Heimdall: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

I think I've rather done my part.

     

Heimdall

United Kingdom

The 8th Day (developer); Core Design (U.K. publisher); Virgin (U.S. publisher)

Released in 1991 for Amiga; 1992 for Atari ST and DOS; 1993 for Acorn; 1994 for Sega CD

Date Started:  1 September 2017
Date Ended: 4 September 2017

Total Hours: 13

Difficulty: Easy (2/5)

Final Rating: 26

Ranking at Time of Posting: 116/263 (44%)

Heimdall got neither better nor much harder. The three segments of the game were exactly the same: sail from island to island, fight easy enemies, replenish hit points with scrolls and food, juggle inventory, solve a series of inventory puzzles, and retrieve one of the three stolen weapons.

Three of my six party members never left the boat and thus never leveled up. Of the three that actually adventured, Heimdall fought 95% of the combats and completed 90% of the actions. Except for their inventory slots, the other party members were essentially useless.

My three lead characters ended at Level 7, Heimdall with all his attributes at or near 99, thanks to both leveling and potions. I frankly think he could have completed the game even if he'd never leveled up. 

Combats also never got harder--in fact, the toughest enemies were mostly on the first map. Although the effects of some of the spell scrolls were potent, like "Giant's Bane," "Hand of Loki" and "Wrath of Odin," they were mostly unnecessary, as Heimdall did as much damage with his weapon. Indeed, the very act of switching from melee attacks to spells creates a gap of a few seconds in which they enemy is likely to damage Heimdall, making it wiser to stick to attacks. I realized late in the game that you can also throw daggers at opponents, but they do less damage than regular melee attacks and thus take longer.
      

I swing my "Storm Blade" at an ogre or hobgoblin or something. Note that I could also use my fist, a silver dagger, or "Fire" and "Ice" scrolls.

      
"Resurrection" scrolls were so plentiful on the second and third map that I ended up dropping most of them. I used one, once, after I died taking a screen shot. Otherwise, there was plenty of food and "energy" scrolls to keep Heimdall at full strength.

In the middle of the second map, I started getting this message when sailing between islands:
      

     
I don't think the first map did, but the second and third required each character to have a ration of food between islands; otherwise, they lost hit points during travel, to a minimum of 10. (Hunger never killed them.) Again, this really didn't pose any problems. Half the time, Heimdall was capable of killing enemies even if at near-death himself; the other half, we found scrolls and food immediately upon entering a new island and were able to restore his hit points.

It's not even really worth recounting the inventory puzzles. There were times I reached a particular island too soon and had to wait until I found a particular item or scroll on a different island to complete it.
     

Looks like I'll have to come back with a "Water" scroll.

      
I suppose the most interesting series of puzzles was on the second map, where I had to find three items--an apple, a necklace, and dragons' eggs--to give to the three muses. But half an hour after winning the game, I can't honestly remember what they gave me that was so important.
     

One of the muses thanks me. The artwork for the muses seems to have a slightly different (less comic) style than the rest of the game.

    
I had to look up a hint on the final map. It wasn't clear to me that the way to find the third of three silver rings was to use a pouch of pepper to get the masthead on a ship to sneeze, thus ejecting its own ring. I probably would have eventually figured it out through trial and error, but I was impatient for the game to be over.
      

The scene, post-sneeze.

     
I also made one puzzle a lot harder for myself by failing to realize that using runestones briefly showed an invisible path over an area of water. I just felt my way across.
     

I could have accomplished this level much faster, but how would you guess that something called a "runestone" would reveal hidden paths across water?

     
The maps in the book indicate that the first session takes place on Midgard (Earth), the second on Utgard (the land of giants), and the third in Asgard (the land of gods), contradicting the backstory that had Loki bringing all the weapons to Midgard. Anyway, the scenarios aren't different enough to truly make you feel that you're in different worlds, although the second does have a memorable moment when you realize that you're walking on the oversized bookcase of a giant. The combat that follows, however, plays out like a regular fight with no indication that it's more difficult because your opponent is 20 feet tall.
     

Something seems intimidating about these walls...

But the giant is just a regular foe.

