Game 551: Boss: Beyond Moria (1990)

I wish all authors so clearly documented the historical trail leading to their games.

       

BOSS: Beyond Moria

United States

Independently developed and published
Released 1990 for VMS, 1993 for Macintosh, 2000 for Linux, 2010 for Windows

Date Started: 30 May 2025  

       

There are so many variants of so many roguelikes that it seems arbitrary which ones get catalogued in various game databases. BOSS, as its subtitle suggests, is a variant of Moria (1983), and a fairly rare roguelike ported to the Macintosh but not DOS. It promises an easier, shorter experience, which is music to my ears after my attempts to win Moria and Angband (another Moria variant) refused to yield success after frankly absurd investments of time. The original BOSS was written by Robert Gulledge and Jason Black, two University of Washington students; the Mac version was ported by a University of Linköping (Sweden) student named Mark Vesterbacka. In 2024, Richard Drysdall released a new version for Windows, Linux, and Macintosh, but RogueBasin calls it a "major rewrite," and I thought it was thus best to play the 1993 Mac version.

       

The authors changed the theme to a post-apocalyptic, science fiction setting, but in the type of superficial way that means I have to waste a bunch of time learning that "disks" are the same thing as "scrolls," "skills" are the same thing as "spells," and K-Mart has taken over the general store, and despite all of these so-called differences in setting, I still end up fighting with a sword and chugging potions. I suppose if they hadn't made those changes, though, I might find the game too undifferentiated from Moria to play it at all.

    

(If you're new to the blog and unfamiliar with games like Rogue and Moria, "roguelikes" are a sub-genre of CRPGs that go back to 1980's Rogue; Moria was the second. These games feature simple, ASCII graphics; complex inventories; randomly-generated content; a large array of commands that use almost every letter of the keyboard; and permanent death. See my entries on Rogue and Moria for more.)

     

Some of the many commands available in this game.

      

Where Moria has you specify a name, race, sex, and class during character creation, in BOSS, you specify a name, quality, sex, and class. These "qualities" give boosts to certain attributes, the same way that races do in other games. The qualities are: elite, hefty, mad, wise, lucky, healthy, sexy, and alien (major bonuses but need more experience to gain levels). Classes are wrestler, scientist, guru, ninja, soldier, wanderer, con-artist, thief, and journalist. Attributes haven't changed (strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, constitution, charisma), but some skills have: "Fighting" is now "Melee Fighting," "Bows/Throwing" now "Guns & Grenades," "Magic Device" now "Weird Device." The rest are identical.

       

Assigning points during character creation.

      

The player gets 100 points to seed among the various attributes and skills (each upgrade costing a variable number of points). In a mechanic I don't remember from Moria, one of the character attributes is "experience factor," which is a multiplier against the normal amount of experience the character needs to advance a level. The player can increase this to gain more starting points.

   

The game continues Moria's tradition of giving you a little random backstory:

 

• "You are the rejected child of a Jarwangian scientist. You have made many enemies among the humans. You have orange eyes, straight blue hair, and a plastic complexion" (this for a character with the "alien" quality).

• "You are one of several children of a thief. You are the hero of your town. You have dark brown eyes, wavy brown hair, and an average complexion."

• "You are one of several children of a chimney sweep."

           

I rolled a random class and ended up with a ninja. As the game begins, it depicts the character riding a bus to Seattle, which is the consequent top-level city that he ends up in. The game apparently offers 8 such cities, each with a dungeon beneath. As usual with Moria games, NPCs roam the city and are easy to accidentally bump into and kill. They've made it annoying here in that killing some of them is a crime and may get you attacked and killed by police.

      

Starting out in "Seattle."

      

BOSS is a bit half-assed in its pretensions towards futuristic sci-fi. The weapon shop and temple are completely intact from Moria, the temple selling magic rings, holy books, and amulets as if it were a fantasy game. The general store becomes a K-Mart, selling raincoats, umbrellas, purses, lanterns, and crowbars (among others). The magic shop becomes a computer store and an "alien artifacts" shop, with disks taking the role of scrolls and ray guns taking the role of wands. The alchemist becomes a bar and grill but still sells potions. The armory is now "Leather & Chains." There's a club where the bouncer says I'm too poor to enter, and a guild where you have to bump into the exterior walls to find the door. An inn and a bank round out the city's offerings.

          

Shopping at the computer store. We have technical manuals instead of spell manuals, disks instead of scrolls.

        

The ninja starts with a katana, 2 throwing stars, a bathrobe, a set of leather gloves, 8 floppy disks of Identify, 2 potions of Cure Critical Wounds, 10 k-rations, and 5 flashlights. I figure that will get me through the first level and head down. There are two stairways down, and it turns out that one goes to Level 1 and one goes to Level 2.

