Game 375: Theldrow (1988)

A "series" of one game begins.

       

Theldrow

United States

Independently developed and published as freeware

Released 1988 for Macintosh; updated periodically until 1992

Date Started: 13 August 2020

Date Ended: 15 August 2020

Total Hours: 12

Difficulty: Hard (4.0/5)

Final Rating: 29

Ranking at Time of Posting: 202/379 (53%)

             
Theldrow has one feature so overwhelming that, until you get past it, it obscures everything else notable about the game. That feature is a near-sociopathic difficulty level during the first half of your time with it. I say "first half," but that only applies if you finally decide to break down and cheat by making backups of your character file (as I did). Without that, chances are you won't get out of the first half, and if you do, it will only be through sheer luck after fielding dozens of doomed characters. But I don't want to suggest that the second half is in any way easy. There is no time in the game that a pack of five giant ants isn't a major threat.
        

Exploring a cavern in Theldrow, the game about which this entry is.

       
Odds are high that a new character won't even make it from the starting square to town, which is only 15 steps away. If he doesn't die in his first combat, he will likely die from an accumulation of them. There's no way to save the game except to quit, and death is written immediately to the character file. If you die, you can resurrect yourself for half your gold and get half your attributes, but this just helps ensure that you're even less likely to make it to town. The only way to heal reliably (in the early game) is to stay at the inn, which costs money. Hardly any enemy in the starting area (or, frankly, the entire game) drops any money, so even if you manage to survive your first few combats and make it to the safety of the inn, chances are reasonably good that you'll soon run out of money and won't have any way to recover hit points.
          

No matter how strong you get, these enemies will be capable of killing you if you're not careful.

      
The difficulty is somewhat legendary, and if you consult any videos or walkthroughs that cover the game, almost all of them encourage you to cheat. I eventually did, but only after I mapped almost everything with about 30 walking dead patsies. The funny thing is that, as stacked as the odds are against you, they occasionally go deliriously in your favor. For instance, there are only a few fixed combats in the game. In the 15 steps from the starting square to the town, you'll probably face at least two random combats, but you might face none at all. If you stumble into the spider lair (5 steps from the starting square) early in the game, you will almost certainly die, but there's a minuscule probability that the "Fireball" spell will work and wipe them all out (which leaves you feeling fantastic until you die three squares later in an encounter with two boars). So while one character individually probably can't survive more than five minutes, a couple dozen characters cumulatively can explore most of the game.
        

A lot of characters died for this map of the surface world.

         
Backing up: Theldrow is a first-person, tiled game with a single character. It has some superficial resemblance to Might and Magic, although with the Mac's obsession with cutesy icons and clicking on everything. I played version 2.2 from 1989; later versions add color and a gloriously over-the-top enemy death scream that you have to hear to believe. I would have enjoyed it the first couple of times and then turned off sound for the rest of the game.
           

This is the screen you see most often in this game.

       

The game is set in a world (Theldrow) recovering from some kind of devastation at the end of the Age of Magic. The author, Glenn Andreas, spent a lot of time developing a pantheon of gods for the setting--far, far more than is actually used in Theldrow--which is just one of several signs he intended Theldrow to be just one of many titles set in the "world of adventure" (as the title screen has it).
          

A hermit claims to have known my father.

          
The main character is the 17-year-old son of a scholar named Leoric who went missing when the PC was just a child. The character and his widowed mother moved into a monastery, but now the mother has passed away, and the child is interested in finding what happened to his father. Following his father's notes, he has arrived at the outskirts of the city of Boden, near Castle Cravenshaw.
         

The character walks alongside the river by the castle.

       

Character creation consists of allocating a pool of points to the standard set of Dungeons and Dragons attributes--strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, constitution, and charisma--all of which the game actually uses. The cost of adding points rises so steeply (20 points per increase to 14 but 100 after that) that I suspect most players end up with roughly the same character with most scores at 14 and maybe one or two set to 15 or 16. You also choose a god during character creation, from Berabaku (God of Light), Ipeke (Goddess of Wind), and Suzes (Goddess of Lightning and Music). Berabaku is the only one with a temple in this game, so it's probably best to choose him, although he is "allied" with the other two gods and you can still use his temple to get divine favor.
      

Character creation.

       
The starting square is northwest of Boden, amidst a forest that wraps around the city. You can head towards one of two entrances, east and south, but the south one is locked. Along the way to an east entrance, you might get sidetracked by a trail that leads to a nest of deadly spiders. Otherwise, you'll probably get killed from the giant ants, boars, or bears that occupy the forest. If you can reach the safety of the city, you'll find it isn't very "safe"--you can encounter monsters on the street with an equal probability of finding them outdoors--but at least it has an inn where you can rest and heal, if you can afford it. You start with an amount of money dependent on how many points you had left over from character creation, plus a single dagger. Boden has a weapon shop, an armor shop, a potion seller, a gem seller, a temple, and a bar where you can get a few hints if you tip the bartender (or have high enough charisma). Hopefully, you have enough money to afford some armor and a better weapon.

