The Return of Werdna: You Can't Get There from Here

 

Not even in defiance could I pretend to "enjoy my travels" on this level.

      

Throughout my coverage of this game, I have reiterated my feelings that mapping is an inextricable part of not only this game but any first-person game created in this era, including the first couple Might and Magics and Bard's Tales. This isn't elitism or some kind of fondness that only old-school players can relate to. Mapping is built into the very fabric of these games, such that the developers included it in their very estimations of game pacing and length. The first Wizardry is a 20-hour game if you map and a 5-hour game if you don't. But more importantly, the player who doesn't map Wizardry has no excuse to go poking down the various hallways and thus doesn't experience the encounters along the way. He reaches Level 2 far earlier than he's ready to experience Level 2. Later, he complains that the game is "grindy" because he didn't experience encounters as part of the natural pacing that comes with making the map.

Mapping is its own reward, something to show for all your work. That same Wizardry, Might and Magic, or Bard's Tale player might die dozens of times from first-level encounters before the party finally is able to level up to a point that the introductory areas are no longer dangerous. If all you're doing is fighting during those hours, your perception of the game is going to be warped. You'll think it's too hard and features too much combat. But the developers clearly intended for you to experience these difficult stages as part of filling in the map of Skara Brae, Sorpigal, or the Proving Grounds. In all three of those games, a completed map of their first levels (or introductory towns) comes at right about the time that the party is powerful enough to move on.

Even in games with utterly boring maps, mapping helps create this kind of balance. But in the best games, the maps themselves have their own challenges and rewards. When the developer does something particularly clever with wall patterns or teleporters or spinners, it's only fun and satisfying when the player uncovers these things himself, not when some online map alerts him before the game even begins. Maps also serve as handy ways to make notes, and to annotate puzzles that you can't yet solve or areas too tough for current exploration. To me, there's nothing more satisfying than settling into an CRPG with a cold soda at my side and a fresh sheet of graph paper in front of me. When a man is tired of mapping, he is tired of CRPGs.

  

Even if you don't feel the same way that I do, you have to pretend you do to understand how badly Level 4 abuses the inveterate mapper. The level isn't just hard to map; it sets out to destroy the player's very love of mapping, his very faith in maps as a tool. Except for the need to find certain key encounters, I'm not sure the player who maps does any better on this level than the player who finds his way blindly. Having finished the level, my "map" is little more than confirmation that I've visited each square and thus haven't missed any important encounters. Don't ask me to use it for directions.

        

Do not try to use this map to play your own game. I make no guarantees to its accuracy.

     

Listening to my hyperbole, you might expect that the map has a lot of spinners, teleporters, secret doors, hidden traps, or Dungeon Master-style puzzles. The map has none of these things. The author created this hellscape with only two simple gimmicks. The first is one-way walls. These look like empty space from one side and a solid wall from the other. It's a simple concept, not even hard to map when the level features only one or two of them. When practically every wall is a one-way wall, however, it creates utter chaos. Look at my map of the level and try to figure out how to get from any place to any other place.

A few of the one-way walls take you into rooms (marked by skulls and crossbones) from which there is no exit. A message warns you of this so you don't waste a lot of time trying to figure out how to leave. (Even MALOR doesn't work, as we'll cover.) All you can do is quit and reload. The infuriating thing is that you can tell where these death cages are because you can see the marking on the floor that indicates that they have a message. But this game requires you to find important encounters marked with the same symbol, so you have to force yourself to walk on every one of them just in case one is not a trap but a key item or NPC.

        

This happens six times on this level.

     

The second gimmick is rarer but also more insidious. The squares marked with "@" are not spinners (which is what I usually use that symbol for) but rather rooms where you remain fixed and the room itself rotates, always clockwise. Each of them has a combination of solid walls and open walls. To enter one, one opening of course has to be facing you. Once you enter, it rotates once, putting the opening you used immediately to your left and (usually) closing the way behind you. You can pass time and get an exit to appear where you want by entering and leaving camp but you have to be careful where you leave the room, as you might not be able to get back to the rotating room, and the configuration of walls that you leave may block off parts of the map. Fortunately, these rotating rooms reset when you leave the level and return. If they didn't there would be entire sections of the map, including one just north of where you enter it, where you could get permanently stuck. As it is, I don't think there are any places except the "cage" rooms (which warn you right away) that leave you stranded permanently, but the map is hard to interpret, and I certainly haven't worked out every possible permutation of the rotating rooms.

