Orb Quest, Part 1: The Search for Seven Wards: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

  

In CRPGs, whoever succeeds at one task always gets the burden of the next task.

        

Orb Quest, Part I: The Search for Seven Wards

United States

QWare (developer and publisher)

Released in 1986 for Macintosh

Date Started: 9 May 2021

Date Ended: 14 May 2021
Total Hours: 19 (including about 10 hours of probably-unnecessary mapping)
Difficulty: Easy-Moderate (2.5/5)
Final Rating: 24
Ranking at Time of Posting: 171/417 (41%)          

      

Summary:

The first Macintosh-native RPG has an Ultima basis in its top-down open-world exploration, its interchangeable towns, and its fairly basic approach to combat. But it also has a few surprises during its "Disassembulet of Yendor" questline that make it worth playing.

     

**** 

     

In the first entry, I had explored the land and found the first of the seven wards. The seven wards were all found within pyramids, but at the beginning of the game, you can only find one. It locks the rest of the pyramids after you find it, with the message that you have to be judged on the Island of the Mystics. The first trick was getting to the island, because there aren't any boats in this game.

   

It turns out that while every weapon, armor, and spell store has the same inventory, the towns’ magic stores each sells a different list. Because the economy in the game is so tight, I was never able to experiment and find out exactly what they all do. You can only have five or six magic items in your inventory at once. Some of them are "always on" and serve as supplemental armor, like the magic helm, magic shield, and steel gauntlets. Some seemed to duplicate the game's spells, like "Staff of Curing" and "Wand of Missiles." There are various potions and items that boost attributes, including restoring attributes lost to various creatures (more below). A "Change Potion" changes your sex, along with the related attributes.

         

Only Three Rivers sells these items.

       

But there are also a lot of mysteries. I purchased a "Black Box," but it was empty. A "Book of Lists" just seems to repeat the words "Book of Lists" repeatedly. I can't imagine what an "Amulet of Truth" does. An "Endure Fire Potion" seems like a good idea until you realize there's no fire in the game—except for that caused by the "Matchbook," which simply burned me.

        

Well, that was useful.

    

Three Rivers sells a "Ring of Water," a limited-duration item that lets you cross water. Unfortunately, every second you spend on the waves carries a chance of causing the ring to rust. This gives you about eight squares' warning to find dry land. The duration that the ring lasts seems to shorten as the game goes by. I spent a lot of time just exploring with my first one, but my last one barely got me to the Island of Mystics. I used the first one to confirm that the world does wrap, but I had already mapped all but a couple of islands.

          

The Orb's "World View" ability later confirmed the geography.

            

The Island of the Mystics was one of these. After I reached and mapped it, I entered the fortress on it. To prove myself "worthy," I had to pass a challenge. It turned out that I needed to do this six times. That is, after every ward found, I had to buy a Ring of Water, return to the Island of the Mystics, and pass a new challenge before I could get in to the next pyramid. The challenges added a fun dimension to what would have otherwise been a standard "Disassembulet of Yendor" quest. In order, they were:

 

1. Solve a logic puzzle to determine which door a throne is behind.

  

2. Play a little mini-game in which monster icons flashed randomly and quickly on the screen. You have to click on the same icon that's highlighted in the row at the bottom without clicking on a bouncing orb. This game was a bit unfair. I think it was designed for a much slower Mac. I had to cheat it a bit by clicking out of the emulator window, freezing the action, so I could study the pattern of icons and click in the right place.

     

It doesn't look hard, but each icon is up for less than a second.

       

3. Navigate a black maze. This one is solved with a clue that tells you the exact path to take. All those clues were not otherwise very helpful. You might be able to solve it just by mapping.

     

This is not a box with four lines sticking out, as I originally thought.

      

4. A crazy game in which you had to try to score points by clicking buttons under certain conditions. I read the instructions multiple times, and I'm still not sure what I was supposed to do. Unfortunately, it had the same problem as #2, even worse. The symbols came and went so fast there was absolutely no way to follow the instructions. I couldn't earn a single point no matter what I did. Fortunately, LanHawk had the same experience and sent me instructions for hex-editing my way past this obstacle. [Edit: Thanks to Mark's comment below, we now know that there was no speed issue; the entire point of the test is for the conditions to make no sense. Hitting "cancel" on the subsequent screen instead of starting the test leads to your designation as "worthy" and advances the plot, no hex editing necessary.]

         

I think I need a drink.

        

5. Answer three trivia questions related to monsters and items in the game.

       

Luckily, I'd been attacked by enough of them.

        

6. Solve a logic puzzle in which I indicated which of four towers held the orb. This one took me two tries. I didn't quite understand what some of the clues meant. Other than the fact that the Prison Tower has no windows (which makes anything else you say about it moot), why wouldn't you be able to see any of the towers from any of the others?

