Walls of Illusion: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

I have no idea who this woman is. There was never any Walls of Illusion II.

       

Walls of Illusion

Germany

Motelsoft (developer and publisher)

Released as shareware in 1993 for Atari ST

Date Started: 16 February 2025

Date Ended: 4 March 2025

Total Hours: 17
Difficulty: Hard (4.0/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)  

    

Walls of Illusion is a Dungeon Master clone, but one that leans so hard into the mechanical puzzle elements and so far away from any RPG elements that it fundamentally feels like a different game. (Its predecessor, Arcan, leaned in this direction but didn't go as far.) There's a sense to which it's more like an escape room than an RPG, an ancestor of Myst and Portal. Enemies are momentary inconveniences on the way to getting stuck at yet another keyhole without a key. I would not have made it without commenters Kalieum and Buck. It's not often that commenters are playing at the same time that I'm playing, running into the same difficulties. We should do that more often.

      

The game consists of nine levels—six above the main level and two below. I spent so long on the first four that I honestly thought they must be the entire game and was surprised and aggrieved when I discovered each new stairway upward. The first four levels are interconnected by multiple stairways, pits, and teleporters; the upper five are far more (but not entirely) self-contained. However, there is no moment in which the game isn't basically linear. Even within the first four levels, you explore them in relatively linear sections, each bit opening the way to the next, such that if you get stuck—as I did, multiple times—you essentially have no recourse.

    

Main +3. Despite its size, there's never more than a couple places to go at any time.

   

Finding your way through the corridors is a matter of understanding all the possibilities inherent in the mechanical puzzles, but this is tough because the game is always introducing new ones. As you explore, the number of things that you have to investigate multiplies. I think this is a relatively exhaustive list of the game's mechanics:

   

• Doors that require a push of a button to open, but sometimes the button is locked, sometimes by a nearby keyhole or coin slot. Finding the related key or coin is a major part of the game.

• Areas that can only be accessed by falling down pits. 

• Pits that you can't see until you've been standing atop them for a couple of seconds; then they suddenly open and dump you unceremoniously to the lower level.

      

A pit opens beneath me just as I'm about to open a door.

       

• Levers and buttons that remove or insert wall pieces, sometimes opening new areas, sometimes closing them off, sometimes when pulled once, sometimes twice, sometimes in combination with others. I should mention that levers can be seen from the side, but buttons cannot, so you have to face every wall to be sure.

• Levers and buttons that unlock doors.

• Invisible barriers, some of which can be turned off with levers, others of which must simply be circumvented. 

       

There's an invisible wall between me and this key. I'll need to walk through an illusory wall and drag a couple of movable walls out of the way before I find the button that deactivates the field.

      

• Buttons with arrows that can be pushed four times, each time removing some wall pieces and closing others.

      

A rotating arrow button.

     

• Illusory wall pieces that you can walk right into. Some may contain levers, buttons, or treasures in the wall space. You have to bash into almost every wall, taking damage, to test for these. My characters were almost always at low health because of this, and I accidentally killed them a couple of times when I wasn't paying attention. Imagine dying because you spent your last bit of health throwing yourself against a wall.

• Pressure plates, some visible, some invisible, that open or close wall pieces.

• Pressure plates that launch fireballs that you then have to avoid, often by ducking through an illusory wall.

    

Failing to duck through an illusory wall.

      

• Pressure plates that advance you to the next square in the direction that you're facing, sometimes allowing you to access wall spaces that are otherwise solid.

• Levers that teleport you from one part of the dungeon to another.

• Squares that teleport you from one part of the dungeon to another with no warning.

• Spinners.

• Moveable walls that you can push or pull to access the area on the other side, only you have to find a place to put them that won't impede movement. While the game does alert you if you bash into such a wall, it only does so if you bash into it head-on. I think I might have missed a number of these by testing the walls by side-bumping them. 

     

Thankfully, it tells you this when you bump into it. You don't have to try to push and pull every wall.

      

• In at least one place, a door that only opens when you regard a message plaque as a keyhole and a Staff of Wisdom as a key.

• In at least one place, a lever that makes a previously hard wall illusory.

      

Having played the game, I find a number of mysteries. Credit again goes to Kalieum for anticipating me on many of these in this comment.

