Lands of Lore: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

Conrad, moments after Baccata confusedly asked him what is meant by the term "s@#$-eating grin."

        

Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos

United States

Westwood Studios (developer and publisher)

Released 1993 for DOS, 1995 for FM Towns and PC-98

Date Started: 2 April 2022

Date Ended: 20 May 2022

Total Hours: 40

Difficulty: Moderate (3.0/5)

Final Rating: 39

Ranking at Time of Posting: 376/460 (82%)

     

Summary:

A slick take on Dungeon Master-style gameplay from the team that created the first two Eye of the Beholder games, Lore benefits from high production values in graphics, sound, and voice acting and tells a story of more coherence and depth than the traditional DM clone (though not more than some other RPGs of the period). Freed from the restrictions imposed by their D&D license, Westwood regrettably chooses to simplify RPG mechanics, making for a less satisfying game in terms of character development, combat, and equipment. But even these reduced categories have a few things worth recommending, and playing Lore today is a perfectly pleasant experience.

****

 

Castle Cimmeria was only three levels, and I had explored one of them, so the rest of the game was only two levels--but wow, did Lands of Lore manage to stretch them out. I can't remember the last time I faced so many obscure buttons, so much backtracking, and so many dead-ends. It seemed like every other corridor was designed to send me on a one-way pit journey back to the first level, or sometimes the basement. Altogether, the final two levels took me about seven hours--and there are hardly any enemies on the third level.

   

Level 2 did have some tough foes. There were first these giant snake-spiders (multi-legged but with a snake-like neck and head). The second were like living buzz-saw blades with giant eyes. Both were capable of killing a character in three hits. Both could be killed with melee attacks, but they were hard to hit, so I generally had to blend physical attacks with magic attacks and, as usual, lots of resting. The damned things respawned like crazy. The buzz-saw eyes also had some kind of acid attack that destroyed armor. For a while, I kept taking it off when I encountered them, but eventually I just let them destroy it. What was I saving it for?

          

One of the more creative enemies in the game.

    

Level 3's only foes were giant frog-like things that appeared sparingly, usually when I hit a button to open a wall, and the frog turned out to be behind the wall. They died in a couple of castings of "Spark," but they had that annoying special attack that causes you to drop all your weapons. I came to really hate that by the end of the game. 

          

It would be nice if the game's enemies made any ecological sense. There's no water around here!

        

The puzzles on the levels weren't very challenging--nothing like the floor puzzle from my last entry. Most of them were of the "find a key here to open a door there" variety, only the keys and doors were in far-flung locations and required a lot of marching back and forth. There were also a lot of barely-visible buttons to press, but the game's flawless annotation of its automap ensured that I didn't miss any of these.

 

Despite the length and business of the levels, there were also some signs of cut content or perhaps a hasty development schedule. Large portions of the levels had nothing in them. There were long passages and doors that lead to absolutely nothing, button puzzles that opened and closed walls that didn't need to be opened or closed.

      

Finding the fourth figurine.

    

The other oddity of the levels was the sheer number of squares that caused projectiles to launch at us, including a section in the south of Level 3 where a constant stream of spikes and fireballs comes whooshing across several of the bottom rows. The problem is that these "traps" hardly do any damage, and since there are no monsters on the level, it's a trivial matter to rest and heal once they hit you.

   

To complete the game, I had to rescue and heal King Richard and defeat Scotia. The order was important. I had the pyramid "keys" and potions necessary to heal Richard once I found him, but Scotia had put a protective barrier around his container, and this had to be dispelled with four figurines. I believe I had three when I started the final two levels. Richard was on Level 2, but the final figurine was on Level 3. It was in a room to the southwest that couldn't be opened on first encounter. A sign read "the sum must be correct."

The sign refers to an "equation" spelled out in the wall patterns in the southern area of Level 3. By default, it reads: "1 + 1 = 3." You've got to hit a button a couple of times on one of the wall squares in the "3" to move it west and ultimately make the pattern say "1 + 1 = 2," which opens the southeastern area. The problem is that this area is the one swarming with those fireball traps, so you're not terribly incentivized to map out the wall patterns. I suspect most players find the button and hit it, opening the hidden area, without ever understanding what the "sum" is talking about.

