The Legacy: Realm of Terror Retrospective Review

The guys at Rock, Paper, Shotgun have kicked up an interesting retrospective review of Magnetic Scrolls' The Legacy: Realm of Terror. RPG, adventure, and survival horror all packed into one fifteen-year-old title:
The character selection is neatly done, having you select from a bunch of different newspaper frontpages revealing who the heir to the Winthrop estate is. While you can jump through to statistics (and even alter them), you're making your choice based on who you want to play as more than what you want to play as. Like Cluedo, but with more mystics and ex-marines. It's actually a little akin to the way Fallout did character selection a few years later pre-generated templates with established biographies, but the option to make something entirely custom if you so wished. I pick the ex-marine, as the idea of punching Cthulu in the face is too good to pass up.

The opening hallway, very reminiscent of the first level of the original Resident Evil, confuses me. On the one hand, it's definitely stirring up fifteen-year-old memories. On the other, what I remember as massive and terrifying is now small, brown and cursed with a very cheesy mwah-ha-ha sound effect. Movement is the cumbersome old mechanic first-person games used to employ before direct keyboard control became the norm clicking on on-screen directional buttons.