   

• There are four locked doors which I never found a way to open. One of them, on Main -1, is on the outer wall of the dungeon, so I'm guessing that it must be for decoration, which suggests that some of the others similarly do not have solutions.

     

The main level. I never figured out how to open that northern door.

        

• I found a couple of gold staves. After you use them a couple of times in combat, they turn into what the English version calls "blowpipes." Kalieum clarified that the translation is poor, and they're supposed to just be "batons." Either way, it's a mystery why they change form after you've used them.

• The game has a lot of niches in walls, some of them with treasure in them. Throughout the game, I suspected that some of the others wanted me to put a particular item in them, but I never found any for which that did anything. If the mechanic is used at all (as it is in Dungeon Master), it isn't to access a required area.

     

A wall niche with nothing in it. These make me paranoid.

       

• Many of the 38 x 38 maps have large unused areas. I suspect those areas are just not used, but I could have missed something.

• There are a decent number of levers for which I could find no effect.

• Up until the end, I was sure that the weird wall messages would produce some kind of message by interleaving the words or lines, but I couldn't make anything out of them. Maybe there's poor translation at work, or maybe the authors were just being deliberately misleading. A few of the messages were related thematically to their areas, but none of them (at least in my case) helped with any of the puzzle solutions. Some samples of the mysterious messages:

• READ NOT | SAVE THAT | WHICH
• YOU | SHOULD THINK NOW | UNDETERMINED
• ONLY ONE STEP | WE MAKE YOU SMALL
• WALK FROM LIGHT | TO THE | OTHER 

     

Another inexplicable message.

     

• Kalieum mentions one that I didn't think about because I mostly played without sound: the game is inconsistent and mysterious in its use of some sound effects, which sometimes alert you to hidden areas. More often, they're just odd. There's a message that says, "Caution steps" right next to three staircases. The game plays a "bonk" sound when you go down any of them, but you don't seem to take any damage.

    

In addition to all of this, you sometimes run into one of three enemy types. Except for the final boss, they always appear in pairs. Except for a couple of places, they always appear where you have plenty of room to maneuver around them. Although their movement patterns aren't as predictable as in Dungeon Master, so you can't always settle into a familiar pattern like the "combat waltz," they're slow enough that you can basically run circles around them and attack from the sides and rear. This is important because spellcasting enemies are more than capable of killing some of the weaker party members with a single attack. Because there are no tactics but to avoid them, and because they die fairly quickly, all the character development and equipment acquisition is largely wasted. What difference does it make if your armor class is 35 or 40 if you can't afford to get hit at all?

       

My lead character's inventory at the end of the game.

       

In my previous entries, I was content to compare the combat mechanics to Dungeon Master, but I didn't explain any of what that meant. In combat, each character can attack with an equipped weapon (melee or ranged) or cast a spell. Only the front-rank characters can hit with melee weapons. After choosing an action, there's a "cool down" period of a couple of seconds before you can do anything again, but spells and weapons have different cool downs, so if a character is equipped with both, he can attack twice without much delay. As usual, picking up missile weapons after a battle is annoying.

    

Enemies are confined to their side of the squares they occupy. Characters can only attack enemies on the side that mirrors the character. So if my first and third characters, occupying the left side of the formation, manage to kill the enemy on the left side of the square they're facing, they can't do anything for the rest of the battle. The other two characters have to kill the right-side enemy. You can change the formation, but it's rarely helpful to do so unless you want to change what skills your characters are building. 

   

Harry, shooting regular arrows, can only hit the enemy on the left. Laura, shooting elven arrows, can only hit the one on the right.

       

Many of the character mechanics are brought over from Arcan, where they were used a bit more extensively, and thus under-utilized here. None of my characters had achieved "Master" rank in any skill by the end of the game, even though I used the first two characters for melee and the second two for spellcasting almost exclusively. (All enemies are fixed, so there's no grinding possible even if it were necessary.) The "Wizard" and "Healer" classes only get one spell each, and neither one that you'd cast with much frequency, making it nearly impossible to level in them. Altogether, I only found seven spells, compared to 10 in Arcan, which is a larger game. Each character, meanwhile, has 13 spell slots. There are 12 spots in the grid that shows active spell effects, but only two spells in this game that put anything in the grid.