Combat features enemies sensible to the environment: giant ants, giant rats, bears, and boars around the woods; undead in the crypts; humanoid enemies in other dungeons. In combat, you and the enemies take turns attacking. Your attacks can include physical attacks (which you make by specifying the hand holding the weapon you want to use), mage spells, and cleric spells. Your available mage power is governed by a "power" bar and by a hidden probability associated with casting each spell successfully based on your experience (also hidden) and intelligence. Your ability to cast cleric spells depends on your experience and the amount of "divine favor" you've stored up by tithing and praying at the temple. It's supposedly indicated by the lines around the religious symbol in the upper-left corner, but I found them too short, thin, and inconsistent to use as a reliable gauge as to whether a spell would work.
            

This boar is about to kill me.

           
Character development occurs as you exercise these three options. The cleric's "meditate" spell helps you determine what your relative levels are in each "class." There are 10 fighter and mage levels and 5 cleric levels. I ended the game only at about the fifth fighter and mage level and the fourth cleric level, so clearly some room was saved for future titles.

        

An early-game assessment of my skills.

            

Because of the difficulty in the early game, every increase in level is a godsend, although nothing is really gated by level. That is, you have some vague probability of being able to cast any mage or cleric spell at any level; it's just that the probability starts quite low. As you level up, it increases. As usual in the world of CRPGs, life becomes a lot easier when you can cast "Fireball" reliably. But the real line is crossed once you're able to use some of the higher-level cleric spells like "Heal," "Neutralize Poison" (this is otherwise a near death sentence), and "Word of Recall," which whisks you back to the starting square. It's a good idea to tithe and pray liberally at the temple to facilitate this development.

         

"Turn Undead" does its job against some skeletons and leaves just giant centipedes behind.

         

The author did a particularly good job with spells. Most are derived from Dungeons and Dragons and work as advertised, but there are a few original inventions. "Magic Chest" calls up a temporary chest in which you can store excess items, for instance. The cleric's "Meditate" tells you about your own strength, but "Augury" tells you about the enemies that you're currently facing. At the top end of both spell systems are a pair of spells, "The Void" for the mage and "Improvement" for the cleric, that supposedly boost your attributes. I didn't develop enough to cast either. A lot of spells require spell components, of which there are an extremely limited number in the game. Again, this was an area clearly meant for continued development in future titles using the same engine.

          

The "Augury" spell cast on a stalker, one of the more difficult enemies in the game.

        

You'd think you could simply grind until you achieve mastery in the classes. This would be true except for two things. First, a pack of five giant ants is never not a threat, and these are frequently encountered even in the safest areas. Second, hardly any enemy has any gold. Giant rats occasionally drop a little, but at the beginning of the game you need to rest in between every 1-3 battles, and the cost to rest goes up as your level does. (A related oddity: for some reason, the game seems incapable of telling you exactly how much gold you have. Instead, it estimates to the nearest 5.) You thus have to start searching outward and downward to find ways to earn money. Eventually, you'll find gems or a ring that you can sell, and your day-to-day financial troubles are over, but you still need to scrimp if you want to afford any of the magic items at the "Bizarre" (the game has some spelling issues). Rings, incidentally, are potentially-useful magic items, but they only last a certain amount of time before they "crumble to dust." I think their longevity is based on CPU cycles rather than game turns, so if you don't have any way to slow down your emulator (which I, using Basilisk, do not), then you might as well sell the rings because they'll otherwise only last a few minutes.
         

Preparing to cast a "Fireball" against an unholy assortment of enemies.

        
The game is pretty small. The top world is only about 17 x 20, including Boden, the forest immediately around it, a cemetery to the northeast, a forest to the southeast, and the outskirts of Cravenshaw Castle across the river. The underworld is a separate 19 x 34, and Cravenshaw itself has its own small interior zone of 8 x 9. Many of the squares are unused. If it weren't for the difficulty of combat, you could easily clear it in an hour.
          

The "underground" part of the game.

        
There are multiple ways to get into the underground, but almost all of them are behind secret doors. The game really likes secret doors. There are two in Boden, which is only 5 x 5 squares. There are three more in the woods outside Boden. Each one requires that you attempt the "search" option multiple times before you find it--sometimes 10 or more. Then, even after you find the secret doors, most of them lead to holes, not stairs. At a certain level, you can climb back up the holes, but until then you need an expensive "Recall" scroll to find your way back to the town. To avoid the holes, the only exploration path is a stairway in the crypts northeast of town--which themselves seem to lead to a dead end unless you search multiple times for a secret door.
          

