"Oh master, I saw the nightmare again. In the depths of my subconscious, in a concealed dimension stands the threshold of darkness. A fortress of pure shining steel, built upon the edge of two worlds by a power beyond expression, the ancient unholy power of an unborn god. Help me master, I feel the burning twilight behind those gates of steel..."
— Finian, psionic-in-training, providing the game's intro narration.
Perihelion is a 1993 turn-based Western RPG for the Commodore Amiga created by the 3-man team Morbid Visions and published by Psygnosis. Unusually for RPGs, the only encounterable enemies in the game are bosses.
100 years before the game's events begin, a psionic-in-training of the Perihelion Imperium receives a monumental, apocalyptic prophecy of the future: The Unborn God (interchangeably called "The Unborn"), the god of negativity, will go mad and rapidly consume reality in its quest to remake it in its own image. Horrified at this revelation, Imperial Emperor Rex Helion 27 commissions "Project Awakening", a group of six artificially-created embryos designed to last long enough against the inevitable collapse of reality the Unborn will bring in its wake to kill it. Now, the prophecy is coming true, and Project Awakening is activated. Will the six beings be able to destroy the Unborn before it can fully manifest, or will they be consumed along with the rest of reality?
Nowadays, the game, alongside a compatible Amiga emulator and the official soundtrack, is provided as freeware by one of its developers, Edvard Toth, on his personal website
- mainly because the game is one of the few Amiga games which does not require the still-sold, licensed Amiga Kickstart ROMs to run on an emulator.
This game provides examples of:
- Admiring the Abomination: One file you can find on a network station in MidLight is an Imperial professor admiring the Unborn's ability to genetically-modify living beings. Given the manual reveals genetics is the greatest Imperial science, not to mention the fact they created Project Awakening - that is, you and your party - this is no small complement to the mad god currently remaking reality.
- All There in the Manual: The specifics of the prophetic vision received by the psionic-in-training, said psionic's name, parts of the game's backstory, how magic works, the nature of the gods, and much more can only be found in the manual.
- Apocalypse How:
- The Ancients, the Perheilion Imperium's precursor society, wiped themselves and everything but their culture and a select bit of knowledge and technology off the face of reality during a nuclear holocaust.
- If your party fails to kill the Unborn, it will complete its total rewriting of reality. You even get to read it happen!
- Ambiguous Syntax: "Perihelion" in-universe can mean "the center of Perihelion Imperial space", the planet called "Perihelion", the solar-centrist culture the Imperium inherited from the Ancients, or..."solar-centric", its real-world meaning.
- Brain/Computer Interface: Your party uses one to access one of many network stations littered around the game world, which can provide plot-critical information as well as lore and world-building material. It also works on the party itself to provide information on inventory items and equipment.
- Blue-and-Orange Morality: None of the gods you and your individual party members can follow in Perihelion - not even the Unborn God - are classifiable as good or evil. As such, the gods are categorized using an emotional alignment instead of a D&D-style moral alignment, maxing out at "extremely positive" and "extremely negative", with "neutral" in-between. Only Primordial Forces can have a "pure" alignment, which is free from any opposing emotional influence, and the only one you are told about and face is the Unborn, which has a classification of "pure negative".
- Boss Game: Unusually for normal gameplay in an RPG, every enemy encountered in the game is a boss, with no regular enemies to be found. This also means the only way to level up is to kill a boss.
- Broke Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu: While your party does kill the Unborn, the radiation it generates upon its death, which is lethal even to your party, cannot be outrun, resulting in death.
- Bittersweet Ending: Your party kills the Unborn, stopping its incursion into the mortal realm, reversing its alterations to the realm, and preventing it from becoming living energy. However, your SandGlider (in-universe name for a hovercraft) is unable to outrun the radiation generated by its death. Being too much even for your genetically and psionically augmented party members, the radiation causes you to die during your escape.
- Complete Immortality: The biggest perk the gods of Perihelion have as energy beings - except for the Unborn, which as of the game's events is a Physical God and thus killable. As part of its plans, it seeks to ascend from its current form to an energy being like its fellow gods, enabling it to complete its rewriting of reality unopposed.
- Copy Protection: The game manual's list of psi-powers/spells and what runes are required to cast them are required to answer the game's copy protection.
- Death Is the Only Option: Either your party dies before you can kill the Unborn God, allowing it to complete its goals, or your party dies from the radiation resulting from killing the Unborn God.
- Deliberately Monochrome: The game deliberately uses a monochrome color palette (with white not always being the second color) as part of the overall mood, with color only used to highlight important elements or emphasize pieces of the interface, characters, and backgrounds.
- Designer Babies: Your party due to being creations of Project Awakening, the plan to kill the Unborn God. You are all designed to be genetically and psychically-resistant to the influence of the Unborn in the hopes you can last long enough to kill it.
- Dreaming of Things to Come: How the Imperium is made aware of the Unborn's coming. An Imperial psionic-in-training receives a monumental, prophetic vision where reality and all which dwell in it are consumed and remade by the Unborn.
- Eldritch Abomination: The Unborn God's very nature as a Primordial Force defies explanation by the sciences which are able to explain every other god and supernatural phenomena. What little can be explained is it's gone mad and wants to rewrite reality in its own image. Worse, if it weren't for the prophecy, the Imperium wouldn't even be aware of its existence until it emerged - which would've been too late to stop it.
