Eye of the Beholder II: Hexapodal Hoedown

A nice action shot from this session.

    

It's surprising how much relief is occasioned from the simple act of finding a key. In the Eye of the Beholder games, progress is almost always blocked somewhere by a locked door, and finding the right key tells you that at least one more path is now open--that you aren't about to hit a dead end. Sometimes I think I have a surplus of keys and figure that the game must have purposefully seeded extras just in case you miss one, but then I inevitably find a door for which a key is necessary. As I write this entry, I'm down to one--a stray skull key.

Not every key fits every lock. So far in the game, I've encountered locks that require grey keys, copper keys, spider keys, Darkmoon keys, bone keys, and mantis keys. There are also non-key items that functionally act like keys, including the stone object used for the teleportation door and (as we'll see) four horns. A very small percentage of locks can be picked, and since any "surplus" of keys always turns out to be illusory, I figure that any lock that can be picked must be picked to explore the full game. A small percentage of doors can also be forced.

          

My lead character sorts through some of her keys.

       

As I wrapped up last time, I had finished with D-4. I used the teleportation door to return to the main level, rest, and see what happened when I resurrected Amber, the scout Khelben had sent me here to rescue. She turned out to be a neutral-good female elf thief/mage, not a useless class, but not really adding anything to the party. She has the highest charisma in the game, but I'm pretty sure that's the most useless statistic. I preferred my pure mage. Thus, I reloaded and kept my original configuration. I guess Khelben can resurrect her when we get back if he really wants to.

         

A 17 intelligence coupled with 18 dexterity keeps Amber alert.

       

Side note: Either it's possible to resurrect an individual from bones alone, which seems unlikely, or the "bones" are just an abstraction and I'm actually carrying a decaying corpse in my backpack.

After my side-trip, I headed back down to D-4 and from there to D-5. This turned out to be the lowest level of the dungeon unless something else opens up later. It was a small level, occupying only 20 x 12 coordinates, with about 130 used squares. There were no secret doors that I could find.

       

It's THEM!

         

The corridors were crawling with giant ants capable of poisoning my characters, but I had plenty of scrolls and potions for that, plus the ants died in a hit or two. They kept respawning, but at least there was a reason for the respawning: two locations where I encountered holes in the wall too small for the party, but apparently big enough for the giant ants living in the area.

       

What do I keep a dwarf around for if not for this?

       

The floors here teemed with treasure, including entire sets of equipment atop the bones of their slain owners. San-Raal worked overtime with "Detect Magic," "Improved Identify," and "Remove Curse." I didn't find much that was useful, though, except a couple magic knives for throwing and some new keys.

    

There have been about five cursed items in the game so far.

        

There were messages that some jars had smashed and some black, tar-like substance had leaked out, but I never figured out what that was about. Maybe the previous inhabitants had been making some kind of syrup that attracted the ants.

      

. . . filled with some kind of syrup or liquid.

        

One of the keys I'd found on D-5 opened a new corridor on D-4. A niche on the wall here held the fourth "wind horn." A series of staircases from here led back up to D-2, where a button opened the way back to the small "spider area" I showed last time.

At this point, the only unexplored path I had marked was a corridor on D+1 where I needed some kind of mark or brand to pass. However, I also had four horns that I thought would have some use at a main-level mural depicting the four winds. Sure enough, blowing the four horns brought the wall down and opened a new pathway upwards.

          

       

The new area was difficult enough that it felt like everything up to this point had been some kind of prelude. The main enemies were "mantis warriors," who almost always hit, cause paralysis when they hit, and are fast. There was no maneuvering dance that remotely saved me from harm.

        

The terrifyingly-fast new foe.

       

The only thing that saved me was the fact that paralyzed characters don't lose their place in formation, so rear characters still can't be hit by enemies in the front. Every time I had to face a mantis warrior head-on, my front characters would inevitably get paralyzed in the first round, leaving my rear characters to kill them with missiles and spells, hopefully before their front-rank colleagues were killed. I couldn't help but imagine a real party in this situation, propping up their stiffened friends and using them as shields. I soon learned to fill my Level 3 cleric spell slots with "Remove Paralysis."

The game didn't introduce this terrifying new enemy slowly, either. When the level opened, I faced a puzzle consisting of light pads that zapped my party every time I stepped on a lit one. I could only suck up damage from one of them before the second had a chance of killing my lowest-HP characters. These pads plugged the corridors to the north and south and filled a room to the east.

       

Yow!

         

Some of them occasionally blinked off for a couple of seconds. Through much trial, error, and reloading, I mapped a semi-reliable path from the beginning to the east side of the room, crossing nine pads that alternated on/off states. (Semi-reliable because it was virtually impossible to avoid getting zapped at least once.) Upon reaching the other side, however, an invisible wall opened and four mantis warriors blocked the way forward. I couldn't backpedal into the deadly light pads, I couldn't move forward because of the warriors, and I couldn't stand still because I got zapped every time the pad blinked back on.

          

I had to concentrate too much on combat to take a screenshot. Here's the aftermath.

            

After several failed attempts, I was able to defeat the warriors by buffing, crossing the pads, launching my deadliest spells as soon as the wall opened, hopefully killing one, stepping forwards amidst the others, and finishing them off before everyone was killed. It was a difficult challenge, but pleasingly so. I don't mind combats that force you to reload three or four times. More than that starts to become a bit sadistic. Later in the level, long corridors and fighting retreats made the mantises a little easier.

