Game 510: Dungeon Hack (1993)

You know this is a serious game because it has two ©s, two ®s, and a "TM."

    

Dungeon Hack

United States

DreamForge Entertainment (developer); Strategic Simulations, Inc. (publisher)

Released 1993 for DOS, 1995 for PC-98

Date Started: 7 April 2024

      

Dungeon Hack is what I've been waiting for my whole life--a fun, replayable game of infinite variety. No more waiting for years for developers to release a new title. Just roll up a race/class/sex/alignment combination that you haven't tried before--there are 698 of them!--and a random dungeon that you haven't experienced before--there are over 4 billion of them!--then customize the dungeon to the challenge level that you want. Sure, there's no real story, but you have an imagination, don't you? Make up some narration as you go along. All you have to do is . . . 

   

Give me back the keyboard, you little delinquent. Sorry about that, everyone. Thirteen-year-old Chester briefly came forward and insisted on having his say. He and I have been arguing for days now. We've had debates before--usually resolved with a line or two in the "Summary and Rating"--but never before have our differences been so stark. Thirteen-year-old Chester (let's call him "Winnie," like one of his uncles did), who hasn't learned the value of time, whose days seem to stretch out endlessly instead of being calculated in hard, unforgiving hours, loves the idea of a "forever game." Winnie's already making plans to win it 698 times with one set of customizations, then turn around to do it again with another. He already has backstories in mind for half the characters. He'll somehow turn its repetitive, randomized corridors into a novel.

     

Dungeon Hack is much like Eye of the Beholder, but with a single character and, thus, most of the inventory options on the main screen.

    

Adult Chester has places to be. I don't have any idea what Red Crystal is, and I'm never going to find out if I waste time running around mazes for their own sake.

   

What's the difference between that and NetHack? This is "Winnie" again. I hated that nickname. That uncle ended up in prison, by the way.

   

Hoping for healing, my character tries a potion and instead gets confused.

       

That''s a better question than it seems. Until I started playing it, I thought that the word "Hack" in the game's name was a coincidence. Anything but. The game is a fusion of first-person Dungeons & Dragons games like Eye of the Beholder (1991) with roguelike elements, including potions and wands whose color and composition are randomized for each new game, random drawing of dungeon maps, and optional permadeath. Your quest, as in many roguelikes, is to find an orb. The executable to run the game is even titled HACK. 

     

And yet roguelikes are more than just randomization, permadeath, and potion lists that you have to re-learn. They're a full set of keyboard commands, for one thing, whereas Dungeon Hack is the second game in a row that a player has to approach with one hand on the numberpad and the other on the mouse, a contortion without an external numberpad. They're about complex inventory mechanics--or, at least, the Hack line is. I grant you that Rogue doesn't have that aspect, but it makes up for it by being short, which Dungeon Hack definitely is not. In fact, in offering the simplicity of Rogue with the length of some of its descendants, Dungeon Hack resembles Moria or Angband more than its namesake. I didn't like those roguelikes nearly as much. Winnie doesn't care about any of this, of course; he's never even played Rogue.

      

Winnie doesn't realize that all these locks and keys are just busywork.

       

The opening cinematic depicts a cross-legged woman hovering in the air before a generic adventurer, reciting (in recorded voice) a verse about an ancient orb she hopes to find. "My lady, I have answered your summons!" the adventurer announces, just as the mysterious woman divines the location of the orb: "A place of traps to crack brave bones . . . an ancient dungeon." She casts a spell that causes a little orb to shoot across the room and stick to a wall map. The adventurer gushes: "It's a strong magic that can point to maps." Is it really? I would think that would be a pretty easy spell. Incidentally, I don't think that map depicts any place in Faerün.

      

What about letting you levitate indefinitely in the air?

        

The adventurer questions her about the salary she intends to pay, but she dismisses him by saying he'll find his salary on the floor of the dungeon: "There lies gold and gem enough for any man." The adventurer protests: "You'll pay me now or I'll never get there! I need horses, supplies . . . " The woman cuts off his protests by zapping him with a teleport spell that apparently warps him directly to the dungeon. "Live or die, adventurer," she says as he disappears, "but bring the orb to me."

      

Our adventurer forgets what franchise he's a part of.

         

He appears in a swamp outside a blocky-looking dungeon, a gargoyle's head looming above the entryway. As he approaches the door on a wooden walkway, some kind of troll or similar beast leaps out of the swamp onto the walkway in front of him. In perhaps the most (unintentionally?) hilarious moment in introductory cinematic history, the adventurer reaches up and smacks the troll back into the water, barely breaking his stride. "Bring on your worst, dungeon. I am ready!" he declares, as the game transitions to the main menu.

