Game 89: Tangled Tales (1989)

       

Tangled Tales

United States

ORIGIN Systems (developer and publisher)

Gary Scott Smith, Alex Duong Nghiem
Released 1989 for DOS, Apple II, and Commodore 64

Date Started: 20 February 2013

         

Tangled Tales is a silly, inconsequential, pleasant, and relatively easy adventure-RPG hybrid, casting the player in the role of an apprentice to a wizard named Eldritch. The contrast to Chaos Strikes Back couldn't be starker, and as often happens when I go from one game to a wildly different one, I marvel at how many different approaches we manage to cover with the "CRPG" label.

The game is notable for an odd hybrid between a top-town iconographic perspective (in the upper right-hand corner of the screen) and a first-person view (in the upper left). As you move the character around the map in the upper-right, the first-person perspective changes to depict the rooms, corridors, and wilderness areas from the character's own eyes. You can't rotate the first-person view or anything, and to be honest, anything important that it depicts is described in the text area at the bottom, so it doesn't have a lot of purpose except as a series of pretty graphics. It's still somewhat fun.

 

Icons across the middle of the screen provide the actions of the game: look, cast a spell, take an item, talk to an NPC, perform an action, drop or give an item, save the game, view the party's statistics, equip weapons and armor, and rest (there's a second row of icons toggled by the switch to the right). Each of the actions has a handy keyboard shortcut that makes gameplay much faster.

Using the "action" command. Ever since I found a matchbook, "light a match" comes up as an action for every location, which is kind of annoying.

 
In tone and approach, the game invites comparison to Hero's Quest: It isn't very serious about itself, it takes place in a fairly limited game world, it has a bunch of light puzzles, and it's not terribly hard. It lacks the wit and...oh, I don't know..."jauntiness" of Hero's Quest, but it has a few of its own innovations, not the least of which is the ability to control a large party of characters instead of a single NPC. In fact, it's one of the first games on my long list in which a player-created PC is joined by memorable NPCs who maintain their personalities even after they join the party. This is something we'll see in Ultima VI and Ultima VII, which makes sense as this is also an Origin game.

When I say memorable, I mean memorable.

MobyGames claims that the game is "specifically aimed at younger people and non-hardcore roleplaying gamers." Some of the screenshots belie the "younger players" idea, but the game is definitely not for the jaded and cynical among the CRPG brethren, with exhibit A being the back story and age of the protagonist. The game comes with a booklet titled A Young Wizard's First Journal in which the PC records some thoughts pre-game, describing difficulties practicing spells, playing pranks on the townsfolk, turning squirrels into dragon-sized monsters, sparring with a fellow student named Drek, and getting into trouble with Master Eldritch. A series of mishaps causes the apprentice to lose all of the master's adamantine dust, which the master punishes by wiping the apprentice's spellbook clean and tasking him to find more.

I really hope that's not supposed to be me.

 
The character has a standard set of attributes--strength, intelligence, speed, and charisma--with the current level given not as a number but a textual rank. Strength proceeds through "puny," "weak," "athletic," "mighty," and "powerful"; charisma's levels are "offensive," "tactful," "diplomatic," "influential," and "persuasive." They start somewhere in the middle, and during character creation, you can trade levels in one attribute for those in another. The uses of the attributes seem straightforward: strength and speed help in combat, intelligence affects spell points, and charisma determines the selling price of items in town.

NPCs appear frequently on the map, and if you move on top of them, you can have a little conversation with pre-determined options. NPCs fill you in as to the game world, items, and other NPCs. Many of them will sell items, and some will cast healing spells.

Much of the game involves solving various interrelated inventory puzzles. As an example, a circus ringmaster in town laments that his bears have escaped. Later, you find them in a cabin, interrogating a blonde-haired girl who has apparently been eating their porridge and sleeping in their beds. To get past them, you have to bribe them with honey, which you get by purchasing a bucket in town and leaving it to catch the dripping honey from a beehive in the forest. Distracting them with honey lets you into the cabin, where you find a "Silence" spell and collect Goldilocks as an NPC. Later, the ringmaster leaves you some tickets to the reconstituted circus.

I think my mother skipped a couple of passages when she read me the story as a child.

During these puzzle-based wanderings, you run into a host of random and fixed encounters with creatures, including (so far) goblins, giant snakes, ogres, rats, and lizard men called "reptons." Combat is of the simplest sort. You simply hit the "attack" button, and the game tells you how you and your NPCs performed. It usually takes multiple clicks to win a battle. There are some small tactics: you can run away, cast healing spells, or cast other spells like "Fear" and "Silence" for your round while your companions make physical attacks. I haven't found any offensive damage spells yet.

A few rounds with a "repton."

The spellbook is a key to both puzzle-solving and overall survival. As I mentioned, you start with it blank and slowly accumulate spells during your explorations. The first one I found was "Light," right in Eldritch's tower.

Spells are divided into "Continual" spells, which drain magic until you turn them off, and "Noncontinual" spells, which have a fixed casting charge. Things got a little easier when I found the "Heal" spell.

Casting a "Light" spell to illuminate a dungeon.

So far, I've found five NPCs in the game, four of them through solving puzzles and one who works for a fee. The NPCs add a little color to the game. They make comments on the environment or holler war-cries before combat. (Goldilocks usually yells something like, "I'll break my nails!" but fights well anyway.)

