Game 142: The Valley (1982)

The Valley

United Kingdom
Argus Press Software (developer and publisher)

Published 1982 as code in Computing Today; commercial versions released 1983 for any computer capable of understanding BASIC

Date Started: 25 February 2014
Date Ended: 30 March 2014

Total Hours: 9

Difficulty: Easy-Moderate (2/5)
Final Rating: 11
Ranking at Time of Posting: 8/142 (6%)

Ranking at Game #456: 29/456 (6%)

The Valley was originally published as code in the April 1982 Computing Today, a British magazine from Argus Press. Later, Argus Press's software arm commercialized the game on tape for a variety of platforms. (I'm playing the C64 version using the VICE emulator.) It is the earliest British CRPG, at least under my definitions.

I frankly had more fun reading the article than playing the game. Although the magazine offers a detailed back story (not found in the commercial version's documentation), it feels like it published the code more as a programming exercise than as an enjoyable game. The 18-page article walks the reader through the code, module by module, explaining the importance of each subroutine and the need for each command. I would have loved to have this in the mid-1980s when I was trying to learn programming. As a game, I think it falls flat, even for 1982. Its events are too random, almost inevitably resulting in death, and it takes too long to win.

Deep in the Valley. The white dot represents my character. You can see the two castles at either end of the map, the path between them, and various randomly-generated buildings. I'm in the midst of fighting a harpy, who has 26 stamina and 9 "psi power" against my 75 strength, 69 "psi power," and 101 stamina.

The back story, which possibly takes up more text than the code itself, sets the game in a valley called Tybollea, situated between two castles. Thousands of years ago, one castle was ruled by Princess Evanna and the other by her brother, Prince Xeron. When the valley was besieged by the "Selric hordes," the princess allied with Vounim, the "mightiest wizard of the Northern Reaches." Together, their magic made the valley safe, and in gratitude, Evanna invited Vounim to settle there. But as the years passed, Vounim grew corrupt, invited an evil group of wizards known as the White Order to visit, and built temples to an evil lizard god named Y'Nagioth. Finally, Evanna had to act against him. Vounim's former apprentice, Alarian, allied with her and gave her his magic six-stoned amulet, and Evanna was equipped with her own magic helm. In the ensuing battle, Vounim was banished from the plane, but Evanna was mortally wounded. She scattered the magic artifacts throughout the various dungeons in the valley and shrouded the valley in mists before she died. Now, Vounim is fighting his way back to the world and the valley has become accessible again. An adventurer needs to find the magic artifacts and stop him.

Players can choose from wizard, "thinker," barbarian, warrior, and cleric classes. The choice affects only the starting and maximum attributes for combat strength and psi power. Although I won with a barbarian, characters with high psi-power seem to fare better, as they are more capable of effectively casting the game's three spells: sleep, psi-lance (the only spell that works on undead and magic beings), and "crispit."

The main Valley area consists of a large map of 37 x 12 squares. A winding path cuts through the map, connecting two castles, and the entrances to four sub-areas--two swamps, a forest, and a tower--are randomly situated, changing even within a single game every time the map refreshes. The two swamps and forest all have maps as large as the main map, and they each have their own one-story buildings in the middle.

Traveling through one of the swampy areas. There's a temple in the lake in the northeast.

The size of the world is wasted, as almost all of the events are random. In each square of the main map, the sub-maps, and the buildings, one of the following things occurs at random:

• Nothing
• Combat with an enemy
• A hoard of gold
• A "circle of evil" that drains stamina and psi power
• A "place of power" that restores stamina and psi power
• An "aura of deep magic" that increases maximum psi power and combat strength

The only exceptions to these random events are the Valley's path, where travel is always safe, and a handful of randomly-dispersed treasure locations, marked by asterisks (*), in the buildings.

A random encounter while walking through the Valley.

Successful encounters raise both treasure and experience, which together determine your overall "rating." The only way to see your rating is to visit one of the castles, where you'll also get healed--although this is rarely necessary since stamina regenerates as you walk, and the "places of power" handle the rest. Both experience and "deep magic" locations slowly increase both psi power and combat strength until you hit the maximums allowed by the character level.

Combat is a rote affair made vaguely interesting by a timeout system. In each combat round, you have the option to strike for the enemy's head, body, or legs, and you have to make your decision within about two seconds; otherwise, the game says "Too slow . . . too slow . . ." and the enemy gets a free attack. Attacks can hit or miss, and when they hit, they might do no damage for a variety of reasons.

Combat. I have only a second to hit one of the options before it times out and the enemy gets a free attack.

The essential randomness to the game extends to combats as well. You meet a variety of foes, from the easy (orcs, hob-goblins, fire imps) to the tough (dragons, thunder lizards, balrogs), but neither their distribution nor your chances of success against them seems influenced by your experience or attributes. I've defeated dragons with early characters and I've been slain by hob-goblins with experienced characters. The choice of body part to strike, and the damage dealt, also seem to produce essentially random results. Spells offer the only real "tactic" when it comes to combat, with "sleep" acting as a kind of "hail Mary" that, when successful, ends the combat instantly. Some foes, like "ring wraiths" and "barrow wights" are only damageable by the "psi lance" spell, which you don't get until comparatively late in the game. Fortunately, their lightning bolt attacks consume their own psi points, so if you can withstand them, they'll burn themselves out in a few rounds.

