Let’s avoid anything going on in the real world and talk about Sentinel Returns, a “modern” (at the time) remake of Sentinel. It’s a game that makes me feel like a smart guy for knowing about it and enjoying it. If you are looking to lord over others with your knowledge of niche games or just want an excuse to act like a smug, superior prick, get into Sentinel.
I first became aware of The Sentinel from this issue of Next Generation, which featured their “Top 100 Games of All-Time” list. It’s almost 30 years old, but it was the first good cross-platform attempt at a list that had the combined, effective inputs of console and computer game enthusiasts. Flipping through to refresh my memory, the list has everything from Trinity to AH64-D Longbow to River Raid and while I appreciate something like Bump n’ Jump making a best-of list, I can admit that 30 years of subsequent releases have probably knocked it down a bit. (It was #65.) Cars don’t come flying out of the sky to crash on things much anymore. Three decades of releases definitely should move Quake down (they had it at #9). The Sentinel was one such game in their list, and I had never heard of it.
If I think a game has a good concept, I will move worlds to try to play it as close to its release on original hardware as possible. The Sentinel – and I am going with its UK title here (not “The Sentry”), because its creator, Geoff Crammond, is British – was originally created for the BBC Micro, which I have never seen nor heard of at the time. I still know nothing about it. It was ported by Crammond to the Commodore 64, one of which I have had in my house, but couldn’t get working. (I gave that C64 to Flack in the hopes that he might be able to diagnosis it or fix it or otherwise get the computer into a working state. He was able to do exactly that. I am paraphrasing his skills and expertise for the layman, but I believe he said, “I plugged in a power supply, turned it on and it started right up.”)
I had an Atari ST in my house, but I was never able to get a single piece of software to work on it. Its operating system started and the mouse worked, but I couldn’t get games to load using the SatanDisk project, and I never bought a real floppy drive for it. Trying to make room for things in my house, I sent that Atari ST to Jizaboz, and it never arrived because the post office lost it. They never paid the insurance claim on it. I am completely against the rampant, pointless cruelty being done to our nation’s federal workers at the moment. I would be okay with the lone post office worker responsible for losing my goddamn ST to “return to the office” long enough to maybe find it and get it to Jiz. Wait.
I didn’t have any of the computers to play it on, but then in 1998 a remake is born. For Windows. Called “Sentinel Returns.” It was developed for the Sony Playstation as well, more on that shortly.
The 1998 instance of the Electronic Entertainment Expo took place from May 28th to May 30th in Atlanta, Georgia, and I was there. I may have been in the audience from this performance from the “Space Bunnies Must Die!” crew. One game being featured in pre-release for the expo was Sentinel Returns, and this was one of the highlights of the trip for me. Some of the stuff being shown off had extremely long lines and wait times but when you are most excited for a remake of a thoughtful puzzle game that was big in England, they bring you right to the front of the queue. I was genuinely excited to play Sentinel Returns. I said I was a big fan of the franchise. I remember going to what I assume was the Psygnosis area, sitting down in front of the computer and monitor and then having to admit that I really had no idea how to actually play the game.
I remember the gal running the event being very particular about taking the time to tell me what the controls were, and then I “got it”, and I was off playing it and loving it. I am sure she had a million other things to do. I genuinely was interested in the game, and I genuinely remember the controls for Sentinel to this day and I did buy a real copy of the game on release, so if it makes anyone feel good about my slight subterfuge, the memories at least stuck.
In Sentinel Returns, you are a Synthoid. You exist on one of 651 distinct levels at the lowest “energy level” (to you low-landers; “altitude” for us Coloradoans) at the start. By absorbing trees to gain energy, you can create boulders, and then spawn an empty replicant of yourself to transfer your consciousness into. Do it enough times and you can get higher than the Sentinel is for that level, and then absorb his bitch ass. Ha! Ha ha! You are then able to create a replicant Synthoid shell where the Sentinel was, transfer your consciousness to it and hyperspace away to the next level.
After a few levels to get a basic understanding of gameplay, it ends up being a pretty intense puzzle game with arcade action. Whereas the original game would have had me appreciate it because of how it displayed a 3D environment in more-or-less real time with a computer from the mid-1980s, the graphics just getting to the screen is less magical in the remake. Sentinel Returns does look haunting and beautiful, with more earth tones than the original. Managing to avoid the Sentinel’s killer gaze and being quick with the mouse offers a combination paranoid/twitch experience. I have killed the Sentinel hundreds of times on hundreds of levels. It never stops being enjoyable to hit the “absorb” button to kill it every time I do. There’s a few moments like that in gaming, which never start to get old: seeing a replay in Food Fight, using “the move” to deke the goalie in NHL ’94, firing the BFG in Doom… you know what I mean. Destroying the Sentinel is the same kind of pleasure.
I have Sentinel Returns for the original Playstation and on CD for Windows. Since the Playstation 2 can play Playstation games, I tried it that way, but I could not get a USB mouse to work for the PS2. It is really difficult to have fun with Sentinel Returns without a mouse, the PS2’s D-pad (there’s no thumbstick support) is just too slow. It looks nice and it has a slightly different title and settings screen than the Windows version, but without a mouse you are just slooo-ooooo-ooooly panning around. It should not have been sold for the Playstation without a mouse. I almost regretted buying a physical copy of it, but the Playstation Network has been down 19 hours and counting at the time of this writing, so tonight I will take my copy of the game to bed with me. I’m not letting it out of my sight. I imagine being able to actually play a Sony product during this outage has someone at Sony infuriated, and after posting this today, they’re probably sending someone to take it. Who do I think I am???
I don’t know, but I will tell you what I think about the franchise as a whole. Without a single word ever being spoken in either of the games, both The Sentinel and Sentinel Returns are ostensibly about defying authority. As each level begins, the Sentinel is very much “above” you in literal and figurative terms. It slowly scans the land beneath it out of pure hatred. The Sentinel doesn’t do anything for those beneath it that it is aligned with. Frankly, it does nothing to benefit anything else in the game. It has a kind of lieutenant that works for it – devoted “Sentries” that do a lot of the dirty work for the Sentinel, but there wasn’t a single time that I could say that the Sentinel showed thanks or appreciation. And taking it one level deeper, the Sentinel and assorted Sentries can create a third antagonist called the Meanie by taking the energy from a tree. If the Sentry does nothing for the Sentinel, a Meanie is even less respected. They will try to stupidly attack you and suck out all your energy. I wonder if the Sentinel knows that they even exist.
Anyway, like I said, I don’t want to talk about anything in the real world and besides, any comparison to rebelling against a nasty, corpulent authority that I don’t agree with and won’t go away is purely coincidental: this is being written in the United States in 2025 and The Sentinel was developed in the United Kingdom, 1986.