Game 291: UnReal World [v. 1.00b] (1992)

The long-running series begins.

                   

UnReal World [v. 1.00b]

Finland

Three Relaxed Byte-Biters (developer)

Released in 1992 for DOS as shareware

Date Started: 27 May 2018

In continuous development for almost 30 years, this "survival roguelike" has developed something of a cult following. I became aware of it through a roguelike subreddit and then its own dedicated subreddit, where unbridled joy followed its release on Steam two years ago. Players seem to love the gritty realism of trying to stay warm, dry, and fed in Iron-Age Finland, with accompanying realistic images created by dedicated cosplayers. It also seems to have the typical appeal of open-world sandbox game in which your skills improve with use. (The modern game's 28 skills include "Hideworking," "Timbercraft," and "Agriculture.") I gather it plays something like Skyrim if it took five times as long to travel between cities and you had all the most difficult options of the "Frostfall" mod enabled.
           

The 2018 version of the game.

           
Fans of the modern game will therefore barely recognize this first version, set not in the authentic past but in a standard high-fantasy kingdom called Ankhyrnia, complete with elves, orcs, and magic, and only a couple hints of a "survival" approach. Though it would be tempting to regard this version as a completely different game that just happens to have the same name, the evolution becomes clear as we move from version to version, which we'll be doing over the life of this blog.
            

One of three pages of NetHack-like commands for this version.

          
The first version clearly owes a lot to NetHack, with much of the thematic material drawn from the Ultima series. In addition to permadeath, it has a roguelike's complexity of commands, using almost all letters of the keyboard in both lower-case and capital varieties, plus several of the function keys and special characters. As the developer was uninterested in multi-platform porting, there are more graphical icons here, although a full-ASCII mode is available. The game goes a step beyond NetHack in the number of attributes and with the introduction of a few skills. As you play, you can't help but feel that the mechanics of the game were designed for a bigger game than the one in front of you, which is indeed the case. The developers intended the base game to serve any number of "campaigns," only one of which was ever designed.
          

Deep in a dungeon, my wounded character finds a Potion of Gain Ability.

          
The game's background gives a lot of detail on the history of the world, most of which isn't used in-game and could be replaced with any other framing story. We learn that the world of Ankhyrnia (a probable homage to Ultima, given other themes that the game uses) was created by Ayinar, the god of gods. The history of the land is marked by wars between good spirits called Tanwas (six of which were promoted by Ayinar to godhood) and evil spirits called Arwas. I could be wrong, but Googling suggests that the proper names were invented by the authors specifically for the game and not derived from existing mythology.
          

Part of the long backstory.

          
In character creation, the player can choose from human, half-orc, elf, halfling, dwarf, and half-troll races and warrior, priest, mage, rogue, cleric, and hunter classes. Attributes, randomly rolled from 3 to 21, are wisdom, agility, strength, charisma, intelligence, exactness, speed, and physique. These help determine the three skills: melee weapons, missile weapons, and defense. If there are any class restrictions on item usage, I never ran into them.
           

 A mixed bag in this set of random attribute rolls.

              
The campaign, called "Random Adventure," places the character in a small world consisting of a town situated between the Doom-Tower and the Dark Caves. The quest is no more than to "find out what is in the tower," accomplished first by exploring 15 levels of the caves to acquire three keys.

The opening town has the character's house, with a set of starting equipment, shops selling weapons, armor, and magic items, a casino, several schools that offer training on specific weapons, and a bank where you can deposit money for safekeeping.

The town map.

Browsing weapons in the weapons store.

            

Early on, you learn to be forgiving of the game's tortured English. I'd certainly rather deal with some awkward sentences than have to make my own translations from Finnish. But the translations create some confusion at points. The bank is called an "office," for instance, and you might overlook it if you don't bother to enter and speak with the agent. A couple of my characters nearly starved to death before I realized a trader in the dungeon wasn't selling "tin" (the metal) but rather tins of canned food. Confessionals encourage you to do penance for "needles fighting," which sounds painful if not lethal, but of course it means "needless." One of the types of armor you can find is "feet shields," which I'm guessing describes greaves or sabatons. You don't have to worry about stealing from the "potion store" since the latter word is used in the sense of "store-room" and not "shop."
                 