 

All four of these shots are from the same square facing the same direction as the room rotates around me.

 

   

Both of these features are extremely hard to map. First, you don't know whether a wall is a one-way wall or a solid wall until you see it from the other side. I settled into a pattern of making it solid until I'd worked my way around, then turned it into a dotted line with an arrow if it indeed was open from the other side. Since everything depends on the perspective from specific squares, you have to track which squares you've been in carefully. After a certain point, though, the map is just a mess of arrows. It doesn't give you any real sense of how to navigate the level. As for the rotating rooms, I just put dotted lines around them. How do you annotate on a map that "three of these walls will be closed and one open, but I can't tell you which will be which"?

   

While you're trying to find your way through this nightmare, of course enemies are attacking you. As I reported on the last level, both Werdna and the enemies he faces are so deadly with MAKANITO ("Deadly Air"), LAKANITO ("Vacuum"), TILTOWAIT ("Ka-Blam!") that combat comes down to who goes first. Since the worst enemy attacks affect all groups of monsters (including Werdna), allies have become almost superfluous. They help soak up some of the lesser spells and melee attacks, but few of them can be relied upon to wipe out an enemy mage or priest in the first round. I found the allies on this level particularly underwhelming. They're almost all physical attackers, some with a status effect or two, but we're way past the point where poison or even level drain is terribly useful. Giant mantises, which have a decapitation attack, are sometimes effective. Dark riders and evil eyes have up to Level 3 spells, but I was getting better than that two levels ago. I ended up going back a couple of pentagram pages and summoning wights and Priests of Fung most of the time, along with mantises or myrmidons. Myrmidons seem to suck, but I thought I might need them because they're mentioned in The Iliad--they might, in fact, appear there for the first time. Maybe I'll need them later.

      

Allies of Werdna or Marvel Comics characters?

      

The two enemy parties on this level were Dorion's Grays ("Well, curse your soul!"), which has two high-level mages and a high-level priest, and Khan's Kosmic Killers ("C'mon, do you want to live forever?"--a Conan the Barbarian reference), with two high-level mages, a priest, and a bishop. The Killers drop a "Get-out-of-jail-free" card that will remove you from one of the "cage" rooms.

     

The Killers kill me.

    

There is a smaller number of wandering enemies, thankfully:

   

• Brud, a neutral samurai.
• Celica, a neutral fighter.
• Darwin, a neutral fighter. 
• Demonslayer, a good ninja.
  
• Deadly Hand, an evil ninja.
• Double-Strike, a good bishop.
• Dr. X, an evil fighter.
• Fireslinger, a good fighter.
• Shandra, an evil priest. 
• Stalker, a neutral thief. He drops a "Night Cloak." It didn't seem to be better than my "Good Hope Cape."
• Starleto, an evil fighter.
• Toranaga, an evil bishop. Casts MAKANITO.
• Trueno, a neutral mage. 
• Urbo, an evil fighter.
• Yuron, a good mage. 

   

Werdna gets what I assume is his last level-up on this level, which grants him TILTOWAIT, MALOR ("Teleport"), and MAHAMAN ("Beseech"). I had been looking forward to MALOR, which I wouldn't have done if I'd known that it simply doesn't work. You can't even use it to move you one square along a perfectly open path. And trying and failing resets the level! MAHAMAN doesn't work any better than its lesser version (HAMAN), either; the game just says that the gods can't hear me. So a lot of enemies are getting TILTOWAITED, but I think LAKANITO is the better go-to spell. 

       

Trying to cast MALOR.

        

Trebor is still around, too. I haven't mentioned him in a couple of entries because it's rarer that he gets me, but it still happens a few times per level. 

        

If there's an ending that lets me torture Trebor for eternity, that's the one I'm taking.

       

There are a couple of key encounters on the level. I came across an old witch stirring a cauldron. "A man with your aspirations," she said, "should definitely have some of my famous 'Blue Blood' special." She said she'd need six ingredients from me to finish the recipe. She further noted that I already had four of them: camphor, rabbit's fur, "fe-s-sub-2," and tannic acid. I don't have any of those things specifically, but I'm guessing the rabbit's fur is one of my hats or cloaks, "fe-s-sub-2" is the pyrite (FeS₂), and the tannic acid is my witching rod, since I recovered it from a pool of such. Finally, camphor is almost certainly the "aromatic ball" that I found elsewhere on this level. She says I still need Spanish unguent and a blender.

