Greetings,

Sorry in advance for the wall of text.

I don't tend to frequent forums, but there is an old, nostalgic game I played as a child that I can't find a thing about no matter how hard I search, and I created this account for the sole purpose of checking if anyone here could help me finally find its name.

I am almost certain it is a DOS game, which I played in an emulator that came bundled with several games. I have this confidence because:

1. This game has a [design/structure] very similar to some DOS [RPG/Adventure] games I saw while searching for it. (More about that below)

2. I remember playing many games that were released for MS-DOS in an emulator; presumably, the same emulator through which I played this game.

3. I already checked *a lot* of SNES/Genesis games to no avail. (Because it seems I also had an SNES emulator, at some other point in my childhood.)

Below I will try to describe the game as I best recall it, but I played it as a small child about 20 years ago, and thus I may be misremembering a thing or two.

The game had a low-poly 3D world map viewed in first-person, similar to the world map of games like "Betrayal at Krondor". You started the game with 1 character, which looked like to be a tribesman. You wandered in that low-poly world map, which seemed to depict a wilderness area with grasslands, hills, maybe forests, and the like.

While wandering there was a chance a random encounter would happen. When a random encounter happened, the view switched from the 3D world map to a third-person 2D map, the layout of which was similar to that of games like "Alien Logic": Your character was placed at the left edge of the 2D map, and whatever or whoever he encountered was placed at the right edge, with a 2D background filling the map.

You could encounter animals and people. Regarding the animals, I remember the game having what looked like rabbits, peacocks, [wolves/hyenas], and bipedal bears. Regarding the people, they all also looked like tribesmen. I never advanced far into the game, so it's entirely possible there are other types of encounters past the beginning of this game.

Some random encounters (especially those with [wolves/hyenas] and bear-like bipedal creatures) were hostile from the start, which meant you had to fight whatever you encountered. Combats happened in real-time, still in that 2D map. Besides the typical melee beatdown, you (and the enemy) could do things like throw spear-like weapons and crouch down.

Some random encounters were not hostile from the start. In those cases, if you encountered people, you had dialog options to choose from, displayed in a user interface below the 2D map. Depending on your choices, the people you encountered could become hostile, prompting the combat.

Unfortunately, I remember virtually nothing from the dialogs themselves. That not only is because I played this game a long time ago, but also because at that time I knew very little English (this is not my native language), so I was choosing dialog options almost totally clueless of what they meant.

I think you started the game near or inside a tribe, to which your character belonged or at least was on good terms with. I say that because it was common for me to have random encounters with tribesmen at the very start of the game if I wandered around my starting location, and I don't remember these encounters ever starting hostile, nor it was common to have my dialog choices turning these tribesmen hostile.

If I wandered far on the map, I could have random encounters with tribesmen that looked different from the ones I could meet in the beginning, and those either started the encounter hostile or were very easy to become hostile by dialog choices.

I remember the game had a "bonding" mechanic, in which you could have a random encounter with an animal that turned out to be "attracted" to you. When that happened, the bonded animal would follow you through the maps, and be at your side on new encounters, even helping you in combats if capable. The animal could permanently die, and even you could kill it, accidentally or not. Usually, docile animals, like rabbits, were the most likely to get bonded to your character, but this could also happen with normally hostile animals. When an animal bonded to you, I remember that a red heart symbol was displayed somewhere in the user interface (I think in the bottom panel of the 2D maps, next to a portrait of the animal).

If I remember well, in a "normal" encounter the game automatically placed me back in the 3D world after the encounter was resolved, either by me winning its combat or by finishing the dialog choices. But in an encounter with an animal that became bonded, that didn't happen by default. If I walked to the edge of the 2D map, by default a new (and usually empty) 2D map would be displayed next, and so on until one of those 2D maps would have a new, "normal" encounter.

One particularly strong memory I have from this game was when a peacock-like creature became bonded to me. I didn't know how to leave the 2D map outside of having a normal encounter next, and that could take a while moving through empty 2D maps. In that specific case, it was taking too long. I eventually got frustrated and fiddled with (almost) all the keys on my keyboard to try to find a way of leaving to the 3D map, to no avail. With deep sorrow, I then decided to kill the peacock, so that in sequence I would automatically be put in the 3D map. At the time I was a very sensible child when it came to animals, and I almost cried for having to kill the bonded peacock in order to leave the 2D maps.

Does anyone have any idea of what game this could be? As I said, I may be misremembering a thing or two, so even suggestions that do not match exactly with everything I said could be the game I am looking for.