The Return of Werdna: Burning Hell

 

The game has a very medieval interpretation of "Hell."

          

This session was mostly about loose ends. When I wrapped up last time, I had MALORed (teleported) back down to Level 9, one of the few places accessible via MALOR. While there, I returned to the Gates of Hell--fighting a trivial combat with the hell puppy along the way.

   

Standing at the gate, I juggled my inventory to make the bell, book, and candle accessible, then started the ritual. The game had some fun text at each stage.

After using the Demonic Chimes: "A hideous wail of many tormented souls screams forth from the chimes, shaking the very foundations of the gates!"

     

Enacting the bell, book, and candle ritual.

        

After the Arabic Diary: "Each gutteral [sic] word you utter from the diary takes form and hurls itself upon the gates like a battering ram!"

   

The candle--goddamn it. I had used it to cast LOMILWA to find the secret door on this level, and apparently that use was the final use. I reloaded, made sure the candle didn't disappear this time, and repeated the above.

   

After using the Black Candle: "A brilliant light, like a small nova, issues forth from the Black Candle and melts the weakened gates. They slowly slump to the ground to form a pool of glowing metal! The gates of Hell are open! Do you dare to enter?"

           

Pro tip: If you ever face this choice in real life, say no.

        

That's not good news. I've permanently destroyed the Gates of Hell. Will its denizens now climb into the dungeon?

I said yes and entered the gates. "You enter and fall into the abyss!" Werdna let out a scream. "It burns, by the gods, it burns!!! The fires of Hell lick and scorch your flesh for what seems to be an eternity. Finally, the torment is at an end. You begin to sink into oblivion, grateful to whatever god still listens to your prayers."

      

This might be the most terrifying death in CRPG history.

         

Yikes, that was gruesome. But it continues: "As your eyes close for the last time, you see a jeweled fruit hanging from a tree of liquid fire. Then all is black. Perhaps this is the true death. The giver of peace?" 

   

Well, of course it wasn't. "Wrong again!" the game crowed, and I woke up on Level 10 of the dungeon. 

  

As I reloaded, I read over the text in the screen shots. If I want to avoid falling into the abyss, I reasoned, I should wear the winged boots. I put them on and repeated the ritual. This time started better: "You plummet into Hell, and the flames lick towards you. Slowly, your fall begins to check itself as your Boots of Levitation begin to arrest the powerful attraction of the infernal regions! The heat from the flames becomes more intense, until it is almost unendurable! Just as your fall is arrested, and you begin to rise again, you are able to reach out and pluck the jeweled fruit from the tree of liquid fire!"

   

Apparently, the whole reason to enter Hell is to get this fruit. Well, I've got it. "Upwards you rise, until the shattered Gates of Hell are once again visible through the flames and smoke!" Alas, the game had another surprise. A voice cried out from below, "You are getting warmer, but you aren't nearly hot enough for my tastes! Hahahah!" I didn't have long to be offended: "Suddenly, a huge jet of flame washes up and over you, immolating you in an instant! There is an instant of pure agony, and then you feel no more!"

     

That's just dirty pool.

      

All right, in addition to something that helps me avoid falling into the abyss, I clearly needed something to protect myself from the heat. I made three more tries, each corresponding with a different cloak I was carrying in the Black Box, but none of them helped.

   

I went back through the hints. I didn't see how Kabbalism could help, although parts of it deal with the afterlife. "Everyone has a weakness. What is his?" one hint asks. Could the pronoun refer to Satan himself? "Get a handle on the forbidden fruit!" That seemed directly related, but getting hold of it wasn't my problem. "Homer will show you the way." Damn it, was it time to read The Iliad? The problem with all of the hints is that there really aren't that many ways to manipulate the interface. The only options I had at the Gates of Hell were to use items in my inventory, and I had tried just about all of them.

  

Despondent, I climbed up to Level 8. I started wishing that this game were Ultima Underworld so that I could just cast "Fly" and levitate over the minefield, and it occurred to me that my boots would probably allow me to do just that. They did!

       

Nice.

        

Level 7 was the ziggurat level, and I set my mind to finding my way to the secret area. I began by exploring the outer "air" spaces while wearing the Winged Boots. Amusingly, I kept encountering regular enemies while flying high above the structure.

          

One wonders how a carrot ended up hovering in the sky in the first place.

