The Summoning: A Laden Swagman

 

As if I needed another reason to think of Osama bin Laden yesterday.

         

As you scurry around pushing levers and balls, testing teleporters, fighting enemies, filling and drinking healing potions, and filling in the map, The Summoning gives you lots of time to think. And what I thought about during my most recent sessions was a typology for how games structure their worlds. This is what I came up with:

1. The open world. We tend to think of open-world games as recent, but they really go all the way back to the first Ultima (1981). In this model, the player has a fairly large space in which to operate, and that space is seeded with both safe and dangerous places--cities and dungeons, usually. The player may pick a particular city as a "home base" (and modern games encourage this by literally letting him buy a house), but he doesn't have to use a particular place. Excepting some episodes, he has full control over how long he stays in each area, and he can transition between them at will, using any number of locations to regroup, buy and sell equipment, level up, and rest and heal. Phantasie, Curse of the Azure Bonds, Baldur's Gate, Ultimas IV-VII, and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion all follow this model.

2. The hub-and-spoke, also known as the "expedition-and-return." In this model, there's one safe place, often at the center of the kingdom, and the player does all of his adventuring from it. Each mission takes him to a new place, and he often has no control over how long he spends there, but when it's over, he returns (often automatically) to the safety and resources of the hub. Examples would be Starflight, Quest for Glory, Planet's Edge, and the two Buck Rogers games.

           

Here's a shot of an NPC named Khamillia warning me about gazers. You'll see why in a bit.

          

3. The airline dive. In this approach, you have a safe surface location, from which you repeatedly depart to explore the depths of a dungeon, keeping a constant tether back to your base. A key aspect of the game is how far and long you're willing to risk exploration before following your lifeline home; judge it poorly and you run out of oxygen. Almost all of the PLATO games fit this model, as does Wizardry and the Dunjonquest series. The goal is ultimately to get strong and skilled enough so that you can reach the farthest location, where you usually find the endgame.

     

4. The highway. The game is linear and one-way, with set "rest stops" (cities, leveling, healing, shops) at set intervals along the way. You don't always know how long it's going to be before the next stop, but you know it will come eventually. The Final Fantasy Legend and The Lord of the Rings fall here, although both allowed some limited backtracking. Icewind Dale II is another.

    

5. The "Waltzing Matilda." There are no "safe spaces," except perhaps the occasional dark corner after you've cleared an area of enemies. You have no "hub." All of your resources are in your tucker bag. You level up on the road and heal when you find a potion. It doesn't really matter if the game world is open or linear because you still have to travel the whole thing, and there are no rest stops. This is most roguelikes, Dungeon Master and its derivatives, and The Summoning. 

             

A partly-completed level.

          

Some of the most tense moments I have playing games is when I don't yet know which model a game is going to adopt. Games often begin with a constrained sequence, and until it's over, you don't know if the game is going to automatically move you to the next area or "open up." Then, if it does open up, you don't know until you start exploring if you're going to be returning to the starting point frequently or if there will be numerous potential hubs as you explore the world. It takes a few hours into Fallout 3 before you realize it's fundamentally a hub-and-spoke game (a player could approach it differently, but most use Megaton as a base of operations); when Fallout 4 began, I thought it would be the same, but it's much more of an open world. Often, a game surprises you by switching to another model for a particular sequence or expansion. Baldur's Gate II is a hub-and-spoke that becomes a highway in Throne of Bhaal. The Lonesome Road expansion to Fallout: New Vegas is a Waltzing Matilda tacked on to an open world.

Games also occasionally create tension and release by subverting their own designs. A common practice in airline dive games is to make you lose the line via teleporters or one-way doors. Hub-and-spoke games often defy predictability by sending you on a mission that turns into a Waltzing Matilda, straining your inventory space, exhausting resources that are normally renewable in town, and making you long for a place to rest or train. When you're finally able to break out and return, the sense of relief is magnified. 

    

I would have to say that the "Waltzing Matilda" is my least-favorite approach, partly because it's the hardest to pick up again when you haven't been able to play for a while. When you finally restore after an absent week, you're in the middle of a dungeon somewhere, with equipment you can't remember the reason for carrying, unsure if you were working on any puzzles and, if so, what they were. Meanwhile, the lack of a central depository means you have to anticipate what you'll need down the road. This is particularly difficult in a game like The Summoning, where numerous readers have warned me not to throw away any pearls or any spell scrolls (despite not needing them mechanically), and having been given the relatively useless advice to try to keep hold of at least one of everything because you never know what is going to be needed to solve a puzzle.

        

The reason for the game's name becomes clear.