      
The third map was oddly the shortest and easiest of all of them. It culminates when Heimdall brings three silver rings to a statue of Odin, which holds the Sword of Odin. One would think that Loki, in "hiding" the three weapons, might have come up with a better idea than to give the Sword of Odin to a sentient statue of Odin, but who am I to question the machinations of the divine?
      

Putting the silver rings in place so I can activate the statue of Odin (offscreen).

     
In any event, the statue gave me the sword, and I set sail for the final island. The brief endgame animation shows Heimdall crossing a bridge. Then, for some reason, his body disappears and his disembodied head floats over the bridge for a few seconds, and then you get the final screen at the top of this entry.
     

Is this supposed to depict Heimdall taking his place as guardian of the bifrost? That's not a very rainbow-y bridge.

      
In the end, Heimdall was an attractive but empty game with poor RPG mechanics, probably destined for the high 20s on the GIMLET. Let's see:
      

• 2 points for the game world. I wish I could praise it for the Norse theme, but it hardly makes use of it. None of the little inventory quests that Heimdall has to solve draw from Norse mythology, and the backstory isn't really referenced during the game. What's there is mostly a little goofy, starting with naming the main character "Heimdall" in the first place, since his story has nothing to do with the god's official bio.

     

I guess this game map is supposed to be Asgard, but it's just a bunch of islands like the previous two maps. It's not even clear how I'm transitioning from one world to the next.

     

• 2 points for character creation and development. There is no creation. There are a couple of methods of development (increasing attributes), but it doesn't have a measurable effect on the game. 83% of the party members don't matter since Heimdall is capable of achieving all tasks.

      

My character levels and attributes towards the end of the game.

     

• 1 point for NPC interaction. "NPCs" are occasional characters who you give things to let you pass. You don't really learn anything about the world from them.

• 4 points for encounters and foes. There are maybe 8 different enemy types in the game, some harder than others, but you don't really adopt different strategies against them. Other "encounters" are mostly about solving inventory puzzles, which the game at least does competently, if not memorably.

      

Despite the game's rhetoric, the sorcerer wasn't notably hard.

     

• 2 points for magic and combat. "Magic" is just the use of spell scrolls. Combat only has a few options and no real tactics.

• 4 points for equipment. You find a series of weapon upgrades throughout the game. There is no armor and no wearable items. Almost everything else that isn't a puzzle item is a spell scroll or something to sell. I give the game credit for a nice text description of each item, making it clear (among other things) which weapons are the best. But managing inventory with limited slots was a pain, and it was too hard to tell when I could safely get rid of something. I ended the game with about 20 excess keys, plus a handful of charms, circlets, and rings that I guess were supposed to be sold.

      

In-game textual descriptions of items are still rare in the era, so I have to applaud any game that includes them.

      

• 2 points for the economy. The game might as well have not had one. Except for a single potion and some occasional food, there's hardly anything useful to buy, and stores are too few and far between to be convenient anyway.

• 2 points for a main quest with no branches, options, or alternatives.

     

A step on the main quest.

     

• 4 points for graphics, sound, and interface. It gets all of those for reasonably good graphics and competent sound effects. The interface is clunky and joyless throughout. Those who appreciate music more than I do might add a couple points for the rock soundtrack.

     

The game's graphical vignettes are a definite strength. It just needed better RPG mechanics.

      

• 3 points for gameplay. Though there would be no reason to replay it, and it's far too easy, it at least ends quickly and offers some minor nonlinearity in the order you explore the islands.

That gives us a final score of 26 to which I will begrudgingly add 2 points for the entertaining minigames during the introduction. These were more interesting than anything else in the game.
      

      
Probably because of delayed distribution in the U.S., Computer Gaming World didn't get around to reviewing it until January 1993. The title of the review, by Allen Greenberg, is "The God's Namesake Must Be Crazy: Virgin's Heimdall." I call this out because CGW is attributing the game to it's U.S. distributor rather than its developer (The 8th Day) or the U.K. publisher (Core Design) that presumably had some input into its creation. I haven't paid enough attention to similar titles to know if this was common practice, ignorance on CGW's part in this one case, or evidence of a systematic confusion between developer, publisher, and foreign distributor. I was similarly confused myself earlier in my career, but I'm not a for-profit game magazine that should know better.

