Review: Déjà Vu - A Nightmare Comes True

Awakening from a drug-induced stupor in a bathroom the janitor forgot, you find yourself with blood on your palms and a puncture wound in your arm. Your jacket and gun hang on a peg in front of you.

A man down the hall has been shot, and all signs point to you.

If this day wasn’t off to a bad enough start, you’ve been drugged and can’t remember your name–or anything else. Welcome to Déjà Vu: A Nightmare Comes True!

Armed with a trench coat, your gun and 20 dollars cash, you set off to put the pieces together and unscramble your brain before the cops bust you for a crime you didn’t commit.

The 1980s Chicago streets are crawling with stinking bums, incompetent but persistent muggers, and a cheap hooker with the moniker “Sugar Shack” who busted out of the joint and has a gun pointed just below your fedora.

Victory is yours when you finally find out what is going on, gather enough evidence to bust the masterminds, and destroy everything they planted to incriminate you.

In case you haven’t figured it out, the game is a mystery.

Déjà Vu could be considered one of the most classic games for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

Long time Nintendo Power subscribers may remember how thoroughly it was whored in Volume 20 with a 7 page spread and Nester comics. But unlike many games whored by Nintendo’s spokespaper, it deserved every bit of praise it got.

In Déjà Vu you take on the role of the amnesic ace. To find all the clues you have to explore bars, underground clubs, offices, and even roll over the stiffs and root through their pockets for loose change. Hey, what else can you do if they’re “all dead?”

If you end up hopelessly stuck, you can always go amble about the sewer and exercise population control on the local alligator mississippiensis. And you thought those flushed pets were just an urban legend!

The game was originally developed for PC-DOS by ICOM Simulations in 1987 and used a click-and-drag mouse interface. Unfortunately like all PC mouse games, the transition to console ended up somewhat clunky at best.

The cursor moves painfully slow. The game could have really used a speed option to make it zip around a little quicker.

It’s also annoying how you have free roaming of the cursor in the picture window, but as soon as you move out of it, it begins snapping to buttons. This can cause your cursor to snap back out of the picture window at odd angles.

However, there were benefits to Kemco’s NES remake of the game, and those came in sound. Comparing the PC-Speaker audio of the first game with the rich synthesis of the 2A03, the NES wins out any day.

Most of the game’s music just screams jazz. The composition is very familiar to the style used in a lot of club performances.

Were one so inclined, it wouldn’t be hard to find an opening to loop the bass and percussion and rip out an eight bar solo. Of course, the NES will not be doing that any time soon, but you can imagine.

The game does its best at trying to simulate the slide of brushes and chop of a high-hat that so typify easy jazz of the era, but the NES’s hardware doesn’t lend itself well to such complex sounds.

But a game like Déjà Vu is not about technical achievement. It’s about atmosphere–where the game delivers in spades. The game is nothing but a framework for you to immerse yourself in.

The jury is still out on whether Carl Coreander would call it a “safe book.” If detective stories are your cup of tea, then this game may be your doorway to Fantastica.

There’s a gaggle of items in the game that can be lugged around, gambling, new clues to find and more to learn as the plot uncovers, and enough good short fun to make it a game to run through any time you have two free hours and a Rollins LP to spin in the background.

Online, there seems to be a downplaying of Déjà Vu in support of another ICOM Simulations game, Shadowgate.

The games contain identical gameplay, similar levels of story development, and similar levels of challenge. Why then does our ace always seem to get the short end of the stick?

I propose it’s because of the genre. If you look at video games, virtually none follow the detective genre–they follow fantasy. Most gamers prefer fantasy and magic to 1930s Americana, so Déjà Vu may not have as broad appeal.

However, for anyone who ever wanted to be Dick Tracey, Sam Spade, Phillip Marlow, Lew Archer, or any of the other hard-boiled detectives, the game offers a totally interactive and involving 1930s setting.

But even if you’re not a detective fan, give it a try. The game offers a genre and theme most never allow you to experience, and that’s what make Déjà Vu so unique.