Game 159: The Keys to Maramon (1990)

 

One theme that emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s is the use of an existing, admired property to tell somewhat minor stories in between the big titles, often using a version of a larger game's engine. We get Hillsfar in between Pool of Radiance and Curse of the Azure Bonds; the two Worlds of Ultima games in between Ultima VI and Ultima VII; Chaos Strikes Back between Dungeon Master and Dungeon Master II. Here, we have a minor game that occupies a brief space between The Magic Candle (1989) and The Magic Candle II (1991). It's set in the same world as the Magic Candle titles, maintains familiar themes (such as creatures and the types of mushrooms), and even uses a version of the Magic Candle engine.

The game features a single character fighting the forces of darkness on the island of Maramon. The game world is quite small, occupying only a little city and four towers that connect to a common multi-level dungeon. Combat is regrettably action-based and devoid of tactics--not unlike Times of Lore or Prophecy: The Fall of Trinadon--and the whole thing seems destined to take no more than my six-hour minimum.
  

Much of the game involves protecting the city from marauding beasts at night. Here I am on Day 9, with 2,030 experience points and 107 gold. My life is down to 12 from around 40; I'll need to heal soon. But I only have 1 monster to kill before I can go to sleep for the rest of the night.

  
The game manual opens with the news that King Rebnard--the ruler of Deruvia from The Magic Candle--is planning to move his court to an ancient castle called Oshcrun, on the island of Maramon, in the Sea of Oshmar, somewhere between the islands of Deruvia and the lands of Gurtex, the source of the evil demon Dreax. Lord knows why Rebnard is doing this, but towards the end of The Magic Candle, there were rumors of evil powers worse than Dreax assembling in Gurtex, so perhaps Rebnard wants to take the fight to the enemy. 

Maramon, from the map in the game manual. Much of the game involves finding various keys to it. Hence, the title.

  
Unfortunately, the enemy is all too aware of Rebnard's plans, and companies of monsters have been swarming out of four dark towers at nighttime and harassing the townsfolk. (I'm not sure if they were always there, or if they only recently arrived and decided to take up residence in the towers.) The back story opens in the Deruvian city of Knessos, where an emissary from Maramon has arrived seeking a hero. Four potential heroes hear the emissary's plea: a fortune-seeking huntsman, a glory-hunting young blacksmith, a dutiful female king's courier, and an aged scholar obsessed with finding magic.

The manual suggests that all four came to Maramon on the ship, so I don't know what the other three are doing while I play the hero.

  
The player gets to choose just one of these four characters; this isn't a party game like The Magic Candle.  Each comes with various strengths and weaknesses in terms of attributes (strength, speed, dexterity, and magic skill), starting equipment, and starting gold. The blacksmith is naturally the strongest character; the huntsman and courier are the fastest; and the scholar has the most magic skill. The huntsman starts with a longbow and leather armor but only 50 gold; the courier has no starting equipment but has the most gold (200).

My character at the end of this session.

  
It's funny how completely different games make connections with each other. I've played three games this week besides The Keys to Maramon: Super Quest, Captive, and Fallout: New Vegas, and this game has connections to all of them. The most obvious is Captive: they were both published by Mindscape. Before playing Super Quest, I don't remember any games where hitting the direction key moves you continuously until you stop, but Maramon does that as well.

As for Fallout: New Vegas, the moment I saw that one of the Maramon selections was "courier," I knew I'd have to choose that character. I like her back story, too; the manual has her fighting male prejudices and condescensions everywhere she goes, and no one believes she can really do the job.

Aside from the name, there's no other character creation process. You immediately start in the town of Maramon on a bright Monday morning. The town has several shops (weapons, armor, magic, mushrooms), inns, two taverns, and a town hall. You can talk and transact with their various denizens. There are also three "storage buildings," to which the citizens of Maramon give you the key when you arrive. You can rest and store items there.

Every night at 20:00, monsters come spilling out of one of the towers and start pillaging and vandalizing the city, and it's up to the player to stop them. You have until 08:00 the next morning to track all of them down and kill them, or else some of the businesses get vandalized and you lose out on a full experience reward. If shops are vandalized enough, they may have to close for a few days. During the day, the character can sleep (inns will only let you sleep during the day), shop, and explore the dungeons (see below), but every night she needs to be back on the streets on patrol. The town apparently has no other militia.

If you can identify the right tower, you can wait outside and kill the monsters as they appear.

You get a little "status report" every morning.

The dungeon is accessed by four towers that each require different keys, none of which you start with. For a while, I didn't know what I was supposed to be doing other than killing monsters every night. Eventually, through one of my conversations with a citizen in a tavern, I got a suggestion that I'd need to review the library's "rare books" stack to proceed.

