Elvira: Won! (with Final Rating)

Elvira: Mistress of the Dark

United States

Horror Soft (developer); Accolade (publisher)

Released 1990 for Amiga, DOS; 1991 for Atari ST, Commodore 64; 1992 for PC-98

Date Started: 6 January 2014
Date Ended: 11 January 2014

Total Hours: 9
Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)
Final Rating: 29
Ranking at Time of Posting: 65/131 (50%)

At it's core, Elvira is an adventure game, not an RPG, and like many adventure games of the 1980s and early 1990s, it has the virtue of brevity. It took me about six hours to fully explore it and figure out the puzzles, and another two and a half hours to win it with a fresh character. I've found that this divide between learning and execution holds for a lot of adventure games and adventure/RPG hybrids. When I replayed all the games in the Zork series in the mid-1990s, they each took about a week of banging my head against the wall trying to figure out the puzzles, followed by about three paragraphs of text to actually beat the games from start to finish. A player who already knows the territory and puzzles could get through B.A.T. or Hero's Quest in 90 minutes each. When I played "The Case of the Sultan's Pearls" scenario for SwordThrust, it took me about two hours to fully explore the castle, only to find that the winning series of commands, when starting fresh, is:

>N. N. ATTACK BUTLER. LOOK BUTLER. GET SULTAN'S PEARL.

There are very few straight RPGs that you could finish in such a speed run. Even if you had all the maps for Pool of Radiance or Dungeon Master in front of you, you still have to invest the time to fight the combats and build the characters.

I won the game with only 60/100 "experience points." I think the others would have come from mixing the other spells offered in the game. As I indicated last time, only a handful of spells are actually necessary to win. The others are optional and help with combat, but until you reach the endgame and know what reagents you need for puzzles, you're afraid to waste them on spells that aren't necessary.

I ended my last narrative having found all of the six keys needed to open Emelda's chest. The difficulty was finding the chest. For a while, I was stumped. I had solved every puzzle that I knew about and had visited every location that I could find. Then I remembered the cannon at the top of one of the turrets.

Lighting the cannon was the only puzzle in the game that I felt was unintuitive, and even it wasn't that bad. I first had to find a pair of tongs in the castle basement. The only problem was that every time I tried to take them, the ghost of the torturer would kill me.

The solution I came to, mostly by accident, was to put the tongs into my canvas sack. From an anonymous comment thread on my last post, I gather this was an unintentional workaround. What I really needed to do was to take the bones of the torturer (I originally thought they were from one of his victims) to the catacombs and lay them to rest in an empty coffin, then return and get the tongs. I did lay the bones to rest eventually, but I didn't tie the two things together.

Anyway, with the tongs in inventory, you can use them to remove a piece of coal from the stove in Elvira's kitchen. You take the hot coal to the cannon and use it to light the fuse. In another fun animation, the cannon blasts a piece out of another turret.

Two feet to the left and I would have blown up the chest. Then where would we be?

 
For reasons I don't really understand, destroying half the turret allows you to go up into it. It was blocked before. There lies Emelda's chest. You use the six keys and retrieve from it a Scroll of Spiritual Mastery and a ceremonial dagger.

 
After this, there was another interval in which I didn't know where to go to find Emelda. Eventually, I thought to use the "Alphabet Soup" spell on a rune stone I'd discovered in the catacombs, and it suggested there was a secret room within the catacombs. I returned and explored a bit more, and finally noticed a hole on the floor of one of the corridors. The hole was just big enough for the rune stone. When I inserted it, the floor broke apart, revealing a passage big enough to climb down.

Confronting Emelda in her throne room.

 
Emelda was in the room below, and she started draining my life force the moment I entered. Defeating her was a three-part process of inserting the Crusader's Sword into the stone in front of her, using the Scroll of Spiritual Mastery (which stripped away her glamour and revealed her undead nature), and stabbing her with the ceremonial dagger. The first part stumped me for a while, and it took several reloads for met to get it all right.

Some things apparently run in the family.

After my victory, the screen changed to a shot of Elvira beckoning me, and the endgame text vaguely suggested some kind of ribald reward:

Elvira beckons to her hero to follow her so that she can show you how grateful she really is for saving her from the evil powers of Emelda. Follow your mistress and collect your just reward.

It would be true-to-character if the next scene showed Elvira giving me a check for $50 and then demanding that I leave her castle. But the game isn't that witty. Instead, the credits roll and the player has the option to start again.

Overall, I feel like Elvira was a bit superfluous to the proceedings, and for a while I wondered if the game wasn't originally constructed without her. It wouldn't have taken much effort to add her to the framing story and the few in-game places in which she appears. The back story doesn't even jive with the film, really: in the movie, she inherits a mansion, not a castle; it's in Massachusetts, not England; and at the end of the film, it's destroyed. However, it's clear that Adventure Soft had obtained the rights to use the Elvira character at least a year earlier (I'll talk about this at the end), so this seems unlikely.