       

My second character's character sheet. RPG mechanics are such a small part of the game that I didn't really register until now that the game has both experience points and traditional levels as well as class levels.

     

The food and water mechanic also makes little sense. You find plenty of food, and you find a couple of fountains that fill your waterskins and empty jars full of enough water to play nearly the entire game on one visit. Because starvation and thirst aren't a problem, there's no downside to resting to restore health and magic points (which doesn't advance the food/water meter anyway). There's an encumbrance limit, but my characters never hit it despite my never dropping a single item. In short, the engine allows for RPG mechanics that the game doesn't actually use. If it removed enemies entirely, the gameplay experience would hardly change.

     

I don't mean to sound like I'm lodging nothing but complaints. The game's cleverness occasionally delighted me. There's a fiendish teleporter on Main -1 that activates just as you're about to reach a door. It shifts you about 30 spaces to the southwest to an identical-looking door. The automap kind of ruins it, but it can screw up your manual map if you're not paying attention. There are a couple of spinners in just the right place to confound you. On Main -2, there's a square that activates a couple of shooting fireballs, but only after a delay long enough to let you stroll right into their path. I'm relatively neutral on most of the puzzles just because they're not quite why I play RPGs, but I can see some fans enjoying them.

    

The automap helps a little by annotating squares with buttons, levers, movable walls, and other features. I just can't see all the color distinctions.

             

As I said, the first four levels of the dungeon are heavily interconnected. When the game begins, you only have five spaces to explore on the main level before you have no choice but to drop through a pit to Main -1.  Once there, you have a roughly 7 x 7 area to explore before you have to drop down another pit to Main -2. From there, several isolated stairways go up to Main +1. Your explorations on that level are confined to a central area and a couple of side areas. One of these side areas contains the first of many indecipherable messages: "SIDE | CHILDREN | IT'S ALREADY HERE." You have to drop back down to Main via a pit to continue.

    

After quite a few hours noodling around on those first levels, but before I'd opened up all of the available wall space (which I expected, since Arcan used every bit of it), a staircase led up to Main +2, which caused me to rant a bit. I think I would have quit if I'd known there were four more after that. Keep in mind that a 38 x 38 level is 1,444 squares, or the size of about three levels (you have to account for the unused space in the "worm tunnel" approach) in Wizardry or five in a Gold Box game. It also takes a lot longer to explore the space in Walls because of all the testing that you have to do. Still, I persevered.

    

A room with multiple levers. One moved me onward. Seven others teleported me somewhere in the level and forced me to walk back.

      

Main +2 had a large open section with at least seven levers creating different wall configurations. I missed one originally and nearly gave up, but I made a final loop, found the unpulled lever, and opened my way to Main +3, the most linear of the levels—assuming you navigate safely through a section where pits open up the moment you pause on their squares (one of these is necessary to access an optional area of the level below, with some equipment). This level also has the least amount of unused space, which the developers managed at the expense of making a good third of it completely empty—not a single enemy, treasure, or puzzle. Just an alternate fountain for restoring the sustenance you expended while bumping into every stupid wall for over an hour. There's also a small teleporter maze.

   

I wanted to scream when all of this exploration led me to yet another level, Main +4. Messages at the top of the stairs said, "PLAY NOW MY GAME" and "THEN COME TO THE GOAL," which were perhaps the most coherent messages in the game and gave me hope that the endgame was near. Hah.

 

The level was similarly linear, though at least it used less space. The centerpiece was a room with four alcoves, each with a silver coin, each protected by an invisible barrier. The four silver coins were needed to open a succession of walls later on. To deactivate the barriers, I had to pull three levers, each of which was in a hidden area revealed with one of those rotating arrow buttons. Oh, and the room with the coins and the room with the rotating arrow button were both revealed by wall buttons.

     

Coins in niches. Note the invisible walls protecting them.

    

When the result of all of this effort was yet another staircase, I came close to despair. But the endgame was close. Main +5 and Main +6—yes, there was yet another one—both used only about half of the available level space. They also had a couple of new tricks. A couple of easy lever puzzles opened the way to a locked door with a message that read: "WISDOM | IN JUDGEMENT | UNLOCKED THE DOOR." Another sign on an adjacent wall produced no message when I clicked on it.

