Game 232: Moonstone: A Hard Days Knight (1991)

    

Moonstone: A Hard Days Knight

Canada

Anderson Gae Studios (developer); Mindscape (publisher)

Released in 1991 for Amiga, 1992 for DOS

Date Started: 19 October 2016
Date Ended: 22 October 2016

Total Hours: 9

Difficulty: Moderate-Hard (3.5/5)

Final Rating: 32

Ranking at Time of Posting: 141/230 (57%)

Raking at Game #453: 304/453 (67%)

Moonstone took me a long time to get up and running, but once I did I had fun with it. It's an interesting fusion of light strategy, light action, and light RPG. A session can easily take 3-6 hours, and there's no saving. There won't be many more such "single session" RPGs on the list.

I ended up vacillating between the DOS and Amiga versions. I'm on an extended road trip, and I left my controller at home (which probably wouldn't have worked anyway), so I needed some way to emulate the joystick-only requirement on the keyboard. After a lot of effort setting up the diagonal controls, the Amiga turned out to be the only platform on which I could fully emulate the joystick. However, I had trouble with video and screen captures with WinUAE. For some reason, every time I try to take video, it just makes a 0KB .avi file but doesn't actually record anything. It also puts huge thick black borders around every static screen capture and saves them as bitmaps (yes, I know I can edit both, but that's a pain). Because so much in this game is rapid and difficult to capture with my usual Amiga screenshot method (Windows 10's clipping tool), I used DOSBox for some screen shots and all video. The drawback with the DOS version was that I couldn't figure out how to emulate diagonal controls on the joystick, so I didn't have my full set of combat actions.
    

How most of my early combats ended.

    
Action-oriented combat is the most important feature of Moonstone. It's relentless, hard, confusing, and increases in difficulty throughout the game. It's the type of mechanic that I absolutely suck at, and I had to spend about 90 minutes reloading a save state at the first combat I tried before I felt I finally had the controls...well, not "mastered," but at least "learned." I soon discovered that every enemy type requires a different approach to combat, so even the lessons of that long practice session didn't carry me through the entire game.
     

"Character creation" is really just selecting a color.

     
On the surface, combat seems easy. When you aren't holding down the "fire" button, the joystick moves you around the screen. When you are holding it down, it executes various attack and defense moves--one for each of the 8 points of the joystick. Sounds easy, but the problem is that the combat options associated with each direction aren't necessarily intuitive, and they also swap sides depending on which way the character is facing. So when you're facing right, upper-left throws daggers, straight up executes a powerful overhand attack, upper-right does an upward thrust, left does a backward thrust, right does a swing, lower-left is a block, straight down is a special block that counters enemies' special attacks, and lower-right is a lunge. Turn and face left, and the top and bottom options are the same but everything else reverses.
    

Battling some spear-wielding jackass.

    
Someone with better dexterity could figure it out, but I spent most of my practice sessions just bumbling around. It didn't get easier until I decided to just focus on movement and one or two attacks (primarily swings and overhead chops) that I could rely on. Enemies rarely stay far enough away to throw daggers and upward thrusts only work in a few places anyway.

Let's back up to the story. "The Druids sent their best knights to Stonehenge," the opening scenes of Moonstone tell us, "so they may be dubbed into the Quest for the MOONSTONE." I'm trying and failing to come up with a sentence of similar length that's even more guaranteed to send historians into fits of apoplexy. "When George Washington signed up to fight Nazis in the Boer War, he called upon every strategy he learned during the Crusades" might fit the bill. But it soon turns out that the "druids" and "Stonehenge" of Moonstone aren't meant to be in Britain. The terrain doesn't even come close to matching, and the closest cities are called "Highwood" and, oddly, "Waterdeep."
     

Visiting "Waterdeep," some distance from the Sword Coast.

    
Every thousand years, the manual tells us, the warriors of the realm have a special opportunity to win a "gift of ultimate power" from the gods. Fighting through "horrible demons of immense power and strength," the warrior must recover a Moonstone from the Valley of the Gods, then race to Stonehenge and present it to Danu, "the great Moon God."

