Abandoned Places 2: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

 

The book closes on another chapter.

       

Abandoned Places 2

Hungary

ArtGame (developer); International Computer Entertainment (publisher)

Released in 1993 for Amiga

Date Started: 22 May 2021

Date Ended: 15 June 2021
Total Hours: 50
Difficulty: Hard-Very Hard (4.5/5)
Final Rating: 26
Ranking at Time of Posting: 203/428 (47%)

      

Imagine this. The only way down from one level to the next is a pit. You enter. You wait a couple minutes for the next level to load. When it does, it turns out you've been dropped into a lake of fire. You're not worried at first. Your characters have enough health that they can survive quite a while in fire. You've done it before. Plus, by now you have "Restore Party," a healing spell that brings everyone back up to their maximums. You've got this.

   

Except as you run around, you can't find any way out of the fire. There's a wall in every direction. The room is a huge 11 x 11, and there's nothing but fire everywhere you go. As for all that healing, it turns out that the area is anti-magic. You can't cast any spells. You can't even "Levitate" yourself up to the previous level.

       

How's your day going?

       

Hopefully, you saved just before you dropped down into the room. Either way, you have to reload. You're experienced with this game by now--you know its deal. One of those wall squares is going to have a button that opens the way out, or the way out is going to be an illusory wall. Either way, you have to face and test each of 44 wall squares to be sure. That's going to take a lot of reloads, and because only a lunatic saves in the middle of a lake of fire, you're probably going to have to reload on the previous level, drop down, and wait for the fire level to load again. That's a good six or seven minutes each time.

    

You persevere, and you eventually find a button on one of the south walls. Maybe you get lucky and find it early. You're home free. But after you push the button, you run around looking for the exit you presumed it opened, and you find nothing. (Remember, your characters are burning to death this entire time.) See, it turns out that the button changed one of the walls to an illusory wall, so now you can walk through it. Even if you intuit this answer, you still have to now check all 44 squares after pressing the button.

       

This has nothing to do with this section, but one level had enemies who walked on the ceiling.

      

Eventually, you find the right wall, four squares to the right of the button. Hopefully you adopted a rightmost search pattern. The corridor beyond is clear of fire, so you step in, looking forward to healing and saving. But the moment you step into the corridor, the square you stepped on erupts into fire. You step forward, but so does the next one. And the next. And so it continues for the next 47 squares. Every one you step in becomes a fire square. And you still can't cast any spells! There's no way out of this corridor that doesn't turn into fire the moment you step into it.

   

So after multiple more reloads, you start searching for more buttons and secret doors. You start at the exit to the original room and work your way along, taking damage the entire time. You can't last long enough in the fire to look at and test many walls, so you have to remember where you died and rush to that location the next time you reload. After you've tested 30 wall squares (if you're doing one side; 60 if you're doing both), you suddenly realize you're back in the original room. What the hell? It turns out that a spinner turned you around at square #15. You've been wasting time ever since then.

        

It's a different corridor, but I thought these demons were graphically well done.

         

Finally, at square # 32--if you avoided the other two spinners along the way--you find a secret door that lets you out of the fire corridor and into a place where you can cast a healing spell. You'll immediately be in combat with some demons, but that's a cakewalk compared to this nightmare. You've had to reload, I would estimate, between 12 and 20 times. If you're still having "fun," this is exactly your sort of game.

   

That level is the third-to-last in the game, and the 11th from the surface in the second dungeon. I had just finished going through the previous 10 levels using Ringo's maps. I thought I would map the last three myself. That resolve didn't last more than two or three reloads from the lake of fire. Even using Ringo's map, it still took me a couple of tries to get out of there. I have never encountered a more hateful dungeon level. Writing that, I got the sense that I had said it before, so I Googled the phrase, and it turns out I used it in relation to one of the late dungeons in the first Abandoned Places. The authors really know how to go with a theme.

   

But for raw, unbridled hate towards the player, the first Abandoned Places has nothing on this one. Consider three other elements equally as bad as the experience I described above:

   

1. Invisible buttons. We've seen plenty of examples of very-hard-to-see buttons in Dungeon Master clones. Eye of the Beholder had some. This game has had plenty. I've often called them out. But this is the first game I've ever experienced in which the buttons are literally invisible--completely indistinguishable from anything else on the wall texture, or from other walls without buttons. The game's justification for this madness is that your cursor changes when you hover it over the button. So not only do you have to turn and face every wall, you have to comprehensively scan it with the cursor (and even then, it's easy to miss one).

