Inca

Year 1992, Coktel Vision, a French studio otherwise known for serving up educational games for kids. And then suddenly — an adventure set in the Incan empire with spaceships and pseudo-mystical storytelling. Back then I took it at face value, because the monitor was glowing blue and I was thirteen.

Inca is a genre hybrid that couldn't decide what it wanted to be. Adventure sequences set in pre-Columbian America alternate with arcade-style space combat in the spirit of a space shooter. You play as Eloy, an Incan warrior armed with both a mythological mission and — and here's where it gets weird — a spaceship. The story blends historical elements with sci-fi without batting an eye, and although it sounds like madness on paper, in 1992 it came across as surprisingly confident.

The adventure sequences work on point-and-click principles, the controls are straightforward. The environments are richly drawn, and pre-rendered backgrounds had plenty to say back then. The puzzles aren't cruel, the world's logic is consistent until the transition to space arrives — then the game turns into a corridor shooter with a sense of control that was average even by period standards. More precisely: survivable. I played through those sequences more times than was healthy, not because they were good, but because there was no other way to progress.

What I remember best about the game is its atmosphere. Coktel Vision had a sense for audiovisual presentation from the start, and Inca draws from that well. The MIDI music on a Sound Blaster card had genuine tension, screens full of golden temples and Andean symbolism felt exotic at a time when most games offered medieval castles or space stations. That combination of archaeological mystery and B-movie sci-fi proved memorable — not necessarily because it was good, but because it wasn't like anything else. That counts for something.

Today the game has aged unevenly. The adventure section holds up — short, straightforward, graphically still dignified. The space combat is, generously speaking, a historical document. Who'll dig it today: nostalgics who want to experience ambition without a budget, and players interested in Incan culture in video games, where there's hardly a crowd. Fire it up in a browser via DOSBox and you'll wrap it up in an hour or two. In those two hours you'll experience something that AAA studios didn't do back then and still don't — a story from the Andes where the hero flies through space and nobody thinks twice about it.