Occasionally, you get a little introduction to a dungeon room.

          
Gameplay feels a lot like NetHack at first. The shops operate the same as NetHack shops, where you examine and take items and then pay the shopkeepers. Dropping items in the shops allows you to sell them. Many of the commands are the same, like (q)uaff, (w)ield, and (i)nventory, and the game adopts the convention--going all the way back to Rogue--of randomizing potion colors, wand materials, and scroll words for each potential set of magic items in the game, forcing you to experiment or find methods of identifying the items.

Soon, however, you start to appreciate some of the greater complexities of UnReal World. For instance, combat isn't just a matter of arrowing into enemies. In fact walking into a monster's or NPC's position allows you to pass them, not fight them. Instead, you choose from a couple of attack options (weapon 1 or weapon 2) that in turn brings up a sub-menu with different attack types depending on the weapon you wield and your skill with it--a dynamic we saw in Dungeon Master.
           

Choosing an attack type against a wild dog.

         
Each character class has a special skill menu that provides various advantages in combat and exploration. Warriors can punch and wrestle opponents, slamming them into walls, without relying on their weapons. They can also "wrench" their opponents' weapons away. Priests have natural abilities to identify scrolls and potions and to find "natural" food. Rogues can sneak, steal, disarm traps, and open locked doors. Hunters, if they stumble into a tree square (which exist within the caves) can find herbs to heal themselves, find food, and craft arrows from the wood.
          

The warrior applies his wrestling skill to a skeleton.

          
Exploration proceeds generally like NetHack. While areas are uncovered from amid blackness much like any roguelike, you also have a "fog of war" outside the 9-square area around the character (less if the character has a light source).
          

Traps include quicksand.

           
The dungeon is generated randomly by running a separate application. You can do this for each new character or let each character build on the experiences of previous characters. The random generation creates some oddities such as doors that open into blank walls, or doors situated right next to open squares going to the same destination. It mostly works, though. Each level fits entirely on one screen. Some areas are naturally hidden, and all of my characters had a miserable time trying to find secret doors no matter how many times I hit the "s" key. I mostly found secret areas by chopping my way into them with a pickaxe.

Enemies in the dungeon are mostly high-fantasy standards: giant bats, wild dogs, orcs, skeletons, zombies, minotaurs, and so forth. Putative "monsters" might befriend certain PCs; orcs are friendly to half-orc characters, for instance. Combat strikes me as a bit easier in this game than in NetHack, and there seem to be fewer enemies overall. A player can descend into the caves quite quickly, and I suppose a rogue could dart down, find the keys, and escape without fighting at all. Players can do body-part specific damage on enemies (a common one is cutting off the enemy's sword arm, causing him to both howl in pain and drop his weapon), but the character has no such weaknesses. Compensating for the ease of combat is the fact that hit points don't regenerate on their own; you must find a healing potion or herbs, get lucky with a prayer, or sleep. UnReal World also has a Rogue-like dedication to ensuring that you're always on the cusp of starvation. Unlike Rogue (but like NetHack), you can eat enemy corpses--and perhaps get sick or poisoned from them. You don't get any intrinsics from them.
         

You can look at a creature to get a detailed assessment.

Cutting off an enemy's limb.

      
The greater fun is the variety of non-combat encounters in the dungeons. These include wandering merchants, NPCs with side-quests, bandits who demand your gold, and special areas such as underground forests in which nymphs gambol.
           

Using Ultima-like dialogue, a priest gives me a side quest to find a holy symbol for him.

          
A series of altars introduce the game's "virtue" system, clearly inspired by Ultima IV and its successors. UnReal World has a trimmed-down version of Lord British's list, with virtue consisting of valor, honor, honesty, spirituality, and justice (eschewing, if you're counting, compassion, sacrifice, and humility). When you come upon a shrine, you choose a virtue on which to meditate. The first challenge involves drawing the virtue's rune by arrowing the cursor around--the challenge being that you can't "lift" the cursor, so you have to draw the rune in one continuous set of moves.
             