    

Just like Moria, the dungeons are huge, sprawling, randomly generated, and impermanent (e.g., when you leave and return, a completely new level is generated). The instructions promise that there are seven cities with 10-level dungeons and a final city with a 25-level dungeon, making for a 95-level game. I don't think you have to explore all the levels. The instructions suggest that you have to "finish" each dungeon before moving on to the next, which includes killing each town's "local mob boss." I don't know what it means to "finish," but if the local boss is always found on the bottom level of the dungeon, I suppose that would make sense.

    

There's a certain variety to the levels that I don't remember from the DOS version of Moria at least. In my first game, Level 1 had proper rooms and corridors, like a game of Rogue:

 

Finding a secret door on Level 1.

       

Level 2 was more cave-like, with completely irregular wall patterns.

         

The less predictable Level 2.

        

Level 3 was completely open. Although unlit (I had to get close to enemies and objects to see them), its wall contours were completely sketched out at the start.

     

Fighting a pygmy on Level 3.

     

And so I began exploring, bashing into sleazy thieves, Scorpion Gang members, short pygmies, white fungi, mechanized Dust Busters, and mutant Keebler elves instead of the usual orcs and kobolds. I guess the game is easier than Moria, as I was up to Level 3 after only two victories (it slows down after that). The game likes to get cute with its attack messages, so in addition to things like "the pygmy rabbit bites you," you get silly messages, often customized to the specific enemy, often making pop culture references:

    

• "The short pygmy moons you." 
• "The Vanilli lip syncs you." 
• "The slobbering pygmy recites poetry at you." 

     

Like Moria, the game makes a distinction between inventory and equipped items; equipment slots include head, hands, body, footwear, rings, an amulet, a computer, and a light source. Obviously, improving your items over the starting gear, by either finding or buying, is a key way to get ahead. There isn't a lot on the early levels, though, and I don't know what to make of some of it (e.g., bloody baseball cards, corpses, a hat rack). Instead of just finding money, for some reason you find "arcade tokens worth $5" or whatever.

      

Skills (spells) seem to be specific to certain character classes. The thief comes with a "Manual of Tricks," for instance, which includes such skills as "Spit Ball," "Evasion," and "Stink Bomb." The journalist's "Beginning Tech Manual" has options like "Find Story," "Interview," and "Flash-Photo." So far, these have all just resolved to mundane counterparts from Moria; for instance, "Find Story" is the same thing as "Detect Monsters." I'm not sure how the game decides how many of these skills you can use, and how often, since there's no equivalent to magic points or spell points.

         

My journalist's "skills." from one book.

      

Miscellaneous notes:

   

• As I noted, the disks take the place of scrolls, but you have to equip a computer to run them. I could only afford a Commodore VIC-20, and it ate about 40% of the disks I tried to run on it. When you find unidentified disks, instead of nonsense words like in Moria, they're titled with nonsense phrases like "Puzzles to Repair Trapped Eyes" and "Reasons to Maim Your Traps."

• The game offers a potion-mixing mechanic that I haven't explored yet.

• It adds the ability to get diseased. I had a pit bull give me a "social disease," which I had to have cured in town.

• I was poisoned a couple of times but it wore off in a few rounds. 

• I checked the stores several times but never found anything like a "Scroll of Recall," so I suspect there's no way to fast-travel back to town. 

• I got attacked by stairways a couple of times. I imagine they were mimics but the game didn't specify. I've seen mimics take the forms of treasure chests and doors in RPGs, but not stairways. 

       

I didn't trip! The stairway hit me!

      

• Current hit points—the most important statistic in the game—is buried among the overall list of statistics and hard (for me, at least) to find when I need it. Moria had a break afterwards to make it easier.

• The game has an explicit "Speed" statistic that was hidden in the early versions of Moria. 

• In addition to selling things, some of the stores offer "special training" to increase attributes and skills. 

           

Some of the options in the thieves' guild.

        

My ninja got to Level 6 before I pushed down too far too fast and got swarmed by pygmies. I created a journalist character called Nellie, but she didn't get very far before she accidentally killed a vendor on the town level (they just walk right into your path) and got shot and killed by the police in retaliation. 

     

The authors really had it out for pygmies.

     

Next character: A thief named Renaud. As he starts, the game says he can gain a skill, and he has a skill book, but for some reason, the key doesn't work. He also comes with 5 throwing knives, 10 K-rations, 2 points of Restore Charisma (which hasn't really been a problem so far), a bath robe, a set of black leather gloves, a towel, and 5 disposable flashlights. The towel is supposed to be his weapon. No sooner do I have him equipped with some better stuff than I accidentally slaughter a street beggar and get killed by police again. Aaargh. 

      

Next: A lucky female wanderer named Zigwena. Wanderers apparently have access to prayers rather than skills, and they really are indistinguishable from a fantasy version: "Detect Evil," "Cure Light Wounds," "Bless," and so forth. She comes with 5 frisbees (missile weapons), 10 K-rations, 2 potions of Restore Wisdom, a bath robe, a pair of Nikes, a walking stick (melee weapon), and 5 disposable flashlights. The Nikes appear to be Nikes of Slow Descent. But before I even get out of the town, I manage to wield a cursed hairbrush (another melee weapon) and can't find anything in town that will remove it for me. To compensate, I sell my potions of Restore Wisdom and splurge on riot armor.

