Legend of Faerghail: Hidden Valley

The world around Thyn.

It must be interesting and frustrating to live in a tile-based world. Every 10-foot-square area is completely discrete; it cannot contain more than one thing at once. If a tree is in the square, you can't be in the square. If another person is in the square, you must interact with that person. Creating an impenetrable border around a kingdom is simply a matter of planting a tree every 10 feet.

The corresponding map from the book.

 
There's nothing round in such a world. All buildings have sharp angles, and of course their sizes must be in multiples of 10 feet. On the plus side, urban planning would be easier.

There's no mincing or striding in our tile world. Every time you move, no matter what direction, it's 10 feet. If the denizens of the world ever heard of Zeno's Paradox, they'd be like, "whaaat?" To cross a 30-foot room, you just have to take two steps. Case closed.

All right, so I'm padding a bit. I've invested about five hours into this game since I last blogged about it, and all I've managed to accomplish is to map the outer world of Thyn, which features the following locations:

1. A "dwarven mine" with two entrances.

2. Six taverns.

You can "pickpocket" in taverns, but I always get caught.

3. A woodkeeper at an entrance to a castle. He asks me a riddle about a vampire and mithril but lets me pass regardless--in fact, there doesn't seem to be any way to "answer" him even if you had the answer.

Get him to trip over it?

4. A derelict castle.

5. A selection of springs that heal wounds.

6. A graveyard where elven dead are buried.

7. A "high priestess" hanging out in a forest clearing.

8. A "Temple of the Savants."

9. A sword in a stone that reads "He who pulls this sword from the stone will never take a seat on England's throne." I don't know if this is a joke or some actual plot device. Probably the former, since "England" shouldn't exist in this world. Then again, the game continually tells me that I'm in the "Valley of Faerghail" instead of "Thyn," so I think it's confused about geography overall.

10. Near one building, a elven warrior riddles me with the names of the relatives of someone named Findal. I found Findal buried in the graveyard and tried all the other names on the gravestones for every possible relative, but the elven warrior just tells me that I'm wrong no matter what.

This left three locations to go: the dwarven mines, the derelict castle, and the Temple of the Savants. I'm not sure how I'm supposed to get to the neighboring land of Cyldane. I suspect it's through the dwarven mines, since a map in the manual has my current area as "wilderness map - east," suggesting that there's a separate "wilderness map - west" on the other side of the western forest, and the dwarven mines entrances are on the west. In that case, I have to congratulate the Count of Thyn for his little hidden pocket of the world, impenetrable on all sides except for the mine exits.

As I painstakingly mapped every tree and wall in the wilderness, I engaged in sporadic combats with various beasts and humanoid enemies. There are aspects I like about the combat system, such as memorizing the last position and actions used, which encourages you to tweak your strategy rather than start from scratch with every new enemy and round.

What do you suppose it means that I "unknowingly" meet the trolls?

What I don't like is that combat is horrifically deadly at these early levels, and there simply isn't enough money to keep resurrecting slain characters. I have to either replace them or reload. After a few hours trying to be honest and replacing them, I ultimately caved to reloading every time a character dies.

This is what happens when everyone dies.

Leading to this sarcastic scene.

Fortunately, this doesn't happen as often since I've discovered that fleeing combat has, as far as I can tell, a 100% success rate.

The way the game distributes experience points--based on the number of successful actions each combat round--means that it'll be a long time before some of my characters level up. Complicating matter is the fact that Siegurd, my NPC companion, does so well in combat that he takes far more experience than anyone else. I'd dump him, but I think he's the only thing keeping me alive.

One of my characters, Chalke the Healer, has negative experience points. I don't know if this is a bug or if she's just been spectacularly unsuccessful in combat.

It's like those players that get into the negative dollar values on Jeopardy. You just know they're never going to recover.

Food is a much more dangerous enemy than any of the monsters. Game time passes whether you make a move or not, at a rate of 1 hour game time for every 4-5 seconds real time, and every 106 seconds (24 hours in-game), my characters munch up 6 rations. To replenish them, I have to purchase them in one of the inns, and they've been taking almost everything I earn from combats. I'm nowhere near getting the 1,500 gold pieces needed to raise even one of  my characters to Level 2. Occasionally, I'll get some rations from a combat, though I don't know if this is because they were carrying them or because the game assumes I'm slicing up their bodies.

Though most of the time it does no good...

...other parties occasionally respond to "greeting" them. I was hoping this would lead to some dialogue options or such, but so far I haven't found any way to productively interact with them.

None of the options except "withdrawal" actually does anything.

Morale, which starts at "good" after a night's rest, slowly declines as my party moves around, eventually reaching the point that they'll refuse to take another step. I learned the hard way that if they rest without rations, morale doesn't go back up, meaning it's possible to get yourself stuck, with no rations to feed your characters, and the characters refusing to walk so you can go get some more.

One thing that differentiates this game from The Bard's Tale is that as you move around the world, you can actually see the enemies moving around the area, too. They don't always make a beeline for your party; sometimes you have to walk into them if you want to force an encounter. And oddly, all enemies look like ghosts or phantoms until you actually encounter them.

This turned out to be bears.

I decided to try the castle next. The moment I entered, the game took a level up in its language skills:

I'll let you know how it goes. I'm nearing my six-hour mark, and so far the game isn't doing anything for me. This is just the sort of game I would have quit back in 2010, when I was just starting with my blog, and didn't have an unbroken string of "won" games going back over a year. I'm at least willing to give it a little bit longer to see if the plot develops into anything worthy.

I'm far enough into it that I'm not eager to switch to a different platform even if the Amiga version is better (among other things, it has music and sound, which the DOS version doesn't). But if you want a take on the Amiga version, Saintus covered it last year on his "CRPG Revisiting old classics" blog. I haven't read his posts yet, but I look forward to seeing his take when I've finished with the game.