Game 78: Don't Go Alone (1989)

          

Don't Go Alone

United States

Sterling Silver Software (developer); Accolade (publisher)

Released 1989 for DOS

Date Started: 3 December 2012

         

When I heard that Don't Go Alone was a horror CRPG, I got excited. I've played plenty of fantasy RPGs, science fiction RPGs, and post-apocalyptic RPGs, but never a horror RPG. I was envisioning something creepy and atmospheric, like Alone in the Dark or The 7th Guest but with attribute scores and random combats. But it turns out that Don't Go Alone is a reasonably boilerplate dungeon crawler with horror-themed grafts. You've got a series of mazes, but in a mansion rather than a dungeon. You fight enemies, but they're ghosts and slimes and such, and instead of damaging your hit points, their attacks raise your fear score. You don't cast spells; you mix chemicals into various "formulas," and they deplete your "concentration" rather than mana.

My party squares off against a "presence."

All my Googling has failed to produce a manual for the game, but various online sites say that your quest is to rescue your grandfather from the clutches of an ancient demon at the top of a haunted mansion. Yes, your grandfather. Look, when my grandpa was alive, I loved him as much as you love yours, but you have to admit this is a rather weak premise for a main quest. Did the developers think that rescuing...I don't know...your girlfriend from an ancient demon at the top of a haunted mansion was too cliched?

I suppose it would be annoying to fight all the way to the top and find out he wasn't.

You play the game with four characters: an adventurer, a technician, a chemist, and a psychic (read: fighter, thief, priest, mage), which is reminiscent of The Dark Heart of Uukrul. During party creation, you can choose from among 4 predefined characters for each slot, but it's not much of a choice. Almost all of the categories have one individual with manifestly higher statistics than the others, and the only reason not to choose him or her would be because you don't want to look at that portrait for the next 14 hours.

Choosing the adventurer. Is there some reason I wouldn't choose "Dan," who has higher everything than anyone else except one point of intelligence? Because I don't like mustaches?

For a game set in modern times, the lack of diversity in character creation annoyed me a bit. Out of 16 potential characters, all except for one are white, and the one exception is an American Indian in the "psychic" category. I kid you not, you can tell he's an Indian because he's wearing a headband with a feather sticking out of it--you know, the way all Indians did in 1989. I think maybe a "special topics" posting about this is in order. (And no, despite his name, "Diego" is not Latino.)

Anyway, after specifying the characters, you can change their names, but you don't have any other customization options. You begin in the front hallway of a haunted mansion. The graphics feature occasional cobwebs and exposed plaster on the walls, and the same four portraits repeated over and over.

Elvis about to grab a candle, I guess.

The interface is very basic, almost entirely using the four arrow keys, with occasional forays to the menu up top. You encounter some creatures randomly, some at fixed locations, and the ones at fixed locations appear to immediately respawn. Combat consists of only three options--attack, prepare a formula, or flee--and only one character can act at a time. You can fight an entire combat with just one person or switch among them. You often have to switch when someone runs out of concentration or his fear gets too high, rendering him unable to act. (In case it's not clear, it's bad when the "F" column goes up, but bad when the "C" column goes down.)

Isn't it enough that we killed it? Do we have to know about its "horrible agony"?

You can slay enemies in combat, at which point the party gets a pool of experience, divvied in part by how many actions the character took in combat (something else the game shares with Uukrul). There are two ways the enemy can win, and in neither of them does anyone "die." If the combat goes on too long, your foe snatches something from your backpack and disappears; if all your characters' "fear" score goes too high, you get randomly teleported to another part of the dungeon. To be fair, this is almost as bad as "death" in many other games, because given the size of these levels, it could easily take you 20 minutes to navigate back to where you where when you "died." I'd almost rather it forced me to reload.

The game's version of "death."

After combat, you can wait for a while, during which "fear" diminishes and 'concentration" goes back to its max level. There's a minor chance of a random encounter while so waiting, but generally speaking if you can survive one encounter, you can rest up to perfect health before the next one.

