Monday, May 16, 2016

Mandragore: Chet Lunaire

As I fear I will become if I keep playing this game.
  
Having sunk a few more hours into it, I can report that Mandragore is a uniquely weird game. It has the ineffably bizarre quality of a French circus crossed with the kind of puzzles we saw in ICON: The Quest for the Ring. It's not a very good RPG experience, but it's...something. 

Given the backstory, I expected a high-fantasy theme, but in reality once you enter the castles, theme goes out the window and anything can happen. The first castle I explored--the one near the starting area--was the least bizarre. As I explored the rooms--usually having to force bars or open doors to get from one to the next--I met a series of creatures named after signs of the zodiac: Pisces, Aquarius, Leo, Capricorn, and so forth. When I used the ASK command on them, each spouted a few letters. Together, their phrases said: FRIENDS, YOU WILL FIND WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR BEHIND THE CUPBOARD.
   
   
Sure enough, one of the rooms had a cupboard, and using the OPEN command on it revealed a secret passageway. This took me to a room containing an object called "Master," which I could pick up. I had no idea what to with it, but later in my explorations, I found myself on top of the castle with an item labeled "Mark." Trying any number of things to interact with it, I dropped "Master" and received a "stanza" that indicated I had completed this castle.
   
   
There were combats in many of the rooms. It's frankly hard to tell what's an enemy and what's an NPC. The monster names are mostly nonsense. I have no idea if the game allows you to kill key NPCs and thus create a "walking dead" situation for yourself. If so, I might be in trouble. In any event, combat is no more interesting than I reported last time. You just type something like SYRELLA ATTACK AXE-MAN or GELTH SPELL GUARD. Sometimes you get lucky and the enemy dies in one hit; other times, it takes three or four, and the foe depletes your own hit points in the meantime.
   
   
I haven't noticed any significant variation in combat success based on whether my characters are armed or unarmed nor what statistics they have. (And yes, I do know that you have to specify the weapon when attacking.) The same goes for non-combat tasks. Theoretically, the thief should be best at DISARM and STEAL and the character with the highest strength should be best at BREAK. I suppose it's possible that they are, but if so, the variances are subtle, and in general--with the exception of spellcasting--every character can do pretty much every action.

Returning to town, I sold some of the treasures I'd found, bought a sword (which, as above, doesn't seem to do much), and restocked on food. The money ran out quickly and I found I didn't have enough to properly heal my characters. I thus resorted to STEALing medicine from one of the shops. I confess to some save-scumming in this endeavor, as getting caught (which seems to happen about 1 time in 5) causes you to lose all your gold and some of your items.
   
   
Having finished the first château, I set out to explore the rest of the land, which seems to be somewhere in the order of 100 x 150 tiles in size. Large lakes and mountain chains make systematic exploration difficult. After some time, I found myself in the far eastern edge of the land and entered a castle there.
    
    
The theme of this second castle was very different from the first. It had a large outdoor area with lots of trees. There was a fountain, but I couldn't find any way to interact with it. A variant of the bizarre French clown Pierrot appeared, telling me that "they've become mad." "They've" turned out to be some very large honeybees, each inexplicably given names like "Bertha," "Gina," and "Antoinette." I made my way through the lair, slashing and killing the bees, but mysteriously unable to do anything with the honey the left behind. (This account is beginning to sound like an LSD trip.)
  
   
Eventually, I reached the lair of the queen, who told me that her "vital fluid is leaking." I have no idea what that means and could find no mechanism to help her. Perhaps it's something I'll find in another castle. I sure hope it doesn't matter that I killed all those bees.
   
TMI.
   
Wandering around some more, I entered a castle surrounded by a lake. There were far more NPCs in this castle than the previous ones--a woman, a princess, a juggler, and so forth. When questioned, each had something to say about numbers: "We depend on figures"; "Juggle with numbers"; "Everything is in the balance."
    
    
The inner parts of the castle featured a series of steps, and I started getting attacked by floating numbers and their goofily-named henchmen, like "rootus" and "dividus" and such.
   
   
The floating numbers, which couldn't be killed, were arranged like this in their various rooms:

1 2 3
   2 0
1 2 3
9    6

At the end of a hallway, I found a number "4" that I could pick up. Dropping it in the blank square in the second row seemed to solve the dungeon and awarded me a glimpse of Stanza #3. I'm not exactly sure what the puzzle was. I guess if you ignore the fourth row with the 9 and 6, it's like a magic square, with the numbers adding up to 6 in all directions.
  
   
This "puzzle" illustrates the key problem with the game, however: the mechanics don't allow for enough different actions to make the puzzles challenging. The selection of commands is so limited that you're bound to figure things out just by bumbling around. Having picked up an item, for instance, the only thing you can do with it is to eat, trade, sell, or drop it--clearly only the latter is going to work as a puzzle solution.

