There are days when you wake up in the morning, look out the window, rub your eyes, look again, and you see something so strange that you have no other alternative than to just deliberately ignore it, ban it from your memory, and try to continue to live your normal life as well as you can. Yet if one doesn’t succeed at this, there remains only one thing to do: to get to the bottom of the extraordinary thing in question. In the case of our protagonist, it is a pyramid. A flying pyramid. Above Paris. To be precise, one that emerges suddenly and unexpectedly above the French metropolis in the year 2023.

Readers of the Nikopol graphic novel trilogy know this story very well. The adventure game Nikopol: Secrets of the Immortals begins what is more or less a true adaptation of the original trilogy created by Serbian artist Enki Bilal, who enjoys an absolute cult status in France. The game focuses on the first novel in the series, and one can predict that in the case of its success, the next episodes will be adapted in future, though for now further sequels are still uncertain. We were able to see the newest game from White Birds in action at GC, just ahead of its North American release.

Similar to the comic book, the story gets going very quickly: what is the ominous pyramid doing in Paris? Who is inside it? What is the shadowy government up to? As Alcide Nikopol, the player finds himself caught in a net of complex intrigues and conspiracies in a dystopic, grim, totalitarian vision of the future. The backdrop is one of the notable differences from the source material: while Bilal’s story occurred in the 1980s, reflecting the conflict between Russia and USA, White Birds’ designers have transformed it into a sci-fi adventure quite in the style of Blade Runner. To prevent the plot from becoming too distorted, the player is put not in the role of the comic book’s hero, but instead his son. At the same time, Nikopol senior finds himself in Earth’s orbit as a dissident on a space prisoner-transport preparing his comeback to Earth.

White Birds promises to have executed these changes with great care, so that all fans of the original will still be able to recognise the intelligent background story in the game. What the changes do is make the game better suited to our current cultural and political climate. Paris of the future has transformed itself into a gloomy surveillance state. The city centre is parted into a small branch for the privileged and big slums for the rest of the population. The Russian and American agents are represented by two antagonistic, undefined religions and in the middle of it all there are the residents of the pyramid: in truth, Egyptian Gods who put the fascist rulers under pressure through humans’ great need for oil. With this story, Nikopol masterfully combines archetypical mythology with spiritual symbolism and up-to-date social-critical tendencies into an atmospherically gloomy thriller. Fans of extraterrestial myths about gods, complex parallel univeres, and scheming, shadowy governments will feel right at home with the clever references to alternative theories. The “allseeing” flying pyramid is only one of many allusions in Bilal’s story.

One notices that the designers have done much to keep the feel of the original storytelling process. For instance, the cutscenes are beautiful collages edited from animated scenes and static comic book illustrations. Looking at the game’s technical aspects, White Birds has this time chosen the first-person perspective. Every single one of the almost 130 pre-rendered scenes offers a full 360-degree view. The left mouse button serves to trigger actions, and the right button opens the inventory. The very detailed graphics can be presented in resolution up to 1280x1024, including widescreen versions. Additional visual effects can be activated in the options menu, where you can also set the mouse sensitvity. The result of these options is that Nikopol runs quite fluidly even on older computers, yet looks very good on modern hardware.

Not every day do we see a parallax feature in a first-person adventure game, but such is the case with Nikopol. The many scenes are composed not only of one rendered background graphic, but of several, combined in a specific order. For example, when looking out the window, the background behind its frame moves at a different speed when panning our point of view, creating a better impression of depth. A great number of animations like spaceships flying by, blinking lights, and the moving sky itself make the environments even more dynamic. However, what is especially appealing is the game’s audio, with random sounds adding still more atmosphere, like the fascist government sending different propaganda programs through a loudspeaker near the hero’s apartment. Every now and then, subtle pieces of music with a lightly psychedelic tone are played in the background, fitting very well into the overall nature of the game.