       

I originally wrote, "The Summoning is taking long enough that I frankly wouldn't mind a 'walking-dead' excuse to wrap it up with a rating." The problem with that sentence is that it isn't taking that long--at least, not yet. I'm only into it for about 14 hours. It just feels very long because the nature of its construction is to never give you a break. I think this has less to do with its "Waltzing Matilda" approach (what seemed like a cute name is losing its charm as I keep typing it) and more because of its Dungeon Master paternity. Other games feature long corridors and large rooms just to fill in their grids, but games of the Dungeon Master line use all of their available space for puzzles. The Summoning is no exception. Any relief that you feel at finally getting a locked door opened almost immediately withers in the face of another locked door. It doesn't really make a difference that most of the puzzles are easy--which they are, far more so than DarkSpyre--but that they're endless.

     

My most recent sessions with the game involved the completion of a section of levels each named "Broken Seal." There were six of them, but a few of them had large basements, so it seemed like more. The ultimate goal was to find six wedges of a broken seal and assemble them to open the way to the next section of levels, which all seem to begin with the name "Elemental Barrier." A linear description of the levels would be boring and hard to relate given my fractured approach to playing and my recursive approach to exploration (more below), so I'll just cover the highlights:

         

• Broken Seal Three had a puzzle that required me to rescue a man named Duncan from a prison. His friend Tristan rewarded me with a bunch of runes for the task, but more important, Duncan told me that Shadow Weaver intends to use the Staff of Summoning to bring the God of Magic back to the world, defeat him in combat, become the new God of Magic, and remake the world.

• On Broken Seal Two, I found a woman dying of poisoning. The game strewed apple cores around her room, suggesting that she'd been keeping herself alive with Apples of Vigor, which was a cute touch. To cure her, I had to find a special antidote in Broken Seal One. As a reward, she gave me a magic mirror that protected me from the attacks of "gazers" (nothing like the Ultima enemies, but rather zombies holding decapitated heads that turn you to stone), which I encountered later in Broken Seal One.

    

The game brought up a little cinematic window as I administered the potion. It does that occasionally, which is a nice addition.

          

• Later, I learned the hard way that you have to actually equip the mirror when you meet the gazers.

       

Another cinematic shows Jera turning to stone.

            

• New spells found were "Poison," "Cure Poison," "Restore," "Fire Shield," and "Fireball." I also found additional scrolls for spells I already knew; it's nice that the game offers backups in case you miss the originals. The "Restore" spell is supposed to restore endurance; I've also found a couple of potions that do that, but so far nothing in the game has affected my endurance. Come to think of it, the manual suggests an entire "fatigue" system that if it actually exists hasn't been perceptible in gameplay.

              

This, alas, just shoots a small ball of fire.

     

• The game is very fond of closed doors that you need the "Kano" spell to open. Some of them are very hard to see as doors. I assume they're walls until I later see them on the automap.

• A common puzzle has been to need to push a rolling ball onto a pressure plate by using the temporary "Create Wall" spell to stop the ball when it gets to the pressure plate.

     

Like so.

           

• An exit from Broken Seal Two went back to the Antechamber at the beginning of the game. This is where I would have appeared if I hadn't gone through the "beginner" levels. A woman near this exit talked about the importance of speaking to magic mouths, which would have been odd advice this late in the game but timely advice for some cocky player who decided to skip the beginners' area.

• Gebo, Raido, and Thurisaz runes teleport the character to the associated "rune floor space on the level in which the rune was invoked." I've found a ton of them. I've been trying to remember to test them on each level in the event that I don't otherwise find those runes on the floors. I'm not sure I've gotten all of them, though.

          

Arriving in a secret Raido area.

       

• Towards the end of the Broken Seal levels were a couple of puzzles that required me to use knowledge of the game's lore. Each had one skull that asked a question (e.g., "Chesschantra's offspring") and three skulls that provided different answers, each with a portal behind it. The problem was that the "answer" skulls were arranged so close to each other that it was often unclear which one was speaking. Since the wrong portals dumped me into an exitless room, I had to reload a couple of times when I knew the answer but chose the wrong skull's portal. My favorite of these puzzles is when the "riddle" skull said "what you want" and the answers were "world peace," "glory," and, practically, "to complete this part of the maze."

          

One skull gives the answer as I face and am closest to a different one.

        

The automap does a good job, but it's annoying to consult. You have to remove whatever you have equipped in one hand, equip the "palimpsest" instead, use it, and then re-equip the previous item. So I've mostly been approaching each level by following the right wall, bypassing doors I can't open or puzzles I can't yet solve. If I've made three loops through the level and still haven't opened some doors (or found the exit), that's when it's time to sit up straight and start taking notice of things.

 

The problem with most of the game's puzzles (or perhaps I should say "challenge," as it's probably intentional) is that the game deliberately obscures their complexity. To illustrate what I mean, assume you walk into a room with four pressure plates, one lever, and a door in every cardinal direction. The "puzzle" could be as simple as the lever activates the pressure plates, and then the pressure plates open the doors in front of them as soon as you step on them. Or it could be as complex as the lever opens a portal to another section of the maze, where you have to solve four sub-puzzles to find four boulders to bring back to the main room to weigh down the pressure plates, which open the doors on the opposite sides of the room, and only one door can be opened at a time.

