Creatures: The Cute Game With the Nasty Streak

Before anything else, a piece of housekeeping, because this trips people up constantly.

This is Creatures, the 1990 C64 platform game by Apex Computer Productions, published by Thalamus. The title is an acronym: Clyde Radcliffe Exterminates All Trolls Under The Surface. Clyde is a round fuzzy thing with large eyes and a friendly face.

It has nothing whatsoever to do with Creatures, the 1996 artificial-life simulation from Cyberlife, where you raise Norns with a genuine genetic model and a neural network and everyone had a lovely time writing dissertations about it. Same word, different universe, no connection of any kind. The Cyberlife one is the one search engines assume you mean. The Apex one is the one where a small furry mammal gets fed into a bandsaw.

Two games on one cassette

The structure alternates, and the two halves are barely on speaking terms.

Half one is a platform game. Clyde runs, jumps and fights his way across a horizontally scrolling landscape, collecting things, killing things, dealing with the geometry. It is competent. It has that specific late-period C64 polish where the sprite work is far better than the hardware has any right to give you and the scrolling is glassy. The Rowlands brothers — John writing the code and drawing it, Steve doing the music — were among the small group of people who spent 1990 proving the machine still had headroom.

Half two is what everybody remembers.

Between the action levels, you get a torture screen. One of Clyde’s fellow Fuzzy Wuzzies is strapped into a machine. The machine is going to kill him. There is a timer. Your job is a physics-flavoured puzzle: work out the sequence of things to hit, push, redirect or destroy to dismantle the apparatus before the count runs out.

Fail, and the game does not fade to black. It shows you.

The failure animation as the main event

Here is why this design matters, stripped of the shock value.

A standard platform game handles failure as bookkeeping. You die, a jingle plays, a counter decrements, you restart from a checkpoint. The cost of failure is time — thirty seconds of replaying a corridor. That is the entire economy, and every platformer from Manic Miner to the present runs on it. It works, it is fine, and it means that death carries no weight at all beyond mild annoyance.

Creatures takes the cheapest asset in the genre — the failure state — and spends its most expensive animation on it. The Fuzzy dies elaborately, at length, in a device that has been carefully drawn, and you sit there and watch it happen because there is nothing else to do.

The mechanical consequence is that the timer stops being a number. In an ordinary timed puzzle the clock threatens you with a retry. In this one it threatens you with a thing you have already seen once and would prefer not to see again. The game has converted an abstract pressure into a specific dread, and it did it with art rather than with rules — which is a variation of the same trick Defender of the Crown pulled four years earlier, pointed somewhere far more interesting.

The second consequence is subtler and better. It makes you care about an NPC you have never met. The Fuzzy in the machine is a sprite with no name, no dialogue, and no prior scene. You have known him for four seconds. Because the game is unambiguous about what happens if you are too slow, he is instantly the most important thing on the screen. Modern games spend twenty hours of writing trying to make you care about a companion. Apex did it with a timer and a saw.

The puzzles are better than they need to be

The torture screens would work as pure theatre. They are also, quietly, decent puzzles, and that is what stops the whole thing being a cheap effect.

Each apparatus is a small machine with a visible causal chain. Something is powering something, which is driving something, which is going to reach the Fuzzy at a rate you can read off the screen. Your job is to find where in that chain you can intervene with the tools the level gives you, in the order that works, before the count expires. The screens are single-screen and static, so everything you need is in front of you from the first second — no hunting, no hidden object, no secret.

That last constraint is the good design decision. A timed puzzle with concealed information is a memorisation test: you fail, you learn where the thing was, you pass. A timed puzzle with total information is a reasoning test under pressure, and it fails you for thinking slowly rather than for not knowing. Creatures fails you for thinking slowly, which is a fair thing to be punished for and a horrible thing to be punished for like this.

The escalation is handled properly too. Early apparatus is a single chain with one intervention point. Later ones branch, or have two clocks, or require you to break something in an order that is counter-intuitive until you have watched the machinery move once — which you can only do by letting it move, which costs you the time you needed. That is a genuinely nasty design idea and it belongs to the same mind that drew the bandsaw.