Greenberg agrees with me on the game's quality. He notes that whatever controller you use, it's hard to keep Heimdall on track, especially when around the copious pits. He remarks that most of the "party" is useless and lambasts the limited number of inventory slots. He did seem to find the combat "entertaining," which I suppose depends upon  your basis of comparison. He concludes the review with a paragraph I could have easily written myself:

       
A player who has never before experienced a computer role-playing game may find some enjoyable hours with Heimdall. While the program is by no means a flawed or unplayable product, its uninspiring appearance and simple gameplay will fail to earn it a place alongside the more sophisticated role-playing games which are now popular.

           
For a more amusing-but-baffling set of opinions, we must turn (as we always do) to British Amiga magazines of the period, which thought that the Gold Box titles were the worst games ever, but that Heimdall was--this from Daniel Whitehead's January 1992 Amiga Computing review--"a vast throbbing epic of a game." Whitehead wastes several paragraphs lamenting how far the Scandinavians fell between the Vikings and "Abba [sic] and Roxette." "Did some horrendous twist appear in the DNA of the Norse warriors?," he honestly questions before calling Heimdall "a game of truly trouser-rending magnitude." Mr. Whitehead went on to a long and respected career as a game journalist, and I have to wonder if on sleepless nights, he ever recalls the fact that he once deemed that a minor title from a short-lived developer was so good that it gave him an erection so massive that it threatened to damage his trousers.

The December 1991 Amiga Action agreed in spirit with a 91% rating, although with no particular language that I can poke fun at. It does start with a few paragraphs about the Vikings, making me wonder if any of these players realized that, after the backstory, the game isn't really in any way "about" Norse mythology. Any kind of framing story could have wrapped around these dungeon walls.
     

This is just a random shot of a "Detect Traps" scroll making some pit traps visible.

    
I read several other positive reviews from CU Amiga (96%), The One for Amiga Games (92%), and Zero (92%), and the common theme, as I noted in my first entry on this game, is a stunning lack of awareness about anything happening in the RPG market outside the U.K.--where nothing much at all was happening. The CU Amiga ends by calling it "the most ground-breaking game since Ultimate released Knight Lore and Epyx completed work on Impossible Mission and Pitstop II," an utterly baffling set of comparisons. But these are magazines that managed to review Knightmare without mentioning Dungeon Master, so I suppose we can't be surprised.

The comparison with German Amiga magazine reviews is interesting to note. Germany had a growing RPG tradition of its own in the early 1990s and had long admired American exports like The Bard's Tale. They weren't as impressed. Amiga Joker offered the worst review at 46%, ASM probably the best at 83%. In between, were Play Time at 81% and Power Play at 68% respectively.

Whatever the case, reviews were good enough to prompt Heimdall 2: Into the Hall of Worlds in 1992. From the screenshots, there are signs that they improved the gameplay with more traditional RPG mechanics and NPC dialogues, while not sacrificing the enticing visuals, so I look forward to trying it. The 8th Day published only two more titles--Premiere (1992) and Gender Wars (1996), both action games of more explicit comedy. Following the dissolution of the company, lead designers Jerr O'Carroll and Ged Keaveney went on to programming jobs at larger developers, with credits into the 2010s. O'Carroll became a graphic artist and animator on a number of Tomb Raider and Alien Breed titles.

Other than this game and its sequel, neither the lead designers, nor The 8th Day, nor Core Design ever published another RPG, a statement that you find at the bottom of a lot of reviews in the mid-20s.

As we continue with Might and Magic III, the next "secondary" game is supposed to be Inquisitor: Shade of Swords, a French game from 1987. I'm toying with rejecting it on grounds of not having character development (there's no evidence of experience and leveling), but the real reason is that it's just weird in that French way. (I'm really nailing the national stereotypes today!) If I do reject it, I won't be saving myself much because the 1987 game after that is also a French title: Karma, the sequel to Tera. So either way, I'd better sharpen my poignard and get to it.