with a 20-page memo detailing what each does? Imagine having to read the thing in its entirety a dozen or so times, if not more, as well as trying to remember which bottle is which; some you need – some will kill you. Unlike Shadowgate, Déjà Vu is fairly open-ended, which should ideally make the act of investigating somewhat more compelling. This is true as long as you remain on the general Main St. of the game, but when it’s time to go traveling…You’ll end up in rooms crowded with objects, yet generally only one is of any importance. How do we “know” that this piece of paper is the sole object of interest; what about all this other stuff? It’s a painful irony that you’ll have bulging pockets of worthless inventory that take hours to sift through, but most of what you should be able to closely examine leaves no impression.

Add to these problems the fact that the “mystery” is extremely obvious and one-dimensional in the final analysis, and the culpability of your guy is never in any doubt (You tell me, without ever having played it: Did you do it, or not?). And the overall solution revolves around an unbelievable piece of evidence just lying around that ludicrously spells out every single detail of “how it was done”. Just be glad you’re up against professionals.

Despite all that, I think Déjà vu has some of the best game box-art of all time. It’s exactly the type of thing you’d expect to see on one of the more intellectually ambitious Mickey Spillane novels. It’s wonderful…and it’s totally inappropriate for the title. Its biggest fault is that it suggests the game is a multi-layered conspiracy yarn that toys with reality (alas, nay), but it also suggests a “noirish” experience, and Déjà Vu is striking for being very “un-noirish”. In fact, the whole story takes place on a bright sunny day (December 7^th, 1941, to be exact). Interestingly, a friend once remarked that it was on that day – the bombing of Pearl Harbor – that American noir was born, as it was that event that really shattered America’s psyche. Yet when night does fall in Déjà Vu toward the case’s end it’s peaceful and soothing; it’s the horrors of the daytime that have been banished. It’s a brilliant reversal of the convention.

So…should this thing be played – despite all its problems? …Probably. I think it’s a little too important to simply ignore if you’ve never tried it, but not nearly important enough for it to be updated and revised on one of the modern game systems. If you get the chance, you should probably give it a try – but be aware of what you’re getting yourself into.

He Takes A Lickin’ And Keeps On Tickin’: I’d like to give a special consolation prize to the hapless mugger of Déjà Vu. The poor guy keeps coming after you for money even though you keep rearranging his face each time he tries. And the sheer pleasure of watching the mugger’s mug…deteriorate with each fresh encounter is sure to bring many hours of pleasure…!

Brendan Lynch

(January 20, 2007)


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