SwordThrust: Walked Through!

You can't really "win" SwordThrust, but here's one of my late-game characters.

   

SwordThrust

United States

CE Software (developer and publisher)

Released 1981 for Apple II

Date Started: 19 September 2013

Date Ended: 18 October 2013

Total Hours: 23

Difficulty: Moderate (3.0/5)

Final Rating: 35

Ranking at Game #402: 288/402 (72%)

   

Since I first posted about SwordThrust a month ago, I've continued to work on it and explore its scenarios. When I was unable to find any walkthroughs--or even discussions of the game--online, I decided to take this opportunity to create my own. Today, I'm semi-proud to present to you:

Chet Bolingbroke's first walkthrough!

"Semi-proud" because I didn't quite finish it. The last scenario was too frustrating and was taking too long. I also left some mysteries in some of the first six scenarios. Nonetheless, I think the walkthrough is good for what it covers. I'm hoping someone will use it to give the game a try--and perhaps help me finish it. I want to offer it to GameFAQs, but they don't even have an entry on the game yet, and they have to approve my submission of that, apparently, before they'll allow any walkthroughs submitted for it. (Edit from 12/01/2013: They accepted my submission on the game and then my FAQ. It's available here!)

As you may recall, SwordThrust is a commercial version of Eamon: an all-text RPG that combines some of the puzzle-solving and item-finding of text adventures with RPG combat, attributes, and economy. It features a fantastically complex combat system in which weapon skill, armor weight, armor skill, the type of weapon, attributes, and luck all go into a formula that determines whether you hit, how much damage you do, and whether other things happen, like fumbles, dropped weapons, broken weapons, and critical hits.

The main hall, from which all adventures begin.

 
This combat takes place in the context of larger scenarios, or quests, in which you're usually trying to achieve an explicit goal, sometimes with difficult conditions, and of course a secondary goal of getting out of each dungeon with as much treasure as possible.

The modules varied considerably in quality, but almost all were better than the freeware Eamon modules I tried earlier this year. A quick rundown:

1. The King's Testing Ground. This introductory module was one of my favorites. It had the greatest variety of enemies, treasures, and secret areas to discover. There was no real "theme" to the scenario, but a successful adventurer gets out of the caves with Excalibur, a weapon so powerful that it will easily last her the rest of the game.

2. The Vampyre Caves. A fun but difficult adventure. You start off to slay a vampire but get captured and turned into a vampire yourself! You must pacify a benevolent god so that he'll turn you back into a human and allow you to escape from the caves.

3. The Kidnapper's Cove. A friend's son is kidnapped by bandits, and you're entrusted with the ransom money and some drugs that the boy needs within two hours or he'll die. There's supposedly a way to get out of this one without giving up the ransom, but I couldn't find it.

4. The Case of the Sultan's Pearl. While you're a guest at the sultan's palace, one of his guards is murdered and a pearl is stolen. The twist is that whomever possesses the pearl at midnight becomes the new sultan. The scenario has you searching for clues and interrogating NPCs more than fighting, although its mechanics don't allow for any complex adventure-style puzzle-solving. The funny thing is that the killer is quite close to the beginning of the game, and the game ends when you take the pearl from his body, so once you know the solution, you can just start the scenario, walk a few steps, kill the thief, take the pearl, and return victorious to the main hall.

5. The Green Plague. A plague has descended over the land. Chasing a lead, you fall into a well and wake up in a dungeon only to find that you have the plague yourself. This scenario is unique in that it awards a certain number of points depending on how many of the goals you achieve: cure yourself, destroy the source of the plague, and banish the evil god whose followers created it.

6. The Eternal Curse. You're summoned to a sorcerer's castle by an apparition of a wizard claiming he's imprisoned there and begging for release. But when you arrive, you find that all isn't quite what you expected. The scenario does a nice riff on The Picture of Dorian Gray but is otherwise mostly fighting.

Killing the boss of this scenario.

 
7. The Hall of Alchemie. This is the only one I couldn't finish. In a goofy Mission: Impossible-influenced introduction, the player is given a quest to kill a Master Alchemist and destroy his Philosopher's Stone, capable of turning any object to gold. The level is rife with alchemical ingredients, but I couldn't figure out what to do with them, and the monsters were unbelievably difficult. The hints suggest there's some way to combine or employ items of the same color against specific enemies, but I couldn't make anything work with the limited game commands.

There's some hint in this description, but I couldn't figure it out.

 
Each scenario was originally sold separately. I'm not sure why they stopped at 7, but I suspect they just weren't selling very well. The final scenario is unique in that it was the only one not written by Donald Brown. The game's documentation says that the author, Peter Wityk, sent it to CE Software with a note that it was "the most difficult dungeon ever created." For 1981 or 1982, this may have indeed been true. I suspect Wityk based the geography on a real location, perhaps a university, given the careful layout of the rooms and their detailed descriptions (which seem to have a number of in-jokes). [Later edit: I was wrong about this; see the end.]

I'm going to have a later posting on the process of creating the walkthrough, because I finally had a chance to correspond at length with the King of RPG Walkthroughs, Andrew Schultz. He offered a lot of insights as to the process of making them. I'm synthesizing my interview with him with my own experiences. Look for that in a few weeks. [Ed. Don't look for it; I never wrote it.]

For now, let's GIMLET SwordThrust and close it off my list.

• 3 points for the game world. There's no consistency to the land of Dirula. It uncomfortably blends Asian, European, and Arabian tropes willy-nilly and doesn't tie its scenarios into any broader themes or a common mythology. But within the modules, there is some thematic consistency and all of the areas are described in vivid prose.

