The game
You are Torgan, a young hunter of the Pieds-Agiles. You roam a vast valley in first-person view: mountains, forests, springs, clouds and storms. Day follows night, and hunger, thirst and fatigue wear you down. You meet wolves, bears, rabbits and men from other tribes: you must then fight in side view, with an axe, a spear or bare hands… or else talk, trade gifts and make allies.
Chip flint to make your weapons, gather berries and roots, tend your wounds, sleep by the fire. Here, cunning and diplomacy are often worth more than strength.
The quest
Hognor, the chief of your tribe, sets you ever harder trials:
- Bring back food: the tribe is hungry.
- Get the Potion of Life from the Yeux-Malins, because the young ones ate poisonous berries.
- Take up the Bras-de-Roc's challenge: defeat their chief and steal the Ivory Axe.
- Take back the Sacred Staff stolen by the Hyènes-Folles.
- And finally… let the law of strength choose the new chief.
Pieds-Agiles
Your tribe. Chief: Hognor.
Yeux-Malins
Cunning healers. Chief: Sl-Oom.
Bras-de-Roc
Feared warriors. Chief: Grungh.
Hyènes-Folles
Raiders of the South. Chief: Krok-G.
Controls
Computer
- Mouse
- Pick an action in the menus at the bottom (▲▼ arrows to scroll), click the picture to look around
- ← →
- Landscape: turn · side view: walk
- ↑ ↓
- Landscape: speed up / slow down · side view: stand up / crouch
- Space
- Landscape: map · side view: strike
- Enter
- Change weapon (or right click)
- Esc
- Leave the view (or click)
- Numpad
- Second player (8246, 1 strike, 3 weapon)
Mobile
- Touch
- Like a mouse click: the whole game is played with the menus (Look › Landscape to go exploring)
- Joystick
- Left strip: turn, move forward (landscape), walk (side view)
- STRIKE
- Side view: strike · landscape: map
- WEAPON
- Side view: change weapon
- EXIT
- Leave the current landscape or view (tapping the picture works too)
- MAP
- The map in the landscape
A long history
- 1986 — First version, written in assembly for the Thomson MO5 and TO7/8/9 and the Amstrad CPC, then rewritten in C for the PC.
- 1987 — A more colorful version for the Atari ST.
- 1996 — The C sources come out of the boxes: a version for MacOS and Windows.
- 2017 — Sapiens becomes freeware.
- 2018 — Myriad releases the sources under the GNU GPL v3 license.
- Today — A port to PHP, playable in your browser.
100% PHP
This version is a faithful, function-by-function port of the 2018 C sources to PHP, built on the JumPHP framework. The same code runs on desktop (PHP + SDL2) and in the browser (PHP compiled to WebAssembly). The sprites, sounds and texts are those of the original game.
Source code: github.com/davidnurdin/sapiensPhp · original sources: Myriad's Sapiens open source page.