Game 260: Hera (1987)

What passes for a title screen.

     

I had intended to sacrifice this one to the "notability" guideline in Rule #4, but as I started playing, I realized the flaw inherent in that rule. Cataloguing the obscure is the very reason for this blog's existence. If the game had won an award or had a bunch of fan pages, everyone would have known about it. Someone who writes better than me, like Jimmy Maher, would have already covered it. Perhaps the fact that this game's name has somehow survived for 30 years is "notability" enough. And doesn't the world need to know about the only Ultima clone with an on-screen temperature gauge? I think it does.

So here we are with Jeff Hendrix's Hera, which he started writing in 1985, when he was 18 and living in Lakewood, Colorado. The title screen, such as it is, mentions that it was available through the "shareware distribution system," and the all-caps means I can't tell if that's supposed to be a generic system or a specific system. He asked $10 for registration, or $15 for registration plus documentation. Later, he updated the game for DOS as Hera: Sword of Rhin (1995), but the only copies of that version that still exist seem to be demos.

     

The land of Hera, per the in-game magic map. Black is water.

     

Hera is largely a clone of Ultima II with perhaps a little Ultima III influence. It has many of the same keyboard commands, such as (A)ttack, (B)oard, (E)nter, and (T)alk. Combat is just "attack" and a direction. You have the same meters: hit points, food, experience, and gold. There are doors to unlock with keys, chests to open, and expensive items that generate area maps. Castles and towns have NPCs and guards, most of who offer one-line dialogues. If you attack them, they'll swarm you, but if you leave town and return, everything is reset and everyone is cool again. We've been here a dozen times before.

     

Combat consists mostly of you missing while the enemy hacks away your hit points.

      

And yet, Hendrix did just enough that was original to keep me interested, starting with the thermometer. As you explore, you run into tracts of desert and frozen tundra. Moving through or staying in their squares moves your the meter up and down respectively. If it goes above or falls below indicated thresholds, you die. You have to look for "normal" squares within the extreme-temperature areas to rest and get back to normal. In at least one area, to survive a long trip through blizzard conditions, you have to warm up to near-death in a desert square first, so your meter has that much further to fall.

      

Hera is the first game in my chronology in which it is possible to freeze to death in a blizzard.

     

There is no backstory offered in the game itself, although by talking with NPCs, you eventually piece together that the land is called Hera and it's in the grip of an evil lord named Zarebae. To kill him, you must find the Sword of Rhin and the magic crystal that powers it, then confront Zarebae in his skull-shaped fortress in the sea. There's some business about Zarebae having a magic gem that must be destroyed, which sounds passingly like Mondain and his gem in the original Ultima.

     

Some intelligence about Zarebae from an NPC.

      

Players can choose between human, elf, dwarf, and halfling races and fighter, ranger, and thief classes, with attendant effects on the only two attributes: strength and agility. (There is no magic system in the game.) I played a human ranger.

     

The brief character creation process.

      

The game starts on top of the town of Helwan (named after an Egyptian city), two squares across the bay from a castle, although it takes a long time to navigate to that castle via the twisty landscape.

     

As the game begins, I'm already standing on a town.

     

Towns have the typical services: weapons, armor, food, pubs, and healing. The types of weapons you can use and armor you can wear are governed by your agility and strength, respectively.

     

It turns out that with my starting agility, I can only wield a dagger or an axe.

      

There are several NPCs in each town, but Hendrix programmed their dialogue to appear in a window, so they're capable of a lot more text than the typical Ultima clone. In another innovation, many of them will pause after their pre-programmed lines to accept single-letter questions from the player. For instance, a guard in the town of Rara Avis asks "What do you want?," and only by speaking with another NPC do you know to type "K" to ask him about "keys." It's not quite the dialogue options of Ultima IV, but it gets us a step closer.

      

A bartender suggests a "keyletter" to use on another NPC.

      

Each city has one or more locked doors that require keys. But in another disruption of expectations, there are actually four types of keys in the game: regular keys, jail keys, boat keys, and submarine keys, each opening a different set of doors. Regular keys work on the majority of doors, but you need jail keys (obtained from the guard mentioned above) to open doors to the city jails and talk with the NPCs there, and boat and submarine keys get you into special areas where you can steal those forms of transportation.

     

This NPC has a good reason to not want to be associated with me.

     

At the beginning of the game, you can walk to three cities--Helwan, Rara Avis, and Capaal (from one of the Shannara books)--one castle, a nomad camp that actually moves around the map, and a ghost town called Irray. For the first few hours, it's tough to survive. Your paltry weapons and armor aren't much use against the land's denizens, and you rarely make enough money from a combat to replenish the hit points that you lose. You have to spend almost every cent on hit points, so it's a struggle to afford keys and equipment.

A saving grace comes when you find a small treasure chamber in the southern castle. It opens with a normal key, which costs 8 gold pieces at the guild shop in Capaal. The chamber holds between 30 and 60 gold pieces depending on luck. Since the chests reset every time you leave the castle, you can buy a bunch of keys, enter, pillage the chests, leave, return, and repeat. The walk from the entrance to the chests and back again makes this a somewhat boring option, but without it, you probably wouldn't survive until the next stage.

      

Looting the treasury right next to the queen.

     

As in Ultima III (but not Ultima II), the king (King Patrick, after Hendrix's middle name) is in charge of your character development, giving you one point of agility for every 100 experience points you earn. I suspect the king in the other castle (which is surrounded by mountains) does the same thing for strength. 

     

This is more than Lord British did for me in the analogous game.

