The Summoning: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

Jera rules the world.

        

The Summoning
United States
Event Horizon (developer); Strategic Simulations, Inc. (publisher)
Released 1992 for DOS, 1994 for PC-98
Date Started: 16 August 2020

Date Finished: 20 October 2020

Total Hours: 53
Difficulty: Easy in combats (2/5), hard in puzzles (4/5), average moderate (3/5)
Final Rating: 40
Ranking at Time of Posting: 325/392 (83%)
       

Summary

This sequel to DarkSpyre (1990) continues the series' effort to bring Dungeon Master puzzles and combat to a single-character axonometric interface. The player enters a fortress of more than 40 levels (though some are optional) hoping to make his or her way to the mysterious Shadow Weaver, a warlord threatening to take over the entire world. The game's well-written backstory plays well into the encounters, NPCs, and plot twists that the player finds within the labyrinth, and the puzzles--tough but fair, involving innumerable levers, pressure plates, teleporters, and rolling balls--particularly shine. Most RPG elements, such as combat, character development, and equipment, are only average, but the game doesn't do much of anything completely wrong. Although it lasts a bit too long for my tastes, it never reaches levels of frustration as high as DarkSpyre. I enjoyed and recommend it.

     

*****

   

I was physically close to winning when I last wrote, but it still took a while. The longest part involved fully exploring the Otherworld. I didn't realize I had barely scratched the surface. I had missed the second destination of one of those double-destination teleporters, and it led to two new Otherworld maps--Otherworld Two and Otherworld Three.

   

Each map had plenty of enemies (including new giant crabs) and plenty of puzzles. One puzzle left me stumped and I had to consult a "let's play" on YouTube to solve it; it involved shooting arrows across a line of teleporters to activate a pressure plate. There was another one involving a rolling barrel that took me about an hour. That's something I picked up from my brief audit of the cluebook: what I had interpreted as cross-sections of trees were in fact "barrels." These levels introduced the "rolling barrel," which looks like a barrel but acts like a ball.

     

I didn't even realize there was an Otherworld Two.

      

The major purposes of the Otherworld levels were twofold: first, they delivered the series of items I needed to open the way to the part of the Staff of Summoning. Second, they provided two scraps of paper that together contained the "Shape Change" spell. (I also got "Lightning Shield" and "Swiftness.") Otherworld Three ended at King Evermore's Treasure Chamber, where I had to choose one from among several items. I chose Boots of Levitation, expecting that they would help me short-cut other teleporters and pressure plates in the future.

    

Back on the first level, on the other side of a Raido rune, I met a young man with no name. He could not remember ever having a name. He had been waiting in the room where I encountered him for many years but didn't seem particularly bothered by it. He said he felt like a part of him was missing; I figured he must be the Staff of Summoning piece in human form.

        

This guy talks a bit like a living staff.

       

The weird little creature called Qasar had the spell ("Channeling") necessary to turn the kid back into a staff. He would only give the spell to one of his own kind, which was obviously what "Shape Change" was for. I cast it, changed myself to whatever furry toothed creature Qasar is, and spoke to him. He congratulated me for my ingenuity and gave me the seven hand gestures for the spell. 

     

No champagne first?

      

I cast the spell near the nameless kid, and he changed into a staff, which I promptly stuck into my backpack. I returned to King Evermore and gated out of the Overworld, never to return, not even for any of the stuff I left strewn in his foyer.

     

That left the four levels of the citadel, three of which I had already partly explored. Each of the first three levels is roughly organized into quadrants, and you can only pass between quadrants on the same level in certain places. Thus, getting to the northwest quadrant of Level 1 means first going up to the southwest quadrant of Level 3, crossing over, and descending two ladders to Level 1 again. I'm making it sound easier than it is; the reality involved a lot more teleporting and levers and pressure plates. But you get the idea.

      

An "execution chamber."

       

I'll spoil for you now that I wasted a lot of time and inventory preparing for a final battle that never came. The Raven, who was relatively easy, was the last "boss-level" enemy that I fought. The Ebon Knight was the last difficult enemy that I fought. I expected some epic-level fight with Shadow Weaver, at least, and I prepared for it by leveling up with a variety of weapon types and magic skills and saving runes like Berkana (restores all magic power) and Dagaz (casts "Slaying" spell), but as we'll see, the endgame doesn't even involve a battle. Some random citadel guard or skeleton was the last enemy slain. Some commenter was right: once you find Warmonger, you can pretty much just use it exclusively. I never once used "Healing" nor used any of my diamonds to make a full-healing potion. I kept a Shield of Spell Absorption, Bracers of Regeneration, and a Cloak of Invisibility for no reason.