The cuteness is load-bearing

Get Clyde wrong and the whole thing collapses.

Imagine the identical game with a muscular commando. The torture screens become Splatterhouse — gore as content, shock as the product, the whole thing filed under horror and forgotten by anyone over fourteen. The 16-bit machines were full of that in 1990 and none of it lands now.

The Fuzzy Wuzzies are round, soft, wide-eyed and helpless, drawn in the register of a children’s cartoon. So when the machine starts, the register does not shift. The art style stays cheerful. The music stays bouncy. Nothing in the presentation acknowledges that the game has changed genre, and the gap between how the thing looks and what the thing is doing is exactly where the discomfort lives.

That gap is the whole effect, and it is a deliberate technique with a long history rather than an accident of a small team’s art budget. The cuteness is the delivery mechanism. It gets past your guard, and then the guard is on the wrong side.

The British cruelty tradition

None of this came from nowhere, and Creatures reads much more sensibly if you place it.

British children’s culture of the period ran on cartoon violence with a genuinely mean streak. The Beano and The Dandy had been administering slipperings for fifty years. 2000 AD was doing atrocity as a punchline weekly, in full colour, on the shelf next to the sweets. Viz had arrived and was busy proving there was no floor. The house style was cheerful drawing plus appalling content, delivered deadpan, and a generation of British kids absorbed it as the normal texture of a comic.

The C64 scene was made by people raised on that, and it shows up everywhere. Cauldron II is a game about a cheerful bouncing pumpkin that is one of the cruellest things ever committed to a cassette, and it does not think it is doing anything unusual. Creatures sits in that lineage precisely, and the word for it is domestic. The Rowlands were doing a Beano strip with a countdown on it, and in 1990 that was an entirely ordinary thing for two brothers to be doing.

The American equivalent simply does not exist, which is why the game reads as so much stranger from a distance than it did at the time.

Where it fights itself

The honest criticism: the two halves are not equal, and the game knows which one you turned up for.

The platform sections are good. They are also, in a year that contained a great deal of good C64 platforming, unremarkable — they are the tax you pay to reach the next torture screen. Every design instinct in the game’s best idea points towards a game that is only torture screens: an escalating series of timed apparatus puzzles with the cruelty ratchet turning. Apex made that game two years later with Creatures II: Torture Trouble, which leans in harder and is, by most accounts, the more focused piece of work and the less fondly remembered one.

Which is a pattern I keep running into on this desk. The first game has the idea and the wrong amount of it; the sequel has the right amount and none of the surprise.

There is also a publishing footnote worth having. Thalamus was founded by Newsfield, the company that published ZZAP!64 and CRASH — the magazines that reviewed C64 games for Britain. A games label owned by the reviewers of games is a governance arrangement that would cause a small international incident today, and at the time nobody blinked. Thalamus put out Sanxion, Delta and Armalyte, so the label earned its reputation on the software. It is still a remarkable thing to look at with modern eyes.

What the Rowlands did next

They made Mayhem in Monsterland, which is the reason John and Steve Rowlands have a permanent place in the machine’s history.

Mayhem is a 1993 C64 platform game that looks like it is running on something else — full colour, absurd speed, a palette nobody thought the hardware could produce, arriving three years after the C64 was supposed to be finished. It is the more astonishing technical artefact by a distance and the better platform game by a distance.

Creatures is the more interesting design. Mayhem is a virtuoso doing the thing perfectly. Creatures is the same people having one genuinely odd idea about what a failure state could be for, and being brave enough to spend their best art on the moment the player loses.

Where to play it

C64, emulated, and it is preserved well. Steve Rowlands’ soundtrack alone is worth the load — it is one of the best on the machine and it is doing tonal work the game depends on.

Go in knowing what it is. The platform levels will pass pleasantly. Then the first Fuzzy gets strapped down, and the counter starts, and you will find yourself moving considerably faster than the puzzle strictly requires. That reaction is the game working exactly as designed, thirty-five years on, on a machine with three sprites and a personality problem.