The Summoning: Take that Pearl

Comments on the last entry have me paranoid about using pearls.

         

It feels eerily like some DarkSpyre developer read my review of that game, went back in time, and wrote The Summoning as a specific answer to my GIMLET for the first game. It's everything that I said I wanted, and everything that fans of this particular sub-genre said wasn't needed: NPCs, a better backstory, an ongoing narrative, an economy, and (as I understand it) quest options. For those reasons, I don't blame readers who suspect a relatively high GIMLET score for this one.

    

I do understand the opinion that these elements aren't strictly needed, and that DarkSpyre and Dungeon Master are perfect examples of their sub-genres, which focus primarily on mechanics rather than narrative. Then again, so is Tetris, but nobody would call it a great RPG. It's hard to determine where to draw the line between not including an element in a scoring system at all versus giving it a 0 when it doesn't have that element. But I feel that The Summoning shows that even unnecessary elements can enhance the game and thus justify a higher score. Neither the NPCs I've met so far nor the economy have been particularly compelling, but I still maintain that they improve upon not having them at all. 

   

The Summoning's NPCs add some flavor to the game that wasn't present in DarkSpyre.

         

Despite these additions, The Summoning remains primarily about its mechanics, and as such, it has a low BOTHR (Bolingbroke Outcomes-to-Hours Ratio), an acronym I introduced seven years ago and then never used again. In a game like this, once I have explained the mechanics, inventory, and combat systems, there isn't much to say about the next four hours except, "I did more of that, but with spiders this time."
          

Weighing down pressure plates with dead bodies.

           

I spent most of this session finishing the three "beginner" levels, which I guess I would have completely bypassed if I'd taken the alternate route from the beginning of the game. After that, I completed two levels called "Broken Seal." These five levels lasted long enough that if they had been the entire game, you would have called it a short game, but not impossibly so. The levels were bigger than the entirety of the Temple of Apshai trilogy, for instance.
           

It makes you wonder why an evil wizard's fortress would even offer levels explicitly for "beginners."

       

Enemies included mercenaries, giant spiders, skeletons, and poisonous things called "creepers." Early in the giant spider level, there was a room with antidotes for their poison, but I went right instead of left and ended up clearing the level without finding the anti-venom until the end. I had to reload every time I got poisoned because I otherwise had no way to cure it. Fortunately, the odds of getting poisoned on any one hit were low, and I just saved after every three or four spiders.

     

I've been dual-wielding most of the game, alternating maces, axes, falchions, and broadswords in both hands. I've already broken almost a dozen weapons, but I always seem to have plenty of backups. I'm up to "Stalwart" (6/10) with edged weapons, "Average" with axes (4/10), and "Novice" (3/10) with polearms. I'm not sure where maces get ranked in this typology.
          

Trading blows with a skeleton.

         

Despite the addition of "Poison" to my spell list, I've mostly saved my spell points for making healing potions, which use nightshade sprouts, which are relatively common, and each sprig seems to be good for endless potions. (If I just munch them, I restore spell points, but the nightshade is ruined.) I'm "Skilled" (5/10) at healing magic, "Average" (4/10) at wizardry, and "Novice" at the other two.  My character is a "Gallant" (7/12) overall. If I hadn't already heard that this is a very long game, I would suspect from these relative rankings that I was already half the way through. As it is, it suggests that either leveling slows down significantly or you reach your level caps well before the end of the game.
           

the "Magic Wall" spell requires four hand gestures.

         

Puzzles didn't get much harder until the end of the session. For the most part, they involved finding an obvious key to an obvious lock or pulling an obvious lever to open an obvious door. Early in my explorations, I did find a couple of rolling balls, and messed around with them for a while, thinking there must be some purpose to them, but I suspect it was just to avoid them.

     

Notable "beginner" encounters included:

     

• A room called the "execution chamber" with two levers and a skeleton on the floor. One of the levers caused four fireballs to shoot out of the walls and converge on the skeleton; the other reset the first lever. I probably could have taken advantage of this by leading enemies into the room, but they haven't been hard enough yet.

         

There might be some Eighth Amendment problems with this method.

        

• The "Lair of Spiders" (all of these room names are announced by talking skulls), which had about two dozen giant spiders, one of which had a round key I needed to progress.

          

Killing these giant spiders leveled me up.

         

• A "Mercenary Training Course" that consisted first of a corridor of rolling balls, and second a corridor with fireballs bouncing between side walls as they moved down the corridor. If there was a "third," I didn't note it. 

        

Just a matter of timing.

       

• A woman named Horsa who gave me the "Poison" spell and warned me to be careful who I befriend.

          

I forgot to use it when I was beset by thieves.

