Dungeon Hack: Blitzkrieg

A minotaur prepares to swing his axe, which looks like it ought to be impossible with the height of the ceiling.

        

I started over after the first entry, deciding to go with a slightly easier game. I lowered the levels to 10, kept secret doors turned off, said "no" to the water level, and created a mage/cleric named Tirena. She got some decent statistics within the first few rolls:

         

No one's pretty or healthy after 10 levels in a dungeon anyway.

       

A mage/cleric is a bit of a handful. Like all characters, she has two hand slots available, but she has at least seven potential things to put in them:

     

• The primary weapon
• A shield
• The cleric holy symbol, for casting cleric spells
• The mage spellbook, for casting mage spells
• Usable items, such as wands, potions, and scrolls
• Items that I want to identify
• Conjured magical weapons

        

Add to this the fact that the character can cast cleric spells while wearing armor but not mage spells. I'm constantly swapping items in and out of slots depending on what enemies I'm facing and how many spells I have left. I mind this less than I might have expected. If I was playing a party of four characters, it would probably be too annoying to bother with, and I'd end up under-valuing one of the two classes. With only one character to manage, constantly swapping things in and out gives me something to do between battles.

    

I've completed six levels. As we discussed last time, each level offers two types of enemies plus a single "boss" enemy who's a higher level than the regular two. Level 1, as before, gave me orcs and goblins. The boss was a hobgoblin. I found a Ring of Feather Falling and a mace +1 among various lesser treasures.

   

One of each.

      

Level 2 served up hobgoblins and troglodytes as the main enemies; the boss was a ghoul. I had my first level-up, with both classes reaching Level 4 (I started at 3). Before I finished the level, I ran into a pit trap and fell to Level 3, which had shadows and ghouls. It was a while before I found the stairs back up to Level 2 and discovered that the "boss" there was also a ghoul.

  

I realized at some point during this process that there's no reason to conserve anything, particularly spell slots. Since you only meet two types of monsters on each level (with that one exception), no monster is any different than any other. Might as well blast away. I fell into a habit of exhausting my mage spellbook (mostly "Magic Missile") before donning the armor and spending the rest of the day with my cleric spells and equipment, only to repeat the cycle after the next rest.  

       

This isn't what I normally think of as a "troglodyte."

       

Shadows and troglodytes both sap strength, but it's not permanent. Ghouls can paralyze for a while, but paralysis just stops you from acting, not moving. You can run away until it wears off. 

    

Still, I was motivated to stay out of melee combat, and it was in messing around with spells that I discovered how awesome "Spiritual Hammer" is. Is it this awesome in other D&D games? I've been ignoring it for most of my gaming career, apparently to my detriment. It creates a magical throwing Thor hammer that comes back to you. If you miss an enemy on the initial throw, it might hit him in the back on the rebound. And you can summon one for each hand!

      

Hammer time!

     

By the time I finished Level 3, I was loving this game. After the first session, I thought I'd be bored with it. But now I was charging through the hallways, hurling double hammers at every shade who approached, getting them coming and going, blasting away with my mage spells, slamming keys into doors, barely ever having to pause to get my bearings because everything is so linear. The key to the enjoyment of this game is that it plays fast. There's no point mapping anything because it's all randomly-generated (and the automap does a great job). There's no point waiting because enemies respawn. There's no point conserving because every level brings new stuff. It's probably worth holding one high-powered item in reserve for a particularly tough boss, but otherwise Dungeon Hack is a game of swift offense.

    

That isn't to say there aren't some problems. Chief among them are horrendous timing issues. Even with the emulator cranked up to a level way above an era 486, I suffer maddening pauses sometimes when moving and turning. It's particularly annoying when this happens in combat, causing me to over-turn and get disoriented.

      

Foreshadowing?

      

Meanwhile, forget about the "Combat Waltz" or any other dance moves. The only way to not get hit by enemies is to not get next to them. This can be difficult. Enemies sometimes dither in one square for several seconds, and other times they seem to move three squares at once. If the enemy does get next to you, and the game's clock decides that homeboy gets an attack, all the shuffling and running in the world isn't going to avoid it. The particularly annoying (and slightly amusing) thing is that the game's combat timer isn't synced well with the characters' positions. There are times that I'll get adjacent to an enemy, then run backwards down the corridor. Ten seconds later and ten steps away, the game suddenly registers a hit and the character goes "oof!"

 

Enemies oddly cannot step and then turn in one move, but they can turn, step, and even attack in a single move. Take this guy:

        

He's closer than you think.

     

If this were Dungeon Master, I'd have enough time to go make a sandwich. There, he would have to turn to face me, then pause, then step into the square in front of me, then pause, then attack. But this guy probably did all three of those things in the nanosecond after I took the screenshot. In Dungeon Hack, you can be two squares away from a monster who's facing the wrong direction and it's still too late.

    

I've learned to live with these aggravations because everything else happens at a good clip. By the end of dungeon Level 3, I had reached character Level 5 for both of my classes. I found a pair of Gauntlets of Hill Giant Strength and two Shields +1. 

  

Level 4 brought the first level-drainers: wights and shades. I tried to suck up the level drains at first, but it happened too many times. I learned to just rely on my hammers, keep out of their way, and reload if they hit me. I got "Negative Plane Protection" at some point, which stopped the draining.