      

Zigwena's inventory after a short time.

       

She makes it to Level 5 before I repeat my mistake of going down too far and getting swarmed. Oh, and she also kills someone by accident on the town level—I swear, it is way too easy—but I manage to get to a stairway before it happens, which resets the level and kills the APB. 

         

That's about as far as I've gotten for now. I'm not really in the mood for this game, as should be obvious by the fact that I keep getting characters killed when it's not that hard to stay alive. I'd punt it down the pike for a later time, but I never want to get into the habit of doing that, as I'll just end up with a huge pile of unwanted games at some inevitable point. But if I can't at least beat the first couple of bosses for the next session, I'll probably put it on simmer and move forward with something else.

   

Here's a mystery to occupy us until next time: It's too early to be cheating, but my mind started thinking about how I could cheat if I got to the point that it was more important to show the endgame than adhere to permadeath. My first thought was, of course, backing up the character save file, but the game is on to that trick. It must write the character names to some other file and record that they've been killed. I don't see that file, but I don't know anything about how Macs store anything. In any event, if I try to restore the save file for a slain character, the game just gives a message that "this game file seems to be invalid."

        

How does it know!?

       

Thus, my next thought: Back up the entire emulated hard drive. I store all my Mac games on a 500MB file called Game.dsk. While Zigwena was still active, I made a copy of that disk. When she died, I deleted the original drive and renamed the backup to the original's name. I launched it again, fired up BOSS—and it still somehow knew that I was cheaating. "This game file seems to be invalid," it said. Just for fun, I tried again with a new character (Jake). I saved him right after creation, then closed the emulator and duplicated the hard disk. I fired up the original. Jake loaded just fine. I saved and quit. I loaded the backup. Jake loaded fine. Saved and quit. Returned to the original, got Jake killed. Deleted the original, loaded the backup. The game somehow knew that Jake was dead. So there's no confusion, the game itself and all its directories are on the hard disk being backed up. I am truly baffled. Any ideas?

   

Time so far: 3 hours 

       

Game 550: Sandor II: Kotalan und die drei Schwester'n (1991)

 

From the company that made Seven Horror's comes another random unnecessary apostrophe.

       

Sandor II: Kotalan und die drei Schwester'n

"Sandor II: Kotalan and the Three Sisters"

Germany

Motelsoft (developer and publisher)

Released 1991 for Atari ST

Date Started: 27 May 2025 

           

This is my fifth Motelsoft game, and I found myself looking forward to it as it came up on the list. Since my first go at Seven Horror's (1988), I've found that the company has offered a consistent middle-range experience. None of their games so far has been amazing, and some have been downright confusing, but in general, they've done a solid job analyzing and replicating the factors that make for successful commercial RPGs. That said, I don't think I've managed to get through any of their games without getting significantly stuck at one point or another, a scenario that's doubly likely here, where the game exists only in German.

   

Sandor (1989) is the only one of their titles so far that I didn't finish. The version Motelsoft offers is freeware, and the company doesn't offer the ability to obtain a registered version. LanHawk was later able to win it and offered instructions for getting around the registration problem, but I never found time to go back to it. I found the plot impenetrable (Motelsoft's site only says, unhelpfully and incorrectly, that it's "self-explanatory"); LanHawk was able to offer a bit more, but even his account leaves a lot of mysteries.

         

The game begins.

     

At least for the sequel, we have a proper description in the instructions: A malevolent wizard named Kotalan has extorted King Salinos of Sandor by threatening to turn all his subjects to stone; he has already petrified everyone in Salinos's court except the king himself. It's unclear what he has extorted the king for; it may be an object or a person. The king has put out a plea for assistance, and heroes have arrived at his castle from various neighboring lands. The player has to assemble a party of at least four characters, visit Salinos, and accept his mission. (German readers, I would appreciate if you could visit this site and let me know if I've missed any nuance.)

     

As the game begins on an iconographic outdoor landscape, there is only one character in the party: a 28-year old woman named Tanja, a "Tranok." (Mysterious races are a staple of Motelsoft's games.) She has skill values between 3 and 5 in various weapon skills (sword, axe, bow), navigational skills (hunting cartography, negotiating), 120 provisions, 350 gold, and various attributes such as charisma, intelligence, strength, and luck. She comes with "arc gloves," "toco plate (iron)," and "talmon boots," none of which she has the strength to equip. She also has one spell: "Healing 1." I'll later find that every time you start a new game, values are rolled randomly for Tanja, and the Tanja I got here is extremely weak. It's very on-brand for Motelsoft to not offer much player choice in character creation.

      

This Tanja's starting inventory.

         

I quickly discern that the game interface is mouse-only, which makes me unhappy. I steer Tanja towards the nearest town, Kolono, which was also the closest town to the start in the first Sandor. The maps are otherwise not identical. The town has an armory, a pawn shop, a healer, a hotel, a training center, a bar, and a place where you can buy and sell trade goods like tobacco and tea. 