         

• A man named Shirvan, who gave me the same warning, almost verbatim. An ex-horde member, now too old to keep fighting, he set himself up as a trader, doing the most business when the horde marches past his part of the dungeon while on the way to war. He offered to give me runestones if I find black pearls for him. Apparently, if I gather raido, gebo, and thurisaz runes, I can make use of special teleportation destinations throughout the dungeon.

• I got a lead on a black pearl when I met an old man who was looking for his friend, Owen.  The old man said that a later part of the dungeon is ruled by an assassin named the Raven. Some thief managed to steal some treasure from the Raven, including a black pearl, and hid it before the Raven's men caught up with him and killed him. Owen recently learned the location of the treasure and set off to find it, but he hasn't returned.

• The visage of Rowena, or someone looking like her, appeared to say that the Council had managed to escape at the last second. The Council has learned that a wizard named Dustan has fallen into Shadow Weaver's hands. If I can find him and rescue him, he can probably help me.

          

I'm not entirely convinced.

          

• Althea, a healer, met me at the exit from the beginner's levels and offered to heal my wounds for a gold piece.

• This amusing sequence:

           

 

            
The only puzzle on the beginner levels that kept me occupied for a while was a room full of pits and pressure plates. Some of the plates opened and closed pits when depressed. Others opened when depressed once, then closed when depressed a second time. Some could be weighed down and others couldn't. The room actually wasn't very hard, but the final step--throwing an object to weigh down one of the corner plates and thus close a pit necessary to pass through the room--somehow eluded me for a while.
         

This room had an easy solution that for some reason came hard to me.

       
In a pit on the other side of this area, I found the body of Owen, including his black pearl. I returned to Shrivan and traded it for raido and a few other runes. I used raido right away and was teleported to the other side of a previously-locked door labeled "The Vault." The area had a bunch of useful items, including a spiked helm, a morning star, leather gloves, chainmail, an amulet of strength, and fehu and jera runes. The manual tells me that jera heals and fehu creates a random object.
            

Careful. I heard The Black Pearl is cursed.

          
The next area opened to a battle with four "creepers" and two skulls that said, "all bow to the power of Shadow Weaver!" The creepers kept poisoning me, so I took them out from a distance with flame arrows, gaining a "Wizardry" level in the process. A lever in the room wouldn't budge until I weighed down two pressure plates by dribbling dead creepers onto them.
            

My introduction to the post-beginner area of the dungeon.

            
I continued on, following the rightmost path (generally). In a nearby chamber, a warrior named Angus was lamenting that some thieves had broken his father's sword, knocked him out, and stolen it. He asked me to return the pieces if I find them.
         

Angus is a bit melodramatic.

          
I traveled through some teleporters, one of which required me to weigh down a plate with a boulder to activate. A skull told me I was in a "secret passageway." I found a book that caused me to level up in polearms; in retrospect, I probably should have saved it until I was already at a higher level. "Without this plate weighed down," a skull soon told me, "You will later meet with frustration." Fortunately, there was an enormous tree stump nearby to handle that task.
   
Eventually, I came across Darius, the lord of thieves who had stolen the sword from Angus. I used the type-in keyword "SWORD" to get him to talk about the theft, which he said was in repayment for a debt owed. He then threatened to imprison and torture me before deciding to simply kill me. I broke a couple of weapons in the ensuing combat, but I eventually defeated him. Angus's sword hilt was in a room past him (I had to push another tree trunk out of the way), and the sword blade was in a room that I unlocked with a jade key found in Darius's body. That room had four chests with a variety of treasures.
          

Darius has quite a few paragraphs of smack talk before I put him down.

           
By now, I was facing serious over-encumbrance--about 17 pounds more than my maximum.  A quick inventory showed that I had a morning star, a bow, 2 falchions, a scimitar, chainmail, a spiked helm, leather gloves, a quiver with 3 arrows, 2 bucklers, a vest and breeches, a +2 Amulet of Protection, 2 stones, 2 broken glasses, a palimpsest, the Eye of Sight, 3 Apples of Vigor, an apple core, an "Algit" potion (cure poison), 2 "Tejwaz" potions (restore endurance), 10 sprigs of nightshade, 6 empty flasks, 14 gold coins, a bloodstone, Angus's two sword parts, something called "seal six," runes of fehu, wunjo, tejwaz, sowelu, and jera, and parchments for "Poison," "Freeze" (2), "Flame Arrow," "Kano," "Liquify" (that's how the game spells it, and I had two), and "Restore." All of this was "organized" in 7 chests and 2 bags.
  
I used the jera rune to heal the damage from the battle with Darius, dumped the extra scrolls, tossed the broken glass and the apple core, reorganized enough that I could ditch three chests. This got me to a good place for now, but I suspect I'm going to be dealing with encumbrance issues throughout the entire game.
         