- Emotional Powers: Given the (scientifically-comprehensible) gods themselves operate on emotional alignment rather than a D&D-like moral alignment, this is how the spells in Perihelion work. The caster must enter an artificially-induced state of heightened emotion, which unlocks their latent psychic powers.note
- The Empire: Unlike what one would expect of this trope, the Perihelion Imperium, from what little backstory the game gives you, is genuinely interested in the well-being of its citizens, going so far as to create Project Awakening in order to have a chance against the Unborn God.
- Energy Beings: The gods of Perihelion are hyperintelligent beings who exist as immense pools of living energies set amongst the abyss of time and space. Among other benefits, this grants them complete immortality. The immortality part is why the Perihelion Imperium sends out your party to kill the Unborn - it currently exists in a physical form despite being a god, and should it successfully ascend into this, it can remake reality with impunity.
- Fetus Terrible: The Unborn's final form, both when fought and before ascending to an Energy Being.
- Guide Dang It!: Thanks to the sparse-on-gameplay-details manual and a lack of other reference material, there are multiple examples:
- Want to use psi-powers/spells? Wondering why a particular psi-power isn't working? Hope you still have the manual, because that's the only place where the system and the runes which represent it is explained. Even then, the manual doesn't explain that spells require specific classes to cast. To top it all off, this manual-only information is also used for the game's copy protection. Thankfully, all this information is officially provided by one of the game's developers on his personal website.
- Nowhere in the game or the manual explains the starting primary and secondary stats for each of the 7 possible races a character can be, nor is it explained which classes each race supports. Throw in how nowhere tells you you can define in percentage how much of a hybrid race is actually hybrid and how that affects stats, and you'll have to create multiple characters just to find out (or find an external guide).
- In Their Own Image: The ultimate goal of the game's main villain, the Unborn. It's up to your party of genetically and psionically-augmented designer babies to kill it before it succeeds.
- It's a Wonderful Failure: Should all members of your party die, you're treated to a text crawl detailing the 'birth' of the Unborn God - that is, becoming an energy being - as it completely consumes reality, remaking it in its own image. Said text crawl is also accompanied by an illustrated scene of the Unborn God's final physical form dwarfing the planet Perihelion.
- Just Before the End: As a consequence of the Unborn's ongoing emergence and ascension, psychic and conventional communication is becoming impossible, solar activity is decreasing, buildings are literally melting, extradimensional, hostile monsters unclassifiable by Perhelion's sciences are appearing, and Perihelion's population is spontaneously mutating, the results of which are frequently lethal to children. And that's just what's happening in the introduction cutscene.
- One-Winged Angel: Inverted when fighting the Unborn. Its first form is a demon-like being, only to turn into a literal fetus when said form is defeated.
- O.O.C. Is Serious Business: The Unborn God is described as a god gone mad, implying that the other Perihelion gods, no matter how sadistic or benevolent they act by human standards, have never attempted to rewrite reality in the uncaring fashion the Unborn is.
- Magic by Any Other Name: Even though the game's manual explicitly labels your party's various abilities as spells, the game still calls them "psi-powers". It also calls the general results of magic, whether godly or psionic, as "energy manifestation".
- Our Gods Are Different: Gods in the Perihelion setting are hyperintelligent beings who exist as immense pools of living energies set amongst the abyss of time and space and their thought processes being described in terms of emotions. Their existence is known to and felt by all in Perihelion, making faith in them both unnecessary and inapplicable. The exception to this is the Unborn, a Primordial Force, whose presence was only warned of by a psionic-in-training's prophetic vision 100 years before the events of the game. Its current form is physical, though it seeks to become living energy like the other gods.
- Precursors: The technocratic society from which the Perihelion Imperium inherited its solar-centrist culture, known only as the Ancients. Stated in the backstory to have nuked themselves into extinction, bringing most of their technology and knowledge with them.
- Psychic Powers: The main source of your party's supernatural abilities, though the game's lore states they must be activated by activated by artificially-inducing a state of heightened emotion.
- Physical God: The form the Unborn starts off the game in is physical, unlike its fellow gods, and spends the game trying to become non-corporeal so it can fully manifest its will and become unstoppable. Unlike most examples of this trope, however, it is actually the most powerful of its fellow gods even in this form.
- Religion is Magic: While not religious in nature, there are organized orders of people dedicated to each god in Perihelion's pantheon. Those who subscribe to these orders are able to utilize a small part of their chosen god's living energy as their own. Following a god also has the side-effect of modifying one's physical abilities, such as strength, dexterity, or speed.
- Runic Magic: The emotions which drive the party's psi-powers are represented as runes. Specific combinations of runes result in specific psi-powers.
- Scientifically Understandable Sorcery: The usage of both godly and psionic powers (psi-powers) are defined by Perihelion's sciences - to the point where psi-powers are activated by artificially-inducing a state of heightened emotion.
- Sufficiently Advanced Alien: Thanks to the Perihelion Imperium's sciences, the gods are known to be energy beings which possess complete immortality and live in the void between time and space, with the exception of the Unborn, which originates from a place beyond that.
- Sufficiently Analyzed Magic: The supernatural is a science to the Perihelion Imperium, meaning even the gods, despite being far beyond mortals, are empirically-explainable...unless you're talking about the Unborn. This does not mean the gods can be controlled by mortals - they're still far beyond anything mortals can ever hope to be or achieve.
- Void Between the Worlds:
- The Unborn's Steel Fortress is explicitly stated in the game's intro to exist between two dimensions.
- The gods of Perihelion in general are stated to exist "amongst the abyss of time and space", while the Unborn comes from a place beyond that.