   

At the armory, which only sells weapons, shields, and potions (no armor), I buy a sword and wooden shield for Tanja.

    

Visiting a pleasant town.

      

In the bar, I have the option to buy provisions (I've already used 11!), talk to the guests, or recruit other adventurers. Talking to the patrons produces a couple of rumors. Scouting for adventurers results in 1 "wanderer" offering to join the party. He's a 22-year-old man of the "Hunch" race with much higher charisma, weapon skill, and strength than Tanja. I take him on, name him "Waldau," and give him Tanja's starting equipment, but he also can't equip the plate or boots. I return to the weapon shop and buy him an axe and shield.

      

Weapons and armor available in the shop.

     

Let's pause for a moment. A few paragraphs ago, I said that Motelsoft was good at analyzing successful games and incorporating their elements. Doesn't the menu town remind you a bit of Pirates!? I think the authors blended menu town concepts from completely different genres; from Pirates! they took the ability to buy and sell trade goods, the ability to recruit at taverns, and the way time passes while you're on the menu screen. (Amusingly, the game has both a 0-hour and a 24-hour, so I guess there's a 25-hour day.) They grafted it with more common RPG menu-town options like buying weapons. I'll bet some of the towns even offer the equivalent of visiting the governor.

     

On our way out of town, a man appears and says, "I am being followed! Will you help me?" We say yes and find ourselves in combat with six grünmagen, which translates as "green mages" but looks to be some kind of gnome (which makes sense). 

         

Getting slaughtered by garden gnomes.

       

Combat takes place on a 13 x 9 grid. You begin by placing your characters. As each round starts, each character has a certain number of action points, which they may use to move, attack, cast a spell, or use an item. This system was popularized by a number of SSI games, including Shard of Spring (1986) and Demon's Winter (1988), and I suspect these games are the source of many of the primary mechanics of both Sandor games. (I should note here that Motelsoft's Heinz Munter, in a 2019 email to me, said that the authors had not played these games, but I think there are just too many similarities. I think it's more likely that after 30 years, Munter forgot, or that he isn't aware that primary Sandor author Harald Breitmaier had played them.) 

   

The enemies completely slaughter us. I can't even kill one of them despite hitting him repeatedly each round. So as unheroic as it seems to say "no" to people in need, it might be necessary this early in the game.

     

The Great Wall of Sandor.

     

I spend the next few hours not so much trying to "advance" as to get a scope of the environment. The game seems to start at the top of the continent, so I move south in east-west strips. Among my findings:

   

• A school that teaches the "Cartography" skill for around 60 gold pieces per point (the price varies between the two characters, so I suspect it depends on charisma).

• There's a wall down the eastern edge of the world, with some obvious content beyond it. The only gatehouse has a freaky guard who demands a password.

      

For a moment, I thought he wanted a longsword.

     

• Other cities called Malonga, Paradiso, and Kassada. They seem to have the same options as Kolono. The shops have different stuff. (I'll figure out equipment later.) I don't find any new companions in the bars: "None of those present are interested in dealing with you."

• King Salinos's castle. The gate guard won't let me pass because I don't have 4 people.

• A couple of dungeons in which the interface turns into a very stylized first-person view. It is quite unlike Motelsoft's other first-person games. Anyway, I don't explore long. I'll have more on dungeons later.

• Some place where I have to press 4 buttons. Obviously, I have no clue here.

        

I definitely don't want to press that first one.

      

• Ringed by mountains, a different dungeon that is explored top-down. I guess the game has both. 

         

 

The second type of dungeon.

        

• A second "Cartography" school and a "Lockpicking" school.

• A place where the game seems to want me to arrange tiles into a mosaic. I think I could probably solve it, but I leave it for later. 

       

I must be missing something because this looks too easy.

       

• A ferryman's hut, where we're offered passage across a river for 40 gold pieces. This is the only way to get to the southern part of the world and several cities there.

      

There are actually two huts, on either side of the crossing.

       

• A place where they'll teach me spells. They say Tanja can learn one new spell, and I can choose between "Firebolt 1" and "Speed 1." Waldau can't learn anything. 

      

We explore so long without any random battles that I begin to wonder if the game has any. Eventually, we're attacked by a thug and a "firenip." This one goes a lot easier, and we're able to kill them with minimal damage. We earn different amounts of experience, so experience seems to be based on what you accomplish during the battle. 

      

The combat window.

     

Shortly thereafter, we get a random noncombat encounter: a group of travelers want to show us their wares. They have some potentially useful items for sale, but I need to get a handle on equipment and the economy before I spend any money. 

   

The wall down the eastern edge eventually turns west and cuts off southern territories, too, so it's clear that what I've discovered is all I have to explore. There's oddly a lot less stuff in the game world than there was in the first Sandor, and other than Kolono, none of the towns are (so far) repeated. There are none of the first game's churches, which confused me. I don't even think LanHawk figured those out.

