Mr. Bones (1996)

 

Developer: Zono

Publisher: Sega

One Player

Sega Saturn

 

In horror, skeletons force one to concede our mortality. Take away the flesh, even if one is spiritual or religious and believe in the immortal soul, and the bones are left on the earth which once kept a person up right when mortally alive. In pop culture however, this sobering thought is constantly undercut by the uncanny and sometimes humorous absurdity of skeletons on t-shirts riding motorcycles on fire or even dancing in synchronized choreography, as made iconic by the 1929 Disney animated short The Skeleton Dance, which was a short produced back in black and white where a group jauntily partake in dance in a cemetery. In scientific medicine, bones cannot move in the human body (or in other species) without the muscles connected to them, muscles to pull and relax to allow one to fold an arm up to the chest and to flex straight again. As a result, skeletons in mythology and pop culture are innately uncanny for their ability to overcome this rational issue and gleefully swing swords in Jason and the Argonauts (1963), through the work of Ray Harryhausen, sing as Jack Skeleton does in A Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) without seemingly a tongue let alone vocal cords, and here rock out blue guitar riffs in Mr. Bones.

Mr. Bones is a damn good representation of the Sega Saturn as a console, one tragically doomed to failure all but in the Japanese market, at the wrong time in trends in the West, not helped by the storm Sony with the Playstation had, and to not be well preserved in retro releases despite the fact that it is full of idiosyncratic games. One of the titles Sega hoped would sell the system and promote a new joy pad was Nights into Dreams (1996), which was as atypical as you could get next to Crash Bandicoot (1996) on the Playstation, a surreal flying game with a non-binary lead in a game openly based on Jungian psychology. That was one of the games that got a release in the West, and between the cult games and those only kept in Japan, you have some curiosities. From Haunted Casino (1996), strip erotic card and gambling games based on Western casinos and horror iconography, to Enemy Zero (1996), Kenji Eno’s take on Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) as a full motion game with invisible enemies you have to detect by sound, horror and games suitable for Halloween alone are really idiosyncratic from the Saturn’s back catalogue even if a small selection, and Mr. Bones among them had enough personality and weirdness just by itself to stand out.

Mr. Bones comes to us from Ed Annunziata and Zono. Annunziata came to Sega by 1990 and the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, the most prominent contribution in his career being the Ecco the Dolphin series, an environmentally conscious franchise which had games after the Mega Drive/Genesis but really had its largest run of entries back for that console and the Sega CD. Mr. Bones was one of two titles Annunziata worked on for the Sega Saturn, but this was developed by Zono, part of a strange era for Sega in the 32-bit console period where iconic licenses of theirs never came to the Saturn despite being popular in the 16 bit one, or came in curious ways. Even for those which did arrive, we got a Shinobi game, Shinobi X/Legions (1995), with digitized actors, and Streets of Rage and Golden Axe were taken from the beat-em-up genres and made into one-on-one fighting games. We, notoriously, never got an official Sonic the Hedgehog game for the Saturn, only tie-ins, and those said to be in production like Eternal Champions were cancelled or never came to be. Some idiosyncratic characters were made for the Saturn sadly left in the dust, from Bug! (1995) to Clockwork Knight (1994), and Ed Annunziata attempted it twice over the Saturn, full of personality just in their leads let alone their curious gameplay styles. Even Three Dirty Dwarves (1996) however, developed by Hungarian developer Appaloosa Interactive seems more “conventional” next to the two as it is still a quirky take on the beat-em-up which briefly gets into a baseball mini-game among other stages, whilst Mr. Bones, based on an original premise by Annunziata, is a mass of various genres.

One night, vampire magician DaGoulian with his occult drum set summons a skeleton army from the dead, brainwashed to let him take over the world, only to have that one percent issue to compromise his plan transpired, that one skeleton (voiced by Fitz Houston) was resurrected and still has his freewill intact. Before he can process his new un-life, the titular Bones in the first levels has to escape from the skeleton army sent after him, beginning with a pursuit scene running from said red eyed skeletons, jumping over tomb stones and ducking rocks being lobbed his way. You do have to describe the game, with spoilers, to even begin to explain what happens throughout as countless genres and gameplay styles like a mini-game compilation are put together here to tell the tale of this skeleton with a heart of gold and a taste for blue music. This does admittedly present the one aspect too that could put people at arm’s length from Mr. Bones, in that these levels vary in tone and some are frustrating to actually play, even if you unlock them in level select, and can try them again to beat them and progress the story.

