The Politics of Dinosaurs and Melancholy in 1995’s “Lost Eden”

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Recently, I craved something simpler from my gaming experience. I was in the middle of getting back into WoW, and a memory came to me from my childhood. I have very few memories from early childhood, and most of them seem to center around a Windows 98 machine on the 3rd floor of our house, nestled in a cubbyhole. I was struck with a memory of myself sitting at the family computer at a big wooden desk, covered in tax documents and bills, launching a game about dinosaurs. Even the name of the game was stuck in my head after all these years: Lost Eden!

I'm really not sure why my parents owned this game. It's possible I saw it on the discount shelf and asked for it. Maybe it was part of my parents' own small collection of computer games. However it got into our house, I launched this game and my young mind was instantly transported to a world of man and dinosaur working together to fight the carnivorous terror of Moorkus Rex.

Lost Eden, made in 1995 by Cyro Interactive, is a melancholy game. It contrasts a sense of mourning the past, while looking ahead with anticipation. It is about how the death of one society and culture makes space for something new. It's an ambitious game attempting to tell a story far beyond its technical ability. However, it's completely charming and unique. A time capsule of the whimsical, illogical, and fantastical stories that used to dominate video gaming.

It is a world of talking dinosaurs, medieval humans, learning to forgive and overcome the sins of the past. There are also a whole bunch of other mammalian races, and it's never really explained why there are also talking monkeys.

Let me introduce you to some of the crew. Lemur guy. Pretty dinosaur lady. Flying Dinosaur man. and me, prince of a kind of evil kingdom.

Story and Interpretation

You are Prince Adam on his 18th birthday, eager to become a man and explore the world! Were it not for the fact that the evil Moorkus Rex is out there eating and enslaving humans. As you petition your father, the king, to allow you to learn about the world, he refuses to let you go. As you'd imagine, circumstances force his hand, and your adventure takes you across this ancient world. It is themed around sword and sorcery, like the world of Conan the Barbarian. The idea being, this is an ancient world of heroes and magic from pre-history. This is the world where gods, legends, and myths find their roots.

As you explore, you meet various tribes and races, all on the brink of collapse and predation by the armies of Mr Rex. Groups of yoked lemurs, Amazonian warrior women, and creepy cave dudes who kidnap women litter this world. Your role is to unite these peoples and ally them with the dinosaurs. The dinosaurs make up their own tribes and peoples, separate from the humanoid races. While you help and ally with the tribes of man, you must seek forgiveness for your grandfather's sins. He enslaved and terrorized the non-human peoples of this world. As a matter of fact, the crisis being faced by all the tribes, human and dinosaur alike, is the direct result of your grandfather's hatred, which destroyed the alliance and safety that had kept the predators away for generations.

Dude is exhausted after flying my butt and 6 bird nests around this map for 5 hours.

Whimsical Story Telling

It's magical storytelling. It sits somewhere between a Saturday morning cartoon and a dark fantasy book. "You must stop people from being eaten and enslaved" is a very powerful call to adventure. It plays into the melancholy theme. At the start of the game, the age of mankind appears to be at an end. One last kingdom stands in the face of hungry dinosaurs. All the tribes of man are divided and hateful, due to your own empire's selfishness and evil. The dinosaur tribes are anticipating the day your kingdom falls, even as they help you overcome the armies of Moorkus Rex.

As you near the end of the game, though, there is a tone shift. Suddenly, there is hope for mankind under a brave and benevolent king like yourself. The dinosaurs begin to recognize that they will be overshadowed by the great feats of mankind. The Dinos are longing for the restoration of a world of tradition and magic, while you are busy forging a new world, organized by power and might. Ultimately, they resign to the fact that their age is almost at a complete end. It’s a powerful story that is rarely told in video games. It invokes the problems found in our own world.

There is a weird thing, were the dinosaurs like to be used as manual laborers for the creation of human settlements.
Their implied to be as smart as humans, but use that intelligence to delight in service to people… a bit strange.

Critical Analysis

Lost Eden feels distinct and refreshing. It feels very aware of the anxieties and issues of our own world and the cataclysmic issues we are facing. It connects its story to the melancholy of the real world. The loss of the dinosaurs mirrors our own struggle with the loss of our natural world. Humanities fear predation and war mirrors our apocalyptic fears of nuclear war by great powers.

At the same time, just as in the world of Lost Eden, we have continued to press forward. The old analog world is replaced by a new digital one. There is much lost, but so much is gained. The story takes bold stances and embraces themes that I believe would scare away game developers today. Think about the backstory of the protagonist: you are placed in the shoes of the prince of a nation that has built a racist empire and has worked to exterminate other cultures. The game makes it very clear your government, family, and friends all very much accepted this reality and participated in making it happen.

