Eye of the Beholder III: Heaven upon Earth, or of True Peace and Tranquillitie of Mind

 

I have to wonder what this beast was before it was undead.

           

As we wrapped up last time, the party had explored only the introductory graveyard. We now headed into the "great tomb consecrated to the fallen warriors of Myth Drannor." The stairway led down into a central chamber guarded by a monstrosity that the manual describes as an "undead beast." It didn't cause paralysis or level drain or anything, but it had a mighty claw. 

While I was thinking about it, I decided to see how well the old "combat waltz" worked in this game. The answer is that it doesn't work at all--or, rather, that it's been replaced by more of a "combat shuffle." In past games of this ilk (though I may be misremembering Darkmoon), when faced with the party in a square diagonal to them, enemies reliably step forward and turn. In some circumstances, they turn and step forward. But either way, you get a shot at their undefended flanks before they turn again to face you. This is not the case with enemies in Eye of the Beholder III. They're perfectly capable of side-stepping, thus keeping their front sides towards the party, and entering the square ready to attack. However, there's usually a bit of a delay before they actually do attack, so shuffling from side to side still imparts some benefit, particularly with the "All Attack" preventing any delay in the party's exit from the square.

       

Enemies show you their flanks if you lead them around corners.

      

Oddly, enemies do not simply strafe between squares when in jagged corridors, only in open rooms. So if you backpedal while leading an enemy down a corridor with a few twists and turns, you will get a few shots at his flank.

   

Once I had dealt with the beast, I read the plaque at the far side of the chamber: "Four bones down will show you the way." The message portended the gimmick of the level, which involves four separate sections in which you have to solve a variety of puzzles to reach a bone switch. Activating all four switches opens the way to Level 2.

     

Four plaques, four levers.

      

The four sections are accessible via stairway from the main chamber, and at first I mapped these as actual stairways before I realized that, for mapping purposes, they're more like continuous corridors that just happen to have an image of a stairway in the middle. I started with the southwest. The area was rife with undead spirits in armor that the manual calls "swordwraiths." The manual indicates that they're not appearing here for the first time, but I don't remember them from any earlier game. They're not hard to kill, but their attacks temporarily drain strength from the characters.

   

The swordwraiths respawned like mad as I initially explored. Ultimately, I figured out the solution to keeping them to a minimum. In each section of the level, you find a nook with two burial drawers, one open. Closing the open one helps put the wraiths at rest and stops most of them from respawning.

 

The undead warriors aren't evil; they're just sick of the draft.

          

The level had a rather nasty surprise early on. We stepped on one square that closed the way in front of us and opened walls on both sides. Behind each wall was an undead beast. A third undead beast spawned in the corridor behind us, meaning we were getting attacked by three at once. The only way to survive was to turn around, kill the beast blocking the way we had come, and then run until we could get to a point where we could fight the beasts on our terms. This strategy took me a couple of deaths and reloads to figure out, and even then I was only able to win through a combination of buffing spells ("Bless," "Prayer," "Haste") and a few offensive spells.

   

The major puzzle involved a corridor with five pressure plates. "Not all need weight," a nearby plaque advised. Stepping on, or weighing down, some of the plates cause a fireball to come spewing from a mouth at the far end of the corridor. I tried weighing down all the plates and running after each one to avoid the fireball. This worked, but a teleporter at the end of the corridor brought me back to the beginning. The fireballs were only incidental; the real combination of plates was needed to deactivate the teleporter.

      

Trying different pressure plate weighting combinations.

        

I started working on potential combinations, from all five weighted down, to four, and then to three. I got it right on my eighth or ninth try and, because I had lost some characters to fireballs by then, reloaded and did it for real.

   

The only other difficulty in the section came in the form of extremely small buttons located along the floor seam of a couple of walls. They were hardly the most obscure buttons that the series has thrown at me, though. One led to a small area with a cursed sword (I had to cast "Remove Curse" to get rid of it) and a key. The key opened the way to the final chamber, where another hidden button lowered the southeast wall and provided access to the switch. Nearby, a plaque informed us that, "FFLAR, CAPTAIN OF MYTH DRANNOR, REFUSED TO ACCEPT DEFEAT."

  

The rest of the sections were much the same: swordwraiths, undead beasts, drawers, one major puzzle, a key, a lock, a final square with a switch obscured by a secret wall with a small button. The major puzzle in the southeast section was the hardest of the lot. Nine squares with switches that opened and closed various walls in combination. Some had to be raised and lowered a couple of times. I broke down and asked for a hint and commenter Futility responded. Honestly, what caused me to waste the most time in this area was a nearby plaque that read: "THE SCEPTRE, LEARNED, PHYSIC MUST ALL FOLLOW THIS AND COME TO DUST." This is a slight misquote (it's learning) from Shakespeare's Cymbeline, Act IV, Scene 2, a line from a dirge sung to Imogen. As far as I can tell, it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the puzzle, but I wasted a bunch of time trying to find a pattern.