     

Having burned a ton of provisions just getting the lay of the land, I start over. I note this time that Tanja has different statistics. Her luck and weapon skills are better; she has three spells instead of just one; and her strength is much higher. She's ugly as sin, though, which I think might affect the likelihood that others will join. I try a few more times, and the three general options seem to be a fighter character (at least one good weapon stat, good strength), a mage-oriented character, or a character that sucks at everything. I don't have any luck trying to get a balanced character.

       

My new party leader.

       

While in the process of rolling my twelfth Tanja, I get a new name: Sirus. He's much better than any of the Tanjas, with skills of 10 for sword and axe, a charisma of 9, and decent magic skill (though no spells). I visit several towns and buy him a decent kit. A guy with decent magic skill joins him; I name him Conleth. He's followed by McCann and Maisie, both of whom are more fighter characters. Equipping them is a huge pain in the neck, as there's no indication when you're buying items what strength they require. I keep wasting money on things that the character isn't strong enough to wield.

     

With four characters, we can now enter the castle, which turns out to be a first-person dungeon. "Only the most daring adventurers may come before his eyes!" a message warns as we enter. Dungeon exploration seems to follow the standard Dungeon Master style (again, mouse-only) with a compass and a stylized GTFO cluster. Special encounters appear in the environment as question marks, as they would in the later Magic Tower I: Dark Stone Ritual (1992). I assume enemies will not appear in the environment and combat will take place on the same tactical grid as the outdoor battles, but I don't meet any enemies here.

     

Exploring the castle.

       

My reading of the interface is that if you have someone trained in cartography, it makes an automap for you, but so far, none of my characters are trained. In any case, this "dungeon" is a very small level of only 46 squares, and the wall pattern leads me directly to King Salinos. He told us a story that recaps the backstory, but with a crucial addition:

 

Kotalan came to me in my castle. He showed me how great his power was by turning all my warriors to stone! Then, as a price for sparing the land and its people, he demanded my three daughters: Sarah, Melissa, and Laura. My pleas and begging fell on deaf ears, so after much back and forth, I gave in.

I called my daughters to me and told them of our misfortune. When Kotalan saw them, he muttered a magic spell, and in the next second, my daughters disappeared. Kotalan held up a leather pouch, laughed his terrible laugh, and disappeared in a cloud of smoke. 

        

Were they triplets?

           

"Do you want to try to free my three daughters?" the king asks at the end of his story. I honestly don't know whether I should say yes now or whether I'm supposed to build up my characters to "the most daring" first. I say yes and the face of Kotalan appears to laugh at me. I guess I deserve that.

   

I love that in a game series that forces you to play characters with names like "Monky" and "Gnorr," the king's three daughters are named Sarah, Melissa, and Laura. 

     

The town menu gives the ability to dismiss characters, even the original one, so I don't know if this will be my permanent party. But I'll see if I can build them up as I figure out more about the game.

       

Time so far: 3 hours 

 

CRPG Addict Appearance on the DOS Game Club Podcast

Hi, everyone. I thought I'd let you know that back in February, I joined four other commentators for an analysis of Ultima Underworld on the "DOS Game Club" podcast. The episode has just been released. One of my co-commentators is Richard of Pix's Origin Adventures.

 

Listen to the episode here.

 

I'm due to join them again at the end of the year for a Betrayal at Krondor discussion. 

 

Pathways into Darkness: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

 

The "best" ending.

      

Pathways into Darkness

United States

Bungie Software Products Corporation (developer and publisher)

Released 1993 for Macintosh

Date Started: 25 April 2025 

Date Ended: 24 May 2025

Total Hours: 31

Difficulty: Hard (4.0/5)
Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)

     

Summary:

     

A well-designed first-person shooter, Pathways into Darkness has a couple of light RPG elements but wasn't really suited to this blog. You play the last survivor of a commando squadron sent into an ancient pyramid on the Yucatan peninsula, where a malevolent alien being is awakening after millennia of slumber. You must fight through hordes of enemies to plant a nuclear device at the bottom level of the dungeon. Along the way, you meet the ghosts of previous expeditions (as well as your own squad-mates), loot their stuff, and get more capable with a variety of weapons and alien crystals. A number of tricky navigation puzzles and limited saving round out the difficulty in this challenging, innovative, atmospheric game.

    

*****

        

It's amazing how a couple of days' break turns "I'm done with this game" into eight more hours of play. I checked my backup drive, and I had made a copy of the Macintosh hard drive I use in Basilisk about a week before the last entry posted. My character was on "I'd Rather Be Surfing," so pretty much where I was at the beginning of the last session, although less far along than that because the first thing I had to do was travel upwards.

      

Finding the crucial violet crystal.