       

Yeah, screw that.

      

The enemies were worth an incredible amount of experience. I arrived on the dungeon level at character Level 5 in both classes, and I left at Level 9 as a mage and 8 as a cleric. Along the way, I picked up a pair of leather boots, a book that increased my wisdom by 1, and a Stone of Good Luck. I frankly don't know what that latter item does, or how to use it. It doesn't equip in any slot and it doesn't activate from the hand slots. 

         

Taking damage from a shade.

       

The game follows Dungeon Master's convention of never telling you, in-game, what any of the enemies are called. You have to look them up in the manual. The "boss" enemy for dungeon Level 4 was an armored guy surrounded by a blue glow, and he doesn't correspond with anything in the manual. He carries a sword and shield; death knights carry a two-handed sword and have skeletal faces. Steel shadows are just animated armor, so they don't go with the fact that this guy has a face. Swordwraiths don't carry shields, and their armor looks completely different. The manual does warn that its list may not be comprehensive.

    

Any ideas what this guy is?

      

Whatever he was, he was fast. All the backpedaling in the world didn't keep him from catching up with me. After he killed me twice, I decided to try my Wand of Fire on him, and he died in one shot.

   

As you explore, you occasionally find message scrolls that give you hints about the game and perhaps fill in some semblance of story? It's too early to tell. This is what I have so far:

• "More than once, the ogre slug I was fighting attempted to hit me with some sort of corrosive spittle."

• "As well, Midnight had a shield, one that would absorb some damage meant for her." [Isn't that what all shields do?]

• "But in order to see illusions, Midnight relied upon her Helm of True Seeing. With it no . . ."

• " . . . ical instrument, this Lute of Well-Being, is also said to strengthen a weakened bard."

• "I wish I had the power of the 'Neutralize Poison' spell. Twice I was struck by the poisonous sting of the wyvern."

     

Did this one appear for the wrong character class?

      

The manual mentions that you might find artifacts from a famous adventurer who preceded you, and I guess in my case, that's "Midnight."

        

Some miscellaneous notes:

    

• The game has a lot of clever ways to offer locks and keys. There are half a dozen different colors of locks and keys to start. Then, sometimes instead of a lock and key you'll have a gem and a mosaic that the gem needs to be placed in, or a plume from a helmet and a relief depicting an armored knight that takes the plume, or a mallet and gong, or a pearl that has to be placed into a clam shell. They're still just very rote, linear puzzles, but at least their variety makes them kind of fun.

       

Just when you thought you'd seen every way to open a door.

    

• I mentioned it last time, but I'll also call attention to the wide variety of things you can click on just to get an atmospheric message.

        

To eat, I would think.

       

• It took me a while to figure out that you can learn spell scrolls by clicking in the spellbook with them.

• Mage spells seem a little underpowered so far. "Magic Missile" significantly underperforms physical attacks. "Ice Storm" often misses. "Hold Undead" didn't work on the undead I faced on Level 4. But the mage class is still worth it for "Improved Identify." 

 

I think this is the only "bad" piece of equipment I've found.

       

• Having played a few hours of Baldur's Gate 3, I have to say that I find the simplicity of AD&D2 refreshing, where you find a Mace +1 and then a few hours later, you find a Mace +2--instead of a mace that gives you +1 but only in the sunlight and when you have a psychic link with at least one enemy who has taken damage from one of your companions earlier in the same round.  

        

I thought that would be enough for one entry, but it's not, so let's do another couple of levels. Level 5 bucked the previous trend by offering only one enemy type and no "boss": Minotaurs. The level was a labyrinthine maze, and they were waiting around every corner. I had several reloads when I couldn't dodge their two-handed axe attacks in time.

There was another clever stand in for a lock-and-key where a relief on the wall depicted a planet with three moons. The space for the planet was empty; I had to find the orb to stick there.

      

Another clever alternative to a key and lock.

      

The level had a brief section in which, when I entered, my character announced that she was suddenly famished. While in this area, food depleted at a much higher rate. It wasn't long before I was out of it, though. I had plenty of food anyway, plus my character was capable of casting "Create Food and Water."

   

Items found on the level helped me resolve the cleric-mage armor problem. A Ring of Strength allowed me to remove my Gauntlets of Hill Giant Strength and put a pair of Bracers +1 in that slot instead. Then a Cloak of Protection +3 took the place of my chain mail. With this setup, my AC is 1 instead of 0. Good enough.

        

Just a shot of the Level 4 cleric spell list.

       

Minotaurs didn't provide nearly enough experience (at least relatively) as the shades. I only gained one cleric level before heading down to dungeon Level 6.

     

Level 6 brought back undead, specifically mummies. They were joined by trolls. No level-draining, but both of them hit hard enough that I did everything I could to stay out of melee range. I hit mage Level 10 at some point, but I ran out of time before I finished the area.

       

The low ceilings have given the troll a flat top.

      

Short entry, but it's a busy week. This is a good game for a busy week--not much plot, a decent amount of forward momentum. There's only so far you can get on momentum alone, though. We'll see how I feel about the last four levels.

   

Time so far: 7 hours (only 4 on this character)