As I finished this castle, my characters were crossing 1,000 experience points and made it to Level 2. I'm not sure precisely what leveling does for you, but I imagine it makes combat easier. I do like the way the game awards experience, for successful action--whether combat or non-combat. Unsuccessful actions, on the other hand, deplete the character's life points, and every once in a while--as I reported last time--everyone's life points drop for seemingly no reason.

Some miscellaneous notes:
   
  • I'm supposed to be able to get food with the HUNT command, but it doesn't work anywhere that I try it.
  • Similarly, the INSPECT command--which you would think would work in a lot of cases--never seems to apply to the objects I use them on. There's no command that allows you to simply look at an item on the screen to help suss out what it's for.
  • Navigation in the castles is complicated. In stereotypical adventure game fashion, the rooms often don't maintain consistency in cardinal directions: going east from one brings you in the south of another. Even weirder, you can often go in directions that seem closed off on the screen, and at other times you can't travel in a direction that appears to have an obvious opening.
  • Whether the game lets you kill key NPCs or not, it definitely has no compunction about letting you sell key quest items or drop them in the wrong place. 
  • I think I'm going to eventually have to buy this boat, but it's been out of my financial reach so far.
       
   
Not much else to do but continue to explore the rest of the 10 castles. I'm vaguely curious where the game is going with its themes and these post-castle "stanzas." The graphics, while not very advanced, have produced some interesting mise-en-scenes. But it fundamentally isn't challenging enough as an adventure game, and it lacks the mechanics to make it a good RPG. It's highly original--I'll give it that--but not really fun. I hope I can polish it off with one more posting.

27 comments:

  1. It's highly original--I'll give it that--but really fun. I hope I can polish it off with one more posting.

    Did you mean 'not really'?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That makes a pretty big difference, doesn't it?

      Delete
    2. It depends on how many people who would curse you for lulling them into playing something that is NOT really fun.

      Delete
    3. When I read it before it got corrected, I understood it as "It's highly original (...) but really fun [even though most of 'highly original' titles turn out to be unplayable and full of weird design decisions made only for the sake of originality]", so it made sense :)

      Delete
  2. I suspect I should apologize, as it's probably my fault that you're having to play this one. Many years ago I got a job lot of Commodore 64 games from eBay, which included a tape of the English version of Mandragore. I sent an image of it to the Gamebase64 project, as after looking it up I found that they didn't have a copy of the English version. I'm pretty sure that the disk image they made from the French disk version and my English tape version is the only one floating round the Internet.

    I wonder how many copies of the English version they sold? It's hard to imagine that there were very many, especially as it retailed for the equivalent of over 20 dollars ... I could never make any sense of it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. My blogging is ahead of my postings for once. Not to spoil the third and final entry, but I do end up not sorry that I played the game, so no need to apologize. Quite the opposite. If you hadn't uploaded the English version, I'd be trying to figure this one out in French.

      Delete
    2. I'm glad you finished the game. In your previous post it sounded like you were about to give up.

      By the way, when you get a Mac emulator working, you should take a brief break and try The Fool's Errand. Not an RPG, but I'm sure you're going to love it.

      Delete
    3. The Fool's Errand is absolutely brilliant (along with Cliff Johnson's other works--and if any Errand fan hasn't played The Fool and His Money, he or she should correct that ASAP), but is it to the Addict's tastes? I'm genuinely not sure.

      Delete
    4. I strongly suspect that anyone who enjoys crossword puzzles would find a lot to love in The Fool's Errand. The fairy tale story and humour on the other may not appeal equally universally. I do also strongly recommend The Fool's Errand, it is, at the very least, worth a peek.

      I've found The Fool and His Money to be a fair bit more exhausting than I remember The Fool's Errand being. Partially because there's more of it, and because there's a lot of puzzles of the same type. I also think it is downright more difficult a puzzle game. Or, at least to me the types of puzzle's in TFaHM are more difficult for me.

      Delete
  3. The image of 'SYRELLA ATTACKS AXE-MAN' down what I can only assume to be stairs reminds me rather bizarrely of the 80s arcade game Tapper..

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Which made 12 year old me really sad when it turned out that serving beer like this is in reality not a thing. It's possible that I cried.

      Delete
  4. "This "puzzle" illustrates the key problem with the game, however: the mechanics don't allow for enough different actions to make the puzzles challenging."

    That's mostly the problem with modern day games as well. I remember the time when Tomb Raider had me scratching my head on how to open up a locked gate via pressure plates while staring at pointy Madonna-brassiere pixelated boobs a couple of decades ago.

