he alien Shee built an arkship to carry their race to another world. The ship, now abandoned, still teems with genetically engineered life in four terrariums (pastoral, desert, jungle and aquatic). Among the life forms are two semi-intelligent races created by the Shee: the simple, child-like Norns and the chronically kleptomaniac Ettin. A third, more hostile race--the Grendels--stowed away on board and forced the Shee to flee planetside. Life on the ship, itself a large organism, is free to develop on its own in each ecosystem, but the three races can wander the ship freely.
This is where Creatures 3 begins, with the player acting as a caretaker to help the Norns develop as a species and as a society. The player breeds the Norns, raises them, names them, teaches them, talks with them, watches over them and protects them from Grendels and some of the nastier non-sentient life forms, as well as various illnesses and toxins. When Norns die--from illness, accident, hostile Grendels or old age--the player can even memorialize them in a crypt while charting their bloodlines.
The player also has control of various mechanical systems in the terrariums as well as in the engineering section and on the ship's bridge. These include a tutorial room for teaching language, a medical lab, a gene splicer, a replicator (that duplicates existing items) and a creator (that creates new items from scratch). The player can also use a variety of movable components--switches, monitors, counters, transmitters and logic gates--to build more complex mechanisms, hooking the components and systems together via input and output ports.
Too cute yet too complex
Creatures 3 is in many respects brilliantly implemented and presented. The graphic design is colorful and inventive, giving a truly organic feeling to the arkship and its terrariums. The underlying artificial life algorithms include mutations, ecosystem swings and even crossbreeding. The user interface concepts work well, with special kudos for the ability to teach the Norns language and then guide and interact with them using that language. And the system-building functions can provide amusement for those so inclined.
However, the game suffers from profound discontinuities in tone and complexity. The Norns--annoyingly cute and wide-eyed, with high-pitched, heavily intonated voices, childish dialogue and constant giggles--appear and act like creatures out of a cartoon show for pre-adolescent girls--the "My Little Pony" age group. The Ettins aren't quite as bad but are largely dull. Even the Grendels look cartoonish, like the Tasmanian Devil with scales, horns and a tail, and their big threat is, believe it or not, spanking the Norns to death.
At the same time, Creatures 3 offers a collection of systems and devices to play with that are reminiscent of a mid-'70s computer lab. Some lend themselves to easy use, but others involve classic Boolean logic (AND, OR and NOT gates) or deal with numeric inversion, counters, latches and other devices that will be largely unintelligible to children attracted to the cute Norns. The thin documentation and lack of a tutorial only make using such systems more difficult, and younger players are likely to be lost. At the same time, older, more technically oriented players will find the unending cuteness, lack of conflict and absent sense of wonder too much to overcome. The remaining audience for this game, would-be electrical engineers who found E.T. the Extraterrestrial too intense and dark, just isn't big enough to let this game succeed.