       

This one is pretty straightforward.

         

I've found that the best way to approach the game is to assume simplicity and to not start going crazy with the mechanics until it's clear that simple isn't working. You have to be goal-oriented in the game. If a room has three levers and one door, and somehow you get the door open without touching any of the levers, it's best not to worry about what they're for. There are plenty of times in which I've left an area suspecting perhaps there was more to find, but happy enough that I found my way to the next level.

New enemies on these levels included centaurs and the aforementioned gazers. Combats have been so easy that they're mostly incidental. I usually welcome them because the game generally uses combats in lieu of puzzles, so a room with mercenaries or skeletons is probably not going to have a lot of lever-and-pit nonsense. Most enemies die in a few hits, and if they manage to wound me direly, I just need to cast "Freeze," run a safe distance, and use "Liquify" to fill and chug Jera potions until I'm healed. Since I found the spell sequence for "Cure Poison," I don't even have to worry about that. The only enemies that have been problems were some ghouls, which none of my weapons and spells would damage. I'm just realizing now as I type this that I never fully "solved" that area, so I must have missed something. Whatever it was, it wasn't necessary to get through the Broken Seal levels.

          

Fighting a couple of centaurs.

           

By far, the biggest issue with the game has been over-encumbrance. You don't want to exceed your weight limit because it significantly slows down movement, including combat. But between runes, gems, potions, wands, coins, extra weapons, extra shields, and quest items, there's a lot in this game that seems pretty essential. At one point shortly after the end of the last session, I took a hard look at what I was carrying, made some tough choices, dropped a bunch of stuff, and was five pounds under-weight. It felt great for about five minutes, until I entered another room and found it loaded with stuff that seems essential. In most games with equipment breakage systems, you spend the game hoping that your items won't break. In The Summoning, you spend the game praying that they will, so that you can shed 8 pounds and swap in the next item.

 

I finally gave up. My character's maximum weight is about 85 pounds, but I'm lugging around close to 115. As we enter a new area, I drop enough chests to get below the threshold, explore for a while, then return and pick them up. (This is similar to Tygr's solution of using the first room of each level as a "warehouse.") Although the system basically works, I keep hoping that I'll eventually use or break enough stuff to get back under the threshold, but that goal gets more distant with every item that I find.

    

A decent part of my encumbrance (in space, if not weight) is made up of gold coins. So far, the only place that I've found to spend them is at NPCs who offer to heal you for a donation. Normally, I'd welcome these NPCs, but self-healing is so easy that I can't imagine ever having to use them. I wonder if there's any other purpose to the game's "economy."

One of Shadow Weaver's warriors, encountered I think on Broken Seal Three, gave me a preview of the rest of the dungeon. He said that Shadow Weaver opens all the seals every six months to allow the horde to come and go from its campaigning, but between those times you have to really work at it to pass through the various areas of the fortress. Beyond Broken Seal are three Elemental Barrier levels, then a series of levels "controlled by the five ruling knights." Each has a medallion, and all five are needed to actually enter the citadel, which I assume also has multiple levels. 

          

Well, this is depressing.

         

As I entered the Elemental Barrier levels, I ran into an NPC named Duncan--a different Duncan than the one I rescued from prison. [Ed: I guess the first guy was "Dunstan."] He said that to open the "elemental barriers," I would need to bring him three spheres, which he would then somehow "activate." (Shadow Weaver drops the barriers whenever the horde marches to and from war, but that only happens every six months or so.) I don't know why spheres are such a big part of every game I play lately. Anyway, he said that in the years since "Balthazar" had placed Duncan in his position, no one had ever brought him a sphere, so he wonders if his job wasn't meant as a joke.

    

Anyway, that suggests that I still have a lot of game to go, which makes sense given the slowdown in leveling. Jera has reached "Adept" in edged weapons (7/10), "Skilled" in clubs and hacking weapons (5/10), "Average" in pole-arms (4/10), and remains a "Beginner" in missile weapons (1/10) because I haven't had any reason to use them. She is "Adept" in healing magic (7/10) and "Skilled" (5/10) in the rest. Her overall level is "Cavalier" (8/12). These all represent gains of only a level since the last session. 

    

I've given the impression of a game that I don't like, but it would be more accurate to say that it doesn't fit well with the available time I have this month. My enjoyment improves in long sessions when I can build a certain rhythm. I'd shelve it for a month except that strategy never really works. Even if it's a game I like (e.g., The Magic Candle III), I still somehow find myself loath to pick it up again. So I'm going to power through with The Summoning even if it means I can't post about it that often. Next up, we'll probably have a BRIEF on Projekt Ikarus because I can't make heads or tails of it.

    

Time so far: 14 hours