Game 188: Lone Wolf: Flight from the Dark (1984)

Lone Wolf looks a bit creepy, if you ask me.

Lone Wolf: Flight from the Dark
United Kingdom

Five Ways Software (developer); Arrow (publisher)

Released 1984 for the ZX Spectrum

Date Started: 17 May 2015

Date Ended: 19 May 2015

Total Hours: 2

Reload Count: 5

Difficulty: Easy (2/5), once you figure out the trick to combat

Final Rating: 13

Ranking at Time of Posting: 15/186 (8%)

Ranking at Game #431: 45/431 (10%)

When I was around 14 or 15, I owned the entire set of Kai (1-5) and Magnakai (6-12) books in the Lone Wolf series, by British author Joe Dever. I loved them. At some point before I left home for college in 1992, I no longer had them. I don't remember why, but Occam's razor would assign the blame to my mother. Until recently, I had no idea that the books had been continued in the Grand Master series (13-20) and the New Order series (21-32), with the last book published in 1998.

The first book in the series.

In preparation for this post, I went on Amazon and ordered used copies of Flight from the Dark and Fire on the Water from a bookseller in Maryland. They had warned me that the copies were only in "good" condition, so when they arrived a few days ago, I wasn't surprised to find the character sheet in Flight from the Dark already filled out. I was surprised to see a familiar odd mix of upper- and lower-case letters and unnecessary serifs on each n and x, something I used to do until another kid in 10th grade leaned over my shoulder and opined that my handwriting was "gay." I can't prove it--there's no name on the inside cover--but I'm 99% sure that I ordered my own childhood copy of Flight from the Dark. If this had happened with my first copy of, I don't know, Crime and Punishment, or The Grapes of Wrath, I'm pretty sure I'd take it as a sign from the Universe. But what do I make of the Universe wanting to reunite me with Lone Wolf?

"You were not meant for Great Things, Chet. Your legacy shall be mildly diverting writings about meaningless, geeky ephemera."

        
The Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, which I read for posts on The Citadel of Chaos and The Forest of Doom, had left me with the impression that gamebooks were always a little goofy and puerile--poor substitutes for an actual RPG. I figured that my memories of Dever's series were a little rose-colored and that I'd be similarly unsatisfied with them. I'm happy to report that is not the case. The Lone Wolf books are just as good as I remembered--probably the best anyone was ever going to do with an RPG in paperback form. You've got just a couple of attributes to juggle--combat skill and endurance--and an inventory sheet that tracks weapons, other items, meals, and gold crowns. You can only carry 8 items at a time, including meals, so you have to be careful with inventory. There are all kinds of wonderfully evocative illustrations, including a series of them that show you each type of weapon.

That "quarterstaff" is the laziest weapon in the world. You couldn't at least wrap some grip tape around it?

The best part of the gamebooks is the series of skills that you select for your character, called Kai disciplines. There are 10 of them, and you can select 5 in the first book. You get 1 for each book in the series you complete. Some of the skills are manifestly for puzzle-solving and getting out of tough situations (e.g., tracking, sixth sense, animal kinship), while others help compensate for low attribute roles (e.g., weapon skill, mind blast, healing). Healing is particularly well implemented; if you have the skill, you can restore an endurance point for every numbered section of the book you pass through. One skill, hunting, allows you to find your own food at mealtime and save backpack space for other items. More than you'd think is possible, the combination of inventory and skills really lets you roleplay different characters, at least in terms of logistics.

The Lone Wolf series is a real series, with the story progressing from book to book, so the reader keeps his attributes, items, and skills. The story is reasonably well-told, though full of familiar tropes. In the northern part of a great continent called Magnamund, Summerlund and the Darklands sit side by side. The Darklords of the Darklands are the eternal enemies of the good people of Summerlund.

          

In Summerlund, the land's great warriors traditionally send their sons to study at the Kai monastery, where they learn skills similar to a ranger in a standard RPG. The protagonist is a young initiative of the monastery named Silent Wolf. One night, when all of the Kai Lords of Summerlund are gathered at the monastery for a feast, the Darklords launch a blitz and kill everyone. Silent Wolf, out gathering firewood during the attack, manages to knock himself unconscious on a tree branch and wakes up when the battle is over. Re-naming himself "Lone Wolf," he vows to take word of the attack to the nation's capital. He sets off with only an axe, a map of the kingdom, a random number of gold crowns, and an item chosen from a random table, which may include other weapons, pieces of armor, meals, a healing potion, or even more gold.