Regardless, while they crafted an interesting and relatively enjoyable game, the developers missed opportunities to truly make it an Elvira game by incorporating more elements from the types of shlock horror films associated with the character. The puzzles and enemies are mostly generic fantasy and horror tropes, and with the exception of Vampira, they don't seem to draw any obvious inspiration from B films. If I wanted to make a real Elvira-inspired game, I'd modify the plot a bit. The castle is haunted, but in such a way that it creates its horrors based on things it finds in the subjects' own minds. When it delves Elvira's mind, it finds decades of awful horror movies and populates the castle with Blacula, The Blob, intelligent rats from Willard, and perhaps a Killer Tomato or two. I guess that might have run into some copyright problems, but the point is the game doesn't quite have the campy humor or irreverent sensibility that you'd associate with Elvira, and most of the enemies and puzzles are played straight.

If they had made a game like this, I'd probably be complaining that I didn't like it because I don't like goofy, campy humor. Nonetheless, I think it would have been more true to the character. As it was, it felt like a decent horror game in which Elvira--a character I don't particularly like but also don't particularly mind--played a tangential part.

In my GIMLET, I give it:

• 3 points for the game world. I give it credit for its horror theme and its tightly-constructed castle architecture, and a little for the back story involving Elvira's ancestor.

• 1 point for character creation and development. It mostly fails in this vital RPG category. There's no character creation, and the only development is with the incremental increases in weapon skill.

• 2 points for NPC interaction. Elvira herself is really the only NPC; other characters are encounters to be defeated. She's...there. I guess I cracked a smile at a couple of her lines.

• 6 points for encounters and foes. In adventure/RPG hybrids, I tend to use this category to evaluate the quality of the puzzles, which serve as "encounters" in such games. I liked the puzzles in Elvira. They were difficult, but difficult for minutes rather than hours, and generally fair. The enemies were fun to look at but not very different when it came to combat.

I could only defeat this guy with the Crusader Sword.

• 3 points for magic and combat. Combat is fast-paced but utterly non-tactical. As I outlined last time, the spell system was intriguing but mostly optional. I give it some credit for the variety of spells and the game dynamic associated with finding their reagents, but I wish the game had done more with the spell system.

• 2 points for equipment. There's a lot of stuff to carry, but most of it is for solving puzzles, and I already gave the game credit for that. The small selection of weapons and armor is another blow to its RPG aspirations.

• 0 points for no economy.

• 2 points for the main quest, which offers only one outcome and no player choices.

• 5 points for graphics, sound, and interface. I quite liked the graphics. The sound in the DOS version was sparse, mostly limited to combat attacks. I give it a little credit for the music even though I don't really care about game music. Mostly, I was surprised at how well I took to the interface. As you know, I'm normally not a fan of a mouse-only interface, but it worked surprisingly well here, even if there were times I wished I could just go forward and turn with the arrow keys.

• 5 points for gameplay. It was nonlinear in the order that you can tackle the puzzles. I thought it was pitched at just the right level of difficulty and lasted just about the right amount of time.

That gives a final rating of 29, which sounds like I didn't like it very much, and I didn't--as an RPG. It's a decent adventure game, the presence of Elvira notwithstanding, but it lacks the combat, economy, and equipment that would have made it a true hybrid.

I guess Horror Soft knew what its selling points were.

Alas, not everyone felt this way. As I discussed in my first post on the game, Computer Gaming World famously gave it "Role-Playing Game of the Year" in November 1991 after considering J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, Wizardry: Bane of the Cosmic Forge, Worlds of Ultima: The Savage Empire, and Eye of the Beholder. I haven't played any of these games besides Bane, but to call that one alone an inferior RPG to Elvira is just absurd. Meanwhile, the same issue put Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire in the "adventure" category and had it lose to King's Quest V; I wonder what would have happened if they'd switched Quest for Glory and Elvira and put them in their appropriate categories.

Those of you who are excited about Elvira, never fear, you'll get to hear all about her continuing adventures in Elvira II: The Jaws of Cerberus (1991). From its description, it sounds like it incorporates more RPG elements, including a choice of starting classes and more combat tactics. 1991 also saw a side-scrolling platformer called Elvira: The Arcade Game in which the player actually controls Elvira and kills enemies. I note that this is the same year that produced The Simpsons arcade game, which had Bart and Marge wielding a skateboard and vacuum cleaner as weapons, and a Hudson Hawk title in which the protagonist beans enemies with baseballs. Clearly, this is an era in which audiences looked at their comedy figures and said, "these characters are funny and all, but what I'd really like to see is them killing people."

Elvira was developed by the U.K. company Adventure Soft under its Horror Soft label, and the interface for Elvira is a clear update of the label's first adventure game, Personal Nightmare (1989):

Personal Nightmare has the same commands and approach to inventory, but it doesn't have the combat system or attributes.

Interestingly, the box cover for Personal Nightmare (also known as . . . A Personal Nightmare) prominently features Elvira. Clearly, Adventure Soft obtained the rights not just to make a video game based on Elvira, but to use her likeness for its Horror Soft series. In addition to Elvira II, we'll see Horror Soft again with Waxworks (1992). Three of Elvira's developers--Alan Bridgman, Michael Woodroffe, and Simon Woodroffe--worked on all of these horror titles, as well as the Simon the Sorcerer series from Adventure Soft.

Next we'll be returning to the 1980s with a review of Dungeons of Daggorath. I've removed Angband from the "upcoming" list because it's going to take me longer than I thought to offer my posts on Moria first. Sorry for those who were looking forward to it; we'll get there eventually.