Growing up in the early 90s, my family had an NES and a Genesis. I was young enough that I don't think I actually realized they were consoles of different generations.

We had somewhat small collections for each, from what I remember. Your Marios, your Sonics, a smattering of Zelda, a few sports games. Nothing too crazy.

But in amongst that collection was a game that always stood out to me a little bit. A game I could never make progress on, whose theme and content and mechanics were massively different from anything else I had experienced to that point. A game I immediately forgot about as I moved on to PC and PS1 and N64 and so on. After that it would pop into my head randomly but I could never remember what it was called, or if it was even real. At one point, I reckoned it was a fake game I had seen on a TV show or movie and got confused about.

Then, in 2024 I started collecting for NES again, having previously given away all my retro games in 2020 in a desperate bid to clean out the house. As I was scrolling the inventory on the website of a local game store, I saw the familiar label art. I hadn't been looking for it, but it had found me again.

I picked it up, I poked at it a bit, and then I put it on the pile for later investigating.

But now it's time.

What is Dr. Chaos?!

Dr. Chaos is 1987/1988 action-adventure game for the Famicom Disk System and NES developed by Marionette and published by our friends at Pony Canyon/FCI. You may recognize the latter duo from assorted AD&D and Ultima NES ports and such, though it doesn't seem like Marionette has too much else under their belts.

It seems like Dr. Chaos isn't especially well-known even amongst the well-mined depths of the NES library. Does that make it a hidden gem? Well let's not get ahead of ourselves here.

Dr. Chaos is a game with ideas more than anything else. And if you know anything about me, I love games with ideas. Let's learn about those ideas by looking at how the game sells itself on the back of the box:

Michael must rescue his brother, Dr. Chaos, from the weird results of a scientific experiment gone haywire. But the haunted house is filled with bloodthirsty creatures, booby traps, and life force challenges. They try to prevent Michael from finding the special weapons and vials of secret strength he needs to save Dr. Chaos and himself.

* Three different screen patterns

* A dangerous maze of corridors guarded by evil creatures and monsters

* Mysterious rooms that conceal both dangers and life-saving weapons

* Space warp to another time and place where death and destruction await

* Thriller graphics

* Graphic score pad to track life force, weapons found, and weapons in use

* Memory capacity to save your score and re-start the game from where you left off

Howzat for some generic 80s-ass video game bullet points? Screen patterns!, graphics!, a HUD!, memory! Heck that last one isn't even true...at least not in the way you may be thinking. There is no battery save - it's just a password system. So idk if that's carryover from the FDS box, or the battery got cut late in development and they never dropped the bullet point. Or if it just references the ability to keep all relevant gamestate in memory in order to produce the password which lol.

Anyway, the general idea here is you play as Michael (Chaos?), who is the brother of the titular Dr. Chaos. Dr. Ginn Chaos - in a case of nominative determinism - is a mad scientist performing experiments into the nature of "warp zones" from his isolated mansion in the countryside. A few months ago, Dr. Chaos went missing, so Michael has set out to find out what happened.

How does Dr. Chaos play?

You like screen patterns? I hope so, cause as we've already heard Dr. Chaos has a whopping three of em. Get ready.

First you've got the side-scrolling sections where you explore Dr. Chaos' mansion, which has been taken over by monsters spilling out of the warp zones. The mansion has 3 floors, with the hallways full of infinitely-respawning bats and rats. You can take them out with your knife (or other weapons once you find ammo), but they come right back. Warp zones be like that sometimes, I guess.

Next you've got the first-person exploration view when you enter a room. You can turn north, south, east, and west in each room and open cabinets, collect health and ammo, move through doors, and even uncover secrets by knocking holes in walls. Some rooms have no entrances from the hallways and you must find the holes in the walls to move into them.

Lastly, throughout these rooms you'll find entrances to warp zones. These warp zones are the fabled third screen pattern. They're...well they're more side-scrolling sections sorry. They're a little bit more open than the mansion segments and have more-and-different enemies. At the end is a boss you must defeat to collect an item to use later in the game. Like high jump boots, an helmet for swimming underwater, or a health upgrade.

The general idea is to explore the mansion to gear up with health and ammo, then make your way into a warp zone, defeat the boss, collect the items, rinse and repeat. Some of the warp zones require traversal items from the earlier ones. In a more just world, perhaps we'd call them Chaostroids. Doctroids?

No, no "how" does Dr. Chaos play??

Oh, you mean like is it any good? Well if you want you can have a look at my playthrough over on YouTube, since I didn't realize @stream.place

I'm not sure if this embed'll properly link to the playlist, but there's 3 videos there you can have a look-out for, about 6 hours total.

Okay, but you're here to read a condensed version of my final, collected thoughts rather than watching me forming them in real-time. Fair enough. I can't promise it'll be "condensed" in any real way, but it is sure written.

Well, Dr. Chaos plays perfectly fine. I had a lot of fun with it. I'm glad I finally got a chance to not only revisit this mysterious game from my childhood, but to fully beat the game on my own (with, admittedly, a single glance at a guide).

Ultimately, I think it's an interesting and ambitious game with a lot of cool ideas that suffers a little bit in execution. For my money, it's able to get pretty far on ideas and ambition and the execution doesn't let it down too badly.

Dr. Chaos' mansion offers 27 different rooms to explore, across 3 floors and a basement. We've talked about how the game unfolds across and outside of these rooms, so I'll try not to repeat myself too much there and just talk about what the experience is like.

The rooms of the mansion all look the same, with the same types of furniture and decorations, the same items and power-ups to be found, etc. But they connect together to form an interesting labyrinth. Some rooms don't open directly out onto the side-scrolling hallway and must be found through other rooms. The hallway has some walls you must navigate around via these rooms, there are secret passages up to the third floor and down to the basement. So despite the repetition, it was all very fun to explore..and indeed to map.