            

I went up two levels to "The Labyrinth" and explored until I found the violet crystal, then made my way back down. This time, instead of rushing through the next few levels, I made sure to explore every corner and find every potion so I'd have a good stock for the final series of battles. I got so paranoid about needing every possible potion that I reloaded every time I got poisoned by a venomous skitter. This was a lot. I spent most of the 8 hours reloading on those levels and trying again. There was one corridor on "But Wait, That's Not All!" where I'm convinced it's impossible to make it without getting hit at least once, but I tried about 15 times anyway. When I finally admitted failure, curing the resulting poison was the only potion I used in the entire sequence of levels. I made it to the endgame with about 15 blue potions (heal), four bubbling red potions (speed up the character), and three pale violet potions (avoid damage for a time).

      

My least favorite part of the replay.

       

Eventually, I was back to where I ended the last session, trying to take on a sequence of rooms in which a dozen or more of each enemy type appears in the same order the player encounters them in the dungeon. As you wipe out each wave, a teleporter becomes available to the next area. There are 12 areas total, with no saving or resting along the way.

   

It took me maybe five tries to get through, and it only took me that many because I was stingy with my potions even though I didn't need to be. (Keep in mind, though, that I didn't know what the rest of the game would look like after this sequence of rooms.) With as many potions as I had, I could have healed twice in most of the harder rooms, which would have been enough on its own. I had enough red and violet potions to use one of them in all of the difficult rooms and still have a couple of spares. The effects of potions, by the way, are canceled when you go through each teleporter, so you have to use them when you arrive in the room, and there's no way to time things so they're active for two rooms.

     

Wiping out the first room in 10 seconds.

    

This was my experience with the various rooms:

   

• Headless. Trivial. One use of the green crystal (earthquake) wipes out most of them, and it's easy to dodge the rest and pick them off with the AK-47. No one who has made it this far is going to suffer a lot of damage here, except perhaps for the first time, when you might arrive utterly unprepared.

• Zombies. Also trivial. Another blast of the green crystal and a few AK shots.

• Phantasms. I've accidentally been calling these things "phantoms" for the entire game. Without the violet crystal, as I discovered last time, they're damned near impossible, since no weapon hits them and the only other crystals that damage them—blue, red, and black—only damage one at a time. With both red and violet potions, plus plenty of healing, you can just make it, but it's a good thing I went back for the violet crystal. It damages multiple enemies at once, in a sort of "cone" in front of the character. With it, they're all dead in a couple of blasts.

      

I can still barely see these bastards.

       

• Ghouls. Back to easy. Another blast of the green crystal and a few shots. Of the first four rooms, the player shouldn't have to use any potions unless he fumbles the phantasm room.

• Nightmares. These are those flying fish that shoot electricity balls. They respond nicely to the violet crystal, but still, they do a lot of damage and it's easy to get overwhelmed with them. I found that I needed either a red or violet potion, or at least one healing potion, to get through this room.

• Oozes. For me, this was one of the three deadliest rooms. There are just so many of them, and they sponge so many bullets, that I needed either a red or violet potion, plus at least one blue potion, to get through it. It might have been easier if I had used HE rounds, but for simplicity's sake, I only made batches of SABOT rounds.

• Wraiths: These are the flying ghosts that can only be seen with the infrared glasses. For all that, they do very little damage, so as long as I remembered to put on the glasses (I didn't the first time, as I didn't know they were next), a couple shots with the violet crystal and my AK-47 were fine. 

         

I don't think of them as "hard," but they nearly got the best of me this time.

     

From this point forward, I learned that it was best to just use either the red or violet potion the moment I arrived, lest I make a mistake and have to replay the entire sequence.

   

• Shocking Sphere. Immune to everything but the gun, you just have to spray and pray. I usually could make it without a red or violet potion, but I definitely would have to use a blue one to heal.

• Skitters. Annoying, but they respond to the green crystal. Again, by now I was using a potion just to be safe.

     

The skitters lose their legs for a moment thanks to my green crystal.

       

• Ghasts. These are the worst. They have that "earthquake" attack, which does massive damage, and they are unaffected by the green crystal, so there's no way to disrupt them short of shooting them. When 12 of them launch that attack at once, there's really no way to survive unless you've slowed them down with a red potion or protected yourself with a violet one. Either gives you enough time to fill the room with lead. Even then, I needed a blue potion to heal.

• Venomous Skitters. Not so bad. Being poisoned sucks, but not for the amount of time it takes to clear a room. One blue potion at the end was fine.

• Greater Nightmares. This was the second-most difficult room for me. Their electricity balls can't be dodged, so you need some advantage until you can clear at least half of them.

         

I come awfully close to having to do all of this again.

     

The first time I made it through the end, I ran out of SABOT rounds in the last room, with three greater nightmares left. I had made at least a dozen magazines before I started, but you burn through ammo fast in the endgame. I had to run around the room and kill them slowly with the violet crystal. Then, after all of that, I forgot to set the damned nuclear bomb before accidentally wandering into a one-way portal back to "I'd Rather Be Surfing." Rather than make my way all the way back down, I reloaded and did it again, which took me a few more tries.