The game supports up to 4 players. If playing alone, as I did, the other 3 players are computer-controlled. Each player explores the map in turn, trying to find 4 keys that will allow him to access the Valley of the Gods at the center of the map. There, if he defeats the Guardian, he'll be rewarded with a Moonstone. He takes the Moonstone back to Stonehenge to win the game.

A secondary goal during the player's exploration is to amass an inventory of magic items, experience, and gold, the latter of which he may use in the two towns to purchase equipment upgrades.
    

I and the other knights explore the map as a dragon swoops around menacingly.

    
Most of the exploration is done at a series of about 20 "lairs" that dot the map. Each has one or more monsters defending a chest, which may contain a combination of gold, magic items, and keys. As the knights acquire these items, the other knights might attack them hoping to acquire their spoils. Each knight starts with 5 lives and loses 1 life for each lost combat. Lives can be restored by paying healers in cities and by sacrificing magic items to Danu at Stonehenge. If you fall below 3 lives, you can get a couple more by returning to your "home village" (your starting location), but you can only do this three times.
    

After conquering one of the "lairs," I find one of the keys to the Valley of the Gods.

    
Playing with other human players would be an entirely different experience than playing with computer-controlled knights. The AI of the computer-controlled characters is pretty stupid. They basically just swarm the human player until you defeat them in enough combats that they lose their lives and die permanently, leaving little graves on the game map. They never return home to heal, nor visit towns to spend their money.

The role-playing elements of Moonstone are light but reasonably satisfying. You get 1 experience point for clearing a lair, 3 experience points for killing the dragon (below), and 3 for defeating the Guardian in the Valley of the Gods. Every time you amass 3 points, you can spend them on 1 point of strength (increases combat damage), endurance (increases movement per round), and constitution (increases hit points). Each of these attributes starts at 1 and might end the game at 3 or 4. Apparently, if you have 4 human players in the game, it only takes 1 experience point to increase an attribute, which again creates a very different game, with some players ending with minimal strength but a huge hit point reservoir and others favoring the opposite.
     

Raising my constitution with some of my experience. I've collected a few inventory items, including a claymore, a suit of chainmail, a healing potion, a Talisman of the Wyrm, and a key.

    
About half the ruins contain gold, which can be spent on healing and equipment upgrades, although the only one that you'd want to buy in a single-player game is "battle armor," since you can loot daggers from slain knights and you ultimately find a sword--the Sword of Sharpness--better than anything the shops sell. Other magic items include a Gem of Seeing, which lets you look in lairs and see what treasures they have, a Ring of Protection, and Talismans of the Wyrm, each of which halves the damage done to the character by the dragon.

There are a handful of delightfully devious items that, again, would only make sense in a game against other human players. Scrolls of Protection, for instance, allow you to avoid other players' attacks against you. A Scroll of Acquisition allows you to steal one item from any other player anywhere on the map. Scrolls of the Wyrm direct the dragon to attack another knight. Adding a twist, each of these items can be cursed. Thus, a player who accidentally reads a cursed Scroll of Protection will find that all the battle controls are backwards, and a cursed Scroll of the Wyrm naturally has the dragon attack the player who uses it.
  

In Waterdeep, you can supposedly donate your gold to Mythral the Mystic for a "chance" to increase your attributes. There's also a chance that visiting him will lower your attributes. I don't know what was going on with my game, but every time I visited Mythral, no matter how much I donated, my stats went down.
     

This cost me 100 gold pieces.

    
The game has a few other twists. After about half a dozen turns, a dragon appears and starts circling the map. If he passes over any knight, there's a chance he'll attack. In a game with other players, I'm not sure if I'd want the dragon attack or not. Chances of victory are low, but you do get 3 experience points and several magic items. The dragon breathes fire in combat, and it took me a long time to realize that the key to defeating him is to get under his head, so his fire goes over yours, and swipe at his neck from a close position.
      