I love mapping games, and I feel like you don't get the opportunity for that very much these days so I always cherish it when I get the chance. I think the complexity of the map is well-targeted for casual map making. Everything (mostly) fit fine on a single page and didn't require any complex annotations or notes. I still got turned around now and then since every room looked basically the same, but the map always helped me orient myself.

The warp zones are where the action happens. There are a couple different tilesets used across the 11 warp zones: a jungle and a cave. The enemy variety is slightly higher in the warp zones, too. You get slimes and flying assholes and little bouncy-explody guys and big jumpy guys...oh and fish in some zones.

They're all configured as sort of a mediocre action-platformer. You can tell some thought went into the level design, with enemy placements requiring skill and potentially inducing some frustration - but never getting to be outright mean. That's a fine line to walk, and ultimately they probably could've tip-toed a little closer to the line if anything. Warp zones will eat up your ammo and your health, but ultimately shouldn't trouble you too much if you've geared up ahead of time.

The warp zone bosses, likewise, show some thought and consideration. There are some interesting designs and gimmicks - a snake dragon that splits apart Centipede-style, a little dude that rolls back and forth and you gotta jump over (actually two of those). It, again, screams "mediocre action-platformer" and you never quite reach the Jalecolian "highs" of a big, multi-sprite boss sitting on a black background.

Anyway, the game continues to play out in a predictable cycle: explore the mansion to load up on health and ammo and find the warp zone entrances, poke into a warp zone to find which ones you can complete with your current items, kill a boss and collect a new item, rinse and repeat.

Refilling ammo and health after each warp zone visit can get a little tedious, but there's plenty of it to be found across the mansion and it respawns each time you kill a boss so it's not awful - especially not if you've got a map to help speed up the process.

Alright, alright, I get it. But should I play this?

I have a lot to say about the state of gaming discourse. And especially retro gaming discourse. But I'll save the broader strokes of all of that for another post probably.

In the meantime, i did want to discuss some of the discourse specific to this game. And, well...there actually isn't really a ton. With a lot of NES games you'll have dueling sets of YouTube videos variously claiming games as Hidden Gems or The Worst Game On The System. Or you'll get twofers like The Worst Game You've Never Heard Of type things.

For Dr. Chaos, you generally get one of two types of takes: "game bad," and "game bad and also Goonies II did it better."

About a year ago, the YouTube channel Big Ole Words did a video review of the game, which is worth watching - whether James likes a game or not, he always puts the work in to try to understand it first.

As I say, I think James does his due diligence in understanding the game. Ultimately, the rough edges of the game - the sameness of the rooms, the tedium of the navigation, the mediocrity of the warp zones and bosses - prove too much for him and he thinks the game is "pretty awful."

Personally, I wouldn't go quite that far with it. But let's look at some more reviews first.

Retrologist, researcher, and all around Games Scientist @jeffgerstmann.com

Now if you watched that maybe you're thinking to yourself "but he didn't even get to a warp zone?!" And...yeah. I have a lot of respect for Jeff and a lot of appreciation for his ranking series and how it's intended to subvert some of the calcified "canonical literature" of retro gaming discourse. Indeed I'll have more to say on that in another post. But it's pretty clear that - although Dr. Chaos made out pretty well here - Jeff didn't necessarily have a full picture of the game at the time.

Speaking of not having the full picture of the game, let's look at some written reviews. The denizens of GameFAQs have mostly rated the game with 1s and 3s out of 10, with a single outlying 7. The low ratings say things like "this game is just way too confusing without a guide" and "in the short hour that I actually conjected [sic] myself to such horribleness, I only found three enemies." Now I'm not overly familiar with the culture over on GameFAQs, but I suppose it stands to reason that if some of the members are there to fastidiously produce walkthroughs perhaps others are mostly there to consume walkthroughs. But still it sounds funny to see someone on GameFAQs to say that a game I got through in 6 hours needs to be done with a walkthrough.

Elsewhere, over on Mobygames, the linked reviews are a little bit more reasonable. But even there, one reviewer wasn't aware the warp zones existed and suggested that "there doesn’t seem to be any pattern or reason to [the first-person] areas."

Okay, okay, but do you think I should play this game?

I don't think there's any question that this is a deeply flawed game. The mansion exploration is tedious, the warp zones are lackluster, the ending is...something less than a heartfelt emotional climax. And some of the games most interesting ideas are better explored in better games.

At the same time, there is no question that I have a deep personal connection to this game. But even trying to put that aside for a minute, do I think it's worth checking out this game?

Well, yes. I think this game is a perfect encapsulation of the NES library at its...well maybe not at its "best," but surely as it actually existed at the time. I have a lot to say in another post (always in another post, I've gotta wrap this up soon) about loving imperfect games for what they are.

I think part of loving games and of appreciating them as honest and artistic human expression is understanding that every game isn't (and cannot be) Super Mario Bros. 3, or Kirby's Adventure, or Metroid. Dr. Chaos certainly isn't one of those games, but it is representative of a huge swath of the library that was just okay and that got a little experimental at a time when gaming conventions and genres were still coming to a consensus about the identity of a home console game as a distinct entity from arcade and computer games.

Dr. Chaos has a lot of ideas that it explores confidently enough. Granted, they don't come together to create a masterpiece, but they do gel well enough to create a cohesive gaming experience with its own identity. It's not broken or buggy, it's not overly difficult, it doesn't have a ton of slowdown or sprite flicker. it works well within its means to deliver you a decent and atmospheric time.

Just, uh, if you find yourself in the late 80s maybe you're better of renting this one than buying it.