      

There is a button in the middle of this wall.

      

2. Keys hidden in fire. Most levels in Abandoned Places 2 require you to find a limited set of keys before moving on. Sometimes these keys are in chests; sometimes they're dropped by enemies; sometimes they're just on the floor. And occasionally--three times, if I recall correctly--they're on the floor in a square that's on fire. You cannot see the key amidst the fire. The only way to find it is to click around until your cursor grabs it. Items dropped in squares can be in any of the four corners, only two of which you can see from any vantage, so not only do you have to click around, you have to click around twice from opposite directions. In every fire square. It's safe to say that without Ringo's maps, it never even would have occurred to me to click around fire squares looking for objects.

      

3. Weapons that do no damage. You get no feedback from the game when it comes to damage done to enemies, and there is no statistic in the character sheet indicating your attack strength. The only way you can tell that a weapon isn't doing any damage is that you're not earning any experience from your physical attacks. And these cursed weapons generally sound like something good, like "Mace of Might" or "Sword of Power." There are suits of armor that have the same problem, but at least in the case of those, you can see that your armor class hasn't gone anywhere.

      

Plate mail that offers no defense.

       

Those are just the three worst things. On top of that, you have anti-magic squares, one-way doors (pity the player who saves on the wrong side), invisible pressure plates, and an utterly pointless economy, and it's amazing that more then one person said, "Yes, let's sell this to actual people." Even Ringo, whose maps are otherwise as complete as any I've seen, couldn't figure it out in places. He had to consult a "Polish guide," and bóg knows what lunatic put that together. I owe him a drink.

    

The game turns out to have only three dungeons: the two-level starter dungeon, the nine-level dwarven mines, and the 13-level "tower" (which goes down) that concludes the game. All maps are 30 x 30 except for three levels of the final dungeon in which the corners were cut off to make more of a circle. The final dungeon is no different than the previous ones in that it has several sections--four, specifically--each with its own textures and enemies. Each level has only two types of enemies, including the last, where one of the foes found on earlier levels of the same texture disappears to make way for the final boss.

   

Enemies got harder in the last two sections, as they were capable of casting spells. One of their spells was "Fireball," which hurls a fireball at the party until it hits, then creates a fire square that lasts for a few minutes. I not only had the same spell, it turns out the Dobelal Shield (which I found at the end of the last session) casts them infinitely, so most of the combats towards the end of the game occurred with both sides standing in fire. But my necromancer got "Restore Party" early in the final session, and then "Resurrect" in case I didn't cast it fast enough. He was never really in danger of running out of necromancy spell points, so the only time I had trouble is when combats took place in anti-magic squares. Even then, it was usually just a matter of running back until I was out of the zone. This is not a game in which monsters are the true enemy.

       

A typical late-game combat begins with setting everyone on fire.

       

I don't want to leave the impression that the navigation puzzles were all awful. There was one level in the final dungeon in which casting spells in empty corridors opened the way to new areas; you have to figure out the right spell from various clues. But aside from that one level, even when the puzzles were fair, they were always a bit boring. You weigh down a pressure plate or hit a button and run around trying to figure out what it did. People forget that Dungeon Master wasn't just a bunch of switches and plates. It had teleporters into which you had to throw items so they would weigh down pressure plates in their destination squares. It had pressure plates that you could only weigh down with monsters, forcing you to lure them into cells and lock the door behind them. It had alcoves into which you had to stick various objects based on clues. It had, in short, the sorts of puzzles that you felt really accomplished for figuring out. Abandoned Places' puzzles are more rote.

     

Ringo's map of the game's final level.

       

The final level of the game begins at the bottom of the stairs from the previous level. There's a short corridor and then more stairs. (This is in the northwest of the map above.) The game does this a lot. Even though you're going down stairs, you're still on the same level; you can tell because real level changes take a few minutes to load. At the bottom of the second set of stairs (at the far south-center of the map above), you're greeted by a horde of blue lizardmen--so many that the number overwhelms the default system's memory and causes many of your clicks not to register, particularly when they start spamming fireballs. But what would have been a memorably difficult combat is rendered trivial (if long) by the fact that they can't advance into the corridor you come from, so all you have to do is pop into their area, launch a few fireballs of your own, and step back into the corridor while they burn. When the spell runs out, you can just step out and do it again. It takes a while, but it's not like there aren't other things to do in the meantime.

