Revelation Mentis

Revelation Mentis is a short exploration game inspired by 90s action adventures. It runs on DOS. The player character is a young man from a small medieval village. Upon hearing that the Artefact of Light has been stolen, he takes it upon himself to face the villain and recover the four parts of the Artefact.

The game consists of four stages, each filling one screen. There are no enemies, but there are obstacles: bushes block the hero's path and bottomless pits warp him back to the start of the stage. You receive a password after each stage that you can write down to resume your quest at a later time, this may however prove unnecessary as the whole game takes less than 60 seconds to complete.

I first learned programming by tinkering with Turbo Pascal 7. I had access to the source code of a handful of existing little games and other projects, and I painstakingly learned what each command and each number meant by blind experimentation. This game can be thought of as the ultimate result of that learning process: it was the first time I sat down with an empty Pascal file and wrote a (non-trivial) program of my own completely from scratch. This happened in a development environment that was already very much behind the times even at the time, but it was what I had access to.

The first complete version of Revelation Mentis clocked in at just under 2000 lines of code. When I later learned about arrays and for loops, I was able to cut those down to 600. Goodbye, 25 variables with almost identical names!

This browser-based version of the game first went live in 2015, and the player was redesigned for my website relaunch in 2020. Another five years later, in 2025, I decided to give the game itself a makeover and went back to the Pascal code to fix known bugs, make the menus a bit nicer to navigate, and sprinkle in a few other small improvements. It was also translated into English for the first time for this occasion.

Looking at it from a player's perspective, there's clearly not much going on. The randomly generated stages, which were intended for replayability, are either trivial to solve (you walk around the obstacles) or impossible, meaning that the game offers no meaningful challenge. And the graphics are limited to what I was able to improvise from code page 850, which is why the four parts of the “Artefact of Light” look an awful lot like playing card suits.

For all its simplicity though, I enjoy how you can see the influence of games I enjoyed at the time, such as The Legend of Zelda and Dragon Quest. It's a shame that implementing simple collision detection was as far as my abilities could take me, or there might have been roaming monsters or even a boss fight.