Pilgrim: Faith as a Weapon

The game is loosely based on Paulo Coelho's 1987 autobiographical novel The Pilgrimage. It is a time of superstition and religious persecution, where Catharism reigns supreme. Set at the beginning of the Albigensian Crusade (1208) in the south of France, the story sees Simon Lancroix aim to complete his dying father's wishes by finding a secret manuscript and delivering it to a friend named Petrus. It is revealed that this is actually a Coptic manuscript that a renegade Templar brought back from the Crusades; it is believed to be the lost Gospel of Saint Jean. This manuscript is passed around to various characters in different locations. Meanwhile, Pope Innocent III orders the inquisitor, Diego de Osma, to retrieve the manuscript. Mystical creatures such as angels and demons also become entangled in the battle. The first half of the game sees the player complete a series of tasks to help other characters. They in turn help the player. Halfway through the game, the player meets Petrus. He reveals that the player's father was the leader of a fictional religious sect called "The Tradition", which aims to bring an absolute truth that no other religion can. From this point the game covers symbolic, spiritual, and supernatural philosophies such as dreams, peace, compassion, love, salvation, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, growing up and giving up, and re-learning what we knew as children; the final scene takes place in Limbo. ==Gameplay==

Pilgrim is a first-person point-and-click adventure. Players click through a series of static frames—a slideshow of pre-rendered 3D environments—to move around. The player is not free of their movements and must often strategically click screen points in a certain order to reach a destination. The cursor becomes an arrow to indicate a possible movement, and a click transitions the player to the next location. The game has a hint system to provide clues for the more obscure puzzles. The entries in the in-game "Encyclopedia" have been described as "spartan", consisting exclusively of text. Sometimes when a character mentions a topic that is available in the "Encyclopedia" during a conversation. A keyword will appear on the screen which may then be clicked to bring up the corresponding entry. While not required, this feature allows the player to delve deeper into the interesting historical nuggets featured throughout the game. The player has an in-game notebook, into which they may copy-paste extracts from the "Encyclopedia". ==Development==

