Game 231: Heavy on the Magick (1986)

The game has no title screen; instead, it starts with these instructions.

   

Heavy on the Magick

United Kingdom

Gargoyle Games (developer and publisher)

Released in 1986 for ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC

Date Started: 16 October 2016
Date Ended: 18 October 2016

Total Hours: 6

Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)

Final Rating: 15

Ranking at Time of Posting: 24/228 (11%)

One of my best friends is British. We met in a training course on September 10, 2001. The next day, we watched the planes hit the towers together and spent the rest of the week getting drunk and watching CNN. I've visited him in London a few times; he's visited me in the States a few times. There have been some minor points of confusion over the years. I once brought him to a Waffle House and had to explain that "well done" is not an acceptable answer when asked how you want your eggs. He had to explain the whole City of London/city of London thing to me, and he laughs at my confusion when he gives his weight in "stone." But on the whole, we understand each other fine, and he's never struck me as coming from a culture so alien that he would have taken naturally to these 1980s British games we're seeing, particularly Swords & Sorcery and Heavy on the Magick.

 

I'm tempted to show him some of these games the next time I see him. Because he seems like a normal person, I expect bafflement. But I could be wrong. Maybe he'll take a look and say, "Ah, the old Speccy! My, wasn't she fine? Ah, you see, Apex the Ogre--he's a popular children's cartoon character in the U.K. Like your Rocky the Flying Squirrel, really. He shows up and offers advice at trying times. Opening doors, you say? Ah, yes, it's a common cliche in British literature that if you need to open a door, you ask the inanimate pillars nearby for a hint. We call them 'guards.' What about using a key? Oh, I understand the confusion! English doors don't have locks on the door: they put the locks on nearby tables! Say, that game doesn't let you delete letters after you type them, does it? Oh, thank god. The Accurate Typing Act of 1984 requires all software to force users to re-type the entire sentence if they make a single spelling mistake. It's supposed to make us more precise, what? My, what a grand game!"
   

In the thick of the dungeon. I'm casting the BLAST spell on a troll while the corpses of several previous foes lie on the ground. When he's dead, I'll collect that key.

   
Heavy on the Magick is an adventure-RPG hybrid that, like a lot of hybrids, doesn't do either of its parts very well. There are very few classic adventure puzzles--most involve shuffling inventory around and using the right items to open doors--and the RPG elements are limited to gaining experience for killing wandering monsters, which you can then convert to stamina.

The game casts you in the role of an obnoxious wizard named Axil the Able. (The game missed an option to make "Axel F" its theme song.) Axil likes to stir trouble by telling fake ribald stories about other wizards. One night in a crowded tavern, Axil has just finished a lewd tale about a wizard named Therion when Therion himself strides up and magically banishes Axil to the dungeons beneath "a dreary castle called Collodon's Pile." The object of the game is simply to get out. Supposedly, there are at least three exits, but I only found one.

    

This salamander charm will later get me past some fire. I don't know why.

   
Exploration occurs in a multi-leveled dungeon with dozens of rooms. Each room can have up to 8 exits (each of the cardinal directions), some of which might take you up or down, so you have to watch the descriptions carefully to make sure you haven't crossed levels, which will screw up your maps. I didn't take any video or animated GIFs, but the outline of Axil (as well as the monsters) does move around the screen. You can use LEFT and RIGHT to move him on the screen without leaving it, which allows you to interact with specific objects.

You control Axil through a text parser. (The game presents this as a language called "Merphish.")  In most cases, you strike a single letter for the first word and then type the second: for instance, P(ick up) KEY or X(amine) DOOR. You can speak to NPCs (and, for some reason, inanimate objects) by putting a single quotation mark, then the name of the NPC, then the subject you want to ask about; for instance " GUARD, DOOR.
    

Getting hints on opening a door. Note Apex's hint to me "WHO GUARDS KNOWS." Is that even English?

    
I had issues throughout the game getting the emulator to recognize all my keystrokes, meaning I either had to play really slowly or I ended up typing the same commands over and over again.