        

On the west side, there was only one encounter. I plucked an "orange rod" from the sky, which was identified in my inventory as a "Hopalong Carrot." The term refers to Hopalong Cassidy, the hero of turn-of-the-20th-century western stories and films, created by Clarence Mulford, who I am obligated to say was from Maine. Anyway, I didn't imagine that the game was trying to evoke Cassidy but rather to reinforce the association between carrots and rabbits. I had several hints from the Oracle that seemed to be pointing to the same thing:

      

• "Chomp, chomp . . . eh, what's east, Doc?"
• "The temple holds an ancient secret."
• "Hop high to enter."
• "Rabbits are sacred to the Dreampainter."
• "Seek the Dreampainter's soul."
• "Take a step to the left, and a hop to the right."

       

Clearly, finding the Dreampainter's secret was going to involve emulating a rabbit, and somehow that was going to involve the carrot, but I didn't know exactly how. I took a save and then tried using the carrot, but nothing happened. I tried equipping it--it turns out that it equips as a weapon--and I was asked if I wanted to "invoke" it. "You hop high into the air!" the game said, but nothing new happened.

       

In this game, apparently, hopping > flying.

          

I decided the first clue must have the answer. "Chomp, chomp" is about eating the carrot, so I must have to stand to the east of the area that I wanted to find. There were two squares east of the hidden area, but neither worked. But then I realized I might want to put the hidden area to my east, which would better go with the last hint to start from the left of the hidden area and then eat the carrot and hop to the right (east).

This worked, amazingly, and I found myself in the "secret inner chamber of the temple." It contained a large stone statue of the Dreampainter (described only in text, of course). When I stepped on it, I got the message: "You are about to battle a god's ushabti!" Wikipedia educated me that an ushabti is a funerary figurine, which didn't sound so dangerous, and sure enough the thing was a pushover (it was a fighter).

         

A god--killed by a regular wight.

        

The unique item on his body was described as "a feather" on the loot screen and "Dreampainter Ka." Ka is the ancient Egyptian conception of "soul," so I had the Dreampainter's soul.

   

I returned to the Gates of Hell but not because I thought the Dreampainter's Ka would help. I was still wrapped up in the idea that I simply needed something to protect me from fire. While fighting random combats on Level 7, I had defeated a miscellaneous ninja named Killer who I hadn't logged the first time. He dropped an item called a Shadow Cloak, and I figured I should try it in the name of comprehensiveness. This trip was successful, but it wasn't the cloak that saved me.

       

Success!

     

"Wait!" the game said. "The fires of Hell are not burning you, and your fall is slowing down! Searching through your gear, you see that the Dreampainter's Ka is absorbing the terrific heat and shielding you, and your Boots of Levitation are checking your descent."  The rest of the encounter proceeded as before. I grabbed the jeweled fruit. But this time, I levitated out of Hell as a mocking voice called after me, "Have you forgotten something? Hahahahaha!" I wish the game would stop asking me that. Have I? I don't know. ROT-13 me something if I was supposed to find something else in Hell.

         

The Oracle later rubs it in.

        

"Slowly, the Gates of Hell reform from the puddle of slag," the game offered, erasing my earlier worry. What was this jeweled fruit? I opened my inventory and saw that it was identified as "HHG of Aunty Ock." I scratched my head for a second and then realized I was looking at another goddamned Monty Python reference. That's what I went through all of this for. And I had thought David Bradley was to blame for turning the series into a bunch of goofy nonsense.

   

Trusting that the thing would become important later, I made my way back up to Level 7. About six steps into the level, Trebor's ghost caught me and I died. I hadn't saved since the Gates of Hell, so I had to go through the entire thing a third time.

   

Back up on Level 7 again, I went through the stone ritual and chose the blue sword. In my inventory, it was called the West Wind Sword. It doesn't do much damage, but it often decapitates enemies. 

       

The price you pay for bringing up my past reign of villainy and terror as a negative is, I collect your @#*&ing head.

       

Levels 6 and 5 were easy with my maps. Level 4 remained a nightmare, and I found a number of mistakes on my map as I tried to get around. I visited the witch again, but the Holy Hand Grenade didn't have anything to do with the Spanish unguent or blender I needed.

   

I took a dip in the cleansing pool and "somewhat cleansed" my soul, assuming a neutral alignment. Alas, the HAMAN and MAHAMAN spells still didn't work. Once I was done, I made my way to the stairway to Level 3, took a second backup save, then took the stairway. I don't know if the witch's "Blue Blood Special" is something I absolutely need, but if it is--please let me know in the comments--I'll just reload from the save before the stairway and--ugh--re-explore the levels until I find what I missed.

      

It's the straight-and-narrow from here on out, and heaven everlasting's my reward.

       

This entry didn't seem to have enough material to post as it was, so I decided to spend some time mapping Level 3. Even if I have to reload from Level 4, time spent mapping is never wasted. When I got to the top of the stairs (which vanished behind me), I cast DUMAPIC and was surprised to see that I was not on Level 3, but rather Level 1. As I stepped forward, a message welcomed me to the "Cosmic Cube," a place that a message on Level 6 had warned me about.