Inspiration Arxel Tribe was founded in 1990 by two Slovenian architects — Matjaž Požlep and Diego Zanco. Frenchmen Stephen Carrière and Guillaume de Fondaumière joined the company three years later in 1993. and French cartoon artist Jean Giraud (also known as Mœbius). Stephen Carrière's mother, Anne, was the head of Éditions Anne Carrière. This connection gave Arxel Tribe the opportunity to collaborate with a high calibre of creative talent on its debut foray into the video game space. Moebius had previously illustrated the French edition of one of Coelho's books, According to SK Online, Coelho "accepted the proposal with great pleasure" after learning that the general appearance of the game would be decided by Moebius. Moebius and Coelho began the design work in 1996. Also in 1996, a year since their last diversification, Arxel Tribe had a meeting with Coelho and Moebius. This resulted with the company switching gears to become a video game development studio and signing onto the project, which was to be published by Infogrames in 1997. Fondaumière recalls "sitting at a bar in Frankfurt with Paulo Coelho [and] discussing the crazy idea of creating a videogame together". Carrière and de Fondaumière helped Arxel Tribe re-position itself as a developer of "author games", and the company bought the rights to publish a video game adaption of Pilgrim. Moebius required an investment of 20 million francs (approx. $4 million US at the time) to become involved. Matja Požlep noted that creating a game based on Coelho's work was a good idea because potential customers would already be acquainted with his work. Guillaume de Fondaumiere recalled that as professionals, Coelho and Mobius charged a high price for their work and had a highly ambitious, challenging, and expensive vision. Arxel Tribe's lack of experience in video game development meant that the collaboration became a "fantastic, but also a painful experience" much to their dismay. Arxel Tribe aimed to create an adventure game with an "epic" and "gripping" narrative that did justice to the source material's "initiatory, romantic and spiritual journey". Matjaz Požlep said the company worked within an adventure gaming niche and within that an intellectual gaming sub-niche. The development company felt that Moebius' drawings enhanced the magical quality of the story, and provided a sense of cultural and spiritual curiosity, transcending the generic conventions of the adventure game genre.); they mixed traditional computer graphics techniques, such as rigging, with motion capture to animate the characters. The game's 3D engine was created in-house at Pilgrim, and the computer-rendered elements like scenes and characters were made to look on a par with the top-level video game developers of the time. Zenzire "set up the initial architecture for the game engine, coded some UI routines and the game's interactive encyclopedia", using expertise from his work using hypertext. He also "supervised the code and offered assistance with other programming tasks". Most of the game's background music was not written for the game; it was chosen instead from preexisting music, largely from the Medieval and Romantic periods. The game was released in the US and Europe in November 1997 in English, French (''Pilgrim: Par le Livre et par l'Epée), and German (Pilgrim: Das Geheimnis der Schrift). The a Brazilian Portuguese edition entitled O Diário de um Mago'' was released in January 1998. The game could also be purchased from the Arxel Tribe webstore. As a promotion, Arxel Tribe announced they would give a free copy of the game to the first 200 people ask the company for it. Just Adventure described Pilgrim as a "little-known title", noting that by the time of the release of its sequel, The Legend of the Prophet and the Assassin in 1999, Pilgrim had still not been released in North America. It noted that there were three potential culprits for the gaming "gem" suffering lack of recognition: little to no marketing by Arxel Tribe, the publisher not understanding how to sell the product, and the gaming industry simply being apathetic toward adventure games at the time. The article, published between Pilgrims original and re-releases, further explained that while the game was very rare, it could occasionally be found on eBay and the Game Trading Zone. Despite that, in 2002, Tap Repeatedly still lamented that the game had sunk into relative obscurity between its 1998 and 2001 releases. On the contrary, VGDb said the game was a "great success", while Arxel Tribe asserted that their game had been recognised by both players and critics for its originality and being faithful to Coelho's work. Guillaume de Fondaumiere told Game.EXE that the game sold "surprisingly well", and that due to the efforts of Infogrames, 40,000 copies were sold in France alone. The re-release contained 3 CD-ROMs: the game discs and a bonus "Making Of" disc featuring an interview with Coelho, 14 storyboards by Moebius, an Encyclopaedia of the Middle Ages, and a walkthrough solution of the game. While created for Windows 3.1 or Windows 95, to be played using a Pentium 75 MHz chip and at least 16 Mbytes of RAM, the game is able to run under XP and Vista on 32-bit. ==Reception==