(To roll random numbers, the book has you close your eyes and point to a random number table at the back. I didn't like that, and I remember purchasing a 10-sided die just to play through the books.)

I begin my titular Flight from the Dark.

Like a good computer RPG, the book is structured into "chapters" that offer some freedom of movement but ultimately funnel you to particular plot points. In the first chapter, no matter what directions you choose, you fight various darkspawn scouring the area after the monastery attack while trying to make your way through the forest. Ultimately, you come across a refugee train led by a column of solders and, assuming you don't run away like a coward, you fight a "boss" battle against a reptilian "Gourgaz" and get a mission from the dying Prince of Summerlund to take a message to his father.

After other assorted paths and adventures, you reach the outskirts of the capital, which is under siege. You have to choose from several paths to avoid the attackers and enter the city. Once inside, you have other assorted adventures before winning a final battle against some spies and getting in to see the king. He immediately gives you a quest to go to Durenor to retrieve the Sommerswerd, an ancient artifact that can defeat Darklords. Segue to Fire on the Water.

A bit of the endgame text. Note the icon indicating the appropriate entry number in the physical book, where the text is about 5 times longer.

As I re-read the book, I tried to remember what I did, as a youngster, if I lost one of the many combats. Some of them are absurdly difficult, especially in the later books when it's assumed that you've loaded up on magical gear from the earlier ones. Certainly, I didn't cry out to the heavens in despair and start the entire series from the beginning. But neither did I simply assume that I won and go on to the next entry: I remember meticulously making all the rolls and fighting each combat. As I was already schooled in the conventions of computer RPGs, perhaps I simply allowed myself to "reload" if I died and to fight the combat again.

The ZX Spectrum cassette versions came out the same year as the first two books. That's pretty fast; Dever must have negotiated the rights to a computer game at the same time he was signing his publishing contract. Unlike the adaptations of the two Fighting Fantasy books we saw earlier this year, the CRPGs of Flight from the Dark and Fire on the Water take a few steps to distinguish themselves as games. Your combat skill, mostly unchanging in the books, increases in the games with every successful combat. (If the games hadn't made such a concession, they wouldn't be CRPGs under my definition.) Instead of choosing 5 of 10 disciplines, the character is assumed to have all of them, but at different "levels" (hidden from the player). The use of skills is binary in the books--either you have the needed discipline or you don't--but in the game, they have associated probabilities, and rolls are made behind the scenes when indicated.

Lone Wolf makes a successful "Sixth Sense" roll.

Combat is quite a bit different in the game. It occurs in real time, with the ability for the player and foes to take steps forward and back in between attacks. Weapons have various reaches associated with them, with longer ones able to often damage creatures who can't come close enough to hit you. There are three attacks--chop, swipe, and thrust--some of which are ineffective for some weapons (e.g., a "swiped" spear and a "thrusted" hammer do little good). The "Mindblast" and "Mindshield" skills are activated with keys, rather than passive as in the books.

Fighting this setting's version of an orc.

But while combat may be more "advanced" in the game than in the books, it still isn't good. You get no feedback about whether your attacks are successful or not, and no indication of your enemy's total health. The two "boss" combats in the game were laughably impossible until I figured how to just spam the same attack over and over, killing the foe before he had a chance to react.

The game, meanwhile, degrades plenty of aspects of the book. There's no way to pro-actively use items or eat meals, so the game simply dispenses with most of the inventory, including the pieces of armor the book lets you pick up. There are plenty of places that offer choices in the book but the game forces you to take one path or another--it reduces player choice in travel instead of doing what a decent CRPG adaptation would do and increase it.

Wait...what? Why would I go the longer way? The book lets me make a choice here.

The interface is awful, with non-logical keys (the game came with a keyboard overlay to help with this). In places where you have options, you have to unintuitively scroll through the options with the "1" key and then hit "9" to select one.