     

A picture of a switch would be boring, so here I am fireballing some swordwraiths.

      

This was a funny coincidence, incidentally, as I had dinner with a colleague last week and I went on a little mini-rant about how my students don't appreciate their general education classes when I'd give my right arm to go back to school and take nothing but classes like "Renaissance Architecture," "Medieval Sculpture," and "British Literature II." Or even teach such classes. My colleague said that I could find creative ways to work bits of art and literature and music into the classes I do teach, which I agree with, but I lamented that "I'd love to be able to just teach Cymbeline without somehow relating it to [my field]." To be honest, I might have said Coriolanus, which is my favorite Shakespeare play, but I was a bit drunk and it's a better story if it was Cymbeline.

   

This area also featured a teleporter that led to a small 2 x 2 room and from there back to the entry room for the level. The final message above the bone switch was identical to the first area, recapitulating that Fflar refused to accept defeat.

The northeast section had, I guess, two minor puzzles instead of a major one. The first involved a pressure plate that caused a spiked wall to come roaring down the adjacent corridor. The party just had to race ahead and hit a switch to stop the wall before it reached them. The second involved a couple of paired teleporters in adjacent halls. They had to be shut off by finding a switch behind a secret wall. The message above the bone lever was: "SPIRIT FULL OF UNREST."

      

I stepped back just in time.

     

The northwest area had the highest concentration of enemies, I think. The only tough puzzle required us to drop down a pit into a room in which fireballs were slinging everywhere. We had to find a switch to activate a teleporter to get out of the room. I told myself if the fireballs did so much damage that I had to reload, I'd take the time to rest and learn "Resist Fire," but I managed to escape before that was necessary. The message here: "SEALED DOWNSTAIRS UNTIL DEFEAT IS BROUGHT TO HIM."

   

Having found all four bone levers, I was annoyed to discover that nothing obvious had happened. I took another look at the sign in the main chamber and was reminded that it specified "FOUR BONES DOWN." I had activated all the levers, but I didn't realize they all had three positions, and I had left some of them up rather than down. Thus, I had to return to each area and make sure the bone levers were facing down. When I did, a secret wall opened in the main chamber, the corridor beyond splitting into two staircases down to the next level.

 

My map of Level 1. The levels in this game are a large 30 x 30.

         

A few other notes before we move on:

   

• The game is incredibly slow, even with the CPU cycles jacked up higher than normal. Every new appearance of a monster requires the game to load the monster, so there are frequent delays when you turn to face monsters adjacent to you. The same is true for spell effects. I don't know how the first two Beholder games did things differently, but they did. 

• Almost every door I found in this dungeon was already open, and a lot of them couldn't be closed. I don't know why the game bothered to depict them. It's not like it's terribly exciting to press buttons and open doors, but it means that you're doing something. 

• Spells seem to last a lot longer than in the past two games. You don't have to save "Bless" and "Prayer" for major battles; you can have them going during most of your exploration. "Haste" is particularly useful in this regard, and since this series doesn't feature character ages, you don't have to worry about growing older.

• The game has both real stairs that lead you to another level and fake "stairs" that just lead to another section of the same level. You can tell the difference based on whether the game has to load when you step on the stairs. I think it was Black Crypt that had the same distinction.

• Sound effects are awful. I don't know enough about the related technology to be able to discuss the difference with any acumen, so I'm going to have to rely on commenters. Effects are loud, unsubtle, too frequent, and often unrelated to what they depict. You hear nearby enemies by linear distance, which means that you're almost always hearing something. Spells sometimes don't have any effects and other times don't make sense; "Cure Critical Wounds" sounds like someone scratching a needle on a record. I praised ambient sound in the first entry, but the mausoleum's one ambient sound is a banshee screech every 30 seconds that's like Chinese water torture.

    

On the second level of the mausoleum, we were instantly met with a new enemy sound, belonging to either the wights or the shadows on the level. I guess it's supposed to be a traditional ghostly moan, but its quality and frequent repetition make it sound like a Klingon engaged in coitus. I would have liked to turn it off, but that makes it hard to detect enemies sneaking up on you.

         

Level 2. I'm not happy with that empty bit in the northwest, but I couldn't find anything else.