       

The welcoming committee on the last level.

        

The lizardman area delivers constant damage to the party while they stand it. I have no idea why. It's just one of those things. So in your haste to hustle through it, you might miss the illusory walls at the north end of the area, where you have to find a button to open the door that allows you to move on. From there, you find yourself in a long corridor. It wraps halfway around the bottom of the map, then all the way up the right side, then halfway along the top. Offensive spells fly continually down this corridor, damaging the party. No problem--you just keep up with "Restore Party."

    

A room off this corridor has a locked door that can be opened with a glass key that you find on the previous level. It has more combats with lizardmen. One of them drops the sentient sword Kuhalk. It's the best weapon in the game. When you grab it, Kuhalk speaks in your mind, alerting you that Pendugmalhe is working on a spell that will destroy your party, and that you need to hurry.

          

"¡Oye, espada! ¿Hablas español?"

     

In my first attempt at this level, I continued along the corridor until it dead-ended at the north end of the map. Near the dead-end, I found a button. It wasn't clear what it did at first, but it turned out to open an illusory wall to a door that required a key. I didn't have another key. I turned around to explore my backpath, but it turned out that button had closed the path behind me. I was stuck. Fortunately, I had saved, but my saved game was from before the battle with the lizardmen. I had to reload and fight that again.

 

The key you need is back in the small hallway between the two staircases, behind a section of wall that only opens when you step on some square--I have no idea which one--in the early part of the level. I probably wouldn't have found that without Ringo's map; it wouldn't have occurred to me to go back to that corridor between the stairs.

   

The second door opens into a very large area full of lizardmen and fire squares. The fire squares form a demonic face when viewed from a map. Pendugmalhe--a tall, hunched, blue demon with a staff--is in the southeast corner of this area, but you have to fight through another army of lizardmen to reach him. The game has a couple of final "screw yous" here. First, the door closes behind you as you enter, so you're trapped. Second, almost all of this 17 x 27 area is anti-magic. I only found a couple of squares where you can cast spells, and Pendugmalhe doesn't come anywhere near any of them. Thus, no matter how much you've built up your spellcasters, you have to face the big boss in melee combat only.

         

This looks less like an evil demon lord and more like an evil demon lord's dumb henchman.

      

I fought both the lizardmen and Pendugmalhe the same way: fight until my characters' health got too low, retreat to one of the spellcasting squares to cast "Restore Party," and return. It only took me about four rounds of this to kill Pendugmalhe.

  

The game goes on pointlessly after he dies. One of the squares in this final area--again, I have no idea which one--lowers a pillar that has a secret door behind it. So you have to run around to all the squares, notice that the pillar has dropped, and then test the walls for secret doors. My idea of a fun time. While I was trying to figure this out (Ringo hadn't figure it out, either, and thus his map didn't annotate the crucial square), I found a teleporter that took me to a small area with two chests and a torch. Ringo's map annotates both chests as simply "locked," indicating he hadn't been able to get them open. Indeed, none of my keys would open them. It turns out that, nonsensically, the torch opens the chests, but only one of them. The chests are full of the major quest and magic items in the game, including other copies of the Dobelal Shield and the sword Kuhalk, as much sense as that makes.

       

So much for this being a unique artifact.

     

Once you find the way out of the final area, you have to fight more lizardmen in a final set of corridors. There are numerous chests in this area, heaped with riches and powerful magic items. Not only do you have no need of them, but you would have had no need of them throughout the rest of the game (see "economy" below). So although a couple of messages seemed to be warning me about something (Kuhalk says, "Beware; wealth could kill everyone . . ."), I didn't need the warning.

     

The final square has a few final items and a scroll. Picking up the scroll, I got a message that read:

     

The evil is forced to go back where it belongs -- back to Hell. But the scroll that would have allowed you to go back swiftly to your plane has lost forever. Suddenly the Master appears in front of you. You have no idea where he came from, but you know it is him. "You can destroy the evil several times, but it will reappear in different forms again, somewhere else. You have to fight the evil wherever it is, but you made the first step towards our final aim: to destroy its plane, and its very source of existence forever."