Other encounters on the level included:

• When I first arrived on the level, some vision "welcomed" me and said I'd be facing a "test of faith" on the level.

        

The #$%@ are you?

        

• A magic mouth that demanded three bones. Fortunately, I'd been annotating assorted skulls and femurs on my map, and I knew where to get some. I fed them to the mouth and got a bone key.

     

The magic mouth enjoys its calcium.

   

• A long, dead-end corridor with plaques that read "What can be trusted?" and "Nothing ventured, nothing gained." I never figured out what these were talking about.

• A neutral-good male half-elf fighter/cleric named Tanglor. He was sleeping in one of the rooms and indicated that he was also there for the "test." Since I already had two clerics and didn't need another fighter, I declined to take him, although his wisdom (16) was better than Shorn's (13). What kind of pure cleric has a wisdom of 13?

        

Also, he was kind of an arrogant ass.

   

• A mantis warrior was bleeding and dying on the ground. I had options to heal, kill, or leave it. I chose to heal it and it attacked me, the bastard, forcing me to kill it.

    

As a deontologist, I was still comfortable with my choice.

   

• I come to a t-intersection and was automatically turned to face a couple of mantises to the west. One threw a "sphere-like" object at me; it was in fact a "glass sphere," which strikes like a fireball. Stepping to the left quickly allowed me to avoid it.

      

But of course it filled me with shame at how badly I was abusing the game engine.

       

• A room full of mantis warrior eggs. It had treasure at the end, but walking to the end caused them all to hatch at once, dooming the party. I had to slash the eggs and kill their inhabitants one at a time.

  

What gives it away?

   

• In a mystery that still bothers me, a hall contained a button, a pit, and a second button on the other side of the pit. Pressing the first button opened a second pit in front of the first. To solve the puzzle, I had to fire a missile down the corridor to activate the second button, closing the first pit but opening the second, then hit the first button to close the second pit. This procedure opened up a secret door on the other side of the first pit, which led into a 10 x 10 room, which had . . . nothing. No treasures, no more secret doors, just nothing at all. I can only imagine I'll get teleported to this little room later or something and thus be glad that I opened the way out.

          

I love the party comments.

The "trial" level.

        

Moving up from this level via a staircase, I groaned when I heard buzzing in the distance. Giant wasps are never fun. Here, they're capable of both paralyzing and poisoning characters. I found they died quickly from "Fireball" and "Ice Storm." Between those and the "Remove Paralysis" and "Neutralize Poison" spells I need to cure their effects, this game is really getting its mileage out of spell levels 3 and 4.

      

Of course, my second mage spent his slots on "Lightning Bolt."

      

Like the ants, the wasps had an excuse for respawning--a nest hidden in the walls. I can understand letting this happen in a distant sub-basement, but on the second floor? The clerics in this place are a disgrace.

      

Shooting weapons or fireballs in there doesn't do anything.

      

My characters entered the game with 172,234 experience points and currently have 272,646. That's been enough to get my fighter/thief one level each in his classes, my mage one level, and my ranger/cleric one level in cleric only. My paladin hasn't gone up at all and won't for another 30,000 experience points. It's almost impossible to imagine reaching the 1.5 million experience points that the paladin needs for Level 13 (theoretically possible in the game). I wonder which is true: a) enemies are about to get a lot harder; b) most players end the game well before the level caps; or c) this is a 200-hour game and I've barely begun.

Four random notes on game/D&D rules:

        

• Identifying an item with "Improved Identify" requires that the wizard hold it in one hand while he casts the spell. But to cast the spell, he has to have a free hand. Thus, I don't see how you can identify two-handed weapons.

• I was going to comment that the rule that characters only get 1 HP restoration from 24 hours' rest is kind of stupid. Then I thought about it and realized that resting for 2 months to go from death's door to perfect health is probably about accurate. In much later AD&D-based games like Baldur's Gate, one night's rest restores all hit points, I think. Did AD&D rules change, or did the game adaptations change?

• The paladin gets a few spells starting at Level 9, but the ranger never gets any. I guess the developers didn't want to bother with druid spells.

• Back when she had the Ring of Wizardry which gave her two additional Level 4 spells, I had my mage memorize four iterations of "Ice Storm." After she lost the ring, she can still memorize those four spells, with the game saying that she has "-2 out of 0" spells to memorize. If I clear the four spells and try to select new ones, I'm sure this will go away and she'll only be able to memorize 2.

     

As I wrap up, I'm stuck on a lever/door puzzle on the bee level. There's a 3 x 3 room with levers in each corner. A doorway to the south leads to a hallway with four closed doors. Each lever seems to open one door. The problem is, each lever also opens a pit in front of another lever, and no pattern seems to allow you to flip all of them without blocking yourself by a pit at some point. The most I've gotten is three.

Down the corridor a ways, there's a button on one wall that doesn't seem to do anything. I'm sure opening the final door involves some combination of levers and the button, but I'm not getting it. A sign in the room says "faith is the key." No idea how that helps. (There's no obvious way to make a "faith-based" pattern, like a cross, in the order of the levers.) This is the first puzzle in the game to seriously challenge me, so in that sense, it's somewhat welcome.

     

I'm grateful for the comment. I haven't otherwise been looking at floor moldings very carefully.

    

If I can rise another level or two by the next entry, I'll try to analyze combat and spells in more detail. Certainly, the spells most useful in Eye of the Beholder are a bit different from those in the Gold Box series.

Time so far: 18 hours