     

If you can get it in one, you did better than I did.

      

After solving each of these puzzles, I could go to a new pyramid and get another ward. Obtaining the wards, in contrast to the puzzles, was remarkably similar each time. There was a brief maze, then a 5 x 5 grid of squares with the ward in the center. Each square teleports to another square, and I just had to find the right pattern to end up next to the ward. A couple of the mazes had tricks like secret doors, or squares that did damage to the character, but nothing to get worked up about.

       

Finding the last piece.

       

Finding each ward piece increased my "Orb" statistic and provided a new orb power to use. In order, these were "Remove Curse," "Blessing," "World View," "Disintegrate," "Dispel Evil," "Flame Strike," and "Teleport." I only ever used the last one, plus a couple of "World Views."

    

Monsters were both annoying and negligible. They continued to scale with each "level" I made and with each new class of weapon or armor that I bought, so I'm not sure there was much point in doing either. At high levels, they started to get seriously bothersome in their special effects. Brain parasites sap intelligence permanently; IRS agents steal your gold; locust plagues decimate your food stores; and disenchanters drain spell points. (Beholders, oddly, often increased my hit points. I have no idea how that happened.) At the same time, you can just outrun a lot of them and reload when bad things happen. Combat was a constant part of the game and yet not a significant part of the game. I rarely felt my life was in danger, and yet at the same time, I don't think I ever reached my maximum hit points or spell points; monsters and "Cure Wounds" ate them up about as fast as they regenerated.

     

When I got the final ward, I got a message: "Congratulations!! The Seven are now one. The Orb is restored. Hustle ye now to the castle and place the Orb upon the Throne of the Ancient Kings." The castle is enclosed by mountains, but the Orb's final power, "Teleport," gets you there.

        

I enter a vast, empty castle that has no purpose except for the endgame message.

   

I expected a final battle, but there was nothing. The castle had some inert guards and was curiously large considering nothing actually happens there except the endgame. I walked up to the throne, dropped the Orb, and got the endgame message:

    

The Orb opens a gateway to the realm of Trigoth, the source of all the evil that invades your land. As restorer of the Orb, you must now travel to the Dark side to destroy the Black Monarch and banish Evil for all time . . . The quest will be fraught with peril and will lead into deep caverns guarded by vile creatures. Be brave and be sure to catch this next adventure coming soon to a store near you!

      

Alas, it did not come soon to a store near anyone. As far as I can tell, Qware (do you supposed they pronounced it "cue-ware" or "kware"?) of Richardson, Texas, never produced another game, and neither did the two authors, Edward Schultz and Michael Mayer. I tried to track them down, but messages had not been returned at the time of this entry.

   

On a GIMLET, I give the game:

   

• 1 point for a bare-bones game world.

• 2 points for character creation and development. You have a few options for advancement, but as I mentioned, it doesn't really matter.

• 1 point for no NPCs, but I'll give it a point for the lore bits that serve as a kind of placeholder for NPCs. They'd be worth more if the hints were useful. I only understood about half of them, and all but one of those were unnecessary.

         

I assume this is because if you fail the tests, you get kicked back to the mainland with only 5 hit points.

       

• 3 points for encounters and foes. I'm giving most of that to the puzzles that surround collecting the ward pieces. Monsters themselves were unmemorable except in bad ways.

• 2 points for magic and combat. Perhaps the other classes have a different experience, but for me it was just attack and heal.

• 3 points for equipment. There's some potentially interesting stuff in the list, and I'm going to be charitable and assume that some of it is useful.

• 4 points for the economy. It was very tight. I never felt that I had enough money. I had to really think about what to buy, when to splurge on an upgrade. Only a lack of complexity keeps it from scoring any higher.

• 3 points for a main quest of seven stages. There were no side-quests or role-playing options, but there were some interesting steps and interludes.

• 1 point for graphics, sound, and interface. The icons are functional, but the sound is horribly annoying and you can't even turn it off. Requiring a mouse for movement is simply inexcusable, and this is compounded by requiring the player to hit the special Mac "command" button along with every key. Honestly, why is "A" itself not good enough for "Attack"?

      

Only on a Mac would a gelatinous cube have a face.

       

• 4 points for gameplay. It's open-world geographically but not narratively. It's only a bit too easy and lasts only a bit too long (even if you cut out the mapping).

    

That gives us a final score of 24--certainly not epic, not even "recommended," but better than a lot of the other Ultima clones during the period. At least this one had me looking forward to each new puzzle. If I'd had a Mac during the period, I would have found it an acceptable diversion for a few hours.