This lady is the protagonist’s long lost sister who made herself queen of the lemur men after she and your mother failed in an attempt to fight Moorkus Rex when you were just a baby, defying your father’s cowardice, and causing your father to fear they died in war leading to the opening events of the game…. There is a lot more lore here, but we don’t have time to get into it….

Political Themes

It's so very much on the nose that I'm not sure if this game came out today people would even want to engage with it. It's political in a way I see many games work very hard to avoid. But, I think the bizarreness and oddity of it all being told to you by a talking pterodactyl makes the medicine go down a little easier. I think we have a difficult time merging such serious themes with irony and silliness. Perhaps we feel today that a game world must be as grim and dark as the themes we want to tap into. I think a game like Lost Eden shows us we can approach these subjects in ways that make it possible to grapple with them, while still delighting our want for a fun story.

Music

Lost Eden has an original, studio-recorded music score made by an actual musician. Something really unique and a big choice in an era where the expectations for good music were to be on par with Super Nintendo games. The music itself is otherworldly. It's like ancient techno music. It's bizarre and favors vibes over realism and immersion. But, again, there is something so charming about this. It invokes this theme of the old world and the new world meeting in this brief moment.

Bro was spitting fire with the giant horn trumpet.

The mixture of it all creates a unique experience that really captured my imagination. The game takes itself completely seriously, while at the same time has no issue with being corny and dumb. At almost no point did this game fall into some major stylistic trope. I never had any idea what visual was coming next. I was surprised! Such a rare thing in video games today, where we have distilled genres down to a few tropes and themes.

Voice Acting

The charm of the game comes from its visuals and voice acting. The game is fully voiced, and the acting is overall very good! There is also a surprising amount of voice acting. Lost Eden's amount of voice acting is on par with what one might expect in a modern game, albeit a short one.

The quality of the voice acting is probably excellent for 1995. It sort of sounds like you're listening to an AM radio station, but if -you have played any other video games from the early or mid-90s, the fact that the dialogue is at all discernible is an amazing achievement. For comparison, Star Wars Dark Forces, a critically acclaimed game from the same year, was still using Doom-like MIDI tracks and has hardly any voice acting, apart from the death screams of storm troopers and a few one-off lines. And none of it is actually discernible!

The voice acting goes a long way towards making you empathize and feel for the people of this world. A talking dinosaur is very easy to anthropomorphize. They become your friends and companions, and it was the correct choice for this game. It would simply not resonate as much if they had made the choice to omit voice acting in favor of simply reading dialogue. But hearing the dinosaurs cry, rejoice, and contemplate really brings out the character and nuance of who these dino-people are.

Gameplay

The gameplay doesn't really live up to level of storytelling, music, and acting. It’s a point-and-click adventure game, which, while very heavy on narrative, is very light on actually feeling like the hero of an ancient world. The gameplay simply does not take advantage of the strengths of the point-and-click genre, and does nothing to add to the story and theme.

Can you guess what your supposed to click here? Would you believe me if I said, there is nothing here your supposed to click?

Your mouse is your tool to overcome all obstacles, and your mouse cursor in many ways physically inhabits the world as your actual avatar on screen. Whether you are getting past a fearful father or evil dinosaurs, you simply must click the right bit of the screen. Sadly, Lost Eden is rather uninspired in its exploration of point-and-click mechanics. Myst, in comparison, was released 2 years earlier and stands up as an incredible game to this day as the greatest point-and-click adventure. Lost Eden seems to take zero lessons from Myst and other well-known point-and-click games from the era. There is 0 thought required to beat this game. Most puzzles amount to being told what item to click on and what part of the map.

The game also made the very 1995 choice of making the mouse cursor a giant rotating cube whose faces change when you mouse over something you can interact with. This delightful cube brings the benefit of being 2 seconds delayed whenever actually showing you what interaction is available to you! Which, when your one mechanic is clicking things, makes the game as slow and annoying as possible!

This man is why we needed 6 bird’s nest…. bro loves bird nests.

Conclusion

It’s a very bizarre game. I honestly love it and hate it. On the one hand, it is full of creativity. Every character you meet, every little plot point, it's all very obviously designed around someone's own little universe they had been cooking up in their head. It almost feels like you can hear the inner 12-year-old of whoever wrote the story saying, "And then.. And then… and then…" On the other hand, it doesn't have great gameplay.

Is it perfect? No. But it takes big swings. Bigger than most games, and it’s beautiful in that sense. They created a world that is lovingly crafted. It taps into anxieties that were being felt at the end of the millennium and that have only heightened over the last 30 years, and packages it all with dinosaurs and ancient techno.