     

The shadows had strength-draining attacks and the wights had level-draining attacks, but they weren't as bothersome as those special attacks suggest. There weren't many of them; they typically died in one hit; they rarely hit themselves; and when they did, their special abilities didn't always activate. In a couple of places where there were a lot of them, or they kept respawning, I cast "Negative Plane Protection," but in general the drains weren't an issue. This is probably a place in which my superior equipment made a big difference.

          

The second level's two enemies.

    

There were two large sections to the second level depending on the stairway taken from the first one. Puzzles included:

    

• An area full of some kind of goopy stuff on the floor. I don't know exactly what it was supposed to be, but it significantly impeded movement. It also significantly slowed turning, which makes less sense, and I'm still not sure whether the long delays moving through this area were deliberate or some kind of loading speed issue.

• A bunch of squares with buttons that opened pits, dumping us into two north-south corridors with teleporters at the other end. 

• Unlike the first level, the doors here were mostly closed.

      

And the images were pretty cool.

       

• In the south, a large room had a single pressure plate. A nearby message read: "FOR EACH PATH THAT MAY BE TAKEN, ANOTHER SHALL SURELY BE GIVEN." Sure enough, the pressure plate opened three different ways out of the room, but opening a new one closed the previous one. The thing is, I'm not sure exactly how the plate worked. Sometimes, it repeatedly opened the same exit. Other times, it repeatedly opened a different exit and I couldn't get it to go back to the first one. It seemed to change which exit it opened if I left the room for a while and came back. 

• A network of corridors in which one direction was blocked by a solid crystalline cube. I thought it was a gelatinous cube at first. I couldn't damage or destroy it with weapons. Nearby, two levers had messages that said, "DO NOT TOUCH!" Pulling either lever caused the party to be stripped of inventory, with their items dumped on the other side of the cube just as shadows spawned in the area. But pulling both levers caused the cube to disappear, allowing us to slowly re-equip all our stuff. There wasn't anything interesting on the other side of the cube, so the whole exercise was a waste.

     

This cube was guarding nothing.

      

• A room that flooded with poison gas when we entered. We had to quickly find a lever to open the door and vent the toxin.

• A lot of secret walls opened by buttons. But there was a single traditional illusory wall that we could walk into. It was the first in the game so far. Absolutely nothing was in the room on the other side of it.

      

At one point, while sleeping, we awoke to find a dwarf rooting through our pack for food. A long scripted encounter followed. The dwarf introduced himself as Isharn Hammerfell, the last of a party of dwarves who had entered the mausoleum to find the source of evil emanating from there.

        

I don't know what he's eating. We rely on the "Create Food and Water" spell.

     

He offered to join the party and we agreed. Isharn is a lawful neutral fighter/thief of Level 8 (both). At first, he was useless, as I already had a strong front line. Later, we found a trident that allows him to fight from the second rank, so I put Marina in the far rear, where she can throw daggers and cast spells.

         

The new NPC.

       

There were two major encounters on the level and I messed up one of them, I guess. In one room, we found the spirit of Captain Fflar. He was unaware that he was dead or that the city had fallen. We tried to convince him, but we failed and he attacked us, forcing us to kill him.

          

I don't care for either of our dialogue options.

     

Later, we found his tomb with his "name bar." When we picked it up, Gaston said, "I believe this may be what the Captain needs to see." That's great, except that we had killed him, and he didn't reappear in that chamber. But if we hadn't met him already, Gaston's comment wouldn't have made any sense, so I'm not sure what I was supposed to do. I can reload a save from before we killed him, but I'd have to replay about an hour of the game. Based on comments that the mausoleum itself is optional, I imagine that solving Fflar's delusions is also optional.

       

I wonder what the character says if you haven't met Fflar.

      

We found three rod parts and one rod globe scattered around the dungeon. We didn't know what to do with them until we found a relief in a wall with numerous symbols on the sites and receptacles for the rod parts in the middle. It looked like one of the teleportation doors from the first Beholder. When we put all four parts into it, a plaque appeared on a nearby wall that read, "FAITH RESTORETH THE SOUL." This caused a Rod of Restoration to appear in the room. I don't know if this same relief will also later serve as a teleporter if we find stone ankhs and necklaces and whatnot later.

      

Assembling the pieces of the rod.

      

With nothing else to do, we made our way back outside to try the forest path. No one gained any levels in the mausoleum (Starling leveled up as a paladin during the first entry, while we were fighting grave mists), and the only interesting equipment we found, save some potions and scrolls, was Ishern's trident. Still, it was an acceptable Dungeon Master-style experience. If the game continues in this vein, it will be adequate but unremarkable.

   

Time so far: 8 hours