The Scourge of Worlds: 
A Dungeons & Dragons Adventure
(2003)
review by Suspiriorium

Have you ever watched a film, & been extremely annoyed when characters make ridiculously stupid decisions which are simply asking for trouble? Since you’re a horror fan, I guess the answer to that is probably yes. And so it comes that someone has finally harnessed one of the potentials of DVD, by creating DVDn. This new technology is essentially a way of creating a DVD version of those “Choose Your Own Adventure” books that were incredibly popular (in the UK at least) some years ago. The way it works here is to take a standard narrative realised in CG, & then at several key points in the film, a menu comes up so that you make the decision of what the characters are going to do next. The result is a film that contains 146 separate sequences, 4 discrete endings, & over 990 possible storyline routes, which should give an amazing amount of replay value.

The narrative is based around the familiar Dungeons & Dragons world, which is to say that it’s a pretty blatant Tolkein rip-off. The Aryx Orthian, The Scourge of Worlds, is the ultimate weapon created many years ago that has been safely hidden for hundreds of years, but is now being sought by the forces of darkness. To try to save the world, three companions, Redgar – a Man, Lidda – a Halfling, & Mialee – an Elf, must travel together on a treacherous quest to prevent the release of the Scourge.

First the good news – this is rather more enjoyable than the live-action Dungeons & Dragons movie of a couple of years ago. But then pretty much anything is better than that, so it still doesn’t make it particularly good. The biggest weakness with Scourge of Worlds is that it feels very much like the tentative first steps of a new technology, & as such it hasn’t quite made the leap it should & doesn’t have the vision to unleash it’s full potential. The narrative is far too linear always needing to find it’s way down to the same points, just making minor detours en route. Ultimately as you replay it, you realise that your decisions really have only fairly minor impacts on the way the narrative progresses, & the four endings all occur at the same point of the narrative. If you make a decision which leads away from the main thrust of the narrative, or even gets a character killed, then it just comes to a dead stop, & you have to go back to pick another route which will take you where the writers want you to go.

Then there are the characters, who are fairly routinely defined. It’s not helped by the fact that one moment you can be making a decision as Redgar, the next you’ll be choosing for Lidda. The old CYOA books were all in the first-person, so the hero of the story was you, & you made the decisions according to your own character. But here you’re choosing for someone else, & have to think – do you do what I would do, or what I think the character would do? The characters have to be mere ciphers, because they have to be able to fit in with whatever decision you make for them. The voice acting is rather routine at times too.

As for the animation, this is not really an attempt at full-blown photo-realism like Final Fantasy, nor is it quite so blatantly cartoony as Pixar. The main characters are fairly well rendered, but there’s very little in the way of backgrounds or interactivity. It always feels as though there are lovely scenic backdrops onto which our characters are placed in the foreground. There’s little in the way of extra detail or set-dressing to sell this as a convincing world, it all feels very minimalist, & frankly rather like a cut-scene in a PS2 game. There are a couple of attempts at action sequences, but these are desperately unexciting as there’s never any sense of the two CG characters making any kind of contact, much less inflicting any damage or being in any danger. In fact, the CG is about as good as in the live-action D&D film, but they do work better here as they fit into the whole milieu of the film, rather than standing out like a hippo in a plant pot.

And so you find yourself guiding a bunch of CG puppets through an unconvincing backdrop, always heading to the same points. All the decision points keep pulling you out of the drama, so it doesn’t really convince as a film, whilst it’s not interactive or involving enough to fully convince as a game. Which really makes it sound absolutely terrible, although there is a certain amount of fun to be had. It is however, aimed more for younger kids (presumably ones without a PS2), who will probably play it to death. Older viewers will most likely tire of it after barely one run-through. Which is a real shame as this technology is a major breakthrough in DVD presentation, which has enormous potential for going in truly mind-expanding directions if only it could loosen itself up from trying to simply tell one linear narrative no matter what choices you make, have stronger scripting, & rather more convincing animation (or maybe even a live-action version). I look forward to seeing more attempts at this idea, but in the meantime this first outing must be filed under close, but no cigar.

I’ve been playing the R1/NTSC DVD from Warner Vision International. The film is rendered in Super-bit High Definition, so it looks absolutely stunning, & the Dolby 5.1 audio is rather nice. For extras, all you get are some brief instructions, & a helpful decision-selector screen, which helps you to jump straight to a later point in the film – very helpful if you’re trying to find all the various possible sequences. This was a title really crying out for some kind of informative extras, detailing things like just how it was made, the difficulties of the writing process, how the technology works etc. But there’s nothing, which is a real shame & makes it harder to recommend, although those with children may fancy giving it a whirl. It is, after all, something truly different, & that’s a recommendation on it’s own.

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