• 4 points for character creation and development. The creation process is mostly just name and sex, after which the three core attributes are rolled randomly. Characters with wildly varying attributes face very different games, especially at the beginning, which introduces a nice challenge. The development process is quite satisfying, with weapon and armor skills potentially increasing in every combat. (There are otherwise no experience points or leveling). There is even one place where sex makes a difference, although not to any significant degree.

Specifically, it's here: only female PCs can enter the ladies' room. (Yes, Chester is a female. No, I don't know how that happened.) That doesn't explain why my NPC, "Jim," can enter, though.

• 3 points for NPC interaction. It's fun how certain NPCs can join you and fight by your side, and other creatures and characters react differently based on charisma. In one module, the ability to talk to NPCs (usually not present) is key to the solution. Nonetheless, most of the time there's no way to interact with NPCs except to smile at them.

• 4 points for encounters and foes. There are a lot of different enemies to face, from evil humans to giant spiders to a dragon, and the game has some fun by giving them the same stats and skills as the PC (they can even increase their skills, just like the PC, with successful actions).  They have some limited AI, and they'll run from combat if seriously wounded. Beyond that, though, the enemies are not well-differentiated. They don't do anything but attack--no spells or special attacks. What I like are several areas in which you can choose to defeat an enemy by either solving a puzzle or just wailing on it with a sword. Enemies "respawn" in the sense that you can try the same scenario multiple times, and there are some clear grinding opportunities in some of them.

• 3 points for magic and combat. Most of the points go to the complex formulas that make combat nail-biting. You don't really have many actual actions in combat (attack, cast, flee). There are 10 spells, each requiring a certain portion of the caster's fatigue, but I found them almost all worthless except "Heal." Since they have a good chance of failing, and since they can easily exhaust you, leaving you unconscious, they're often more dangerous to the PC than to the foe.

I could not get past this enemy in the final scenario.

• 3 points for equipment. You're limited to a weapon, armor, and a shield, and if you find any during an adventure, you can't see their related statistics until you return to the Main Hall. Although it was a nice reward, it was too bad that I never found a weapon that outperformed the one I discovered in the first scenario. There are a small number of potions and potion-like items, such as underwater breathing pills. The greater portion of the items you find are either to solve puzzles or treasures, and the game does an okay job within its limited mechanics allowing you to use the items in various ways, from destroying an evil rock by dropping it under water to "rubbing" a tube of vanishing cream on difficult foes.

• 3 points for economy. A key element of the game is in finding treasures in each of the scenarios, which are automatically cashed in when you return to the Main Hall. You use the proceeds to buy weapons and armor, spells, and training. But the weapons and armor are outclassed by what you find in the scenarios, and as I covered above, I don't think the spells are very useful. The only really good thing you can do with thousands of gold pieces is get some training in various weapons.

• 5 points for quests. You can regard them as 7 main quests or 7 side quests, but in general, they're varied and fun. I like the mix of conditions, goals, and constraints that the quests offer, and almost all of them have some limited choices that affect the ending, allowing for some limited roleplaying.

Each quest begins with a detailed back story.

• 2 points for graphics, sound, and inputs. There are no graphics or sound. While the text-based inputs are relatively easy and intuitive, and there's a nice feature that allows you to just hit ENTER to repeat the previous command, I ultimately found the list of available verbs a bit too limiting. The game is also needlessly specific in its nouns, treating you like an idiot if you type GET BATTLE AXE instead of GET STEEL BATTLE AXE.

• 5 points for gameplay. The seven modules can be attempted in any order, and 2-6 are all pitched at about the same level of difficulty, so there isn't an "obvious" order. The scenarios themselves aren't large enough to be linear or nonlinear, but you can attempt them multiple times and try different options, giving them a decent sense of replayability. With the exception of the final scenario, they're all brisk and challenging but not frustratingly so. In writing my walkthrough, I took about 2.5 hours to complete each one; someone just playing could do it less that two hours. This wouldn't have made me happy if I'd spent $29.95 on each scenario, but it's a good pace for today.

This gives a final score of 35, quite good for a 1981 game series. I hope a few of you are inspired to check out some of the scenarios, read my walkthrough, and give it a try. See if you can do what I didn't, and complete the final scenario!

This kind of game is the spiritual ancestor of the persistent-hero multi-module games we see today, like Neverwinter Nights, and it's too bad that it's not better-remembered. (Granted, Eamon, its predecessor, still thrives.) I couldn't find anything like a walkthrough, summary, or message board on SwordThrust or any of its modules, which isn't a fate that the game deserves.

My next couple of weeks are still going to be very busy, and postings intermittent, but let's see if I can finish Wizardry VI.

*****

Later edit:  Not 10 minutes after I posted this, Peter Wityk called me. I had left a message for several people of that name, hoping to find the right one (I really wanted to win the last scenario). We had a very informative, friendly conversation. Peter indicated he knew Don Brown when he decided to create the Halls of Alchemie scenario, but he otherwise never worked on another game (his career took him into the finance field).

Unfortunately, he didn't remember enough about the scenario--now 32 years old--to help me successfully navigate it, except that one particularly deadly enemy (a giant black scorpion) couldn't be killed through normal means. He also said that despite my assumption, he did not base the Halls on any real location. He mapped it out on paper with the intention of creating a geography that felt real and offered challenges to the player that were different from the rest of the SwordThrust scenarios. He certainly succeeded at that!