BRIEF: Journey into Darkness (1986)

Isn't that adorable: their tails are linked!

   

Journey into Darkness

United States

Earthware Computer Services (developer and publisher)

Released 1986 for Apple II

Couldn't play because: Technical issues, no documentation

    

Well, it would have been fun to have three Darkness games going at the same time, but it is not meant to be. My attempt to play Journey into Darkness suggests that it is:

   

1. Unplayable without documentation.
2. Perhaps unplayable even with documentation.
3. A game I am unwilling to spend more time on even if #1 and #2 turn out not to be true.

   

The game presents itself as an Ultima clone in which a single character adventures in a tiled landscape hoping to (according to advertisements of the era) "defeat the pernicious and despicable lord of Dragongate." Character creation is a process of choosing a name, after which the game rolls values for strength, reaction, kipower, endurance, semblance, and money. Every character that I rolled was a "rouge," which an inspection of the game file suggests is a level rather than a class.

 

[Ed. Commenter PK Thunder turned up this document which tells a different backstory. It is an unnecessarily complicated tale that boils down to: A warlord named Trimexion conquered the land and now sacrifices people to his evil god while his minions roam unchecked. The PC is a warrior of prophecy who must search for the artifacts of one of Trimexion's defeated rivals, Mardiux the Black. The rest of the document just describes the different characters and enemies in the game.]

    

Starting out.

     

The game has a Japanese veneer. Weapons include shurikens and tiger claws (along with more pedestrian daggers, sabres, and staves), and ranks include "minor samurai" and "major dynamo," which I suspect is supposed to be "daimyo."

       

Let's deal with #3 first: The game is completely controlled by a joystick. But even worse, it uses the joystick as a mouse. When you want to do anything with your inventory, for instance, you have to press a joystick button, move the cursor to the menu, pull it down, select an option, then move the cursor over to the inventory panel and select the item. Making a joystick the sole control method is obnoxious; using it as if it were a mouse is completely unforgivable. And even if such a control worked well with an original Apple II, it doesn't work at all in the emulator. It takes me a good 30 seconds of moving the cursor around to get it to stop on the precise command or object that I want without overshooting it. I could slow down the speed, but that would make the rest of the gameplay sluggish.

        

This should be outlawed by the Geneva Convention.

    

Even if the control system were tolerable, the game is even more primitive than the original Ultima. There is no NPC dialogue, for instance. Towns have a couple of shops and a mix of NPCs and enemies. Both, when they get adjacent to you, occasionally offer you an item, but none of them offer any dialogue. Yes, even enemies occasionally say, "Would you like something," while they're pounding away your endurance. I'm guessing there's a hidden experience statistic that governs your rank (rouge, pathfinder, mystic, seer, archer, quester, etc.; there are 32 of them), but I never saw any changes to my statistics.

     

A yeti offers me an item while killing me.

     

Combat happens by pointing the joystick towards the enemy and mashing one of the mouse buttons. You periodically get messages like "just grazed it," "you struck it," and "a deadly hit." If you kill an enemy, you get to loot his body, and your inventory fills with items, most of which you then have to drop—which you do by painstakingly going to the "Thing" menu (yes, it's called "Thing"), choosing "Drop," moving the cursor to the item, clicking on it, then clicking on an adjacent square of ground.

       

Fighting an orc in a dungeon.

     

Speaking of inventory, you may notice that the items don't really look like much of anything. If you want to know what they are, you have to activate the menu, click on "Examine," and then click on the item. However, in shops, there's no way to do this until you've already bought the item. 

  

You can hold one item in your hand and wear another. If you want to pick anything up off the ground, you first have to un-equip the hand item, which is yet another annoyance.

   

Now we get into the documentation and/or possibly technical problems. Combat saps endurance directly. I have not been able to find a way to restore endurance. There is no command to rest or sleep. There are no temples in the towns I visited. You do occasionally find food and drink, but they do nothing except, oddly, occasionally add a few points to your money. Every character I started was thus time-limited to about five battles.

    

Finding a dungeon in the outdoor map.

     

Other notes:

     

• Exploring the land, I found a couple of towns, dungeons, and shops. Dungeons are presented in top-down view just like the towns. I never found any clues or directions.

• One of the shops is a bank. I don't know what items it's selling. The game crashed every time I exited the bank.

    

These might be spells.

       

• Text in the game file suggests that it has spells, but there's no command to cast, so I assume spells are inventory items that you "use."

• There doesn't seem to be any way to tell what weapons do the most damage.

• Using torches doesn't appear to have any effect.

   

It's possible that the game's documentation, assuming it had any, cleared up some of these issues. If it surfaces, I may think about giving it another shot. I can already see a few of you opening a new browser tab, so let me suggest you direct it here before going anywhere else. 

    

A treeman kills me.

   

Earthware Computer Services is an interesting company founded by Gordon Goles, a renowned volcanologist from the University of Oregon. Accordingly, its first game was Volcanoes (1981), written by Goles and his wife, Donna. The game challenged multiple players to predict volcanic eruptions in their regions of "Wrangelia." The company also published two early games (1983's Zoo Master and 1984's Black Belt) from then-University of Oregon student Kevin Ryan, who went on to a career with Dynamix. He programmed Sword of Kadash (1985) and Rise of the Dragon (1990) and created puzzle games like The Incredible Machine (1992) and Puzzle Poker (2006).

     

A screenshot from Volcanoes.

     

You may note that the title screen gives the author of this game as Ed Goles. Edward R. Goles was aged 16 or 17 at the time Journey was published, so I assume he was Gordon and Donna's son. I tried to track him down but did not have any luck. Journey sold for $12.95 via ads in magazines like Computer Gaming World. The endgame message for Journey promises a sequel called Out of Time, which was offered for sale in magazines.