Character creation is very odd. In a system clearly influenced by the Fighting Fantasy gamebook series, your attributes are stamina, skill, and luck. Stamina serves as a combined action point/hit point/spell point pool, and it decreases as you perform certain actions, cast spells, and get hit by enemies. (You also lose 1 stamina point every time you save, which is an interesting idea that more games should adopt.) As you start, the game generates three numbers for these statistics, and they're always very high, moderate, and very low, like 38-9-2 or 35-7-1. You can assign these stats to the attributes in any order you want.
    

Starting a new game. I can shuffle the points but not re-roll them.

    
At first, I thought it would make sense to assign the high number to stamina, but later it became clear that it's much more important for skill. I only had success in the game when I gave the moderate number to stamina and the lowest to luck.
   

The opening screen.

   
In the first room of the game, you find a couple of books. One of them (on the left) contains a poison that damages and eventually kills you. You have to figure that out through trial and error. The other is a magical grimoire that gives you your first spells: BLAST, FREEZE, and INVOKE. BLAST is an all-purpose combat spell and really the only combat option in the game. (There are no weapons.) FREEZE performs as expected, freezing monsters, but that doesn't do you much good because you generally need to kill them to get through a room. Later, you find some additional spells, including TRANSFUSION, which swaps experience for stamina, and CALL, which allows you to summon an annoying NPC (below).
    

BLASTing a wyvern.

   
The game's monsters include ghosts, vampires, wyverns, werewolves, and trolls. Their primary statistic is "cunning," and as long as it's lower than your skill, your BLASTS do a reasonable amount of damage. Eventually, you find some garlic which allows you to instantly kill vampires, as well as a "nugget" that allows you to instantly kill werewolves, and for all I know the other monsters have instant-kill options, too. I didn't find them if they did.
   

Killing a werewolf immediately with a nugget. I assume it's a silver nugget.

   
As you kill monsters, you gain experience, which can then be traded for stamina with the TRANSFUSION spell. There's also a "leveling" system in the game that I didn't quite understand and seemed more dependent on wandering into certain rooms than gaining experience through combat. I only "leveled" this way once in the game, from "neophyte" to "zelator," and I was allowed to keep my level even after I died.
    

Going up a level just for entering a room.

    
Much of the game involves picking up a variety of items to use in other locations, a process rendered difficult by the fact that you have only 5 item slots. At first, I tried bringing everything to a central location, but later I just marked the location of items so I could go get them if I needed them later. Most of the "puzzles" involve passing through doors. Some doors are passed by dropping keys on nearby tables, others by dropping bags of gold on nearby tables, and still others by giving a password to the door. There were a handful of doors I never found any way to open.
     

Picking up a key in a multi-exit chamber.

    
The password puzzles are the only really challenging ones in the game, and it took me a while to figure out how the hints worked. You can get password hints from the "guards" (really just inanimate pillars) that flank some doors, or from an NPC named Apex (more below). The hints are pretty cryptic, and I had to look up one before I understood what the game was doing. That one was "CRY AND ENTER DOOR." The answer to it is WOLF. As in "cry wolf." Another was "TO ENTER IS MADNESS." I tried a bunch of synonyms--INSANITY, CRAZINESS, PSYCHOSIS--before I got it with LUNACY.

In the midst of all these dungeon rooms roams a "helpful" NPC named Apex the Ogre. You can ask him for hints about the various monsters, objects, and doors, although he rarely gave me anything that really helped. You can CALL him once you get the spell scroll, but most of the time, he just showed up unbidden and generally stood in my way until I said "APEX, THANKS to banish him. Although he's not hostile, if you happen to be standing where Apex appears in the room, you'll take continual damage and die.
    

When Apex gets in your space.