     
There's also a mage's tower in the upper-right quadrant where the wizard Math might give you a magic item, or some gold, or an attribute increase, or might turn you into a toad for a few rounds.
    

One of the few special locations in the game.

     
But back to combat. The computer-controlled knights are pretty pathetic, so for a single player, the biggest challenge is figuring out how to defeat the other monsters in the game. Each has a different approach to regular attacks and special attacks. As a general strategy, darting north or south on the combat map, then executing an attack just in time for your opponent to walk into it, then darting away, works against almost everyone but takes a lot of patience.

Most lairs generally have more than one enemy. Towards the end, you might face upwards of a dozen. About mid-way through the game, they start attacking you 2 or 3 at a time, too. I don't know if the increased difficulty and numbers are based on how many lairs you've already cleared or on increases in your attributes, but either way the endgame combats are much, much harder.

The manual lists 5 monster types--troggs, ratmen, mudmen, baloks, and trolls--but I swear I faced more than that, and I can't quite reconcile any of the creatures on the screen with the descriptions in the manual. "Mudmen" are the most obvious--they're tall bastards who swing tree branches at you and have a much greater reach than you do, making it hard to hit them first.
     

Is this a trogg, a balok, or a troll? No idea.

     
But there are some undead-looking things that I can't match with any of the descriptions. As you kill one, a new one immediately comes erupting from the ground and kills you in one hit if you don't dart out of the way.
     

Does this look like anything in that list of foes?

    
In the upper-left quadrant, there are some boar-like creatures that gallop back and forth across the combat screen. You have to make a quick attack the moment you see them at the edge of the screen, or they'll bowl you over before your strike finishes executing. Then there are these spearmen, who might make my "most annoying enemies" list in a more consequential game. Their reach is far longer than yours, but they dart too quickly to catch them with daggers. If you face one on either side, they can catch you in a neverending succession of rapid thrusts, and you have no choice but to watch and die.
     

Two spear dudes skewer me.

    
One highlight of combat, particularly for the 1991 player, is the "gore" setting, which ensures that every character death is accompanied by copious on-screen blood loss, dismemberment, and decapitation. Knights in combat always execute a decapitating coup de grâce on their defeated challengers. Almost every review or summary of the game mentions this aspect, but honestly it's pretty tame compared to what we're accustomed to in 2016.
     

My character is beheaded by another knight.

    
A few other notes:

• The game mentions wandering "Black Knights" that you have to watch for, but I never encountered any, or didn't know what they were when I did.

• This is the first game I can remember to offer hints on loading screens.

    

     

• There's a gambling game in cities, but I lost every time I played.

     

It's well-animated, anyway.

    

• Each knight can visit each "lair" only once, after which it disappears from the map. Sometimes, you fight an exhausting battle at a lair only to find that another knight has already been there and claimed the treasure.

• The game features nice animation in the opening and closing screens. But if you can perceive a difference between the Amiga and DOS versions of these screens, I think you're making it up.

• DOSBox either had problems emulating the sound, or the sound for the DOS version was just awful. But I didn't really experience the Amiga sound because I was mostly playing the game during a time when I had people around me and I was supposed to be working, so I had the sound off.

• Technically, I guess there are multiple "Moonstones" that you can obtain in the Valley of the Gods, and you need to wait until yours corresponds with the right phase of the moon (shown between turns) before you enter Stonehenge to win the game. In a multi-player game, this would give other players a chance to defeat your character while you wait. In a single-player game, everything else on the map is probably dead by then, so you just end up passing a few turns until the moon aligns.

   

If I have the "new moon" Moonstone, I have a lot of waiting to do.

   
It took me about 5 false starts to finally win the game, even against the pathetic computer AI. Once I had the four keys, I went to the Valley of the Gods, where the Guardian--a whirling genie-like creature, was probably the easiest enemy in the game. (At that point, I had been used to fighting 3 creatures at once and 15 creatures total.)

    

It killed me here, but only because I stopped to take a screenshot.

