Deja Vu

Two very different games share this title. The one on this page is not the ICOM Simulations point-and-click mystery that launched the MacVenture line; it is Déjà Vu – Eine phantastische Geschichte, a German illustrated text adventure written by Jörn Böhrer for Axis Komputerkunst and released by Ariolasoft in 1985 for the Commodore 64 and the 8-bit Ataris.

The premise is a schoolboy who reads about a temple called Garasim. The temple is crumbling, the world is going with it, and there are ninety-nine days left. That countdown is the game's spine, turning aimless wandering into a cost rather than a free activity.

Everything runs from the keyboard. You type commands, the parser answers in prose, and a drawn illustration sits above the text. There is no music and no sound at all, which on a C64 is a conspicuous omission. The release spans two double-sided floppies, so disk swapping is part of the experience rather than an occasional interruption.

The language is the wall. The parser only understands German, and specifically the narrow 1985 vocabulary the author programmed into it. Without German you cannot get past the opening screen. With German you still face the usual mid-eighties parser lottery: verb guessing, unhelpful refusals, dead ends you only discover hours later, and no mapping help of any kind.

It is playable in a browser through VICE emulation, disk swapping included. Approach it as a document rather than as entertainment – evidence that the German-speaking C64 scene wrote its own adventures instead of only importing British and American ones. The audience is genuinely small: readers of German who already enjoy period text adventures. Everyone else is probably looking for the ICOM game that shares the name.