     

The starting landscape offers tantalizing glimpses of cities and dungeons in the midst of mountains and across the seas. Most of the NPCs in Helwan talk about boats, so a clear step on your quest is to acquire one. You can steal them in an area behind a door in Helwan, but the door is locked with the "boat key," and you have to piece together a series of clues and solve a modestly-difficult but original puzzle to find it.

      

How will I ever get in there?

     

An NPC in Helwan says, "Find Steve, for he knows of the key." When you find Steve, he says, "Rumor has it that it is on an island." "Look for islands in desolate places," a sailor contributes. And in such places, "water may be your only hope!" says a man named Logan. 

I spent a long time looking for both literal and metaphorical islands (e.g., lush patches in the middle of desert). The problem is, you can't reach islands without a boat in the first place. Even if you do, there's no "search" command, only "get," so you really need to be able to see the key from afar.

Eventually, I realized that the most desolate place was probably the ruined ghost city of Irray, where all the undead NPCs just moan at you. Sure enough, a map showed me an island in the northeast. There was no way to cross to it, though. A ship sat maddeningly close by, and I could board it, but it was landlocked by a single square.

      

How do I get one of these boats into that water?

     

"Water may be your only hope," Logan had said. I tried crossing each square of water but was rebuffed. Incidentally, the island is surrounded by swamp squares, which are always dangerous in Ultima clones. In regular Ultima, they poison you. In Gates of Delirium, they directly damaged you. In this one, some kind of tentacle erupts from them and whacks you, then disappears before you can respond.

Anyway, I wasn't getting anywhere with the puzzle. But in further exploration of Irray, I found a locked door with a water square behind it. I couldn't see how it could help, but when I opened the door, the water followed me! I led it back to the ship, messed around until it placed itself in the square between the ship and the lake, boarded the ship, and sailed across my new water friend. Tell me you've ever seen that type of puzzle in an Ultima clone.

     

The boat is no longer landlocked.

      

The island in the middle of the swamp held the boat key, and an NPC standing next to it said, "All of Hera is now open to you. Be careful."

      

That is one enormous key.

       

I took the boat key back to Helwan, opened the door to the boat yard, and stole the boat. Based on the NPC's statement, I expected it to open a lot of new locations, but most of the extra dungeons and castles I had seen from the mainland are still blocked by mountains. It really only opened the way to one new place, an island town called Paranor (another Shannara reference).
      

The interior of Paranor.

     

More important, though, the cannons offer a powerful way to dispose of wandering enemies, and like in Ultima II (but unlike Ultima III), killing them with cannons still awards you experience and gold. The enemies grew more powerful as my experience increased. You can't see their names, but based on icons, they include things like thieves, orcs, cyclopes, wizards, and demons. On the water, you face mermen and whales. 

    

I finish off one enemy with my cannons and prepare to take on another.

     

In Paranor, most of the NPC discussion had to do with bypassing electric walls. I had encountered one guarding some treasure chests in the castle; crossing the wall means instant death. One section of Paranor was walled off by the force fields. An NPC told me that the princess knows of a "special suit" that allows safe travel through the fields.

      

An "electric wall" fences off a section of this town.

     

The princess was back in the castle, sequestered in her chambers because, as Queen Linda said, she is "very mischievous." To get to her, I had to open an unlocked door, which was no problem, but I also had to get past a fixed guard. You can't kill guards in this game--at least, not with the weapons I'm capable of wielding--so the only option is to attack them and force them to leave their posts to chase you. With that method, the guard at my heels, I was able to get into the princess's chamber and speak to her.

She didn't just know where the special suit was--she had it. Thus, I couldn't just reload after getting the intelligence. I had to escape the castle with dozens of guards dogging me. My health went from over 1,500 to about 200 before I escaped, and it took me a couple of reloads to avoid getting boxed in by multiple guards.

    

Notice the guards already lining up to ruin my day.

     

Back in Paramor, I used the suit to cross the electric walls and found an NPC guarding something called a "sub key." The entire time, I'd been expecting to find some way to climb mountains, like a grappling hook. But I realize now that all of the places surrounded by mountains have a single water square next to them, which means that the real solution is probably to board a submarine and sail it beneath some of the land squares. That's an original element.

      

I had to cross some "hot" squares to reach him, too.

     

Unfortunately, this is where I'm stuck. I suspect the submarine is in Rara Avis--it's the only other city with a bay. There's a door that opens the way to the bay, and a selection of landlocked ships, but none of them are subs. I think the sub is actually in the middle of the bay, but I have no way to get a boat into the city.

      

I'm sure the endgame is going to be here. I just have to duck beneath that square of land.

      

Based on NPC clues, I suspect the answer has something to do with letting a pirate steal my boat and sail it into the bay through a secret mechanism, then killing him and taking it back. "Pirates are the only ones who can steal a boat and get away with it," a jailed NPC offers, echoed by an imprisoned pirate who confesses to a compulsion to steal boats. "I hear only pirates have been able to sail into the cove. The reason? Nobody knows," says the bartender at Rara Avis.

     

This pirate's name is Becky.

      

The one time I found a pirate outside, he did indeed steal my boat--but he just sailed away. I've been trying to find one closer to Rara Avis, but no matter how long I wait, none appears. I'm not sure the specific mechanism by which this would work anyway. Since towns just reset when you leave and return, it's hard to imagine entering Rara Avis and finding a pirate in the cove with my stolen boat. There's got to be something I'm missing.

I've written to Mr. Hendrix for help and for more information about the game and its remake. Obviously, I'll welcome hints here from anyone who has played the game. Either way, we'll wrap things up in a second entry later this week.

Time so far: 5 hours