Perihelion: Mask Up

Per CDC recommendations.

     

At the end of my last entry, I was trying to solve a bunch of inter-related puzzles to get access to the lower levels of the SoulTomb Mines, where I would presumably find a boy kidnapped by lycanthropes. The basic gimmick carried on for a few more dungeons. The game's areas might be small in total squares, but you have to do a lot of things to open all the doors and access all those squares, and this in turn requires paying careful attention to all the notes and descriptions the game gives you. There's a strong adventure game quality to these puzzles, and I often find myself wishing that games in the Dungeon Master line would do more of this rather than offering puzzles that are purely mechanical.

   

(I should add, though, that even "purely mechanical" puzzles have a certain charm when they require logic, creativity, or experimentation on the part of the player. Dungeon Master itself excelled at these. A lot of Dungeon Master clones are less interesting, requiring only that you find a key in one place to open a door in another place.)

   

Until the mines, Perihelion hadn't offered anything near this level of complexity, so I blundered into it and didn't realize I was lost until I'd already passed a lot of the text I should have taken more careful note of. I thus reloaded a save from early in the dungeon and went through everything again. As this session went on, I got increasingly annoyed at the game's presentation of text in long passages scrolling at the bottom of the screen. These endless paragraphs precede just about every NPC encounter, combat, and entrance to a new area. I don't mind the text itself--I like it, in fact. It contributes to the game's eerie lore, and it makes each encounter what I call a "contextual encounter." But the method of presentation makes it impossible to easily capture, reference, and quote it.

   

What I don't mind on the bottom of the screen are the many atmospheric messages that provide a bit of flavor to what would otherwise be blank corridors and repetitive textures. Some examples:

     

• "This very badly lit barrack makes you claustrophobious."
• "Broken medical supplies and radiation detectors are lying on a round table."
• "You almost stumble over the scattered equipment here."
• "Piles of tubes and small, rusty wires cover the floors of this chamber."
• "The walls in this section of the mine can crumble in any moment."

       

The puzzles begin after Corall, leader of the mutants, lets you explore the lower levels looking for Mirach. Mirach is on the mining storage level, and my natural exploration pattern brought me to several rooms on the way. In one of them, I found a mining drill. Although just a tool, it can only be wielded by a fighter type, which I suspect is why commenters told me to make sure I had at least one of those. I also found an empty battery.

   

I ran into a network station on the way, where the word MUTANT scrawled on a wall let me know the local netcode. One of the documents told how to use "Cobold" explosives, specifically that after you place them, you have 6 seconds to escape behind a firedoor.

   

I eventually reached Mirach's chambers, where the kidnapping of his grandson Algol went as related last time. I defeated the remaining lycanthropes and accepted his quest to rescue his grandson in exchange for his information about the Guardian. Mirach gave me his passkey. (It's important to grab it after talking to him, as he disappears afterwards. If you don't get the key at this moment, it puts you in a walking dead situation.) As I left the area for the only passage downward, his daughter, PearlBlood, gave me an "artificial crystal" which supposedly "brings fortune upon its possessor."

     

This is the only screenshot you're getting for a while because I played a DOSBox game just before this session and forgot that CTRL-F5 doesn't do anything in WinUAE.

       

Mirach's passkey opened the security door at the beginning of the next level. An early corridor had two doors. I was able to open the first, but the second remained stuck. I couldn't figure out what to do until I paid attention to the message I got when walking down the corridor: "Separated air-circulation system--do not decompress!" I had to close the first door behind me before the second door would open. It opened into a room containing a "strange tablet with a hexagonal hole." This is one of those cases where you have to realize that this isn't just flavor text--you actually have to do something here. In this case, the "something" meant inserting the artificial crystal.

      

You're afraid to believe your own very eyes when you put the gem into the hole: Strong psychical energies fill the room as the crystal reveals the contents of its information-cell encoded more than three centuries ago. A very clear holographic image of a priest of Toxic Waste appears on the front wall. Then a loud, aggressive, supernatural voice echoes down the hall: BANISH THE THEORY OF EQUALITY BECAUSE THE TIME HAS COME FOR THE MIGHTY TO RULE AND FOR THE WEAK TO SERVE. TASTE MY FURY AND REMEMBER . . . I AM WHAT I AM . . . then the hologram fades and the crystal disperses into dust.

         

I always like it when the game does me the service of destroying my inventory items when they've served their purpose, but pity the player who doesn't transcribe the message the first time.

   

In a nearby room labeled "explosives," I found several grenades, a demolition pack (the game didn't use the name, but it looks like the "Cobol" in the image), a "composite key plug," and five "dust filter masks." I would later convince myself that there must have been six dust filter masks, one for each party member, and that I either left one behind or put it in the wrong part of someone's inventory. Pursuing this belief cost me a lot of time, as we'll soon see.