     

He won't be nearly as effective once he actually gets into the dungeon.

     

For his character, the player has the options to create one or choose from a slate of characters with existing names and backstories. I started to recount the list of pre-made characters, but there are like 20 of them, and they're not all that interesting. I'll just observe that a couple of them (principally "Fatzon Axemaiden" and "Kathra Shallowtaint") have unfortunate names, and many of their stories don't seem to go with their alignments. We're told repeatedly that nominally good characters are only in it for the wealth, for instance. 

      

I mean, it would be kind of weird if . . . you know what? I'm just going to let it go.

     

If you want to create your own character--and of course that's what you want to do if you want to be either Chester's or Winnie's friend--your experience is governed by second-edition AD&D rules. That means race/class restrictions and level caps. Only humans can be paladins; only humans or half-elves can be bards; only humans, elves, or half-elves can be rangers. Only demi-humans can be any multi-class.

      

It's nice to have all the character creation options on one screen.

      

Bards are appearing for what I believe is the first time in an official Dungeons & Dragons title. It's a funny game to make their debut, as they don't work great as solo characters. The game also didn't implement any bard song abilities, so the bard is basically a thief who can cast the occasional spell. Weirdly, his alignment must have the word "neutral" on either side but not both. Another oddity is that bards and thieves can wield any weapons.

Single-class fighters, rangers, and paladins start at Level 3; clerics, bards, and thieves at Level 4; and mages at Level 5. That's good; I was thinking about playing as a mage--which I almost never do--but I wasn't looking forward to casting "Magic Missile" once and then resting. 

     

Portraits for male characters.

       

You can re-roll the standard set of D&D attributes as many times as you want or just set the attributes to whatever you want. (The manual doesn't even pretend that you're trying to "match a favorite AD&D® character" anymore.) Alignments are from the standard set of 9, and I'm not sure what significance they have for this game. Your last character selection is a portrait.

   

After that, you get to customize the game's length and difficulty. There are sliders and toggles for the number of levels, the difficulty of monsters, the deadliness of poison, the presence of undead, and a dozen other features. "Easy," "Moderate," and "Hard" macro-settings toggle these switches accordingly. Of particular note is "Character Death Real," a toggle switch that turns on permadeath. The lowest number you can set the dungeon levels is 10, so you can't make yourself a game that's too easy. Finally, you can manually set the "dungeon seed"--the basis of the procedural level generation--in case you want to play the same maps as a friend or something.

      

All of the dungeon settings on "moderate."

     

For this introductory session, I messed around with a few character options, I tried a paladin, a fighter/mage, a bard, and finally finished the level with another paladin. I'll get some opinions before I move forward with any of these characters.

    

Once you commit to a dungeon, the game takes a few minutes to build it using the numeric seed you or the game chose. You're then deposited at the bottom of the entry stairs with a basic set of starting equipment, including a couple of rations. 

     

This bard seems out of his league.

    

Other than their size (28 x 27), dungeon levels are all randomized. I don't know that they share any specific code, but the nature of the randomization seems very similar to that in Anthony Crowther's Captive (1990). The levels are large but quite linear, since the randomization algorithm (unlike NetHack's, we must observe) does not allow access to the same destination from multiple directions. Doors are placed at random intervals, and opening them can involve a variety of buttons, chains, switches, and keys. If the door is keyed, the algorithm ensures that an appropriate key will always be found on the floor before reaching the door. "Keys" can include mallets that strike gongs, coins that drop into slots, and gems that fit into murals on the walls. There's an option in the customization settings to turn on multi-leveled puzzles, for which keys are sometimes found on previous levels, but I guess there are ways that this can screw up the game.

      

Hitting this gong with a mallet is a variant of a lock and key.

      

Textures for walls, doors, and floors are also randomized, including wood, rough-hewn stone, polished marble, and various types of paneling. To keep things from getting too boring, developers also threw in some random decorations and furnishings, most of which can be clicked on for a brief message. These include tapestries with demonic beings ("I certainly hope this creature only appears in this dungeon as a tapestry and not in the flesh!"), paintings, engravings, carvings, incense burners, and floor grates. 

     

It's also for young lovers to stick their hands in and then pretend they were bitten off by retracing their hands into their sleeves as an amusing part of a falling-in-love montage.

     

Every once in a while, a wall is replaced with a cool kneeling statue, blocking access (I don't know if there's any way to remove him) or a hole that only the smaller races can get through. There are also illusory doors and the occasional  niche with treasures.

       

I have to have one of these for my house.