In June 1997, before the game's release, Stop magazine published an article which described the game's genre as most akin to the video game Myst (1993), in terms of its technical design. In November 1997, La Croix selected the game for its article Les créateurs français innovent avec poésie (French Creators Innovate with Poetry), describing the game as a "historical-New Age quest". That month, PC Joker wrote that the game's bugs were enough to sour the player experience, despite the title's beautiful aesthetic design. In December 1997, PC Player said it was initially turned off by the cumbersome, bland, and strange game, but after a while became enamoured by the "mystery and profundity" of the game's images and sounds. Power Play negatively compared the game to Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars, PC Action described the interface as "unusual but very intuitive", GameStar negatively compared the game to Riven and Zork: Grand Inquisitor while accusing it of being both too complicated and obsolete, and PC Games said the game lacked tension, variety and mental challenge. In January 1998, PC Power praised the animations and the elaborate background information, though lamented that it missed award status by having handling and gameplay issues. That year, Joe Nettleback of PowerPlay wrote that he was pleased with the German dub. In 1998, Nataliya Dubrovskaya of Game.EXE said that the game was a beautiful entry in the "Euroadventure" genre, along with contemporaries such as Dark Earth, Nightmare Creatures, and Cryo Interactive titles like Atlantis: The Lost Tales, Dreams to Reality, and Versailles. ; the site praised the game's beauty and solid story. Privat Computer PC loathed the game, describing it as a "French failure" In 2001, Ray Ivey of Just Adventure, a self-professed fan of the developer who enjoyed Ring (1999) and Faust (1999), picked up Pilgrim "mostly out of academic interest" to examine Axel Tribe's debut work; he described the title as "lovely", "mysterious", "educational", "compelling", and a great entry in the adventure game genre. In a 1999 Faust review Metzomagics Steve Metzler said the company had "improved tremendously" when compared to Pilgrim's "incomprehensible" puzzle design. In 2006, Avsn-nikki of Adventurespiele admitted that the graphics appeared outdated, and noted that in order to succeed you need to ask every individual character every tiny conversation thread. Old-Games.ru listed the game in its International Festival of Adventure as a rare and interesting entry in the genre. The site noted that the game was released just after historical-themed adventure games came into fashion in the late 1990s, while praising the novice developer for Moebius' beautiful work and favourably comparing Coelho's confident script to the work of Cryo Interactive and index+; the site criticised the interface for taking up nearly half the screen and the transformation of Moebius' "cute and stylish" 2D drawings into low-polygon 3D dummies, but deemed it a historical, cultural, and entertainment achievement, and praised the developer's use of authentic melodies expressing a desire for them to continue this in their future work. AVEC's Andrea Maroni thought the game did not attract "the interest it deserved". Puntaecliccas Aspide Gioconda liked the game from both a historical and puzzle design perspective despite the game's bugs affecting its quality level. Abandonware France thought the graphics were plastic-like, yet detailed and impressive for the time; the site also thought the French voice acting was generally good. Studies in Medievalism explains that Pilgrim is one of only a handful of adventure video games set in the medieval period, alongside entries like Cryo Interactive's ''Arthur's Knights, noting that Pilgrim "tries so hard to be authentic". Camille Saint-Jacques of Arts contemporains, 1950–2000'' thought Moebius' contribution to the game was an example of the interest graphic artists of the time (particularly young ones) had in multimedia and the video games industry, which offered a more magnetic pull than traditional neuvième art (comic books); it noted that the Slovenian designers did not "disdain to be interested" in collaborating with a comic book artist. On his review site Feibel, German journalist Thomas Feibel felt the 3D characters moved around like "living helium balloons", due to their movements lacking in detail and precision. Gameboomers reviewer Clovis noted that pixel hunting is required early on and that puzzles toward the end were so obscure he was forced to use a walkthrough. Damien Poussier of Hardcore Gaming 101 asserted that Pilgrim is the resulting blend of the "relative seriousness" and "classic feel" of Arxel Tribe (which he compared with Cryo Interactive), the "great artwork" of Moebius, and the "ridiculous new age philosophy" and "low-grade proselytizing" of Coelho. Poussier also compared the gameplay to Myst and liked that the game did not follow the book too closely, noting that a "stain" of the "author's influence" was not noticeable until the game's midpoint; he thought the scene with Petrus was "completely out of the blue" and "filled with absolute nonsense that even the stonest {sic of all hippies would find laughable". The Hardcore Gaming 101 reviewer also criticised the plastic-like characters which did not resemble Moebius' work, having to wait for characters to complete an animation before answering each question, and the "excruciatingly awful" voice acting of many characters, particularly the incorrect French and Spanish accents. Poussier praised the atmospheric music, as well as the "well-handled" education despite lamenting that the encyclopedia would have been more palatable had its walls of text been sprinkled with some images. ==Legacy==

The game received the Golden CD-ROM award in France and other international awards. According to Arxel Tribe, the game's release saw the developer become recognised for its "author games", which had beautiful graphics and an in-depth scenario. The game turned out to be Arxel Tribe's prelude; it was followed by the company's "international breakthrough" hit Ring (1998), based on an opera by Richard Wagner, which would sell 600,000 copies. Rings game engine was based on the one created for Pilgrim, so the titles had a similar architecture and design. There are many references to Pilgrim and Coelho's thoughts on the experience throughout the book; the following passage illustrates this: After Pilgrim, it was decided that the "fruitful collaboration" between Arxel Tribe and Coelho would continue; this resulted in the creation of two more games set in the Medieval Middle East, creating an adventure trilogy. Described by Guillaume de Fondaumiere as a "kind of continuation", However, Damien Poussier of Hardcore Gaming 101 argues that while Simon de Lancroix is mentioned in the sequel, the name is not referring to the same character from Pilgrim. Guillaume de Fondaumiere later said that while he was proud of the game, it was not particularly impressive by the standards of the time. ==References==