     

It is correct, for certain values of "1."

    

Forcing the player to go to Level 3 before healing Richard on Level 2 increases the likelihood that he's going to encounter Scotia before he's ready. This, of course, happened to me. You have to find two keys to Scotia's lair in the center of the level. Once you pass through it, it closes behind you and offers no way to get back out. Thankfully, I had saved the game before entering the area and didn't lose much progress. 

      

You can look like anything, and this is what you choose?

    

Once we had the four figurines, we went to Richard's room on Level 2. Both Richard's and Scotia's rooms are small, single squares, which seems odd until I reflect that every cut scene in the game has taken place in a single square approachable from only one direction. I'm guessing it's a limitation of the engine. Anyway, you have to place the figurines on various pedestals around the room to reflect light in a particular way. None of this is obvious when you start the "puzzle," but there are only four pedestals and four figurines, and the game alerts you when you've chosen one correctly, so it didn't take long.

   

If you say so.

    

Once the business with the figurines was done, we then placed the four "keys" (again, they're pyramids) on the magic coffin. It wasn't obvious where to put them, but it didn't take much clicking around to determine that the game wanted me to put them in the corners.

         

If they don't unlock the coffin, they'll at least weigh it down.

      

The blue encasement fell away after the final pyramid was placed.

 

And Conrad starts speaking in tongues.

         

Finally, we administered the potion. Richard awoke and asked what was happening. He gave us his ring--apparently the Shard of Truth--and said it would help defeat the Nether Mask. He said he was too weak to accompany us but asked for a weapon to defend himself. I gave him a spare trident.

       

The annoying thing is that this is almost iambic meter. "Reveal" messes everything up.

       

Again, I have to praise the voice acting by Patrick Stewart here. He probably doesn't even faintly remember the gig, and I doubt he spent a lot of time learning his character's backstory and motivations before reading the lines. And yet he completely commits himself to dialogue like, "Legend says that only Truth can reveal the Nether Mask and foil the hag." I had been eagerly anticipating hearing from Sir Patrick again, and it occurred to me that this is probably the first time I've regarded voiced dialogue as a real "reward." It goes to show how important the voice actor is. No one else in this game even comes close, although with his thick speech and faux British accent, Baccata's voice actor is at least somewhat successful in creating a friendly character.

   

Fortunately, I had recently re-read the lore from the beginning of the game, and I knew that the Ruby of Truth had to be combined with the Shard of Truth to foil the Nether Mask. (Yes, it does occasionally occur to me that I'm a grown man of nearly 50 and I spend a lot of my time typing sentences like that.) I put them together in my inventory, and they made some kind of ball called The Whole Truth.

         

This now must be combined with yet another artifact called And Nothing But the Truth.

    

It was time to take on Scotia. We returned to Level 3 and opened her door. "So! You worthless dogs have come to your deaths!" she snarled. She scoffed at the "old tale" that the Whole Truth could defeat her Nether Mask and attacked.

   

Scotia uses the Nether Mask to take several forms in the final battle, starting with the same kind of giant frog that you find elsewhere on the level. After you defeat that, she turns into a giant, furry, one-eyed snake. Upon the demise of that form, she morphs into an indescribable four-limbed monster with claws, jaws, and tentacles with their own mouths and jaws. Apparently, she is completely indestructible in this final form, so to defeat her, you have to use the "The Whole Truth" earlier in the fight, during one of her transitions. Of course, if you don't have the artifact, there's no way to stop her from that final form, and thus you can end up in a situation where there's no way to win the battle and no way to escape her part of the dungeon. This happened to me the first time.

       

Scotia is indestructible in this form.

      

With the artifact, you just have to use it as she makes a transition. It dispels her chosen form, and you end up fighting her in her normal human form. The battle is still pretty hard--her attacks include that obnoxious "spectral snake" spell from the White Tower, plus she constantly shrieks during the battle, making it extra unpleasant for the player. Nonetheless, I had hoarded a ton of artifacts for this battle, including just about every magic playing card, several of those "Guardian" globes, at least eight potions that fully restore mana, and at least six uses of the "bezel cups" that fully restore health. I just spammed these items until she died.