Drawing the rune for honesty.

           
After that, you supply the virtue's mantra, along with a second mantra that indicates what you want to do: check your status with the virtue, get a hint on how to improve the virtue, sacrifice gold (always $250) to improve the virtue, or sacrifice 10 hit points to improve the virtue. (Both the runes and the mantras appear in the game manual.) Each virtue has a few in-game ways to improve it, but not many; this is one area in which the engine demanded a more extensive campaign. I particularly like that you improve spirituality by making use of one of the several confessionals found in the dungeon. You can confess anything, but the game suggests common vices like needless fighting, drunkenness, and patronage of a prostitute.
             

"Weekend in New Orleans" serves as a shortcut for all of these.

           
Leveling up occurs at reasonably regular intervals, with increases to hit points, skills, and attributes. Being virtuous sometimes gives you extra bonuses during leveling. Each class has a hit point cap, and I found that most characters reached it within about 5 level-ups. Other statistics improve past that, however.
          

Leveling up. Valor is the easiest virtue to improve. You just charge into combat.

          
As with most roguelikes, the equipment system is strong here. For armor, you have your main torso armor, helmets, boots, gloves, cloaks, and the aforementioned "feet shields." There are potions, wands, rings, staves, and scrolls to identify--and wandering mages who will do so for a fee. Players dedicated enough to truck everything back to the surface for resale will make a bundle, which of course helps with virtue development at the altars. Between those altar contributions, identifying items, buying items, paying for identification, and paying for healing, the economy is also relatively strong.
           

A mid-game inventory. "Saltjars" cause zombies to immediately desiccate and die. "Make-up stuff" increases the charisma of NPCs. Why?!?

A wandering magician offers to identify my stuff.

      
There are a thousand other details and oddities. You can get hiccups from eating tinned food; they interrupt you every few turns with a hiccup message. Skeletons are resistant to edged weapons. Ogres (for some reason) can impersonate other NPCs until you get close. Zombies can keep on fighting as you carve chunks out of them, which the game highlights with a series of hilarious messages. And when zombies die, demons show up to convey their souls to Hell. Rogues roll a chance to steal every item they pick up in stores. You can find beds in the dungeons that give you a better night's sleep than random corners. It's these types of little details that are so delightful in NetHack, and the developers did an excellent job introducing original details to this game. If any of you get a chance over the next few days, fire it up and see what you encountered that I missed.

I found the game's challenge moderate enough that I decided to play it straight. My first character who really tried, a half-orc warrior, found two of the keys before he was slain by a minotaur on Level 12 of the dungeon. I just started a second character: a priest named Jeanne. If I lose her, I'll probably resort to save-scumming (my usual standard is to save every two levels) so I can experience the endgame in a reasonable amount of time. For now, I can say that this is a great start to the series--a fun, well-balanced RPG with more interesting encounters than the typical roguelike (up to this year, anyway). It's good to see something other than SpurguX coming out of Finland.

Time so far: 6 hours

*****

Turlogh le Rôdeur, or Turlogh de Penroth if you go by the title screen, turns out to be an interactive gamebook; it actually came coupled with a printed comic gamebook called La Sphere du Necromant in which you play the same character. "Playing" the game is a process of walking through an extremely linear story in which you meet weird NPCs and fight the occasional combat in which random rolls of the dice play a role.

The title screen has a different name than the game was marketed under.

The accompanying book. Are those Frankenstein-like bolts sticking out of his neck? Or are they badly misplaced ears?

Meeting an NPC.

              

The beginning of a combat.

            
If it was in English, I'd suck it up and cover it in a single entry, but I really don't feel like translating all the French text for something that isn't really an RPG, and I can't really figure out the controls for the few combats that the game offers, so I'm afraid it goes in the rejection heap.