Original Release: Tomahawk, 1990, MS-DOS/Amiga/Atari ST
A truly strange and surreal adventure that involves cybernetic geisha and the Hell of the Horny Dragon somehow.
Geisha (PC, Tomahawk, 1990)
Where to Buy: eBay
How to Emulate: MS-DOS Emulation Guide
Review by: Master-B
Geisha is a weird adventure game made by a small French company called Coktel Vision, who were basically known for making weird adventure games in the early 90s until Sierra On-Line bought them out and they made a few slightly less weird games for them like Inca and Gobliiins.
Anyway, I couldn’t really figure out the plot of Geisha just by playing it, but after reading around at some other places I think I have it mostly figured out. You play as this chick who has a mad scientist fuse her with a robot body, so she can turn into a cyborg, which somehow helps her in her investigation to track down the Horny Dragon.
The game mostly plays like a confusing version of Snatcher or Rise of the Dragon, with a first-person point-and-click interface. There are only like six chapters and each is pretty short, but it can take forever to get through them because sometimes you have to do really bizarre or obscure things to proceed. They also have little arcade sequences scattered here and there, like where you have to play some weird poker variant against a girl to make her horny, and there’s another one where you protect a naked diving girl from sharks and eels and stuff by shooting them with a spear gun.
Unfortunately the game doesn’t run all that well under DOSBox, there’s a glitch where text disappears which makes the already confusing game even more headache-inducing. The art is surprisingly nice at some parts, but other than that there’s not a lot of reason to bother with it, except for the shot of your character somehow going to the Hell of the Horny Dragon when you lose (which you can see here anyway).
For the period the graphics are not too bad but there’s nothing stunning here either. There are some weird shifts between decently drawn VGA art and grainy black-and-white photos of people that are kind of inexplicable.
The sound doesn’t like to work too well with DOSBox but from what I’ve heard you’re not missing much. There are some grainy moans and stuff that cut off too early and sound like they might be coming from a forest creature instead of a woman anyway, and some really basic staticy FM music at certain points. That’s about it.
Gameplay-wise, nothing about the game is really fun at all. Even just figuring out the basic interface at the beginning is ridiculously confusing, since the functions of the buttons aren’t even labeled. And the mini-games aren’t really any fun either, more annoying than anything else. It’s also one of those games where you can get hung up in a later chapter by missing an item early on that you can’t return for, and it’s especially bad here because everything is so bizarre and obscure. So yeah, it pretty much sucks. There is one interesting point though – they translated it into like five different languages which you can choose with the space bar at the first screen, though anything but French is going to be a bit mangled and odd.
This is one of those things that you just look at because you can’t believe that someone actually put this much effort into creating something so strange, or that it actually got published. It’s basically a complete mess in terms of gameplay and unless pixellation really gets you off it has little to no wanking value. Only the fact that Horny Dragon is the villain saves it from an F, really.
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