I do like the incantations that appear when you cast the spells.

The mission of the game is fairly simple: head to the Temple of Y'Nagioth (one of the buildings in the swamps) and search the distributed treasures until you find the Amulet of Alarin. Then head to the Black Tower of Zaexon and search its multiple levels for the six stones that go with the amulet. Once you have the amulet and its stones, go to Vounim's Lair (in the forest) and find the Helm of Evanna.

The game complicates this process in a few ways. First, since the treasures are randomly distributed, you may have to enter, exit, and re-enter the buildings multiple times, searching through all the treasures, until you find what you need. This is particularly notable in that even if you find one of the amulet stones, there's a 5-in-6 chance that it's the "wrong one" and does you no good.

I have to leave the dungeon and return, let the treasures regenerate, and hope for better luck next time.

Second, the game won't even randomly generate the Helm of Evanna until the character has a rating of at least 26. This takes forever. The reason that there's such a gap between the start date and the end date of my play-through is that after about 3 hours of gameplay, when I had the amulet and all my attributes were at their maximums, I still only had a rating of 13. It took another 3 or 4 hours of constant, boring, random grinding to achieve the needed rank, so I saved doing it for times when I had other stuff to occupy me--meetings, webinars, and the like.

I only have one thing left to get before winning the game--except that I have to develop twice my treasure and experience first.

During this process, the likelihood of eventually getting killed by some random monster approaches 100%, but fortunately the game allows saving at the castles. I couldn't figure out how to mimic saving on a tape drive, so I just allowed myself to take a save state every time I got to a castle. Once you have the Amulet of Alarin, you'll automatically get resurrected when you die, but at the cost of all your gold. Since achieving a rating of 26 based on experience alone would take well into the next decade, this is a scenario for reloading.

There's no special screen or anything when you accomplish the primary objective and "win" the game. You simply find the Helm of Evanna among the random treasures in Vourin's Lair:

The game notes that you have the Helm when you check into the castle, but you otherwise can just keep playing and trying to increase your score. If you reach a rating of 28, you can call yourself "Master of Destiny," but I'm going to quit at 26, or "Demon Killer."

The closest we get to a winning screen.

On a GIMLET, I can't do better than an 11. Its primitive approach to character development, its lack of NPCs or equipment, and its boring, random gameplay put all of its scores at 0, 1, or 2. It barely qualifies as an RPG under my definitions.

The game's box art from its 1982 or 1983 release.

Overall, nothing about The Valley is very fun in 2014. The graphics are primitive; there's no sound; the encounters are too random; there's no depth to the gameplay; there are no tactics or tactical challenge; and it takes way too long to grind the character to the necessary level. Even walking through empty squares, having to wait a couple seconds for it to tell you "Nothing of value . . . search on" is annoying (and you can't defeat it by speeding up the emulator because you'll hose yourself in the timed combats). There's no reason that a modern player would want to fire up the game.

A shot from Paul Robson's DOS remake of the Valley.

A shot from vounim's Windows remake.

So, naturally, there have been remakes, the first by British programmer Paul Robson in 2001 for DOS, the second by a Norwegian programmer named Jan (writing under the name "vounim") in 2013 for Windows. Once again, this proves Bolingbroke's Nostalgia Theorem ("every game, no matter how awful, is someone's favorite") and its Remake Corollary ("if that person is a programmer, he will attempt to remake it"). Seriously, I do admire the efforts that go into these remakes, even if they leave me a bit confused as to their purposes. I've written to both Mr. Robson and Jan to see if they want to stop by and comment on what they see in the game. My understanding is that Jan's closes the game better by offering a final level and endgame screen.

  

[Ed. Thanks to the investigative work of El Explorador de RPG, we know that the authors of The Valley were Peter Green and Peter Freebey, but they seem to have based it heavily on a 1980 game called Halls of Death, which I've yet to explore. The Valley was later plagiarized as Valley of Death (1983) and The Amulet (1983). See the comments for more.]

An early character dies right away. There's a cute death message.

This game did not interrupt my playing of Crusaders of Khazan; I just happened to finally reach Level 25 and win the game while in a boring meeting on Friday, and I already had this post written (except for a couple of paragraphs) last month. More on Khazan later in the week.

In other news, we've had another massacre on the older games list. After some investigation, I've rejected Volcanic Dungeon (1982), The Dark Dungeons (1983), and Federation Quest 1 as belonging more to the adventure game category, Fortress of the Witch King (1983) as being a strategy game, and Chivalry (1983) as being a board game. Oh, all of them have some RPG characteristics, but honestly, I need to trim this list, and I'm sick of playing half-assed quasi-RPGs from the early 1980s, so I'm going to start being more strict about my three elements. Dungeons, Dragons, and Other Perils turns out to be a 1984 game, so I moved it to the appropriate chronology.

This means that Expedition Amazon (1983) is the next game on the "old" list; despite the name, it definitely has all the RPG elements. It also means, more importantly, that I've closed out 1982. I may have a post on re-thinking its "Game of the Year" soon.