      

Note that I never used the black crystal. It instantly kills one enemy (the closest), but it leaves its corpse in place, which can screw up movement. You could even block yourself from getting down a crucial corridor with that. I don't think it's worth it. I also barely used the grenade launcher. It takes too long to load and too long to create ammunition for it. Oh, and while we're on equipment: was the gas mask used for anything?

   

Once the last Greater Nightmare is defeated, the djinn who's been orchestrating everything from the center of each room becomes vulnerable. I'm only half-joking in calling him a "djinn." Some commenters said that he's supposed to be the big alien bad guy who you're there to stop in the first place, but I don't think that's true. I think the alien is still slumbering. This guy is the spirit who came out of the bottle that the Cubans were looking for. The hint book calls him a "flaming smokey dude" and doesn't give any suggestion that he's the alien. I do wish I knew more about his backstory, though.

         

Whatever he was, he's dead now.

      

Once the djinn dies, he leaves an "alien gemstone" on the ground, which I suppose is a tick mark in the column for him being the alien, but if so, what happened to the creature that the Cubans brought in a bottle? In any event, the Cubans insisted that I couldn't escape without the gemstone, so I grabbed it. I immediately started losing big chunks of health, but I had been waiting for an excuse to use the lead-lined box that I found on a previous level, and this was clearly it.

     

This also seemed like a good place to set the nuclear bomb, which the game confirmed by allowing me to do it. I entered the code, including the new first three digits given to me by my dead compatriot. It was Wednesday at 03:29 when I set it, nearly a day and a half before the deadline. I set it to detonate in 30 hours.

 

This was about 28 hours more than I needed.

 

    

I should mention that you can't save during any of this. From the moment you enter the 12-room sequence, you can't save until you leave the level and find the first rune on "I'd Rather Be Surfing." It's a bit nerve-racking.

    

The trip back to the surface was otherwise simple. I just had to make my way from one ladder to the next, killing the rare individual enemy who had spawned since my first pass through the area. I thought the authors might have flooded the dungeon with monsters, but they didn't. I could have set the bomb for 1 hour. Because I had plenty of time and I had to go through that level anyway, I stopped on "Beware of Low-Flying Nightmares" long enough to collect the 11 gold ingots behind the locked door, for which I now had the key. A German soldier was dead in the room; his fellow soldier, Walter, had shot and killed him when he saw the gold in the room.

      

I came to save the world, not get rich, but I'm not going to complain if I get rich along the way.

       

I thought about going back to Captain Muller to see if he had any new dialogue now that I had all the gold, but I couldn't remember where he was, and none of the dead NPCs so far had responded to anything I'd done in the environment. I did verify that Captain Muller's plan wouldn't have worked; gold ingots do not fit inside the Cedar Box.

   

At length, I returned to the Ground Floor. The alien gemstone allowed me to open the door to the exterior. Beyond that was a pointless final battle against half a dozen ghouls. When I walked down the hall, the game took over, indicating that the extraction team picked me up and took me to safety. A few hours later, the bomb detonated and buried the "dreaming god."

       

The game then briefly switched to an exterior shot of the pyramid, which detonated.

      

Wait for it . . .

     

Finally, I got my endgame statistics and score. I'm not sure how much treasure I missed. I had an expert marksmanship badge (on the M-16) in the Army Reserves, so that part of me is always going to be a little irked at an accuracy rating of 68%, but honestly, I'm just glad I got through the game. 

     

How do yours compare?

     

I took a video of the final battles, setting the bomb, and escaping the dungeon (omitting most of the walking back to the ground floor). Watch below if you're interested:

     

        

After I won, I reloaded and played with some of the ways to lose the game. Each results in a simple message:

         

If you don't set the bomb in time.

If you set the bomb but don't make it to the exit before it goes off: a "Pyrrhic victory."

If you set the bomb and make it to the exit in time, but don't leave enough time for extraction.

      

As we've discussed, Pathways doesn't really meet my definitions of an RPG. The only way it comes close is the skill level that it assigns to each weapon. Every time you "level up," you do more damage, and at a greater distance. But with only two "level-ups" per weapon, and with every character essentially guaranteed to reach maximum level in all of them, it fails my fourth criteria: "Players must have some control over the rate or details of development."

   

Nonetheless, I'm glad I played it. I enjoyed the challenge. I whine a lot about how I'm not good at action games or first-person shooters, but I don't really have any basis of comparison. I'm probably better than I think I am. I had a moment in Pathways when I was leaving the dungeon. I was heading down a hallway and heard the unmistakable sound of a skitter shooting a missile at me from behind. I instinctively dodged to my left just as I heard the sound of another missile being fired by a second skitter. I waited for the first to fly by on my right, then dodged right and watched the second sail by on my left. I then turned a corner and continued on my way without even turning around. That felt pretty badass. I enjoy those moments of satisfaction when you realize that you've "gotten gud," and I appreciate a game that offers the right sorts of audio cues, visual cues, and controls to help you get there.