    
A major part of the manual is given to a dynamic that I never really experienced in-game and didn't understand: summoning demons with the INVOKE spell. The manual lists four demons--Asmodee, Astarot, Belezbar, and Magot--each of which is supposed to help in a different way. For instance, Magot knows of "hidden treasures" and Belezbar "reveals all deceit." When you INVOKE them, you have to be holding their particular talisman--found within the dungeon--or they send you to a furnace room with no exits. If there's any way to escape from there, I never found it.
    

Invoking Magot turned out to be a bad idea.

 

A fiery room with no escape.

      
I guess the demons might be solutions to particular puzzles, but I never figured out what they were, and I managed to win the game without needing to invoke them, so I'll appreciate if another player can fill in the blanks there.

The demons are some of the nods the game makes to the "real" world of the occult. "Therion" was one of the drug-fueled names used by the occultist lunatic Aleister Crowley, and the manual encourages the reader to check out several titles from the "Western Occult Tradition," but honestly there isn't enough game content to really develop this theme. Probably some of the symbols on the walls have an occult angle that went over my head.
   

Does the SATOR square have some kind of occult meaning?

   
I'm not sure my description so far has conveyed just how confusingly weird the game feels. The text is presented without punctuation and is often awkward. Color is used like a weapon, with each screen saturated in some garish bright shade. The mechanisms for interacting with objects often don't make any sense. You can't delete or backspace after entering text, so if you make a typo (which happens frequently), you have to abort the entire line and try again. Skill and luck fluctuate for reasons I don't understand. Some of the messages make no sense. I don't know what "2° = 9°" meant for the entire game, but it was right there under my current rank.
   

One of the map levels I made.

   
I did my best to map as thoroughly as possible, and in the process of blundering around I found a door. It was past a cyclops with a high "cunning" score, and I wasn't able to defeat him until I put the highest statistic in "skill" and jacked up my stamina with multiple TRANSFUSION spells.
    

Fighting the "final battle," at least of my game.

    
The guardians at the door said "TO ENTER SAY A NUMBER OF MAGICK WORDS." Like everything else, it's an awkwardly-worded clue, but I figured it out. The manual says "the number of Magick is 11," and the door opened when I gave it that password.
    

    
The room beyond indicated that I was in "the Pile Collodon" (not "Collodon's Pile") and a punctuation-free message indicated that I had made it to an exit while my character did a little dance on screen. I could re-enter the dungeon if I wanted, but screw that. This dude's YouTube video shows him reaching all three exits in a 75-minute game, if you care that much.
    

I "won."

     
The game gets a 15 in the GIMLET, scoring 1s and 2s in almost every category (economy gets a 0). It's boring and weird, and I'm afraid I got to the end without ever really "getting" it.

    

 

    

Contemporary reviewers liked it a lot more--it got "best adventure of the year" in Crash! magazine and Computer Gamer gave it the equivalent of 95/100, but between what they produced and how they rated real RPGs (cf. the Amiga magazine reviews of Gold Box titles), I'm pretty well convinced that the Brits of the era simply had no idea what they were talking about.

   

From the manual, a significant waste of effort.

     

Heavy on the Magick was roughly the 6th game from British developer Gargoyle Games, which specialized in ZX Spectrum titles, including the action game Ad Astra (1984) and the adventure games Tir Na Nog (1984) and Marsport (1985). Magick uses an updated version of the adventure games' engines. The creators had greater ambitions for Magick: the manual maps a large game world (called Graumerphy) of multiple islands despite the game taking place completely underground, and it promises future titles called Collodon's Pile, The Tombs of Taro, Paradise Reglossed, and The Trials of Therion as well as a book. To this end, the game allows the saving of Axil as a character independent of the game. Of course, none of this extra material ever happened. Gargoyle closed shop in the early 1990s, and as far as I can tell, developers Roy Carter and Greg Follis left the gaming industry at that point.

Honestly, at some point the Brits must start producing RPGs that make some modicum of sense, communicate in actual English, and don't feel five years behind modern technology. I just don't know when that's going to be. We've got three more in 1986--Mindstone, The Wizard of Tallyron, and Tallyron II. Maybe one of those will finally feel like something recognizable to a fellow westerner.