       

The programming part of this is all impressive, but I was already sick of it by the end of the first level. Randomization--or, at least, this kind of randomization--prohibits both interesting and realistic dungeon layouts. For all its randomization, NetHack manages to drop in the occasional castle, throne room, store, and treasure zoo. Does Dungeon Hack have anything similar? If so, it's not on the first level. What it does have is plenty of cases where you spend half an hour finding a key to a locked door only to find three squares of nothing on the other side of it.

        

This creepy arm is a lever that opens a door.

     

Each level does have plenty of monsters and treasure, and no matter what seed I started with, the first level had mostly goblins and orcs, maybe with a zombie or two towards the end. Monsters have a variable number of hit points, but they mostly die in one hit, even from the weaker characters. Of course, the character is also pretty weak, and once he or she is down to 8 hit points or less, a single blow could easily mean death, with no other party members to cast healing spells. The same tricks that work in most Dungeon Master variants work here, including the "combat waltz," backpedaling down hallways while throwing things (anything, it seems, can be used as a missile weapon), and so on. 

       

I got "held" for a little while by this undead. Fortunately, "held" characters can still move. They just can't do anything else.

     

The floors are strewn with treasures, including weapons, armor, amulets, potions, wands, scrolls, and rations. I didn't find any rings on Level 1, but I assume they're coming. Scrolls are all labeled, but nothing else is identified, which is a staple of both Dungeon Master clones and roguelikes. Potions, amulets, and wands are identified by color or material (e.g., pink potion, bronze amulet, pine wand), and once you find out what one does, you've identified all others of the same description. The problem is that the game offers no NetHack-like ways of testing what the different items do without trying them and hoping for the best. The effectiveness of armor can be assayed by changes to the armor class, but I'm not sure there's any way, save one, to identify weapons at all.

   

The one exception is if you have a mage or bard who can cast "Improved Identify," which allows you to identify items one at a time. The other classes must either have to rely on scrolls, which I haven't found, some other mechanism that hasn't appeared yet, or just guess. 

      

Now I just need to know what an "Amulet of Imminent Return" actually is.

    

Other notes:

     

• There's a food meter that slowly depletes. So far, all my characters have found enough rations to keep up with it.

• A minor-mode march plays over the title screen, but there is no music in the game itself. There are serviceable sound effects, mostly taken from Beholder.

• You occasionally find machines that take single gold coins to fully restore your health. That's the only "economy" I've seen in the game so far.

      

A little boon to those of us who aren't clerics.

    

• The game has no issue starting multi-classed mages (and bards) wearing armor that prevents them from casting any of their spells.

• I bought the GOG version of the game. It comes with a pre-loaded "High Score" list that has "C. Nova" at the top with 1,024,000 experience points. Other names in the hall of fame are Sprig, Mario, Elizabeth Zazo, J. J. Farnsworth, Room 9B, Borel Darkonious, Jojo the Great, Brady Cosmo, and Reamy Ro. At first, I thought GOG had ripped some random user's disk, but since all the experience point totals are perfectly even, I suspect these names were in the original. 

    

SSI could have made these numbers more realistic.

     

• The game has an excellent automap that annotates monsters (even in completely different parts of the dungeon) and items on the ground. It takes a good 10 seconds to appear, however.

       

A good automap. I can even see the colors.

     

• Monsters appear to respawn.

           

How I move forward will depend on what type of challenge I want to create for myself. Obviously, if I just wanted to breeze through, I could use "easy" mode with a paladin or fighter/cleric or something. But some things walk a fine line between "challenging" and "annoying." I'm toying with the following settings:

   

• Dungeon Depth = 13. Why prolong things? Setting it to the minimum, 10, seems lame, though.
• Monster Amount = High. I like combat-related challenges. I might as well set this high to compensate for the other things I'm thinking about doing.
• Monster Difficulty = maybe a smidge higher than normal.
• Illusory Walls = Off. The last thing I need is to have to go all the way back to pick up three squares in some corner of the dungeon that I missed on the first pass.
• Food Availability = High. Keeping myself fed is not necessarily the type of challenge I'm looking for.
• Water Level = Off. I hate water levels. Plus, someone told me you can get into a "walking dead" situation where you can't survive them.
• Encounter Undead = On. Who doesn't like undead?
• Other settings default.

    

As for characters, I'm toying with:

   

• Paladin. Just my default single-character game character.
• Mage. For the challenge and "Improved Identify."
• Fighter/Mage or Cleric/Mage. Less of a challenge, still get the spell.
• Bard. For the novelty of it, and I still get "Improved Identify," plus he's kind of a fighter-thief without the restrictions of multi-classing.

    

I'll be happy to take your thoughts before moving forward. Even 13 levels feels like it's going to be long.

 

Time so far: 3 hours