Even with all the containers, my inventory is getting out of control.

           

On the way back to Angus, I killed a bunch more skeletons and creepers and I ran across an impoverished nobleman named Augustus. For a gold piece, he told me things I'd already figured out about Darius.

Angus was happy to get his sword pieces back, and he rewarded me with a dagaz rune, which casts a spell of slaying, and a ruby. My plan is to save it for a difficult enemy and thus probably never use it. I left Angus wondering how he was going to get the sword repaired. Not long afterwards, I found a smith named Pandrake whose sole purpose seems to be to mend the sword, so now I wonder what Angus would have given me if I'd returned to him with the sword mended.
         

Pandrake makes it clear that he has only one purpose in this game.

       
Miscellaneous notes:
   

• There are 12 different hand gestures. Spells require between 2 and 8 gestures, and gestures can be repeated. This would give us 469,070,928 possible combinations except that apparently gestures are never repeated side-by-side. It took me a while to work out how many gestures to "subtract" based on this rule, and I came up with a final number of 199,000,032 potential gesture combinations, but I'm not 100% sure on my math. [Ed. The number is of course 233,846,052.] If you tried one combination every 5 seconds and never slept, it would take you 11,516.2 days, or about 31.5 years [Ed. based on the real number, it's 37 years], to try them all. Thus, I suspect you can't really "find" spells by trying random combinations.

• When you go to the game options screen (save, restore, etc.), there's a place to type in your own keyword, much like the dialogue screen. I wonder if there's ever any reason to use it.

            

This, alas, did not work.

          

• Amulets disappear within minutes. They're basically good for one battle unless you take care to take them off in between. I also don't care for the way the game interrupts combat to bring up the inventory screen and tell you when something is vanished or broken. It would be one thing if it brought up the screen, the screen paused the action, and then the game stayed on the screen so you can equip something else. But instead it brings up the screen, shows you the item blink away, and then takes you back to the regular window. That's just a waste of time.

    

It feels like I just put it on.

         

• A little ladder-climbing animation appears when you go up and down ladders.

          

A cute touch.

         

• I have tried using the Eye of Sight several times and I can't figure out what it does.

• Nightshades don't seem to ever run out of uses to make potions. Can I ditch most of these sprigs?

• If you walk into a wall, the game puts you in a "confused" state for a few rounds. Does it assume you're banging your head on the wall?

• The annotations on the automap are a bit small to read, but the map itself works very well to determine which areas I haven't visited.

           

I feel like we've been seeing a lot of competent automaps lately.

         

• I used a fehu rune at one point (which generates a random object) and got an odin rune. Supposedly, this powerful rune increases an attribute and rarely changes the character's sex. Well, every time I try to use it, it changes my sex, which I don't want, so I keep reloading.

    
I close having finished most of the second "Broken Seal" level. The goal here seems to be to collect six pieces of a seal, which will somehow let me out of this area.
          

This is my third.

           

Early in the level, I met a fighter who said his band had been slaughtered by a group of mercenaries led by "Kruk." I later encountered them and killed them all. ("Freeze" is a great spell to ensure that you only fight one enemy at a time.) Kruk dropped three pearls, one of which opened the way into the mercenaries' treasure room, where I found one of the seals and a perth rune, which automatically levels you up in one magic level. I also got the "Magic Wall" spell here and some Boots of Levitation.
      

Slaughtering a bunch of mercenaries.

         

I'm trying to figure out a puzzle on this level. It's found in a room full of glyphs on the floor that damage you when you walk over them. The Boots of Levitation are the only way to survive. This is clued by a nearby NPC named Mistral, who speaks of a pit that you have to open in the room. I found the boots and can thus survive the glyphs, but I'm trying to figure out what I need to do to open the pit. There are three pressure plates in the room that I imagine need to be weighed down. Regular items don't work; the plates require something very heavy. There's a tree trunk and a rolling ball that will presumably take care of two of them. I think the trick is to use the trunk as a kind of chock to get the ball to stop rolling when it reaches the plate, then push the trunk onto the second plate. I'm not sure about the third one; perhaps the "Magic Wall" spell that I recently found will do the job.
          

This room is going to take a while.

        
           

The Summoning is a decent game, but because it has such a low time-to-text ratio, I may delay further play for a couple of weeks. My life gets extremely busy in September, and I really need a story-heavy game where an hour of gameplay gives me enough material for an entire entry. It's too bad Matrix Cubed is wrapping up, because that would have worked well. I still have to write my final entries for that game, and then we'll see if the next one is more plot-heavy. Fortunately, even if I find I don't have time to play games at all, I built up a small reserve of one-off entries over the summer that I can burn through while waiting for the new semester to stabilize.
      
Time so far: 7 hours