Sentinel Worlds: Careful What You Wish For

Even in a science fiction CRPG, I end up fighting rats.

In my last entry, I suggested I was looking forward to a possible fusion of science-fiction and fantasy. Well, the game certainly took a turn that way, although I'm going to reserve judgment on how good it is until the end.

When I last blogged, I was starting to explore the three towers on Caldorre. They were a bit of a disappointment. They were quite large, but mostly empty, and each held essentially the same things: a weapons store, a general store, a bar, places you can train your statistics, and an exclusive club. Except for the clubs, they were all fairly redundant. I was looking forward to some quality conversations with NPCs, but in three towers, I only found two NPCs (not counting the generic ones). Neither of them gave me any clues about the main quest. I did pick up one bit of intelligence that humans hadn't build the towers; they'd "been there forever." There was also a suggestion that the native Caldorrians used to be technologically advanced but had regressed, which is why I guess I found them living in grass huts.

Wow. You are just an enormous font of helpfulness.

As I said, there were "clubs" on the bottom floors of each tower, and entry required me to have 20 of a favored attribute: charisma, dexterity, and strength. Fortunately, at least one of my characters had 20 in each of these, so I was able to get in. But near as I could tell, there was nothing to do in these clubs except raid their armories.

Don't I look charming, dammit?

The good news is that training costs $1,000 and increases attributes by 1, so it doesn't look like I'm going to run out of reasons to make money.

I had about $9,000 to blow when I arrived, so I trained a few stats and stocked up on new weapons and ammunition. I found a fairly good melee weapon called an energy blade, so I kept my lead character armed with it and gave everyone else firearms. Oh, and I wasted $2,000 bribing one of the NPCs to tell me that the raiders must be sent by "one of Grager's enemies!" I'm not sure it was worth $2,000.

"Duh," the crew replied, before killing Kann and retrieving their two grand.

Without much sense of what to do next, I returned to space and continued destroying raiders. About this time, I noticed that in addition to giving me locations of convoys under attack, the "federation" message center also suggested quests. One scrolling message said that the "federation recommends boarding of raider ships to interrogate raider crews." This sounded sensible, so I started focusing my efforts on boarding. I found that the reason I got slaughtered the first time was because doors kept closing between my lead character and the medic, so I learned to order the crew members in such a way, and approach the enemies in such a way, that the medic was always within reach of the person at the head of the line.

While I haven't gotten anything out of a raider yet, exploring their ships suggests that they only have short-range capacity and there's alien technology on board.

I stopped dying, but I still had trouble getting any raiders to surrender. My crew just killed them. Finally, one of them surrendered long enough for me to ask one question before he chewed up a cyanide capsule.

Why did he even bother to surrender?

 
After a few more futile boardings, I gave up and went to Ceyjavik on a report that there was a distress beacon. Exploring the area, I found a science research station with a dead man named Eckirrt Kann outside; it seems like nearly every NPC in the game is named Kann. Anyway, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I expected a quick quest like the one on Caldorre last time, but I ended up taking a six-hour slog through several science station buildings, the science station headquarters, an undersea lab, a submarine, and an endless series of volcanic tunnels.

References to films continue.

Throughout all of them, I was assailed by the fauna of the underground: ice tigers, giant rats, fire lizards, and things called "green dragons" that were fairly tough. By the end, I was thoroughly sick of the game's melee combat. Enemies spawn and re-spawn continually even when you're sitting still, and moving through the corridors became a real chore. Particularly annoying is that combat is automated for all but the lead character. If four out of my five characters are going to blast away under the computer's control, what extra good does it do to force me to watch one weapon's readiness status and hit ENTER continually?

"You can drink your fancy ale. You can drink it by the flagon..."

Even against tough creatures, combat isn't terribly deadly--that is, unless you get out of range of your medic. Then, it's nearly instantly deadly. When he was in range, he kept up with healing the damage of even the toughest monsters. This makes combat primarily an exercise in positioning. As long as he could reach anyone under attack, I wasn't in much danger of dying, even when most of my characters ran out of ammunition and the battles were entirely up to those party members in hand-to-hand range.

I almost felt bad killing this one. He's so cute!

There might have been around 20 different featureless, repetitive dungeon screens in this quest. Among them, I found only one NPC: a woman named Virginia, hiding in a closet, who imparted a little bit of information about the submarine. The game didn't give my heroes any choice but to just leave her there, surrounded by prowling tigers.

She sounds so broken up about it.

At one point, I wandered into a goofy "Electronic Arts FunMap!" (helpfully marked as "not part of the game") that might have been a facsimile of the EA offices. The enemies were marked as "EA Roudies," which is either an embarrassing spelling error or some kind of in-joke. One of these days I'll do a posting on games that break the fourth wall, like Ultima II's inclusion of Richard Garriott. I can't think of too many games that have entire dungeon levels based on the developers' offices. Might & Magic VI comes to mind.

There's nothing so tiresome as people who think they're being clever.

So here's where it got weird. At the end of the volcanic tunnels was a room containing some kind of object called the "Key of Thor." When I spoke to it, it claimed to be a "creature of light" and went on for several paragraphs about what I'm guessing is the main quest. It sounds like it may be kind of stupid, but at least it explains the game's title.

The dialogue could frankly have been written a little better.

The summary--and I think I have this right--is that there was a race of beings called Sentinels (hence, Sentinel Worlds) who were "keepers of the light." The Sentinels "found" the Key of Thor on some distant world, "many aeons ago." Wherever the Key came from, there was another being like him in whom the light "shined darkly" (yeah, figure that one out), so the Sentinels destroyed it.

The Sentinels, led by someone named Kedro, later took up residence on Earth. One of them, named Malcolm Trandle, turned evil and "began to treat the poor primitives who lived on that world as cattle and playthings." Malcolm made an army of those Earthfolk and overthrew the rest of the Sentinels. He stole Kedro's book of spells and the Key of Thor and brought them to the far ends of the galaxy, hiding the Key deep in the planet where I found it. Malcolm then took up residence on Caldorre because he sensed an ancient power on the planet, manifested in the three towers, which are powered by a generator of "dark light."

Kedro and some of the Sentinels came looking for the Key, but Malcolm "dealt them a blow that left them helpless, their minds confused forever." The Key bade me to find them so he can restore their minds. Then he offered this:

The Sentinels have the power to wield the light just as you do. On Earth, the name the people gave to it was 'magic.' Have you heard of it? You have it in you, but you clearly do not have the knowledge to wield it. Kedro does. The Sentinels do. The light can let you mend people, it can let you change their nature, it can let you confuse them or strip them of their knowledge. It is the only way Malcolm can be defeated.

I can't quite figure out if the story is supposed to be referencing some event on Earth's history or mythology. Are the Sentinels supposed to be the Greek or Roman gods? (The "Key of Thor" would suggest a connection to the Norse pantheon, but I don't see anything in "Kedro" or "Malcolm Trandle.") Is Malcolm Trandle Satan? Is the Key supposed to be some artifact from history and I'm just not making the connection? Either way, this little twist has the potential to be interesting or staggeringly silly. We'll see.