         

CRPGs have featured plenty of devastating spells, but I think this is probably the most disrespectful spell.

   

She collapsed against some piece of furniture, shouting, "Fool! My death will not save you from our wrath!" I don't know what she was talking about, as I didn't face any "wrath" after that. Instead, an endgame cinematic commenced showing Richard's army triumphantly returning to Gladstone, Richard bestowing a medal upon Conrad, and the Draracle ominously watching the proceedings in silence. A credits sequence rolls for a while, with each of the game's enemies coming out of a pair of double doors and taking a bow.

      

Uh . . . maybe I'll pass.

      

Those ending credits are a good encapsulation of Lands of Lore. Not many games of this era have scrolling end credits, particularly not with extra content like a rotating parade of the foes you've faced. In the end, Lore didn't break much new ground in terms of game mechanics. There are even several ways in which it regressed. But it did kick the genre forward in production values. Although I have suggested otherwise at times, I am not completely immune to the appeal of nice graphics and professional-quality sound, and I've done my best to highlight those elements in my coverage. Indeed, they left such a positive first impression that I may have been a bit hyperbolic in my initial entry. In the end, however, I am an RPG fan for RPG mechanics, and in this area Lore did a few things that I suspect will collectively hurt the GIMLET and put the game a bit below the Eye of the Beholder series in the Dungeon Master-clone pecking order.

            

Those flying worm bastards come out and dance at the end of the game.

          

As for that GIMLET, I give the game:

   

• 4 points for the game world. I wish I could give it more, but Lore really doesn't make effective use of its backstory, most of which is derivative anyway. The different races aren't well-explained and don't make much of an appearance except in choice of player character. People and monsters are seeded throughout the game with little thought as to whether they make any thematic sense.

• 3 points for character creation and development. I was most disappointed with this category. I've read accounts that the Westwood development team felt straight-jacketed by TSR's rules when creating the Beholder games. Freed of those constraints, they created an extremely simplistic character system in which development doesn't make you feel especially more powerful, there are no choices along the way, and one-third of the class system (the "rogue") is horribly under-utilized. It occurred to me late in gameplay that the lack of traditional attributes makes Lore almost a non-RPG by my definitions.

• 4 points for NPCs. NPCs are important to the game, and a few of them are memorable, but almost all of your interaction is one-way. There are no dialogue options or role-playing opportunities. I particularly don't like that your choice of NPC companions is so scripted and linear. I do like the way they make comments and asides throughout the game.

     

Voice acting creates more memorable characters, which in turn gives greater poignancy to moments like this.

    

• 6 points for encounters and foes. Here, Lore does well by its Dungeon Master roots, creating an original slate of enemies with a variety of special abilities and defenses, a challenging set of puzzles (to me, these perhaps exceed Beholder but not Dungeon Master), and even a few basic role-playing options during cut scenes. I would have appreciated more of the latter.

      

I would have liked to see more choices like this, with more nuanced options.

     

• 4 points for magic and combat. As with character development, Westwood did little with its freedom in this area. The lack of any length or complexity in the spell system is particularly vexing (no protective spells!), although I appreciate that the different levels of each spell do slightly different things.

• 4 points for equipment. I have the same complaints here that I have with most Dungeon Master clones: it's too hard to determine exactly what various items do except their raw offensive and defensive scores. Looking through the cluebook later, I see that there was an axe that conferred a 5% chance to kill with each attack, a staff that has a 5% chance of inflicting triple damage, and a sword that has a chance of striking the wielder with every 7th blow. I'm not interested in doing all the testing and observation necessary to record these things. Even worse are the endless parade of single-use magic items, like the cards, whose use isn't possible to discern until you've already used them, at which point they're wasted. Interface oddities, meanwhile, made bows and throwing items mostly useless in my opinion; you cannot really play this as a "ranged" game. And why does the distribution of equipment in Dungeon Master clones always have to be so fixed?

      

You always find the exact same equipment in every location. Why not mix it up a little?

    

• 2 points for the economy. It has one. There was hardly ever anything useful to buy, and I ended the game with over 5,000 gold. In a replay, I'd know to spend more on potions and not be so protective of them.

• 3 points for quests. There's a main quest with multiple stages, but no choices, role-playing options, or side quests.

