Game 234: Knightmare (1991)

       

Knightmare

United Kingdom

Mindscape (developer and publisher)

Released in 1991 for Amiga and Atari ST
Date Started: 6 November 2016

    
We've seen it happen before and we'll see it again: A TV or film franchise is popular. Someone thinks it would make a good computer game. But time is of the essence--you have to catch fads while they're hot--so there probably isn't a lot of time to build an appropriate game engine from the ground up. A developer is contracted with a strict deadline. "Hey, why don't we re-use the Whatever engine that was so successful in Our Last Game?" they say. Boom. Three months later, you're playing Friends: The Official Game, which inexplicably has the six title characters repelling a demonic invasion of New York in the DOOM engine. ("Could you be any more dead?!" Chandler says every time he takes down a boss. It's funny the first time.)

Thus, when I first heard that Knightmare was both a) based on a British television show and b) was developed by Antony Crowther using his Captive engine, I was sure we had another such situation on our hands. I knew nothing about the plot of the TV show: I just couldn't imagine how it could possibly be served in the kind of plot-limited, Dungeon Master-inspired first-person gameplay featured in Captive.

Little did I realize that this is a rare case of the match-up making perfect sense. The original show takes place in a first-person view (for one player) and a quasi-first-person view for the rest. The Dungeon Master-inspired Captive engine, which already allows for a variety of navigation puzzles, probably works better than anything else available in 1991 to offer a combination of role-playing and puzzle-solving.

Having watched a few episodes of Knightmare (1987-1994) now, I first can't believe I'd never heard of the show before. It's a delightfully bizarre cross between a reality/contest show, a virtual reality experience, and live-action role playing. You have to watch it to do it justice, but the basic theme is that a team of 4 kids navigates a part-constructed, part-virtual reality dungeon, solves puzzles, slays monsters, casts spells, and whatnot, hoping to find a treasure. A host, named "Treguard of Dunshelm," sets up and moderates each episode, and other recurring "NPCs" occasionally appear to offer hints or challenge the players. Only one member of the team actually "navigates" the dungeon, wearing a "helmet" that restricts his or her view. The rest observe his or her progress and offer advice and encouragement. The quests are extremely hard, and in the eight-year history of the show, only eight teams won the game. 

   

A player tries to navigate around a cobra while his team members give him instructions on where to walk.

      

(As an aside, the kids on the show crack me up. I watched three episodes from different seasons, and I don't think a single one of them smiled or laughed the entire time. They were all deadly serious and somber, even when just stating their names and the towns they came from.)

The game manual similarly presents the party as composed of four English youths who have been camping and hiking all summer, hoping to find the way to Treguard's realm. Eventually, they come upon a portal that takes them to Dunshelm, where they are given a quest to retrieve four items--shield, sword, cup, and crown--from the castle's dungeons. Much as in Chaos Strikes Back, each item lies along a particular path with puzzles appropriate to one of the game's classes. Once the party has assembled all the items, they will use them to challenge Lord Fear and "banish him from this earth forever."
    

The introductory screens invite the player to a castle.

    

In creating a party of four characters, you choose one of 8 "breeds"--man, woman, goblin, ogre, ghoul, elf, troll, and insectole--and one of 6 classes--adventurer, gladiator, samurai, wizard, priest, and genie. Of the advantages and disadvantages of these breeds and classes, the manual tells you precisely nothing, nor does it attempt to reconcile such races with the backstory. You assign a name and title to each character, then select sex, breed, class, and dominant hand.
   

Character creation.

    
I went with a male adventurer, female samurai, an elf wizard, and an insectole priest. The game began!

I played Captive over two years ago (starting here) and left the impression that I didn't like it. It was the sort of game that's confusing on your first trip, and it wasn't until after I'd finished playing that I realized I liked it better than I thought and actually found myself missing it a bit, so I didn't approach this one with any kind of dread. The interface has been simplified--there are no "monitors" across the top of the screen, among other things--and this coupled with the medieval setting actually feels a bit more like Dungeon Master than the original Captive. The engine has been modified to allow more puzzles, and my understanding is the levels are all created by hand instead of procedurally-generated as in Captive. Even in the first area, it was clear that Knightmare allows more things in the environment than Captive.
   

Yes, I know some of you think it makes perfect sense that you take damage from walking into a bush. We'll never agree on this issue.