      

After this, the game asks whether I want to save and then shows a cinematic of Pendugmalhe morphing into several forms and being killed in each one. Finally, there's a bookend to the game's introductory screen showing an arcane book being closed. I have literally no idea what this endgame message and cinematic was trying to convey.

Pendugmalhe in another form, I guess.

      

In the GIMLET, I give the game:

    

• 3 points for the game world. The backstory is mostly a framing story, referenced only a couple of times in-game. Although the manual tries to draw some connections to the first game, none of the proper names really line up, and I get the impression that this was originally conceived as a standalone title. The overworld didn't add a lot to the first game, but its loss is felt here. I have no idea why the developers didn't structure this one as four or five smaller dungeons, giving more of a reason to occasionally visit the towns in the outer world. As it is, they're almost entirely superfluous. The bits of text that pop up as you explore the dungeons do give some atmosphere to the game, however, and I wish more Dungeon Master clones offered something like that.
  

• 4 points for character creation and development. Creation is better than the first game, since you're not so locked into a specific party composition and you can edit your characters' statistics. Development is satisfying throughout the game, with the party becoming noticeably more powerful. It's particularly fun to get new spells to try.

• 0 points for no NPC interaction. They should have expanded on what the first game offered, not cut it.

• 4 points for encounters and foes, a combination of the unnamed enemies of various strengths and the puzzles.

      

Contending with lizard men in the final area.

      

• 3 points for magic and combat. Too much of it seemed rote and simplistic: attack with your weapon and blast with your best spell. The magic system definitely could use some more (or any) buffing spells. Incidentally, the game pretends there are 8 spell levels, but you can't actually click on Level 8, and Level 7 only has one spell--"Resurrect All"--which is hard to imagine needing, and even if you did need it would only save you a couple of clicks from three individual "Resurrects." The spells are also poorly documented in the manual.

• 4 points for equipment. You have slots for two weapons (or weapon and spell, or weapon and shield), armor, a helm, a cloak or robe, a ring, a necklace, and boots. You find regular and satisfying upgrades to these items throughout the game, some of which have special functions. But the game shares Dungeon Master's vice of really telling you nothing about your items, and as I pointed out, a fair number are simply useless.

     

If you could eat these gems, they'd actually be useful for something.

    

• 1 point for the economy. It has one, and I did use it once to resurrect a dead character. But otherwise, and this cannot be overstated, there is no point in collecting gold and gems in this game. You won't visit the surface often enough, and even when you do, there's absolutely nothing useful to buy. I don't know what the game thought it was doing, offering me chests of diamonds and opals on the 11th level of a dungeon. Did the authors think I was going to hike back up 11 levels to sell the gems and buy a regular short sword?

• 2 points for a main quest with no choices, no role-playing, no side quests.

         

Did I do something wrong? Was I supposed to use the scroll a different way?

       

• 4 points for graphics, sound, and interface. The graphics are quite nice for a tiled first-person game, and I never stopped enjoying how the graphic artist chose to depict pillars and walls on new levels. The sound is alternately too busy and too sparse. The interface is a mixed bag. It works well with simultaneous mouse and keyboard, but I would have liked more keyboard redundancy for combat, spellcasting, and inventory shuffling.

     

In place of "pillars," we get cages with skeletons on this level.

     

• 1 point for gameplay. This is where it suffers for its length and difficulty (too hard on puzzles, too easy on combat). It's also quite linear--much more so than the first--and not replayable.

    

That gives us a final score of 26 against the 31 I gave to the first Abandoned Places. Gameplay in Dungeon Master clones is similar enough that I think that games need to do something to distinguish themselves. Unlike its predecessor, which was distinguished by a top-down overworld, multiple dungeons, a little nonlinearity, and a detailed plot, this one is distinguished mostly by gameplay choices that seem designed to punish the player. 

A note on the difficulty: I originally was going to give the game 5/5 for "very hard," a rating I'd only ever previously given to Knightmare, another Dungeon Master clone. My reasoning was that several of the navigation puzzles are simply impossible without help. But Knightmare had both impossible puzzles and impossible combat, whereas Abandoned Places 2 has only the former. Hence, the compromise.

