Swords of Glass: Large, Full Dungeon

This is the most difficult monster on Level 1. You can't hit him!

The more I play Swords of Glass, the more I see it as the little CRPG that could. I spent this evening mapping the first level of the dungeon, which at 25 x 25 is the largest of the square-area games I've played so far (Might & Magic was 15 x 15, Wizardry was 20 x 20, and The Bard's Tale was 22 x 22). The dungeon is chock full of monsters, treasure, and interesting encounters.

And death. I cycled through six first-level characters before I finally survived long enough to raise a few levels and thus stay alive. At each level increase, you get another pool of points that you can put into health, strength, dexterity, or intelligence. My current character has risen five times, so he's getting pretty strong. He could still die at any minute, though--see below.

At five locations on the first level, you come upon pairs of doors side-by-side with a sign in front of them posing a riddle. You have to choose which door to enter. If you choose the right one, you get a nice piece of treasure; the wrong one, you find yourself roasting alive in an inferno. Here are a couple of the riddles:


So one of the signs is true and the other is false. If the first sign is false (e.g., both rooms have treasure or both have fire), then the second can't be true, so the first sign must be true, which means it has the treasure. Now try this one:


It's been a while since I had to solve a cryptogram. Well, HIO is almost certainly THE. That means HIOQO is either THERE, THESE, or THEME. "Theme" seems unlikely, and if it's "these," that means that another word, HQAO, begins with a TS. I'm going with THERE. That means for the long word in the first and second sentences, I have TRE---RE, which can't be anything but TREASURE. And so on. The solved cryptogram reads:

THE LEFT SIGN IS TRUE IF AND ONLY IF THERE IS FIRE IN THE ROOM. THE RIGHT SIGN IS TRUE IF AND ONLY IF THERE IS TREASURE IN THE ROOM.

Left side: AT LEAST ONE ROOM HAS TREASURE

Right side: AT LEAST ONE ROOM HAS FIRE

It took me a while, but I got it, and a Bow +1 for my troubles. Guessing means instant death, so you have to be careful.

Other different encounters include several statues that clue you to the location of treasure and stairs, a teleporter, "dark" squares that you have to carefully navigate, gargoyles on the wall that attack you and you can't fight back, and a pit of quicksand in which you have to abandon some of your equipment to escape.

Alas, proper spelling does not.
(Note: making fun of someone else's spelling or grammar virtually guarantees that you will have a major embarrassing mistake in your own posting. I look forward to the first person who tells me what mine is.)

The monsters are difficult but not impossible, with the exception of a "wispy shape" that takes only one damage per hit, and you only hit him one out of every dozen times you try. The creatures re-spawn constantly, though, and attack you from all angles, so you have to keep turning around and making sure you're not being followed. If you espy a monster from a distance, you can try shooting it with your bow, which allows you to direct shots to the right and left, as well as straight ahead, depending on where your foe is coming from. Not even Might and Magic V, which won't come out for eight years, allows anything but straight-ahead archery.

One of many nice little touches in Swords of Glass.

You are helped in your explorations by potions and other treasure, including an enchanted map that gives you a little mini-plot of the area. Monsters don't drop treasure, but chests are plentiful and the dungeon resets when you leave, so you can keep picking up treasure from the same chests. This sounds like it's too easy, but wait a second and I'll tell you something.


All of these interesting and innovative features are balanced by a couple of frankly unforgivable design flaws having to do with traps. First, you encounter traps in the corridors with no option to search for or disarm them ahead of time. Whether you trigger the trap or not depends on your dexterity, but even if you trigger it, it remains active and waiting to snare you when you pass that way again.

Even worse, opening chests has a chance of triggering poison, paralyze, or sleep traps. Poison is annoying as usual, but you can treat it with a healing potion or a trip back to the surface. Paralysis and sleep, however, never wear off. They are the equivalent of instant death. If you trip one of these traps, you have to kill DOSBox, reload, and create a new character. [Later note: as several readers pointed out, I'm wrong about this.] If you were playing a multi-player game, your second character could heal the first, I guess, but to have such unavoidable traps in a single-player, permanent-death game is just absurd.

Kojak will be stuck here forever. Maybe that's where all the statues came from.

I never did find a manual for the game, so the only way I know anything about the main quest is from Dean Tersigni's "The Glass Shrine" page, which gives a brief summary. Apparently the ultimate goal is to get down to the eighth level and find...see if you can guess it...the Sword of Glass. Why you'd want to find this particular weapon--a weapon that sounds like it would be good for exactly one hit--I'm not sure. There's no back story about a tyrant or usurper or anything. Anyway, one of the dangers of getting your "manual" from a fan page is spoilers, and Dean's has a big one: when you finally get the Sword of Glass, the game gives you a simple "You Win!" and that's it. I wish I hadn't seen that, but now that I have, I have no problem simply envisioning such text appearing on my screen the next time my character gets paralyzed or put to sleep.

In the meantime, I'll start mapping Level 2 and see how it goes.

The massive Level 1.