   

An elevator led down to a new level, where a chamber proclaimed: "Energy cell rechargers." There were three alcoves, and in each one of them I could use my empty battery to give it a charge. What order to use them? Well, the alcoves were labeled "I," "AM," and "WHAT." If that wasn't enough, we also learn that "the ceilings are filled with ancient, ritualistic runes of the Toxic Waste." I like to think that with my extensive knowledge of Popeye lore, I would have figured it out without the vision on the crystal. But I also might have figured that you could only use each recharger once and thus tried "WHAT AM I?" or something. Getting it right filled the battery with "the necessary variants of energy samples."

       

"I am what?!"

      

The solution to the next puzzle was a bit unintuitive. At the end of a tunnel was something reading "Composite Assembling Unit." That brought to mind the composite key plug found earlier, and indeed when I used it, it "slid into the assembling slot." It was less intuitive that I then needed to use the battery to create a "composite key." But simply trying all my inventory items produced the solution.

   

Mirach's pass key opened another door, where a blank wall told me of a "tubular-shaped hole." Clearly, this hole wanted the composite key. When I inserted it, I got a message that the "polarity [was] disengaged." At the end of another set of corridors were three doors, the center of which would not initially open. The other two had "sensor-coordinating lasers" in them, and when I opened both doors, the laser beams met in the middle (this is all relayed by text) to somehow open the central door.

   

The game noted that the next door "looks like a fire door," which put the demolition instructions in mind. Sure enough, the corridor behind it ended at a blank wall where the rocks were "much more loose than anywhere else." I first tried to just blow it up with the demolition charge, but that wouldn't work on its own. I then remember the mining drill. My human used it to drill a hole into the wall in which we then inserted the demolition charge. We had to rush back behind the fire door and close it. The screen shook. When we re-opened the door, there was a corridor beyond.

       

I still don't see why a spellcaster couldn't use this.

       

Only a couple of steps into this new corridor, a reddish tint covered everything, and the game noted that "everything here is covered in choking, thick, radioactive dust." I distributed the dust masks among my party members but only had five of them. The sixth, the game noted, was being "badly injured by the radioactive dust!" This is where I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to find the sixth mask, even reloading an earlier save, before I concluded no, there was ever only five. My maskless character kept dying before I could reach the end of the corridors, and I started to wonder if I would have to complete the game with just five characters. I had to look at a walkthrough to find the obvious solution: just swap the masks around every few moves to ensure that no one loses too much vitality. Only about 10 moves into the radioactive area is a sixth mask, which solves the problem.

      

Name any game in which a red tint is a good sign.

      

The corridors open into a large room, where we were attacked by another pack of lycanthropes, just as annoying with their damaging wails as the first. My approach to combat is still largely the same as last time: start each battle with a volley of offensive spells, then quickly switch to "Alpha Catharsis" to restore stamina and vitality. (Enemies hardly ever cast spells or use attacks that deplete attributes other than stamina and vitality. I think only a complete loss of vitality actually kills you. If you completely lose some of the others, you can't act in combat, though.) Here, I had to start using healing spells right away because the radioactive dust had already knocked down our vitality.

 

One constant annoyance is when the game insists that an enemy is not in my line-of-sight even when he clearly is. I've noticed that enemies often are able to attack me at times that the game says that I can't see them. This is particularly absurd during melee combat, as in the shot below. At times like this, I have to cancel the attack, move, and re-initialize it, costing me half a round.

     

How is he not in my line of sight?

        

I should pause to say something about inventory. I'm mostly still using the things that the game started with. I think I missed a lot of potential upgrades in the early dungeons because I hadn't yet trained myself to watch the locater unit. My lead character did acquire an axe to replace his hunting knife, and another character I equipped with a "katana-blade" when his ammunition ran out. It took me a few tries to realize that the katana has to be used from one square away from the enemy, not right up against him. I've found a couple of submachine guns to replace what my rear characters started with, but I suspect everyone will be using melee by the end. Since I discovered "Alpha Catharsis," I haven't been using bandages at all, which is good because the game regularly tells me that a character has no injuries even when he does.

   

After defeating the lycanthropes, I looked around and found Algol in a corner. I'll transcribe the entire creepy message:

       

You found Algol in a small, uneasily worn chamber. He's leaning against the wall in a weird trance-like state. For a second, you're standing amazed by the radiating, unearthly intelligence of his eyes, but the wicked, malevolent voice that speaks from within the boy dreads even you . . . "YOUR UNIVERSE IS ONLY A CREATION OF YOUR MIND . . . AND YOU ARE ONLY A CREATION OF MY ABSENCE . . . WE SHALL MEET IN MY ENTIRETY" . . . and when the Unborn's presence releases the child's body he unconsciously falls into your hands. You realize that you have to hurry now before the poison starts to take its deadly toll . . .