    

Computer Gaming World and other American publications didn't take notice of this sequel. It was well-covered in British Amiga magazines, which are always reliable when it comes to a game's box and its first 15 or 20 minutes. The problem is that Abandoned Places 2 looks a lot better at the beginning than the end; you don't know at the beginning that the economy and towns are going to be useless and that navigation is going to become impossible. Hence, we have ratings of 77 to 87 from CU Amiga, Amiga Format, Amiga User International, Amiga Computing, and The One, all of which praise the game in comparison to its predecessor, Eye of the Beholder, Bloodwych, Knightmare, and Black Crypt. (At least they understand the genre. Certain American reviewers might have called it a "Might and Magic-style game.") At worst, some of them feel it's a little derivative.

   

Several reviews have something to irk me. The most interesting comes from Tony Gill's CU Amiga review in April 1993. We've long talked about the "combat waltz" inherent in many Dungeon Master clones; well, we weren't the first to coin a term for the maneuver, nor the first to use a dance. He calls it the "Purple Worm Two-Step," which is slightly inaccurate in that you only step once in the movement. I prefer "combat waltz" since it has three beats: turn-step-attack (or step-turn-attack if that's your bent, weirdo). In any event, Gill assures the player that it will be necessary in Abandoned Places 2. Maybe it was for him. I didn't even bother to investigate whether it would work.

      

"Just when we thought the Dungeon Master genre was dead and buried," starts Paul Tyrell's review in the April 1993 Amiga Format. Who thought that, exactly, and why? The rest of the review is no better. Tyrell thought it was "a massive improvement over the first game," a rival to Eye of the Beholder II. His glowing prose is almost entirely about the graphics, however, and he refers to the outdoor areas as the "later levels" in the game.

Tim Norris's July 1993 review in Amiga Power (58%) is closer to my rating, but . . . ugh. Read it here. The problem is that Norris isn't content to Review; he must also Write. Thus, his perfectly valid points about loading times and copy protection (which I didn't experience) are lost among some flowery prose about Why We Play Role-Playing Games. I suppose I could be accused of the same thing, but I dare say a blog entry of 4,000 words is better equipped to go off on such flights than a one-page review. A similarly insouciant review in the May 1993 Amiga Force also rated it low (40%).

   

There were consistently low ratings from non-English Amiga magazines, including Power Play (64), Amiga Joker (66), Pelit (74), ASM (75), and Play Time (75), and among them, there are quotes I like to see: "not for newbies"; "terrible story and horrible manual"; "lack of smooth response to keystrokes." I don't see any of them complaining about having to find a key in a square of fire, but I suspect no one made it that far.

    

ICE must have spent all the proceeds on those free t-shirts.

    

Whatever I think of the game, the developers didn't deserve what they got from their publisher, which was apparently nothing. The publisher of their fist game, Electronic Zoo, went out of business just as the game was hitting market. Its assets were bought by International Computer Entertainment (ICE), which published Abandoned Places 2 and Piracy on the High Seas. After forcing the developers to represent their names in Anglicized form (e.g., István Fábián became "Steve Fabian" and Ferenc Staengler became "Francis Staengler"), ICE rewarded them by severing all contact and never sending any royalties. An account written by Fábián tells how ICE representatives failed to show up for appointments and how the ArtGame team showed up at their offices for a scheduled meeting to find the place abandoned (irony!), with "only a few people packing boxes into a van." [Ed.: I guess I misunderstood the anecdote. The ArtGame team went to a computer show at which they expected to meet ICE representatives, not their offices.] Never having made any return from three games, ArtGames was forced to close. Most of its employees found work into the 2000s with other game companies. ICE published only a few more low-rated games before themselves folding in 1997.

        

Fábián notes that playtesting took three months. The playtesters "could only finish the game by using various cheats," which he attributes the playtesters having "never played an RPG before." As someone who has played plenty of RPGs before, I can tell you that probably wasn't the source of their problems.

    

I chose the games for my "upcoming" list at random, so it's an interesting coincidence that the next one, Perihelion, is not only another Amiga game, but it's also from Hungary. Let's see how it compares.