       

A clue to the spell parchment to insert.

       

Levels 1-3 of the citadel are mostly about supplying the black and white pearls that you need on Level 3 to open the way to Level 4. There was one key thing to do, however, which was to find the phylactery of Balthazar, the mage controlled by Shadow Weaver. I guess I had been encountering Balthazar for several levels--I just assumed it was some random mage--but you can't defeat him permanently until you find the phylactery, which itself means feeding a bunch of spell scrolls into the appropriate slots.

   

Once found, the phylactery need only be thrown against a wall to free the mage. The act gets you about 50,000 experience points, enough to raise me to Level 10 ("hero").

       

I guess "free" wasn't quite the right word.

       

Five black pearls and five white pearls are needed on Level 3. As some commenters pointed out, you don't ever find any extra black pearls. I did end the game with several extra white ones.

      

Inserting the first pearl.

     

The final level is an outer ring with a group of inner chambers. Various teleporters are scattered throughout the outer ring, leading to isolated inner rooms where you battle guards, skeletons, and stone golems to find iron tokens. You need about eight iron tokens to open the teleporter that leads to Shadow Weaver.

    

There's one!

     

Two sentient swords guard Shadow Weaver's chambers, but Warmonger threatens them and they agree to depart the world, although they swear revenge. From there, getting into Shadow Weaver's chambers is just a matter of inserting half of the Staff of Summoning in a hole. It awaits pickup on the other side of the door.

       

A sequel is set up.

        

Shadow Weaver stands alone in a large, empty room, as if the developers' budget ran out in the final area. Wearing a cloak and mask, she invites the character to take the second half of the staff from the chest behind her and mend it. The chest contains not only the staff but the God of Magic's rune necklace. Casting "Mending" brings up a cinematic in which the staff is made whole.

         

You rule the world but you don't have any furniture?

          

Shadow Weaver then demands that the character hand over the staff. When the character refuses, Shadow Weaver taunts her, claiming that she is impervious to both physical and magical attacks. Indeed, "any attack brought against me will only serve to harm the attacker" (I verified this). Jera says something about thwarting her plan, but Shadow Weaver says: "Plans? What do you know of plans? The puppet speaks back to the master with only wood for brains. You have been my pawn from the beginning, and now your part in my play is done."

      

The player has a few seconds to make a choice of object to hold in her hand before activating the Staff of Summoning. No matter what she chooses, Jera says that she knows that Shadow Weaver is Abighael, daughter of Borel. But Shadow Weaver reveals that she is also Rowena, head of the Council of Mages. She Palpatinesquely played both sides of the war and engineered the arrival of a hero to find the second half of the Staff of Summoning, which for some reason she could not do. "[Now] my revenge will be complete. The world will finally regret the pain it has brought me."

        

TV Tropes calls this "All According to Plan."

        

Three objects work and offer three different endings. The first thing you can do is hold the rune necklace and summon the God of Magic. Shadow Weaver is delighted, as she intended to do that anyway. The moment he appears, he blasts and kills Jera. He and Shadow Weaver then engage in a "great cosmic battle" that Shadow Weaver loses. The God of Magic then apparently destroys the world.

        

         

The second possibility is to hold Chesschantra's skull. Chesschantra paralyzes Jera when she arrives, and Jera watches helplessly as the mother and daughter together summon the God of Magic, who does his thing.

        

Not even a word of gratitude?

       

Mother and daughter battle and defeat the god, at which point Chesschantra turns on her daughter and kills her. 

 

This was mean.

        

The game offers the same world-ending message, although it is unclear why Chesschantra wants to destroy it.

     

But why?

          

The third and "correct" option was my first inclination, so I'm happy with that. If you hold Warmonger in the other hand, the staff summons King Borel. Although Shadow Weaver claims that it's impossible, since Borel was destroyed by the god-created DarkSpyre, Borel does appear. He thanks Jera and opens a portal to take his daughter to "a realm where they may dwell in peace." Abighael seems happy with this result as she takes Borel's hand and steps into the portal.