My adventurer wets his trousers.

The characters start out with some hand weapons like Swiss Army knives and "armor" like boots, and you can find more at fixed locations in the mansion. There are a lot of special items, like different types of gemstones, flashlights, and strings of garlic, and without the manual I'm not entirely sure what to do with them.
          

My technician's stats and gear.

           
The spell system is theoretically the most original part of the game. Yes, they're technically called "formulas," but really they're spells--or perhaps you can explain why mixing zirconium, xenon, thallium, and sodium (the "Ocularium" formula) shows me a map of the level without any magic involved. There are between 20 and 30 spells in the game, divided into different levels, and you have to find the book associated with the level (e.g., "Chemistry, Vol. 3") to use it. Everyone starts out with Level 1, which includes spells that protect against fear, restore concentration, show the automap, tell you some information about your equipment, and cause a few points of acid damage. The formulas use real elemental symbols, but beyond that the originality ends. You carry an unlimited supply of each element (the number of spells you can cast is limited only by "concentration"), and you don't have to figure out how to mix them together: you just select the appropriate combination from a list. You can only have one spell active at a time, and you can't change it in the middle of combat.

Selecting a spell. Somehow, tungsten, oxygen, and carbon come together to dispel invisibility.

The maze itself is standard dungeon-crawling fare, with one-way doors, hidden doors, locked doors, keys, and random teleporters. Secret doors are clued with messages about winds and such, and you have to pay attention because they only appear once. The two levels I've explored already are very large, maybe 100x100, although of course not all that space is used.

The automap for one section of Level 1.

If there are any special encounters or NPCs, I haven't come across them yet, although you do occasionally get taunting messages from (presumably) the ancient demon.

On Level 1, I had difficulty with a couple of fixed combats with unique creatures not found anywhere else on the level: a "rock creature" and a mummy. Once my characters reached Level 2, the rock creature wasn't so hard, but the mummy wouldn't die even after I grinded against the rock creature until all my characters were Level 3. I eventually left it alone and moved on.

The undefeated mummy.

Level 2 started with a spirit voice warning me "beware of shifting walls," and indeed the level was full of one-way doors, but there was always some path to get me back to the beginning, and without much trouble I explored the whole level, including an area of darkness (a flashlight dispelled it) and a room that seemed to have no exit (there was a secret door) and caused fear with every step. There were some decent equipment upgrades, and my characters got to Level 4. Perhaps I'll return to Level 1 and take on that mummy again.

If I ever explore a haunted mansion, I'm going to take better weapons than this when I enter. I'm not going to trust I'll find them along the way.

Overall, with the simplistic interface, basic gameplay, and inability to die permanently, it feels like a game for novices, or perhaps children. It was developed by Sterling Silver Software, which otherwise never developed a CRPG (they specialized in sports games, particularly golf) and published by Accolade, which otherwise never published a CRPG. The developers, Lee Actor and Dennis Koble, have games like PGA Tour Golf and Hard Drivin' to their credit (no other CRPGs). It was a weird one-shot for everyone involved.

This is not the type of game I'm likely to stay with until the end, but I'll see if anything interesting develops within the six-hour window. If anyone's got an old manual around, I'd love to see it.

Moving on to Level 3. Wait...this is a mansion. How much sense does it make that the levels are going DOWN?

Just an amusing side-note: most people who know me say that I'm as least responsive to authority as is possible without becoming a total anarchist (an unemployed anarchist at that). Anytime someone tells me that I "have" to do something, I've apparently retorted "the only things I have to do are pay taxes and die" so often that people just say it along with me, in unison. My wife got me a GPS for Christmas a few years ago, and I had to give it up because I was always getting mad at it for telling me where to go. I mention this because this game strikes a visceral piss-me-off chord every time I start it up. "Screw you; I'll go alone if I feel like it!" I keep yelling at the game. Yeah. So. Probably more than you needed to know.