Immercenary

Immercenary is an action RPG developed specifically for the 3DO and released in 1994, set inside a digital world called Perfect. The player enters it as a hunter with a single goal: reach the ruler known as Perfect One and dethrone her. Between him and the top stands a hierarchy of other beings who hunt each other within this world and climb the ranks, so the player never moves across an empty map. The climb upward thus serves as both story and difficulty regulator — the higher you get, the tougher opponents start taking interest in you.

The world is open and entirely polygonal, which was unusual for a console in 1994; the player moves through it in first-person view, shoots, collects energy, and advances through whoever they defeat. Enemies aren't mere targets — they hold their own position in the hierarchy, and defeating someone affects who confronts you next. Visually, it's a feverish mix of neon colors and strange shapes, accompanied by music that underscores the feeling of moving inside a computer rather than a landscape. Orientation is deliberately difficult, and the game explains its rules rather grudgingly. The player learns orientation and the meaning of individual indicators mainly through trial and error.

At the time, it was a title critics treated as a display of courage: technically ambitious, visually distinctive, and unusual to play, but also confusing and unfinished in places. Commercially it sank along with the console, and today it's known mainly among people who collect 3DO hardware. That's exactly why it's worth remembering: it's one of the few attempts in the early nineties to build an open three-dimensional world with RPG elements, and although the controls are stiff and the frame rate wavers, the idea itself holds up. Anyone who likes strange, original games from a time when nobody quite knew what 3D was supposed to mean will find here a rewarding piece that, moreover, can't be mistaken for anything else.