    

After they leave, Jera is left alone in Shadow Weaver's chambers. Warmonger has disappeared. Jera notes that Borel had his own sword, but it wasn't Warmonger, and she speculates that Warmonger has "gone off to sulk somewhere." I'm not sure if this is supposed to be a hint that one of the swords guarding Shadow Weaver's door went and found Borel and helped him return, or if it's just blather.

        

Am I supposed to attach some significance to this?

      

Shadow Weaver's outfit is left on the ground. Other than grabbing it, the only thing to do is leave via a portal. If the player leaves without putting on the outfit, she is attacked in the next chamber by a group of elite guards. I do not think they are beatable. They do half your hit point total in damage every time they hit, and they almost always hit, and there are about a dozen of them. I tried using all my amassed equipment, including Figurines of Resurrection, and I couldn't kill even one of them. Even if I could, the room's one door has no mechanism to open it.

         

Shadow Weaver should have put these guys on guard duty.

       

The proper solution is to put on Shadow Weaver's outfit.

        

I look and perhaps sound the part. I hope my lack of shadow-weaving abilities isn't a problem.

         

The guards then assume that she is Shadow Weaver and bring news that the final battle has been won and the entire world is under her control. She seems to accept this situation, with plans to rule benevolently while continuing to impersonate Shadow Weaver:

        

The world has seen much of war these past decades. It is now time for a little peace, I think. Come! Gather my messengers! It is time to go out and see what I have won. There are a great many things I have planned!

        

Roll end credits. I tried several other objects with the Staff of Summoning, including the wizards' skulls, but nothing else worked. Making it to the endgame rewards you with about 500,000 experience points, catapulting you to the top level even though it no longer matters.

           

Jera shows a lack of understanding of the economics of ruling the world and keeping a standing army.

                         

The twists at the end were pretty good, although I think some of my commenters oversold them. I was expecting something even more earth-shattering. Still, I have to praise the game for improving upon the approach of DarkSpyre and making the backstory relevant throughout the game. I never really like the "you've been doing my bidding all along" trope, but it's well done here and actually makes sense with the plot reveal. Shadow Weaver's one mistake was assuming Jera wouldn't go to the citadel's lower level and find out how to use the staff from Chesschantra's ghost.

      

          

I like the puzzles of The Summoning much better than DarkSpyre, too. They feel more organic and less artificial (although the previous game had a good reason that they felt artificial). Most of them have a couple of solutions, and some can be skipped entirely or circumvented (e.g., using the Boots of Levitation to get over plates and teleporters; casting "Freeze" to stop rolling balls). I could have done without the double-destination teleporters, however, which force you to test every teleporter once you know they exist.

    

The Summoning has NPCs, but as for other RPG elements, I'm not sure the sequel did a better job. Making Warmonger so overpowered and then introducing it slightly more than halfway through the game was a mistake; it ruins the other weapons. I wasn't enamored of the spell system. For combat tactics and character development, DarkSpyre may have been a little superior. But because of its other elements, I expect The Summoning to out-perform DarkSpyre's GIMLET score of 30.

   

For a game of this many entries, I would normally save the GIMLET for its own article. But I've already got one of those coming up for Dark Queen of Krynn so let's just bang it out here:

     

• 5 points for the game world. It has a good backstory with original elements, referenced repeatedly during the game.

• 3 points for character creation and development. Character creation is relatively meaningless given the way the character develops, and as for that development, I never felt that any of the "level-ups" made me more powerful.

• 5 points for NPC interaction. I like the NPCs: they had personalities and interests of their own. They weren't terribly complex, and the game could have done more with the dialogue keywords, but the system was still miles ahead of DarkSpyre. They even offered a fundamentally role playing choice in the decision whether to kill them as you left them, as most were loyal to Shadow Weaver.

• 5 points for encounters and foes. The foes are nothing special. Some hit harder than others and some throw globs of whatever at you, but for the most part you adopt the same approaches to all of them. I do give credit to the game manual for providing a couple of paragraphs of description for all of them. Most of these points go to the puzzle system, which I regard as a type of "encounter." The two games do a good job bringing Dungeon Master-style puzzles to an axonometric interface.