     
Unfortunately, just as in Captive, the party takes damage from walking into things, and there are more things in Knightmare's environment (like small bushes) that it looks like you ought to be able to move through. These bushes, I soon found, are used to create mazes in the outdoor areas.

Combat is much the same: each character has two hands and can hold a variety of weapons and magic wands or staves in those hands. Right-clicking activates the attack or item use. When you first find an item, the first time you right-click, the game asks what action you want to execute. It asks this even if there's only one possible action. You want to do this right away and not have the pop-up menu show up in combat. Annoyingly, every time you toss a throwing weapon, the action re-sets, so you have to specify it again every time you pick up and re-equip the weapons. As if picking up all your throwing weapons post-combat wasn't annoying enough.
    

The party fights some kind of troll thing with its fists after exhausting its balls.

    
The characters start the game with no equipment. The opening area was small and offered only a couple of faces in magic mirrors (or something), one of which said "Welcome to your knightmare" and the other said "return the crown here." Through a nearby portal, I found a cubbyhole with three balls that work like the superballs of Captive. Later, strewn across the ground, I found various items of "armor"--shirts, shorts, and sandals. This makes me wonder what my characters were wearing, if anything, when they went exploring in the first place.
     

My character assembles a basic outfit.

    
The opening area consisted of three small rectangles, 6-10 squares wide and 6-7 squares tall. They were connected by a track with a cart that moves automatically. I couldn't walk on the track itself and I took damage when I tried (was I hitting the third rail?). Exploring these areas meant jumping off the cart at strategic times in it's rapid back-and-forth movement.

There was one enemy in the area, some kind of troll thing. Just as in Captive, it's satisfying when enemies finally die in a puff of blood.

"Take this shortcut to the forest" a floating head said next to a portal. This led me to a much larger map, about 25 x 25. "Your quest starts here," a nearby head announced. At first, I was hemmed in by hedges, but a switch on a wall opened one of the hedge squares. A "twig" found near the entrance served as a crude weapon.
    

The forest. You start in the bottom-center.

    
The larger area was crawling with little gnomish creatures, flying tree heads, and little rabbits, the latter of which seemed non-hostile. As I explored, I found a couple of penknives to serve as better weapons.

Four exits from this area were blocked by living trees. After they thoroughly whomped me in combat (that I started), I realized that they're not even hostile. If you click on them, they talk. Lesson learned--don't just attack every creature on the screen. Each tree wanted something. "Have you seen my cup?" one asked. Another wanted his weapon, a third his "cover." None of these corresponded with items that I'd found.
    

      
The fourth said he was missing his "child." I tossed the twig at him and the tree disappeared, leaving a magic wand in his place. His disappearance unblocked a path to a portal. A nearby head announced that this was "Quest One, the Shield of Justice." I assume that on this quest path I'll find an object to give to the tree blocking Quest Two.
    

     
In the northeast corner of the map, I found an iron key. I nearly missed it; my colorblindness hurts me a bit in games with small items on top of such detailed features. Anyway, the key opens a door in the northwest corner, behind which three ogre-like creatures are lurking. They killed my party in a hot minute. I reloaded and tried combat-waltzing them, but one mistake led to the death of a character in one blow. I guess I'll save them for later.
   

I suppose this gate was probably closed for a reason.

     
When party members die, incidentally, their--yuck--hearts are left behind. I don't yet know if there's any way to raise them.
    

A gnome manages to kill two characters while I thought "pause" was active.

     
The manual for Knightmare is unforgivably sparse. In addition to not covering anything about races and classes, healing and resurrection, it doesn't indicate if there's any downside to resting or standing around (both of which, unlike in Captive, heal damage). It's very thin on how the magic and character development system work. Rather than offer skills and experience points as in Captive, the game seems to copy Dungeon Master by assigning skill levels to the various character classes and by leveling you up based on how you use those skills. Various weapons, wands, and staves are aspected to particular character classes.

   

My lead character has an adventurer and a gladiator level.

    

Finally, I'll note that after playing Fate, with its rich background sounds, Knightmare is a bit eerie in its silence. A jaunty tune based on the TV show theme plays when you first start the game, and there are sounds to accompany combat and accidentally walking into walls, but otherwise nothing. There won't be many more games that are so quiet during exploration.

    

The Quest One portal takes me into a more standard dungeon-looking terrain, and I suspect the puzzles there are going to get harder, so I'll leave off for now. It's not bad so far, but I wish I wasn't playing and mapping two large, first-person Amiga games at the same time.

Time so far: 3 hours