It also becomes exceptionally quirkier as it goes alone, making sense at first having escape the skeletons only to be trapped on top of a mausoleum roof, dodging your bony-like, and then a platforming section which enforces one of the key aspects found throughout the levels regardless of gameplay style, that with more damage you take, Mr. Bones loses limbs with greater ease until you are a head on a spine. This can be prevented by increasing your level of “skeletism”, the force that brought him to life and can be acquired as health through various cosmic blue entities of the spirit world, usually butterflies, and be able to reattach limbs with the greater sense of them remaining attached. Things take a curveball when you encounter a blind man in a cabin, evoking the legacy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in how, alongside its iconic central figure, one aspect which thankfully was brought back in the Universal films, Bride of Frankenstein (1935), and continued from the novel in countless films is the blind man in the cabin who can help the monster without their appearance bringing forth a barrier. (Even a non-horror Alfred Hitchcock film, Saboteur (1942), had this trope of all things at one point in its thriller plotline). In this case, Mr. Bones is taught the power of electric blues guitar, providing one of its best virtues of the music.

One of the more idiosyncratic aspects of this era is the amount of people from legendary bands who went into video game composition. Former member of The Police Stewart Copeland, who had already a long score composer career at that point, working on the original Spyro the Dragon games, to the Sega Saturn, where sadly mostly in Japanese only releases this transpired: John Petrucci of Dream Theatre working on Digital Pinball: Necronomicon (1996), a game tragically never released in the West as a pinball game based on the work of H.P. Lovecraft, and Ian McDonald of King Crimson and Foreigner working on Wachenröder (1998), a steampunk based JRPG. One which thankfully came to the West is Mr. Bones, where Ronnie Montrose composed the score. The late Ronnie Montrose, before his solo career where this score came within, is likely to be known for Montrose, also known as the band where Sammy Hager was the lead singer early in his career before his own solo career and the Van Hager era. This is a sumptuous blues rock soundtrack in dire need of re-assessment, spoken as a heavy metal and rock fan that yet, growing his music tastes over the decades even beyond guitar music, came to appreciate blues music early on not as a genre appropriated by dull white vocalists but full of vibrancy. Instead it was legendary figures from John Lee Hooker to Muddy Waters, and when it was appropriated, it was figures like ZZ Top to Stevie Ray Vaughan who made good blues rock music, which Mr. Bones score fully commits to. Here, it is fun seeing a skeleton stop other skeletons from fighting through an admittedly confusing (but thankfully not difficult) rhythm guitar section by the power of electric blues riffs, to the point the audience finds lighters to lift up despite the issue of not having pockets.

Platforming is the basic meat of many levels, following a triptych of levels where, with accursed bats stealing your limbs if given the chance, and giant lumberjacks to avoid, you need to get around and reach goals where you may need just one arm to pass, a button on the Saturn controller allowing you to implode. Yes, there is also the ill-advised ability to connect your arms back on without a rib cage, which looks wrong even if you exist as a skeleton able to still move. The platforming can be awkward, but it is a series of levels which are sufficient enough without taking too much of your time. This also presents, not a negative of the game, but the fascinating circumstances of this being a work you can beat in less than two hours over the two discs it is contained on, effectively a 16 bit game brought into the full motion video era, be it where you see the old tropes of throwing a lot of obstacles over these three levels, or how this culminates in forcing one to run away from rolling timber set to southern banjos. Again you get rhythm gaming with access to the infernal drum kit, not with sticks but hand drums, which is a case of catching up with the right one indicated.