A late-game choice. I have to hit "1" to see the next one--to follow the riverbank.

Even worse, the game reduces most of the book's text. I can't imagine why; the game certainly wasn't shy about forcing the player to read paragraphs of scrolling text. Yet there isn't a single entry as verbose in the game as in the book. A typical example:

Game: You descend the rocky slope towards the graveyard. Wicked briars tear at your cloak and cut your legs. The haunting murmur of distant voices fills your ears.

Book: As you descend the rocky slope towards the Graveyard of the Ancients, you are aware of a strange mist and cloud that swirls all around this grey and forbidding place, blocking the sun and covering the graveyard in a perpetual gloom. A chill creeps forward to greet your approach.

Towards the end, it gets nuts. In the book, once you reach the city of Holmgard, you're given a choice whether to keep following an officer or take off on your own. Either choice leads to a bunch of adventures before the ending. The game has you automatically "lose" your guide, go through one battle against some enemies, and then shoot right to the ending text.

You may notice in the screenshots that the game continually references the associated entry in the book. This is because the cassette came with the book, and I guess players were meant to keep it in hand if they wanted to read the full text of each encounter. Given that, I can't think of a single reason that a player would want to play the game.

The sequel is selling on eBay for only $5.66.

My GIMLET gives it:

• 2 points for the game world. The backstory is good, but the game doesn't offer much of a "world" since you're stuck on a linear path.

• 1 point for character creation and development. There are no options at all during creation, and the only development is an increase in combat ability.

• 0 points for no NPC interaction.

• 2 points for foes that are a bit original to the setting, but don't really have any particular strengths and weaknesses. Games based on gamebooks ought to be stronger in encounters, but while Lone Wolf is a better-written gamebook than most, it still doesn't offer puzzles, role-playing choices, or even logic in its various flip-the-page options. At least, not in the first one.

I don't know...this might be the earliest game where I fight something riding something else.

• 1 point for a godawful action combat system with no magic except "Mindblast."

• 2 points for equipment, consisting primarily of a bunch of weapons that you can swap in and out and some quest-related items.

Checking my inventory.

• 1 point for an economy. You find plenty of gold here, but you can't spend it anywhere except to buy passage in a couple of places. Fire on the Water offers more options for spending accumulated gold.

• 2 points for a main quest.

• 1 point for graphics, sound, and interface. Graphics are bare-bones but at least try to flesh out the scene. There are a few scattered sound effects, but the music is so piercing you mostly want the sound off. The interface is pretty bad, consisting of non-logical keys (e.g., although you usually fight on the left side of the screen, you hit "E" to advance and "R" to move backwards). Even though the game is short, it's annoying to have to wait while some animations and music play.

The game at least made an attempt at cobwebs.

• 1 point for gameplay that is extremely linear, too easy, and extremely brief. The 1 point is for replayability since you might want to try different paths.

             

That's a final score of 13, which still seems kind of high. I think I enjoyed Ultima: Escape from Mount Drash more. I found one contemporary review, from the March 1985 Crash. The author, Derek Brewster, makes the same points I do: basically, why play the game when it offers a more limiting experience than the book?

The Spectrum versions of both Flight from the Dark and Fire on the Water were written by Five Ways Software in Birmingham, England. They received only a U.K. release. Five Ways' c.v. shows them mostly creating Spectrum ports for other company's games, none of them RPGs.

This wasn't the end for Lone Wolf computer games, however. 1991 saw Lone Wolf: Mirror of Death by Mr. Micro, a non-canon action platformer. It's not an RPG, so it won't be on my list. In the 2000s, we saw an aborted MMORPG and then an aborted first-person computer game. In 2013, an iOS game called Lone Wolf: Blood on the Snow was released. It seems to take place after the books (at least the first series). It has excellent graphics and some ability to move around areas, although it has the verboseness and general linearity of a book. I'm in the midst of "playing" it now, and I generally enjoy it.
    
I fired it up Fire on the Water for a few minutes, but nothing had changed in the interface and I'd rather just read the book. Look, we've been here a few times now; can we all agree that a literal computer adaptation of a gamebook, even with some RPG elements, isn't really an "RPG"? I don't know how many more of these I can take.