   

On a GIMLET, I give it:

   

• 6 points for the game world. It tells a fun, original story, backed up with environmental cues and NPC dialogue. It also leaves a few mysteries open to interpretation. I wouldn't say that the player's actions "measurably affect the game world," but otherwise, I wish most RPGs did as well with their stories. 

• 1 point for character creation and development. It barely deserves that. There's no creation, and the only development is through those weapon skills, which are essentially automatic.

• 5 points for NPC Interaction. This is perhaps the first game I've played in which all NPCs are dead. You don't often see keyword-based dialogue in first-person shooters, nor the delivery of complex lore and clues through NPC dialogue. Pathways is definitely RPG-like in this category.

     

I grew to love this part of the game. NPC lore is both interesting and vital to success.

    

• 5 points for encounters and foes. The game has a satisfying number of monsters with different strengths and weaknesses, just like an RPG. Its non-combat puzzles are less interesting, but I gave an extra point here for what some gamers call "level design," which otherwise doesn't have a place in the GIMLET.

• 3 points for magic and combat. It comes down to shoot and dodge, with some additional tactics offered by the crystals.

• 5 points for equipment. You have an escalating series of weapons, crystals, potions, and a few special use items. I appreciate that the game offers a textual description of each.

   

Some of my late-game stuff. I used the red velvet bag for treasure and the canvas bag for stuff I didn't think I'd be using again.

      

• 1 point for an economy that only contributes to your final score.

• 3 points for a main quest with no role-playing options or side-quests, but at least some alternate (bad) endings.

• 6 points for graphics, sound, and interface. I thought the graphics were great here. I don't know what else I would ask for. Sure, they're clearly not "modern," but in this case, I don't know that more advanced graphics would really add anything. The keyboard shortcuts were intuitive and responsive, and the sound quality superior. I offer particular praise for the clear, informative automap.

        

I would pay extra for most 2025 games to offer such clear maps.

      

• 6 points for gameplay. It's a little bit nonlinear and a little bit replayable, but most of the points here go for the satisfying challenge and the enjoyable length.

       

That gives us a final score of 41, not bad for a non-RPG being rated on an RPG scale. I don't know what a first-person shooter addict would give it, but I think it's near-perfect for its scope and intentions, and particularly for its era. I struggled whether to subtract any points for allowing the player to enter a "walking dead" situation, as I almost did, but I don't know. My own mistakes turned a game that wouldn't have lasted much more than 20 hours into one that lasted about 30, which still isn't too bad. I don't think it's necessarily poor game design to force a player to learn from his lessons, as long as he doesn't lose too much time in doing so. I don't punish Ultima for making you wander from town to town to find a key NPC, so I'm not sure Pathways deserves any point reduction for making the game unwinnable if you similarly miss an NPC in a corridor, or use too much ammunition, or what have you. It's not like it doesn't give you enough save slots.

       

Looks to me like there's only one valid pathway.

            

Richard Mulligan offered a mostly-positive review in the November 1993 Computer Gaming World, essentially calling it a fusion of a "dungeon crawler" and id's Wolfenstein 3D. He felt that the difficulty was extremely uneven throughout the dungeon but that the interface worked great and that the game offered crisp graphics and atmospheric sound. "Overall, a job worthy of a strong recommendation," he concluded. Inside Mac Games review Jon Blum said in September 1993 that it was "one of the best Macintosh games I've ever played!" Despite that enthusiastic endorsement, he had some qualms about the difficulty; he echoes my own sentiment in saying, "I'm almost tempted to say that Pathways is too hard, but then again I did solve it."

     

Fans of Halo and Bungie's other modern games should be grateful that Pathways did so well; an old G4 article credits the title with keeping Bungie alive. Author Jason Jones took his experience with Pathways and used it in the Marathon series (1994-1996) and then the Halo series starting in 2001. (In between, was the Myth strategy series.) We won't encounter them again as a developer, alas, although they did publish Paranoid Productions' Odyssey: The Legend of Nemesis, a 1996 RPG.

    

While I was researching the game and looking for solutions to my problems, I found this 28-video series by YouTube creator Jeoku, and I want to offer it particular praise. This is the way I would want to do videos if I had the time (or if I were a vlogger instead of a blogger). I've never understood the appeal of watching other gamers play games instead of playing them myself, but his "in-depth" approach is one I can get behind. As he goes through the game, he stops frequently to consider aspects of history, technology, and mythology. As he encounters each new enemy, he reviews what Bungie has to say about it in the hint book and analyzes its strengths and weaknesses. He frequently pauses to show maps and explain his strategy and to introduce outside content from articles, reviews, and message boards. It's hard to imagine more comprehensive coverage.

   

With that, we have at least emerged from the darkness. It would be funny if there were an equal number of upcoming games with the word "light" in them that I could put on the list as a contrast, but developers curiously seem to avoid it. We'll just have to metaphorically acknowledge that the light at the end of the 1993 tunnel is starting to faintly appear.