It is after this I will argue, before the disc change, Mr. Bones knocks out the best levels, and where I came to admire this game, when it gets existential, emotional and deliciously weird. The platforming level over broken shards in space may annoy some, but set to a spoken word piece set to blues riffs, about the meaning behind blues music as an expression of emotion, is a beautiful moment in a game that is entirely for the most part over the top, before it gets to the cherry on top, a legitimately great level in the history of gaming, where you play a game of bouncing yourself off your own skull. The reason the game is two discs long is that gameplay scenes do use FMV for them, as well as in the cut scenes, and this is an example where this is used to a great advantage, where having to bounce yourself using yourself (and not knock your “ball”, curled up, off-screen) to collect parts back, when you collect the item for that section, you having a stacking doll-like scenario, truly surreal, where the giant skull you have bounced off becomes what you have to bounce off another giant skull of yourself on and on until the section is entirely complete. It is the best moment of the game, though the first disc itself ends having to travel into the screen through a vortex collecting your limbs back again, Mr. Bones as a character constantly haunted by the fact his bones, whilst brought together by skeleticism, seemingly wander off on their own accord.

Disc two, whilst with highlights and weird tangents, does however show the issues of how finickety some of the levels were and that Mr. Bones could have done with some revisions in places. This has some of the most frustrating moments of the entirely set of levels, beginning from the get-go with our lead trying to navigate an underwater tunnel without hitting rocks in-screen. Moments like this do show, honestly, that some fine-tuning to the difficulty were needed, and there are a few examples here. Having to release a skeletal dragon for example, by bouncing off the giant screws of its chains, and more so when, having apologized for their temper, they help fly you to DaGoulian‘s castle, where there is mandatory damage to go through all the stain glass windows showing his life, a cool visual touch but having to maneuver Mr. Bones, swaying like a drunken sailor on a boat in the claws of the dragon, past hazards and collecting the health to be prepared for the next stain glass window is a frustrating challenge in itself. The most egregious is an ice lake stage where, having to navigate the thin ice, it is precarious to an extreme and only needs you to fall in the water twice before the extreme cold suck you into the currents below. Thankfully, in contrast to this, you have some of the strangest moments of this entire game, like recreating the civilians Lilliput of Guillver's Travels, the iconic extra tiny people of the Jonathan Swift novel only touched upon once, with these characters never appearing again baring the level where you protect them from spiders. Weirder still, worthy of historical record in videogame lore, is thwarting a boss by way of telling jokes, which is up there next to Alex Kidd and the Enchanted Castle (1989) with beating bosses through Paper, Rock, Scissors, only with less concerns of irritating random chance, and more Dad jokes.

It is night and day why this would have not been a hit, too weird to live to paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson, if thankfully existing, but this has to also be factored in with the fact that, despite all the fascinating games I have nodded to just from 1996, that was already seen as a time when the Sega Saturn was failing in the West, meaning even the cult games would have been effected.  Mr. Bones on a preview demo on a disc called Sega Flash Vol. 3 (1996), released with issue #15 of Sega Saturn Magazine in the United Kingdom, was where I first learn of this game as a kid, part of a holy collection of Saturn games mostly never gotten to and rare - Keio Flying Squadron 2 (1996), Die Hard Arcade (1996), Dark Savior (1996), Dragon Force (1996), Enemy Zero - which showed that, whilst the reality was Sony were winning, it did not diminish how many idiosyncratic games they had regardless of the flagging virtues of the Saturn. All those alongside Mr. Bones had European releases in PAL and are now mostly rare, a murder's row of games, even if they all had flaws, one would argue for their preservation and re-release on a Saturn mini console, Mr. Bones a really odd game outmatched in terms of the virtues for all its flaws. Mr. Bones comes with me better with its good moments and the aesthetic really standing out, less morbid as the final boss battle is bouncing back attacks with one's guitar solos and a villain forgetting they are a vampire, more broadly spooky. [Spoilers] It has the tone where, for a slight ending, it is still a good happy one, glad to see, where a character like Mr. Bones gets to enter a dimensional portal and be with a female banshee he wooed with his music earlier in disc one. [Spoilers End] A potentially one-dimensional figure, a literal skeleton, he is given enough life literally by voice actor Fitz Houston and the game, memorable since childhood for images welding that guitar like a king, and I can only wishing this was preserved and re-released. Zono as a studio sadly did not last long into the 2000s, whilst Ed Annunziata was able to continue on, even moving on into mobile phone gaming and its possibilities. It did lead to him having direct involvement with the Nokia N-Gage as a game producer, which did not go well at all for that handheld console/phone hybrid, but there was at least an attempt.