Maramon's library has a few purposes in the game. The "open shelves" contain information on topics important to the setting, such as keys, towers, mushrooms, and the library itself. "Closed shelves" can be visited for 20 gold pieces and contain books that increase your strength, speed, dexterity, and magic skill by one point--but only once every 1,000 experience points. "Rare books" cost 200 gold pieces to visit, but these books actually serve to advance the plot in some way. The one on "Keys" delivered me a copper key, which I used to access one of the towers and a few rooms of the dungeon.

Reading this book allowed me to find a copper key in one of the store rooms.

Once in the dungeon, a counter in the lower left tells you how many monsters remain in the portion you've accessed. As you find more keys and open doors, this number increases (or resets, if you already cleared the previous areas). The four towers all eventually connect to each other, but different combinations of keys are needed to open the doors. So far, I've collected bronze, brass, and copper keys, but I've found doors that require iron and steel keys as well.

Kind of a security overkill.

It takes a long time to amass 200 gold pieces, and there are plenty of other things to buy in the meantime, such as weapon and armor upgrades, magic items, ammunition, weapon repairs, and mushrooms.

Seriously? I'm pretty sure I only paid 50 for it.

A night's worth of monsters might drop 20 or 30 (along with some mushrooms). Fortunately, you get a 100 gold piece "salary" at the end of every week from the town hall, but you have to fight seven nights' worth of monsters in between.

Yes, I noticed your're not wealthy. Despite the fact that I'm trying to save the town, your librarian makes me pay to use the library.

Exploration of the dungeon has to occur during the day, or during the portions of the night after you've cleared the monsters. I've found I might have a few game hours to explore the dungeon before I have to return to the surface, rest up, and restore my hit points in time for the 20:00 attack. There's not a lot of breathing room in the game.

Having covered the basics, I'll say that I absolutely hate the combat system. It's so far on the other extreme from The Magic Candle's tactical screen (reminiscent of Ultima IV) that it's hard to believe they were created by the same developers. For melee combat, you have to charge up to an enemy (they rarely come to you) and start mashing the SPACE bar to attack. The problem is that if you're not facing their precise direction, your attacks do nothing while they pound on you. When surrounded by enemies, I find it extremely difficult to turn and fight with the keypad; I inevitably spend several rounds swinging in empty space while the game ignores my furious commands to turn and face a different direction.

Dammit, Eneri! TURN SOUTH!

Being in melee range, meanwhile, is survivable for only a few seconds against even the weakest enemies.

Enemies won't step on bags of dropped treasure, so I try to use them to funnel them to me. Unfortunately, the enemies could care less about my presence. They won't come and attack unless I get closer to melee range.

Ranged combat doesn't help much. If you're not in melee range, enemies wander around randomly and quickly, making it very difficult to line up a shot. And arrows and magic wands are so expensive that it's not a very viable option anyway. Wands, incidentally, are the game's only use of the "magic" skill. There are no spells.

I suspect everything would be easier with a joystick, but my attempts to get one working with DOSBox have only ever ended in failure, and I can't seem to find the last one I purchased anyway.

Mushrooms help a bit. They're expensive, too, but enemies frequently drop them. Most of them do the same thing as in The Magic Candle: Sermins heal (instead of restoring stamina), Mirgets increase strength, Gonshis increase speed, Luffins increase dexterity, and Nifts increase armor class. The supply is somewhat limited, so I've been erring on the side of conservation, even when it means a lot of reloads.

Finding a pouch of nifts post-combat--along with another key.

The flexible keyword-based dialogue system from The Magic Candle is gone. Instead, you just talk to shopkeepers and people in the tavern, who vary and have different things to say depending on the day. While you do pick up some lore from them, it's not nearly as interesting as Candle.

A vital tip.

The character doesn't really develop very fast. The "closed books" allow for a one-point upgrade of any statistic every 1,000 experience points; so far, I've been able to use 3. This also conveys an extra 2 hit points. Where you already start with attributes in the 25-40 range, an increase of 1 doesn't feel like it does much.

Eneri gets an extra strength point from a tome on "physics."

The game does offer what I think is one "first": in addition to wands, the magic shop sells something called a "fire globe." You place this on the ground, and it erupts the next time an enemy walks over it. It's essentially a land mine. I don't recall any other games so far in my chronology that have offered the ability to put traps in places of the player's choosing. (Ultima VI had bear traps and caltrops, but I don't think the player could pick them up and place them where enemies would step on them.)

Nice. If only they didn't cost so much.

In total, not a fantastic game. At least it feels like a quick one. One more posting will probably do it.