    Fast forward to now, all the puzzles in Uncharted 4 basically only requires you to have the camera angled correctly to show you what item you can interact with to solve the puzzle. It probably means that Nathan Drake is really a lot smarter than the player but, man, there simply is no challenge there at all.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Challenge interrupts flow. Flow is everything.

      Join the hordes of Diiiaaaabloooo!

      Delete
    2. I can't tell whether I like puzzles in games or not. I guess if they're there and you can't do them, there's always the internet, but it feels lame and I have negative associations due to pre internet gaming: endlessly repeating the same content in the NES games Solstice and Metroid, or in EotB because I had zero lateral thinking skills and had no idea that a game would dare play with your perception.

      Delete
    3. This is why "puzzles" isn't a category in my GIMLET. I like them when they're done right, but I don't consider them key to RPGs.

      As someone who tangentially plays adventure games, however, is that now that we're in an era in which someone could make an EPIC text-parser game, no one wants that style of game any more.

      Delete
    4. The puzzles in Legend of Grimrock (1 and 2!) were truly great. Difficult but logical, and solvable with some thought. I made a point of not reading any spoilers so I could enjoy solving the puzzles without any help.

      The combat, on the other hand, was kinda dumb.

      Delete
    5. I played all the way through LoG 1 (unfortunately 2 bored me to death, I don't know why) and I fully agree. I agree that combat was dump. I started once, played a little and decided that four throwing characters are a way to go and finished game this way. Not a single spell was cast, not a single sword was swung. Weird and dumb, I agree.

      Delete
    6. Yeah, I guess that was why guns were invented.

      Delete
  5. Hopefully there aren't too many "Dead Man Walking" scenarios when it comes to accidentally missing or destroying quest items. Nothing's worse than approaching the end of a game like this and then realizing you can't actually finish it because you didn't feed the dog a sandwich back in act 1.

    ReplyDelete
  6. HUNT only works when there is a huntable animal onscreen, so SYRELLA HUNT RABBIT brings you a little food. It's just cosmetic.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks. I wish I'd tried that before I finished. I only remember rabbits on the screen in one dungeon, though. Maybe I could have hunted some of the fish in the underwater castle?

      Delete
    2. I don't think I thought of that one at the time. There's an elk or two in the dungeon with rabbits though…

      Delete
  7. Are you from the U.S. or Europe? I ask because I can't imagine this game having achieved wide distribution in the U.S.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Can you explain your subtitle?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. "A closed book of spells, the horizon sleeps -- in silence."

      Delete
    2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierrot_Lunaire

      or if you want to hear it:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsIATAaR-X0

      I've listened to it dozens of times, and while I can appreciate it, I'm never going to like it. I'm afraid the same is true of Ornette Coleman.

      Delete
    3. The really good Schoenberg piece from that era is Five Pieces for Orchestra; the first movement of that one will blow the doors off your barn. Best performance I've heard:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naygeVS0lY0

      Delete

I welcome all comments about the material in this blog, and I generally do not censor them. However, please follow these rules:

1. Do not link to any commercial entities, including Kickstarter campaigns, unless they're directly relevant to the material in the associated blog posting. (For instance, that GOG is selling the particular game I'm playing is relevant; that Steam is having a sale this week on other games is not.) This also includes user names that link to advertising.

2. Please avoid profanity and vulgar language. I don't want my blog flagged by too many filters. I will delete comments containing profanity on a case-by-case basis.

3. NO ANONYMOUS COMMENTS. It makes it impossible to tell who's who in a thread. If you don't want to log in to Google to comment, either a) choose the "Name/URL" option, pick a name for yourself, and just leave the URL blank, or b) sign your anonymous comment with a preferred user name in the text of the comment itself.

4. I appreciate if you use ROT13 for explicit spoilers for the current game and upcoming games. Please at least mention "ROT13" in the comment so we don't get a lot of replies saying "what is that gibberish?"

5. Comments on my blog are not a place for slurs against any race, sex, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, or mental or physical disability. I will delete these on a case-by-case basis depending on my interpretation of what constitutes a "slur."

Blogger has a way of "eating" comments, so I highly recommend that you copy your words to the clipboard before submitting, just in case.

I read all comments, no matter how old the entry. So do many of my subscribers. Reader comments on "old" games continue to supplement our understanding of them. As such, all comment threads on this blog are live and active unless I specifically turn them off. There is no such thing as "necro-posting" on this blog, and thus no need to use that term.

I will delete any comments that simply point out typos. If you want to use the commenting system to alert me to them, great, I appreciate it, but there's no reason to leave such comments preserved for posterity.

I'm sorry for any difficulty commenting. I turn moderation on and off and "word verification" on and off frequently depending on the volume of spam I'm receiving. I only use either when spam gets out of control, so I appreciate your patience with both moderation tools.