• 6 points for graphics, sound, and interface. Graphics are top-notch. Some of the voice acting is very good; almost all of it is at least adequate. Sound effects are fine. Where I can't give a lot of points is in the interface. While the automap deserves a lot of credit, the scrolling inventory window is a horror show. There isn't nearly enough keyboard redundancy, and what little there is is mapped to uncomfortable keys. 

       

Even random textures were pretty cool throughout the game.

    

• 3 points for the miscellaneous gameplay category. It suffers here in being far, far too linear, not very replayable, and a little bit too long. I challenged myself with the higher difficulty setting, but I would otherwise rate the default challenge level as just about perfect.

   

That gives us a final score of 39. That's where I thought it would fall. I put the Beholder games at 41 and 40. While Lore clearly improves on them in some ways, it doesn't give enough attention to its RPG roots to exceed those previous efforts.

       

"Throne of Chaos" just seems like political mudslinging. Like, give her a chance.

      

In the November 1993 Computer Gaming World, Scorpia offers a review that presages my own. She's a bit too in love with simplicity for its own sake, as when she says, "You do not, in fact ever see any experience points at all, which is a pleasant change from most CRPGs." What makes it pleasant? Why is knowing how much I'm earning from specific actions a bad thing? She similarly praises the lack of traditional attributes. I think she forgets that CRPG players like CRPGs because of those types of statistics. Aside from that, however, she hits on many of my points: praise for the automap, disappointment in the combat system, disdain for the whole Xeob/Knowles section, criticism for not being able to tell what items of equipment do. She doesn't have much to say about graphics and sound, which surprises me, but then again, my understanding is that the voice acting wasn't present in the initial release. 

   

MobyGames's summary of reviews shows the average (contemporary) score in the 80s, with most reviewers comparing it favorably to the first two Beholder games and extremely favorably to Eye of the Beholder III, released the same year. As positively as it was reviewed at the time, it seems to do even better in memory: It's not hard to find any number of retro sites, blogs, and YouTube channels offering exhaustive coverage and glowing praise. 

   

Detailed coverage of the development of the Lore series comes from the August 2009 issue of Retro Gamer. In summary, Westwood's 1993 project would normally have been Eye of the Beholder III, but the studio had just merged with Virgin Interactive Entertainment and was looking to create its own property. Comments from producer Rick Gush indicate that what I've called "dumbing down" was a deliberate choice on Westwood's part to make the game more "accessible." For instance, in terms of character creation, he says:

     

Imagine someone who'd never played AD&D getting tossed all those things along with some esoteric dice-rolling number system. They'd be lost and afraid of creating a gimped character that wouldn't be capable of completing the game and wouldn't be fun. Brett [Sperry] has us put in simple character creation: you picked one of four pre-made characters and that was it.

        

I'm not sure I understand why such a stark choice was necessary. Since the 1980s, games had been shipping with default characters while still allowing players the freedom to create their own, indulging both casual players and those (like me) interested in getting involved in all the statistics. This seems not to have occurred to Westwood.

The article goes on to address the elephant-in-the-industry that was Ultima Underworld. It came out during mid-development of Lore and caused a brief discussion about whether they should try for a new 3D engine. Ultimately, they decided to introduce a "blurred step and turn" approach (which I turned off and promptly forgot about) but otherwise spent money and time on improved production values. Chief among these was hiring Patrick Stewart for $30,000 for three hours of recording time. "I was concerned that the context of the lines would not always be clear," Gush said, "but once he started reading, it was obvious that he'd give us some wonderful stuff."

   

Still, the team went with proper continuous 3D movement for the sequel, Guardians of Destiny, which wouldn't be released until 1997. I had a look at some gameplay on YouTube, and I would compare it favorably to the Might and Magic games from the same period.

Let me tell you what surprises me the most: Geron didn't turn out to be a traitor. I thought for sure that an early scene, in which a crow flies up to his windowsill, was setting up the eventual revelation that he had been working for Scotia. Instead, he's there at the end of the game, praising you while King Richard hangs a medal around your neck. I wonder if there was some cut content there. If ever get Rick Gush or Brett Sperry on the line, that's what I'll be asking about.