Original Release: Coktel Vision, 1991, MS-DOS/Amiga/Atari ST
An odd adventure game in which stewardess Doralice gets caught up in a scheme to steal a newly-invented boner pill.
Fascination (PC, Coktel Vision, 1991)
Where to Buy: eBay
How to Emulate: MS-DOS Emulation Guide
Review by: Master-B
Before French developer Coktel Vision was acquired by Sierra, they made a lot of “erotic” adventure games for the Amiga through minor publishers. “Adult” games were usually big news in the late ’80s to early ’90s even if they sucked, but these all remained extremely obscure, mostly due to being poorly translated from French, having confusing and obtuse interfaces, and generally just not being very good at all.
Fascination cleanly fits into this mold, and like the other Coktel “erotic” games, the “erotic” content is mostly limited to some grainy digitized GIFs here and there. With just this to sell it, along with all the other flaws, the game just really offers almost no reason to bother with it.
You play as a lady named Doralice, who might either be a stewardess or an airplane captain, the game can’t seem to make up its mind. The one really neat part of the game is the introduction, where full motion video clips are integrated with the static background graphics to give you the perspective of a sniper looking through a rifle scope at some businessman. He gets away from that one, but apparently later he suffers a heart attack on the plane, and somehow Doralice snags his briefcase, which turns out to contain some sort of super Viagra-like drug that menacing types are after.
The game panders right from the get-go by allowing you to take as many showers as you like in Doralice’s Miami hotel room, which consists of a series of frontal nudity GIFs repeated over and over, albeit a bit dark and pixely and hard to see. Doralice is also established early on as a merciless slut and generally a rather unappealing character (how did she get that briefcase, anyway? Did she just steal it?). I think there’s some kind of a sex scene later in the game, but I didn’t have the patience to push all the way through to it.
Puzzles are extremely simplistic and you have a limited inventory, which usually makes the next step obvious when combined with the limited amount of screens and hotspots you can access at any given time. The only thing that adds any challenge at all to the game is that it throws a lot of phone numbers and addresses at you that you must write down on the spot or you may not be able to come back for them (many are randomized with each new play.)
The graphics are fairly nice for the era, and pull the occasional neat trick such as the one mentioned before in the intro. That’s about the only thing to enjoy here, though. The music is by MOBY (not that Moby, a different guy who did a lot of early Amiga demos and games) and sounds like stereotypical porn stuff, but it only plays in like three second loops and seems to pop up at totally random times. The interface is simple and a little easier to manage than that of other Coktel games but saving and quitting the game are still made needlessly obtuse. And you certainly aren’t going to be jerking to it.
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