Alvin really punctuates his sentences.

NPCs don't make combat any easier, though: the game scales the number of enemies you encounter relative to your total NPC count. With 5 NPCs, I face 13 giant rats instead of only 3.

Honestly, CRPG developers: Why not giant hamsters, or giant lemmings, for a change?

The game also has an odd approach to NPC equipment. I can choose what weapons and armor to equip for myself, but not for the NPCs. I can't even see what they have. If I find myself with a stray piece of armor or a weapon, an NPC might suddenly ask me, "Say, Chester, I could really use that dagger if you don't want it," making me wonder if he's been beating the rats with his fists the whole time.

From both enemies and traps, the main character and the NPCs can take damage, ranging through "Not at all," "Bruised," "Lightly," "Heavily," "Intensively," "Critically," "Unconscious," and "Dead." In keeping with the game-for-novices theme, though, there's no permanent death in the game. When you die, Eldritch simply resurrects you with all hit points and gold. Unless there's some disadvantage that I'm seeing, it's actually a better deal than paying for healing and resurrection.

The Grey Lord needed a crystal ball like that.

The game takes place in a walled town with several buildings (including the mage's tower) and the small surrounding Fairhaven Valley, which contains a few structures and small dungeons.

A map of the valley from the mage's tower.

 
The game began in my bedroom in the mage's tower, and this is what I've accomplished so far:

• Explored the tower, got the quest from Eldritch to find some more adamantine dust, and found the "Light" spell in the library. Eldritch also told me to get help from a man named Riley.

• Visited the tavern. Ate some stew that was so bad that it caused me to faint, but got a book of matches. Found 40 gold pieces in a barrel. Talked to a dwarf fighter named Sir Isaac who wanted some apples. Tipped the bartender for some intelligence and found that a man staying at the inn plans to take on the evil wizard Xavier by himself.

• Visited the inn, but the desk clerk wouldn't let me into the back room until I paid 70 gold pieces for a room, which was 40 more than I had.

No, thanks. I think I'll just find some acid for my eyes.

• Visited the bucket shop. Couldn't afford a bucket yet, but discovered from the owner that an adventurer named Alvin had headed up north to kill goblins and could probably use some help.

• Met a fighter at the fighter's guild named Sedrick, who wanted 50 gold pieces to join me and insisted on saying everything in rhymes. I later hired him, but he got too expensive and I had enough other NPCs, so I booted him.

Anybody want a peanut?

• Headed outdoors. Freed a bunny from a cage. It turned into a beautiful nymph who gave me some magic seeds.

That is the most pathetic-looking bunny I've ever seen.

• Found a rope leading downward in a hollow tree. Followed it into a goblin lair, killed some goblins, and picked up my first NPC: Alvin the elf.

• Found a shovel in the dungeon. Used it to dig and plant the seeds outside in a garden. Seeds grew into a big apple tree. Plucked the apples and gave them to Sir Isaac in the inn. He joined me. Also dug with the shovel in the garden to get some worms. Fed the worms to some fish in a fountain, who rewarded me by retrieving a blue key.

• With the gold I'd obtained from the goblins, got a room at the inn, met Riley, and got him to join me.

Oh, yes. There was a whole Sir Isaac Newton/gravity thing going on. The game thinks it's terribly clever.

• Found some sale coupons in Moe's Magic Shop. My fellow apprentice, Drek, had been going on about waiting for the next sale. When I returned to the mage's tower and gave him one, he ran off excitedly, allowing me to search his room and find the "Heal" spell.

• On another part of the map, found a pool full of slime. Swam through it, to the astonishment of my NPC friends, and found a cave full of lizard men.

Calm down, man. That's just how I roll.

• Found a statue of the ancient Archmage Fizzle on an altar in the lizard men's cavern. Invoked it. It told me that Fizzle was slain by the evil wizard Xavier and asked if I'd avenge him. I said yes. Told me to seek out the "secret study" under Fizzle's cabin in the mountains. This is where I encountered Goldilocks and the three bears, as covered above.

"No" just gives you the chance to do it again.

That seemed good enough for my first session. There are a few open puzzles, including a locked door in the mage's tower, a pink pool in the basement of the mage's tower that I have to throw diamonds in for some reason, a miner wandering outside offering to sell me his pick, and the search for the evil Xavier's fortress. A few other notes before I close for the night:

• There's no sound in the game.

• At one point, I chose not to kill some "friendly" snakes and got a reasonably funny screen:

• There isn't much to buy in the game, but it's also slow to give up gold pieces (I've been chronically under-funded), and there's at least one reason to save up lots:

If it turns out to be "42," I'm going to be pissed.

• You only get one save slot, so you want to make sure you haven't screwed anything up before saving.

• I'm not sure if my many combats are doing anything to advance me in the way of "experience." There's no experience meter in any event.

• Time passes in the game, and quite quickly, with only about 84 moves between noon and midnight. But the time doesn't seem to affect anything: stores are always open, NPCs are always in the same place, and it doesn't get dark or light.

• A limited set of actions in each area almost guarantees that you'll choose the right one. It would be very hard to get stuck in this game.

I don't know how long this game will take, but if a prophecy from a soothsayer comes true, we won't be spending very long on this one.

Then again, maybe she's talking about Keef the Thief.