One of our protagonists, fighting a hippo.
Tail of the Sun is a quirky, artsy caveman simulator released in 1996 for the PlayStation. It was developed by Artdink (A-Train, No One Can Stop Mr. Domino) and directed by Kazutoshi Iida (Doshin the Giant).
The ultimate goal of the game is to build a ladder to the sun using mammoth tusks. In order to achieve this goal, the cavemen must explore and gather resources in a large open world, and hopefully grow their tribe's cultural and physical levels enough to hunt the fearsome mammoths.
The cavemen also have an infamous tendency to fall asleep at the worst possible times.
Tail of the Sun provides examples of:
- Alien Sky: A mild example. The nighttime skybox features a wheeling effect with stars and multicolored planets.
- All There in the Manual: The manual is the only place where you're told of your goal, as well as where a map of the world (along with a few landmarks and points of interest that you can search for) is provided. Without that, you're going in blind.
- Defeat Equals Explosion: Killing any creature, man or animal, causes it to gloriously shatter and explode into many polygonal fragments.
- Eyes Out of Sight: One of the three cavepeople you start out with has this look going on.
- Fantastic Fruits and Vegetables: The flora in this game are sugar cakes.
- Gonk: Your caveman can have a number of different faces. While some are relatively normal, others are quite funky-looking.
- Good Old Fisticuffs: This is what your offensive capabilities start out as. By raising your cultural level you can obtain increasingly more powerful weapons, which are useful for hunting.
- Guide Dang It!: The game doesn't really explain anything before thrusting you into the action. It can take a while to figure out what you're supposed to be doing.
- Min-Maxing: A requirement. Each of your stats are marked in the "Body" screen with a different color, indicating how strong they are (from weakest to strongest, the colors are: purple, blue, green, yellow, peach, and red). Stats cannot be of the same color, so you need to pick and choose which ones you want to raise.
- Misplaced Wildlife: Hippos (blue ones no less!) roam the arctic region of the continent.
- The Monolith: Naturally included as a reference. You can find a group of five colored monoliths. Interacting with them imprints a tattoo on you that increases one of your stats.
- Multiple Endings: There are a total of nine. Which one you'll get depends on which stats you increase and how you perform.
- Permadeath: You choose a caveman to control from the ones in your tribe. When it dies, you may pick another one. If you lose them all, it's No More Continues. In order to avoid this, you must increase your village's population by consuming food and increasing your Propagate stat.
- Power Tattoo: The monoliths give you these. Depending on which one you currently have on you, your Brain, Swim, Propagate, Jump, or Run stat increases. The Hand stat does not have a tattoo.
- Power-Up Food: The sugar cakes you can find improve your different stats when you eat them.
- Sleep Deprivation: Cavemen need to sleep from time to time, and if they go too long without a nap, they'll die of exhaustion. The US version allows you to button mash the circle button to wake them up, though doing this too many times will ultimately be fatal.
- Winged Soul Flies Off at Death: This happens to the cavemen when they die.
- Wizard Needs Food Badly: It is possible to starve to death.