• 4 points for magic and combat. The fundamental problem with combat is that it's too easy. There are a number of environmental strategies that you might employ if it were harder, including maneuvering enemies into the paths of each others' missiles, leading them to traps or rolling balls or teleporters, using spells like "Magic Wall" to limit the number that can attack you at once, crushing them in doors, or using "Invisibility" to elude them. However, as easy as it is to "Freeze" and heal, not to mention how overpowered Warmonger is, you might as well just wade in swinging. It's too bad because the spell system has some creative spells that I rarely bothered to cast, including "Magic Skill," "Weapon Skill," "Swiftness," "Battlerage," and "Zap Away." You mostly need to save magic points for puzzle-related spells.

      

One of several spells I never used.

     

• 4 points for equipment. There certainly is plenty of it. Focusing just on the standard RPG stuff, you've got various types of weapons and armor, wands, potions, necklaces and other magic items (which have laughably short lives), and of course runes with different effects. Again, it would all be more meaningful with harder combats. I do not like that so much equipment was used for puzzle-solving, particularly when it involved items that most players would be expected to use immediately, such as Odin runes and skill books. I don't like that the distribution of equipment is completely determinate. And I don't like that half the game is spent micro-managing your inventory so you're not overburdened.

• 1 point for economy. I'm being generous. Individual gold pieces that take up their own slots is more "equipment" than an economy. 

• 4 points for quests. There's a main quest with several outcomes, even if some are obviously "bad," plus a few side-quests and side-areas.

• 4 points for graphics, sound, and interface. I didn't think there was anything particularly good or bad about the graphics and limited sound effects. As for the interface, I think it required a bit too much mouse work, and too much of that had a tendency to go awry. The system of dragging the inventory panel up and down was never a good idea; it didn't work well in DarkSpyre or Dusk of the Gods, either. (I seem to have said otherwise in my summary of DarkSpyre, which surprises me.) I would have much preferred a single key to switch between the two. The automap is well-annotated but I would have preferred an easy way to call it up instead of requiring the player to equip a special object.

• 5 points for gameplay. Here, The Summoning significantly outperforms its predecessor, which was painfully linear and difficult. Both games were a bit too long.

     

That gives us a final score of 40. I was expecting something in the 40s, so that basically works. I'd certainly consider it "recommended," and if Event Horizon had made a third title in the series, I suspect they would have done even better. Considering how much I was dreading the game at the outset, I'm pleased where I ended up.

         

Note that the hero in the advertisement is choosing the worst possible ending.

          

Samuel Baker reviewed The Summoning in the March 1993 Computer Gaming World. Some of his statements are a little mysterious ("I found that floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee paid dividends when there were many adversaries"), but overall he was complimentary to the game. Despite some frustrations with the inventory puzzles, he notes that: "I found myself more and more involved with The Summoning, playing not out of duty, but out of pleasure." That's exactly how I felt, although I can't agree with his follow-up: "I was sorry to finish the game." He alludes to Scorpia having tried the game but quitting in frustration, but I can't find her review in the issue he points to. Later that year, the magazine nominated The Summoning for "Role-Playing Game of the Year" but gave the award to Ultima Underworld II. I was surprised to see much less complimentary scores in MobyGames's round-up (they range from 39 in the German Power Play to 82 in the German PC Games); most of the complaints seem to have to do with technical and interface issues that I didn't experience.

       

The Summoning ends our experience in this game world--presumably, Jera ruled in peace forever--but not with Event Horizon or the two primary developers, Christopher Straka and Thomas Holmes. Screenshots of their vampire-themed RPG, Veil of Darkness (1993), suggests that it continues the DarkSpyre engine. Later, they'll move to a first-person interface for Dungeon Hack (1993), Ravenloft: Strahd's Possession (1994), Ravenloft: Stone Prophet (1995), and Anvil of Dawn (1995), but even then some of the graphical and interface elements look familiar. Straka's games have gotten continually better since the odd Wizard Wars (1988), and I look forward to seeing the rest of his trajectory.

    

With that, we get ever-so-closer to the end of 1992. Next, I'm going to attempt the French Oméga, Planète Invisible from 1986, but I warn you I'm not going to have a lot of patience for it. We'll see a wrap-up of Dark Queen of Krynn before that. I would also note that is my 120th entry for 2020, which has been my annual goal since setting up my Patreon account in early 2019. If I maintain my pace, I should have close to 150 entries by the end of the year, making this my most productive year since 2011. Even 10 more entries this year will make it my most productive year since 2013. Tell that to all those people who say Chester Bolingbroke is on his way out.