Adventure Construction Set: No Eternal Life for Me

I will eat, drink, and be merry--forever!

Man, I was truckin' along pretty good there with "Rivers of Light." After last night's posting, I:

1. Found a secret door that led me to a weapon called Repeller:

 
2. Used said weapon to defeat Yam the dragon.

 

3. Got from Yam's corpse the third of three tablets I needed to figure out how to survive the endgame. Here they are crudely pieced together in Word:

 

4. Followed Gilgamesh's path o'er hill and dale, and through a poisoned lake (that's where the cedar poles came in handy) to meet none other than Utnapishtim, the Babylonian analog to Noah:

 
5. Followed Utnapishtim's instructions to get a mysterious plant called a "Gray Grow Young."


 

6. Hiked back across the Sinai Peninsula and explored some pyramids, including one that took me into a mysterious valley called "Two Hero Valley."

Unfortunately, the name of the Valley didn't turn out to be a metaphor. You see, Adventure Construction Set allows you to have multiple characters active in the game world at the same time. I didn't see any point to it, but now it's clear that it's the only way to win the game.

 

Maddictra is stuck in her side of the valley now, and I need a second hero to come along and open a passage on the other side. Regrettably, this means creating a second character, and building him up enough to get the equipment he needs to cross the Sinai Peninsula to meet up with Maddictra. Am I willing to invest that kind of time? If it was a better game, maybe. As it is, no.

I tried looking for a walkthrough, but "Rivers of Light" seems to be the exception to the rule that every game has one. The best I found--and this is actually quite good--is a series of YouTube videos made by user "I Played a Thing." He's playing on an Amiga, so the graphics look different (i.e., better), but the gameplay is identical. (For some reason, he has chosen to call his character "Fire" and has an icon representing fire.) He reaches my stuck point at 06:26 in the video below. His reaction is identical to mine: "That is some bull$&%, Rivers of Light!"

He was willing to do what I'm not: take the several hours to make a second character and haul him over to the valley, so if you want to see how it ends, keep watching his videos. The summary is that you work your way through a series of gates in a valley-cum-dungeon along the Nile, ultimately meeting the Egyptian god Osiris face-to-face in his tomb.

Stolen from "I Played a Thing's" video.

 
There, you are reunited with the souls of your seven past lives and "born again" in a "land of milk and honey," according to the text anyway. In the game itself, it appears you are kicked unceremoniously back into the Fertile Crescent with no further talk of eternal life.

Well, sorry I missed that for myself.

Let me do a quick GIMLET on this game: I give it 7 points for the game world; it's the only game I know that draws on Mesopotamian mythology, and it's quite well-researched at that. (In fact, I should add an addendum to my "What Have You Learned?" posting, 'cause this game really fleshed out my knowledge of the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Babylonian pantheon.) Apparently, this was a common modus operandi for developer Stuart Smith, who also created Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves and Return of Hercules, neither of which I played because they didn't receive a DOS port.

Your presence doesn't do much in the game world, though--one character continues to whine about the various threats in Assur long after you've slain them all.

Chin up, buddy. You only have trolls to worry about!

Character creation is down at a 4; all you get to select is your name and icon during the creation process, but character development uses a fairly good skills-based system. NPC Interaction gets a 2; there are many NPCs, and you learn from them, but there is no "interaction" per se. Encounters are more interesting than you'd expect, with a variety of foes, some of whom flee when wounded. They respawn, allowing lots of opportunities for skill-building, but no real depth to the encounters. Let's say 4.

Magic doesn't exist, as such. You get spells, but they only work in limited circumstances to accomplish a particular thing; there are no real tactics to the combat, so we're going with a 2 on this category. There isn't much equipment in the game, and none of it is well-described. Having weapons and armor occasionally break is more annoying than challenging. The game is interesting for being one of the early ones to assign a weight-based movement statistic, but I wouldn't say this "adds" much to the game. I give it a 3.

The economy is based on barley, which you can't accumulate much of because it's too heavy, and there's not much to buy anyway (1); there are no side quests, just steps on a main quest that, while original, has no real fulfillment in the end. There's also only one potential outcome and no replayability (2). Graphics are not distractingly bad, but there's no sound, and at least for modern keyboards, the interface sucks (2).

The Fertile Crescent setting is unique, a least.

 

Finally, on gameplay, although you can theoretically explore the entire game map from the outset, in reality you need to visit the various cities and dungeons in a specific order to progress through the game. Until the moment it throws the "two heroes" curveball at you, the game is fairly easy but not overly so, and it is reasonably brief. But there is no replayability to it (3).

Final Score: 30. It was brief enough that I would have finished it if it hadn't been for the game's sudden surprise, but it wasn't enjoyable enough that I mind watching the end on someone else's video.

I'll play with the "construction" part of the software and then move on to Alien Fires.

*****

Nearly 5 years after abandoning the game because of "Two Hero Valley," I returned to it and won. I used the updated posting to discuss the totality of Stuart Smith's contributions. Read it here!