     

After defeating the Guardian, I returned to Stonehenge with the Moonstone and got the endgame. "You have completed the quest," the end titles informed me, before taking me to the "ceremony of the Moonstone." In said ceremony, my warrior stood triumphant on a platform in the middle of Stonehenge while scantily-clad girls danced around him.

     

      

Then a portal opened up in the heavens...

    

    

...and my knight was sucked up into the night sky to become a constellation. I'm not sure how much of a "reward" that is. But the game deserves credit for a series of victory screens more interesting and complex than the typical RPG that takes dozens of hours.

    

I suspect this would actually kind of suck.

        

As I said, I had fun with the game once I got the hang of combat. The process of exploring the ruins and finding items is satisfying and relatively quick, and character improvements from both equipment and attributes is immediately noticeable in combat. (Without the extra enemies towards the end, the game would be far too easy.) Let's see how it does on a GIMLET:

    

• 2 points for a fairly minimal game world.

• 3 points for character creation and development. Creation is nothing special--you just select a name and a color--but as above, development is swift and satisfying.

• 2 points for a couple of NPCs who help you out, but there's no interaction.

    

This guy just barely qualifies as an NPC.

     

• 3 points for foes that act differently depending on type, forcing you to adapt. Alas, no role-playing encounters, but it's not that sort of game.

• 3 points for an action-oriented combat that nonetheless makes you think and plan.

    

A "mudman" waits for me to recover.

     

• 3 points for a decent set of equipment.

     

Purchasing items in town.

      

• 4 points for an economy that never loses value (you always need to heal, if nothing else)

• 2 points for a main quest.

     

The game's final screen.

   

• 4 points for graphics, sound, and interface. The graphics are fun, and what I heard of the sound in the Amiga version was serviceable, but I have no patience for joystick-only interfaces.

• 6 points for gameplay. The game is meant to be replayed, and offers a slightly different game depending on what knight you choose (each knight has a different starting area). It's brisk and fun, and offers a satisfying challenge in its difficulty.

That gives us a final score of 32, which isn't too bad, particularly given that it's not really a classic RPG. Morever, it's the first British game to break the "weirdness" barrier that I talked about in my entry on Heavy on the Magick--although we have to note that the Brits still don't show any signs of understanding classic RPG conventions. [Ed. And as we learned in the comments, the game isn't British but rather Canadian.]

    

At least the tagline is accurate.

    

I had a feeling that our friends at the perpetually annoying Amiga Power would love this one. After all, it has virtually no RPG elements and spends nearly its entire wad on graphics and sound. So I was surprised to see reviewer Neil West rating it only a 73/100, basically saying that its not quite enough of an action game and not quite enough of an RPG. Overall, Moonstone was pretty controversial among reviewers, with ratings from a low of 48 (Power Play) to a high of 100 (Top Secret). American magazines tended to overlook this one.
    

An interview on a fan site credits Todd Prescott with the game's concept. He indicates he was inspired by "a combination of D&D and the board games Talisman and The Dark Tower." He approached a colleague, Rob Anderson, and Anderson handled most of the programming. For combat, the pair was heavily influenced by the action game Barbarian (1987). Prescott indicates that the game never had a U.S. release because Toys R Us thought it was too violent. The limited release unfortunately sank plans for a Moonstone 2. This was Prescott's only game; Anderson went on to a longer career at Mindscape, Electronic Arts, and Sega (among others), and currently lists himself as an independent video game developer. None are RPGs, so we won't be encountering him again.

Moonstone seems to have a lot of retro-fan love these days, and I understand why. It's not going to be part of my soul or anything, but it was a fun way to kill a couple of days in a hotel room. Let's see if the same can be said of another Mindscape title, Knightmare.

****

Alas, Fer & Flamme continues to give me trouble. A kind commenter sent along the French manual, which allowed me to advance through character creation. The problem is, when I get to the end of the creation process, the game insists on saving the party to disk. I insert a blank disk, give the party a name, and hit the "$" key as prompted, and then get this:

    

     

Unless there's an obvious workaround I'm missing, this game might not be playable after all.