         

That was the cue to rush Algol back to Mirach. I don't know if there was actually a time limit on getting Algol back, but there was a limit of another sort. Just before I got out of the radioactive zone, the game told me that my characters succumbed to the radioactive dust and everyone died. They didn't actually lose vitality, but I guess there's a hard limit on how long you can spend in the zone, both coming and going, and I exceeded it. I had to reload the game from an earlier save and fight the lycanthropes again, this time making sure to keep my movements efficient and my route as short as possible. I think I missed some equipment because of this.

      

This image says everything you need to know about this game.

       

We got Algol back to his family, they jabbed him with his medicine, and everyone was grateful. Mirach told us in great detail about the Guardian. I won't transcribe all of it, but the gist is that 30 years ago, the mediators of the Tower of Neon accidentally summoned a "lesser entity" into the world "during one of their collapsed PlaneShift experiments." The Guardian--I still don't know what it is, really--somehow banished the entity back to its own plane. Mirach had the Guardian while he was in the WatchTower colony, but someone ratted on Algol, who is a mutant, and the family was expelled and its possessions confiscated. Mirach later learned that the Guardian had been given to Lord Daleth, ruler of Fort NightFall, but that it is ultimately destined for the Tower of Neon, where the mediators hope to use it to banish the Unborn.

      

Mirach tells his four-page tale. At least I can take screenshots of this text.

       

Great! Someone's going to do our job for us! Why do we have to be involved? But Mirach nonetheless recommended that we go to NightFall and grab the Guardian before it's taken to the tower. Lord Daleth is some kind of bloodthirsty criminal, but the mediators have allied with him because they're desperate.

   

The game had one final surprise before I got out of the SoulTomb Mines. As we returned to the entrance, Corall attacked us in a fury, screaming that our missive to the emperor had come back negative, meaning that the emperor had refused to loosen the empire's controls on mutants. We could see the reply in his hand, though, and its color indicated a "yes" response, not a "no." This made it clear that the Unborn had managed to possess or fool Corall. We unfortunately had to kill him and a bunch of his mutants. He was moderately difficult, throwing all kinds of radiation grenades and bombs, but he did us a service by catching a lot of his own mutants in the blast radius.

        

Corall catches some of his own party members with a grenade.

       

After the battle, PearlBlood showed up with the sad news that the Unborn had killed Mirach moments after we left him. (She didn't specify how, but the more gruesome part of my mind thinks it probably possessed Algol again.) She led us to the exit and tearfully begged us to save the world from the monstrous entity.

    

NightFall featured puzzles of equal complexity, but I won't go into those in as much detail. I just wanted one entry in which you could get a full appreciation of the game's approach. Being handed a key in reward for completing a task is more satisfying than just finding it, or gods forbid having to root around for it in a lake of fire (cf. Abandoned Places 2). Opening a wall with a mining drill and dynamite is more interesting than finding a pressure plate. The games aren't really the same sub-genre, so the comparison is inapt, but you get my meaning.

   

Before I go, I want to call for another round of applause for the game's music. You know that I have been indifferent to, even dismissive of, game music in the past--even good game music. This is because I don't want any tune on a constant loop as I explore, no matter how good it is. (As I've discussed, I don't like background music in any setting. When I listen to music, I want that to be my primary occupation.) Playing Perihelion, I realized that I haven't made enough of a distinction between games with "background music" and games that are actually scored. By that, I don't just mean that the game has different compositions for different areas. Everyone does that. I mean that the game knows when to play and when to shut up. Fortunately, there are some videos online in which the creator isn't yakking, so you can hear what I'm talking about (thanks to YouTuber ravencrest1985 for posting these). First, note that in combat, when you're trying to concentrate, there's no music at all, just a steady industrial hum. Later, when you're exploring, you don't get some distracting melody. You get more of a mood piece that's half sound effects. (My only "complaint" there was the loop is too short.) The game saves the big compositions for major encounters or when you approach a new area. Even that one is more atmospheric than melodic; try this one, which transitions us to the next entry, for a real tune.

    

Perihelion isn't the first game scored this way. I probably first identified the distinction in Quest for Glory without really analyzing it. But the music in this game is some of the best I've ever heard. Credit is given to a Zoltan Vegh, who only has a small number of games to his credit: The Simpsons (1991, Konami), this one, and Theocracy (2000, Philos). I don't know whether he worked for Morbid Visions or Psygnosis. I don't know what else he did in life (searches for him are overwhelmed by a footballer of that name). I don't know if the music is all original composition or if he was "inspired" by existing compositions (if so, I've never heard them). What I do know is that he's caused me to notice game music in a way that I never have before. I think I'll be making it a bigger part of my blogging from now on.

 

Time so far: 21 hours