    

You know what? I think I'm good.

         

The second encounter is a small grotto with a pool of water between a couple of walls at (6,5). The game calls it the "Ron Wartow Not-Yet-Memorial Wading Pool." Ron Wartow seems to have been an employee at New World, maybe someone Roe Adams knew. Anyway, it seems to be an in-joke. Also proof that Sir-Tech didn't need David Bradley to descend into goofiness.

        

The "Wartow song of death"?

        

Even goofier, the game wants me to ponder before bathing:

  

Oh, will he ever return?

Will he ever return?

His fate is still unlearned!

   

These are slightly incorrect lyrics to the song "M.T.A.," which you hear a billion times if you live in Boston. It was written in 1949 as a political song to promote a particular mayoral candidate who opposed fare increases for the subway. The song tells a tale of poor Charlie, who gets on at one station just before the fares increase and doesn't have money to pay the exit fare when he gets to his destination. The Kingston Trio recorded it in 1959, and it became a pop hit.

     

What does this mean for Werdna? Well, if I bathe in the pool, the game says, "It is as if the evil of your soul has been somewhat cleansed!" Sure enough, Werdna is now of neutral alignment. I assume this is a point of no return that determines the potential endings you can get. I reloaded and left the pool alone for now. I imagine that Hint #19 (""You too can be saved! Repent ye sinner! Wash away thy sins! Repent!") is about this pool.

   

This isn't the only point of no return on this level. I found the stairway up fairly early in my explorations, but there's a message right next to it that says: "Upward from this level, there is no turning back!" I haven't taken the stairs yet.

       

At least there's a warning.

     

More Oracle hints [Ed. I later created a special entry just to record and analyze Oracle hints]:

25. "Cursed with too many blessings? Find relief in a bottle!" No idea.

26. "Your future is grey and hazy!" A possible reference to multiple endings?

27. "It's all Greek to you! (Well, maybe a little Latin)." I would think this refers to The Iliad again, but I don't think any of that is in Latin.

28. "A tisket, a tasket. Trebor's rump in a basket." That would sure be nice.

       

Here's a random shot of me taking care of "Dorion's Grays." What's next? "Lady Windermere's Fans"?

      

29. "Find the paths of the true way!" I'm doing my best.

30. "Sniff, sniff! Whew, what a stench!" A reference to the aromatic camphor?

31. "Look to the Lych-Gate!" No idea.

32. "Seek amongst the historical writings of Trebor's foes for the password." Again, I think I know what this references, but I'll cover it when I get to it. I have been looking through my maps and notes from previous games, mostly because I was curious if the dungeon in Wizardry bears any resemblance to this, as it's supposed to be the same dungeon. It doesn't, really.

    

Before I bathe or head upstairs, I have a number of things to accomplish and a few mysteries to solve--a lot fewer mysteries than all these Oracle hints would suggest.

   

• I have to return to Level 9 and perform that bell, book, and candle ritual at the Gates of Hell.

• I have to return to Level 7 and explore the external areas of the pyramid and see about getting into that blocked room.

• Hopefully, those two expeditions give me the final two ingredients for the witch's brew, as otherwise I have no idea where to find those objects. I hope a "blender" isn't one of the dozens of weapons I haven't bothered to pick up from slain foes.

• Level 4 also has a bunch of walled-off rooms. I don't know if there's any hope of getting into those. MALOR doesn't seem to help. One of the walled-off areas looks like the letter "K," but I don't know what to make of that.

• I guess I have to pick one of those swords since it doesn't appear I can come back to these levels once I ascend. Could one of them be the "blender?" Weirder things have been in this game.

      

I was preparing to head down when just for the hell of it, I tried MALORing down 5 levels, and damned if I didn't end up on Level 9. So now I have no idea what the rules of MALOR are. It will take me down to the bottom of the dungeon but not one space to the east? Weird.

         

MALORing the hell out of here.

        

I'm looking forward to a break from this game for a few days. I hope there aren't any more levels like that one.

     

Time so far: 34 hours