After about a dozen tries.

         
Both the bartender and a hermit outside of town will say that they knew your father, but you don't really get any significant clues until you start exploring the abandoned Castle Cravenshaw. Bits of Leoric's old journal are strewn about the castle, and together they suggest that Leoric was researching the titular builder of the castle, the wizard Crav Enshaw (yes, groan), who somehow opened a portal to something called the Dark World.
           

Part of my father's journal.

        
Opening the portal required four parts (called the "quadparts"), which Leoric eventually found but which are now strewn throughout the underground. Specifically:
     

• The Bell of Thon is in a room in the northeast part of the underground, under the old grain storage building in Boden.

          

Recovering the bell and some other goodies.

        

• The Book of Krell is located in the giant ants' egg chamber at the end of a cavernous maze. You have to fight multiple battles with large packs of giant ants. "Fireball" mostly got me through.

• The Candle of Knorsos is at the end of a maze of one-way doors in the middle part of the underground.

           

The candle is found in a dead end.

         

• The Skull of Something That I Didn't Write Down is in the ruins of Crav Enshaw's bedroom in the castle.

      
Other scrolls tell you how to place the items in a special chamber in the underground to open the portal to the Dark World.
         

Using the bell to open the portal.

         
One of Leoric's notes says he was captured by ettercaps on the other side of the portal. You fight some as you make your way through the final area, which is a lattice of four rows and four corridors. There's a teleporter at every intersection point. You ultimately have to find your way to the northeast, and through a final door, where a disappointing message says that your adventure will continue in the undercity of Thelos in the sequel.
          

The "won!" screen.

           
I had to restore my character backups about a dozen times to win, and I question whether anyone has ever won the game "legitimately." Aside from the difficulty, and in fact partly because of it, I mostly had a great time. The mechanics of this game are solid. It's mostly just too small, more like a proof of concept than a final game. Some elements I can't rate high simply because there aren't enough of them; for instance, the game uses an Ultima-style keyword system for talking with NPCs, but there are only two NPCs. There's a stealing mechanic, but you get banned if you get caught, and there aren't enough shops in the game to risk it. There are only two traps in the game, a couple of teleporters, one lever, and a small number of fixed encounters. It's too bad we never got Thelos or any other game in the setting, but Glenn Andreas went on to create Cythera (1999) for Ambrosia Software, which looks a lot like Ultima VII.
         

Cythera has graphics and dialogue a lot like a game we recently reviewed.

            
Andreas currently operates Gandreas Software but doesn't seem to sell any games except for a Macintosh port of Rogue.
          
In a GIMLET, this one gets:

• 2 points for the game world. There's not much to the setting, but the character's motivation is pretty clear.

• 4 points for character creation and development. It gets most of this for relatively satisfying development. The game doesn't last long enough to really experiment with different "builds," but in a longer version it would be interesting to see how a combat-focused character compared to a magic-focused character.

• 2 points for NPCs. The mechanics are good, but there are only two of them and neither really tells you anything vital.

• 3 points for encounters and foes. It makes good use of the Dungeons and Dragons bestiary, including special attacks and resistances.

          

Fighting an owlbear.

       

• 4 points for magic and combat. The combat system is tactical enough, and it really opens up once more spell options become available. As I mentioned, the spells themselves are interesting and well-programmed, and I liked the variances in how mage spells worked versus cleric spells. The magic system deserved a longer game to really shine.

• 3 points for equipment. There's a modest variety of stuff, identifiable with the "Identify" spell.

• 3 points for the economy. It's a bit stingy at the beginning and a bit generous by the end. Giving weight to gold and thus necessitating the "gem" system was a needless addition.

         

A good deal for a ring that probably won't last very long anyway.

         

• 2 points for a main quest with no side quests or role-playing options.

• 2 points for graphics, sound, and interface. The graphics are serviceable. There's no sound in this version, and I think the effects are a bit too much in the color version, but if you don't agree, add an extra point or two. The interface mostly works all right. There are keyboard shortcuts for movement and most of the actions, like attacking, searching, and bashing doors, but having to click on the menus for spells got annoying. The game interface is 2-3 windows that you can move or size yourself, but which always show the Mac desktop behind them. I hate that part of playing Mac games.

         

Atmospheric messages occasionally enhance the graphics.

        

• 4 points for gameplay. The difficulty is pitched a bit too hard, but then again the game is awfully short, so the factors almost cancel each other out. It has some limited nonlinearity within its small world, but I wouldn't say it's replayable. 

That gives us a final score of 29. I was hoping it would land closer to my "recommended" threshold at 35 because I really did end up enjoying it, but then again that was only after several hours of pain.

It's always nice when I can bang one out in a single entry. I don't expect that to be the case with The Summoning. I didn't like its predecessor much and I can't imagine that I'll have the stamina for the entire sequel.