           

This seems to emphasize that there's no way back to the lower dungeon.

         

"Ponder the ancient mystery of the lady or the tigers if you wish to tread the hidden ways of the cube." This seems to link to hint #29 about finding the "paths of the true way." I'm not aware of any mystery regarding the lady or the tigers, plural, but "The Lady, or the Tiger?" is a famous short story by Frank Stockton, published in 1882, which has appeared in countless English anthologies. I probably read it for the first time in fourth grade. The story concerns a convicted man who, in the custom of the land, has been sentenced to an arena. There, he must choose two doors. Behind one is a beautiful lady whom he will immediately marry. Behind the other is a tiger who will devour the man. Every criminal faces this 50/50 chance, but the twist here is that the man has been convicted of consorting with the princess. The princess has used her influence to determine what is behind each door, and she subtly indicates one of the doors to her imperiled lover. The question--unresolved by the story--is whether she has truly aided him or, unable to see him marry another woman, sent him to his doom. A related question is whether his interpretation of her motives will lead him to choose the door she indicated or the opposite.

          

As I read the message, I wondered about the relevance of the story for the game. I figured that it may be referring to a simple choice of two doors that I'd have to make, one leading to success and the other to failure. Or, I thought, maybe there will be a complexity thrown into the decision. For instance, maybe Trebor's ghost shows up to indicate one door, and I have to figure out his motivations. That would be intriguing.

       

Alas, it's just a logic puzzle.

         

I needn't have bothered. Instantly, there was another message that completely changed the nature of the problem. "Before you are three doors," it began, before launching into a classic logic puzzle. "No room is empty, but only one door tells the truth," the game established. "Find the lady, and you will take the first step on the Golden Path. Choose falsely, and you will roam the Cosmic Cube for all eternity!" The doors read as follows:

      

• Left door: A tiger is in the right room.
• Middle door: A tiger is in this room.
• Right door: A lady is in this room.

       

The rules had established there is only one "right" path, so only one door has the lady. Right away, it's clear that the left and right cannot both be lying. One has to be telling the truth. That means the middle door cannot be telling the truth, which means there isn't a tiger behind it. [Ed. As commenter VK points out below, the parable had already been turned into a series of logic puzzles by American mathematician Raymond Smullyan and published in The Lady or the Tiger? (1982), clearly the source of this riddle.]

   

Having so established that the central door was the answer, I took the right door and found myself in a one-square room with a stairway down. The left door took me to a room with an "up" staircase that just brought me to another section of the same level. Thus, it appears that the game doesn't tell you that you've made the correct choice right away--which, I guess, means that the very rules of the game were lying. There are no ladies or tigers behind the doors. If the rules are not also lying that the wrong choices put you in a "walking dead" scenario, it appears there's still a lot of the levels to map while walking dead, and naturally I have to do it. Since I may be "walking dead" anyway (from not having completed the witch's brew on Level 4), that suits me okay.

    

From what I've experienced so far, Levels 1-3 are more interconnected than the previous levels, and to some extent, I'm mapping all at once. I know it doesn't really save any time to do it this way, but somehow I always feel like I'm making faster progress when I map multiple levels at the same time. Anyway, I'll cover my discoveries on these levels next time.

   

I met the Oracle a bunch of times during the session. I decided to create a special entry just on the Oracle's hints (it published just before this one). For some reason, I want to end this experience knowing exactly what he was talking about for each hint. The entry has my current guesses, and at the end of the game, it will have our final conclusions. 

          

Well, that's just mean.

      

This session exemplified everything I love and hate about the Wizardry series. The text is generally fantastic, and it raises all kinds of questions of lore and theology that I'd spend more time pondering if I had any faith that the creators had worked them out for themselves. But then it sacrifices all the good will that it's accumulated with its worldbuilding with nonsense like the Hopalong Carrot and the Holy Hand Grenade. Certainly, the creators could have come up with more realistic puzzles that draw from the game's actual setting. Emulating a rabbit by eating a carrot, which then allows me to hop high over a wall, reminds me of the old stupid riddle about a locked room with a mirror and a table where the solution is to look in the mirror, at which point you "see what you saw," and then you take the saw and cut a hole in the table and escape through the hole. The riddle works as neither a logic puzzle nor a semantic game, and yet kids continue to tell it with sly grins on their faces as if they've really outsmarted you when really the whole thing just makes no sense. I always envision a similar grin on Roe Adams's and David Bradley's faces when they designed these games.

   

Time so far: 37 hours