       

Back on the main level, a door I hadn't been able to open since the game's first hour had a message that mentioned a Staff of Wisdom. I had found a key on Main +3 called the Key of Knowledge, and I assumed it would finally open that door. This proved to be true when a nearby lever teleported me back to the main level. Behind the locked door, a 1 x 1 space had a niche on three sides, each of which looked like its own copy of the Staff of Wisdom. However, when I took the staff, it disappeared from all three niches. Adding to the mystery, any time either of my rear characters touched the staff, it deducted three hit points from their totals, but the same wasn't true of my two lead characters.

       

The Staff of Knowledge. Niches to my right and left have identical copies.

       

A nearby lever warped me back to Main +3, and from there I walked back to the locked "wisdom" door. Buck had to help me at this point. The solution was to pretend the Staff of Wisdom was a key and click on the mute sign as if it were a lock. I don't know how he figured that out.

      

And somehow unlocking a door with it.

     

Beyond that was a corridor in which nearly every square triggered a couple of instant-death fireballs from the opposite end; I had to navigate a series of illusory walls to dodge them.

   

The game's final major puzzle was a large room with a keyed door and three alcoves in the corners. A rotating arrow button caused a different staircase to appear in each alcove. These four staircases led to four small areas of Main +6. In each case, the stairway closed behind me, and I had to find my way to a door that opened to a central staircase back down. Each of the four areas had a key hidden somewhere. One area made extensive use of illusory walls, another of moveable walls. One had a lever puzzle that confounded both me and Buck until Kalieum solved it: I had to pull a lever once to turn a formerly solid wall into an illusory wall; behind that was a second lever opening the way to the key. The problem was, if you pulled the first lever twice, the illusory wall turned into a wall with a niche. Since all of the other three keys had been found in niches, it made it look as if the fourth key was supposed to be there and it had just bugged out.

     

The last level (though not the top one).

         

The four keys opened the way to a final area on Main +5. It was a large 14 x 15 area in which some walls in the middle spelled out "THE END." If that wasn't enough, a sign next to the only door out of the place also said, "THE END." There were a few enemies in this area, but nothing difficult.

   

The last door opened to a 3 x 4 room with a single enemy, presumably the "Bragos" mentioned in a couple of wall messages. He was a spellcaster, with at least twice as many hit points as any other enemy in the game, but he was no faster. Since enemies can only be attacked by characters on their side, two of my characters couldn't materially participate in the final battle.

       

I never did find out who this was or why we invaded his realm and killed him.

      

The second he was dead, the game flashed to the winning screen at the top of this entry, and that was it.

   

As I was preparing this entry, I realized there was one lever in the final area (before Bragos) that I hadn't pulled. It opened up a wall space from which six or eight pairs of enemies swarmed out. They would have been legitimately difficult. I would have had to hide among the walls spelling out "THE END," attacking with guerilla tactics, ensuring I didn't get trapped or surrounded. But since there's absolutely no treasures or equipment upgrades in the area that the enemies come from, and you hardly need any more experience or leveling at this point, I consider it a good thing that I ignored the lever.

      

There's not much else to tell you. We've covered Motelsoft games before; you can learn more about them in my entries on Seven Horror's (1989) and Magic Tower I: Dark Stone Ritual (1992). We will see them at least 16 more times if I make it all the way to 2006. They were very good at analyzing successful elements of major commercial RPGs and replicating at least bits of them, and it's rare for any two of their games to be as similar as Arcan and Walls of Illusion, their final games for the Atari ST. I give Walls a 19 on the GIMLET in comparison to a 23 for Arcan; even though they're the same game mechanically, I thought the original had at least something of a story (good for 1 point) and the RPG elements were a little more meaningful. If you really like those mechanical puzzles, Walls is probably better. Plus, you don't need to translate anything from German (assuming you're not German).

    

There's an extent to which I've admired the Motelsoft games more than I've really enjoyed them, but I think we're about to see a big leap for the company, judging by screenshots for their 1994-1996 offerings. We'll see them next with Escape from Ragor (1994) or Megrims Rache (1994), which may be the same game. I don't think anyone has ever written anything about Walls of Illusion, but I have several commenters whose ability to search out obscure magazine articles and archived web sites dwarfs my own.