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Friday Flashback: Deja Vu

Nintendo was notorious for censoring potentially offensive or graphic content in its games, especially in the 8-bit and 16-bit days. That's one of the reasons why ICOM Simulations' 1990 release Deja Vu is so impressive. This first-person adventure game, in the same vein as Shadowgate, brings some genuinely gritty and dark storytelling to the NES (the game was released before then on the Amiga, Commodore 64, PC, Apple, and Atari ST).

You're an amnesiac detective named "Ace" Harding, who wakes up in a sleazy bathroom to find a corpse upstairs, the police on his trail, and only a thin trail of clues between him and death. It's noir like Max Payne is noir; over-the-top, hammy, crazy, and thoroughly awesome because of it.

Like so many adventure games of the late 80's and early 90's, your screen is divided into view, inventory, and control panels. The view shows where you are, like an office or the street or a cab. The inventory gives you a list of all the items you've picked up. The commands let you "Use," "Talk," "Hit," and perform other actions to interact with objects in the world. Considering the limited technology available, this set-up let games create a large, interactive world with only a few dozen still images and some clever programming.

Because Deja Vu is an adventure game and it came out on the NES, it offers the insane difficulty that you can only find at the crossroads of Nintendo Hard and Guide Dang It. If you make one wrong move, you're dead. If you fail to pick up the right item, you're screwed. If you go to the wrong area and talk to the wrong person, you're dead and screwed. This arguably leads to a lot of replayability, if only because you'll be starting over many, many times just to see the ending once.

The dark, gritty story really makes Deja Vu stand out against nearly every other NES game. It was constrained by 8-bit graphics, but the constant threats of death from gun-slinging hooligans, crocodiles, and your own stupidity, combined with a willingness to actually show and describe dead bodies, makes it fairly unique.

Sadly, Deja Vu is not available on the Virtual Console, nor can a remake be readily found. You can pick up the DOS version as abandonware, but it's really, really ugly. Why did developers always use blue and purple when they were presented with a limited color palette?