BOSS: Beyond Moria: Summary and Rating

The most generous that this game ever was with the economy.

        

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   

Date Ended: 16 June 2025

Total Hours: 8 (not won)

Difficulty: Moderate-Hard (3.5/5)
Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)

        

Your comments on my first BOSS entry were useful. First, I figured out the backup issue, thanks primarily to Kalieum's thread. I was stupid when I was first playing. It turns out that I actually have two "System" disks attached to Basilisk, one with System 7.0 and one with System 7.5. It was booting from the 7.5 version but still showing the 7.0 version in the interface, and of course that one was where I had been hunting for the preferences file.

   

Backing up both the character and the file worked—usually. It wasn't a good long-term solution. I kept messing it up, either by forgetting to create a new copy when restoring or deleting the wrong file. There were times I didn't think I did anything wrong and the game still saw through my ruse, refusing to reload the slain player. Nonetheless, I got a few reloads out of each character and thus got farther in the game than I would have gotten if I'd been forced to play it a lot safer.

         

Creating a new ninja character.

       

I also adopted P-Tux7's suggestion of using an alien character, agreeing that the improved statistics were worth the longer time between level-ups. I continued to roll random numbers for the class. I burned through a warrior, thief, wrestler, and scientist before having my best luck with a ninja. Ninjas don't learn any magic, so I assume that they lose potency later in the game, but they're great starting characters. For one thing, they have one of the few actual weapons (a katana) at start; most characters begin with hairbrushes or walking sticks or tennis rackets. They also come with 8 scrolls—sorry, disks—of identification. 

    

Some other things I noted as I played:

   

• All stairways in the game take you a random number of levels. You can get to the bottom level with just a couple of stairways if you're lucky (or unlucky). 

• I feel like a lot more things cause attribute drains in this game; for instance, insect swarms somehow reduce charisma. 

• The economy feels a lot tighter. There were times I spent hours trying to save up enough money for a single potion to restore an attribute. Buying higher-level weapons and armor during the first few hours never crossed my mind.

• "Beam-Me-Up" disks do indeed act as Scrolls of Recall. But the computer eats the disk so often that you need to adventure with three or four of them to ensure you can actually get back to town.

         

One shop's armor list.

        

• And "Research Points" are indeed akin to magic points.

• About half of the monsters in the game poison the character. I get why spiders and snakes do, but pygmies? Stairways? A lot of stuff blinds you and splashes acid on you, too.

• Money doesn't just come in the form of arcade tokens, as I reported last time. You can find it in the form of nickels, dimes, trinkets, blank disks, postage stamps, and coupons.

• Speaking of coupons, you can find coupons that give you discounts at the various stores on the town level, but they have to be identified first.

   

And because I have little else to report, here's an exhaustive list of creatures slain by my ninja character. See how many references you can get: Action Jackson, automated steamroller, berzerk construction drone, Blip gang member, blue Jarwangian mold, confused psionicist, crazed ferret, creeping pennies, Crud gang member, crude dude, drooling trekker, excuse for birth control, floating orb, giant green frog,  greedy little guy, green walking fungus, grey ectoplasm, grinch, Jarwangian bully, kamikaze attack droid, large grey snake, large white snake, major insect swarm, mechanized Dust-Buster, Milli, minor insect swarm, mumbling scientist, mutant cookie monster, mutant Keebler elf, pit bull, remote laser camera, Scorpion gang member, scruffy hermit, secret agent, seeker orb, short pygmy, shrieker slime, sleazy thief, slurged mutant, small spider, snapping turtle, stairway, studly hacker, Tigger the tiger, Vanilli, Vogon scout, Walter the Wrestler, wasp swarm, white walking fungus, wasp swarm, yellow ectoplasm, yellow Jarwangian mold, Zippy the zapping pinhead. I remember reading "Zippy the Pinhead" strips in the Boston Globe back in the 1990s. I could never understand them.

        

You won't find this one in the D&D monster manual.

         

My ninja eventually made it to dungeon Level 10. While still randomized, it's a bit different than the others in that it feels a bit more hand-crafted. It is a large rectangle, outlined in straight walls, with numerous buildings in the interior. For a while, I kept getting killed on the level, or had to flee back to the town level because I was about to. Eventually, I was attacked by the Seattle Mob Boss. I defeated him in a couple of blows and got a message that I could take the bus to the next city from the hotel. Shortly thereafter, the character was killed by a swarm of remote laser cameras while trying to find a stairway.

           

About to win the first dungeon.

       

I was about ready to wrap this one up, but I hated the idea of yet another Moria variant with a "No" in the "Won?" column. Instead, I fired up the most recent edition (3.2) of the Windows version by Richard ("PlunderBunny") Drysdall. I played an alien soldier and managed to get to the same place I got with the Mac version: killing the boss of Seattle. I even returned to the city and boarded a bus for the next city on the list: Boise.

         

I wonder if any of the cities have ever been mentioned in an RPG before.

      

Drysdall's version is recognizably the same game, but it has a host of minor tweaks. Some of the ones I noticed:

     

• The random city layouts are more imaginative, with buildings of different sizes and sometimes multiple shops in the same large building. There's even the possibility of water along one edge.

       

If we imagine that left is northwest, the "F" is in the perfect spot for Pike's Place.

      

• Other more imaginative screen layouts (see the death and character screens below), often with the use of color. Color is used for functional purposes, too; for instance, the PC character changes to something (green?) when he's poisoned and something else (red?) when he's low on hit points.

        

Of course, there's a new title screen. This version isn't "beyond" anything.

     

• Slightly different keyboard commands.

• Potions are now pills, which are E)aten instead of q)uaffed.

• Reloading gives you a recap of what happened in the previous session.

       

California slang makes a comeback in Seattle in the future, apparently.

         

• There's a time limit of 99 days, which the author promises is generous. It took me almost 2 days to defeat the first boss and get to Boise.

• There's a clock on the screen and stores close at night. Given how slowly time passes and how often you need stores, these closures pose a major strategic challenge that the player has to prepare for. 

• Doors open automatically when you move into them.

• A lot more of the game map fits on the screen.

         

Here, I can see nearly a third of the level.

       

• The dungeon has semi-permanence. I didn't experiment enough to figure it all out, but I think maybe the game remembers the levels until you return to town. When you go down a flight of stairs, a set of stairs remains on the new level to take you back up. The game is otherwise less generous with stairs as you explore. 

• There are a lot of new enemies. I think at least half the bestiary is different. The enemies in this version are significantly harder than in the Mac version I played. I also didn't note any self-replicating swarms of enemies in the Mac version, and this version was rife with them. (I spent over an hour trying to get through a swarm of kamikaze droids before concluding that it just wasn't possible.) The enemies seem to have a greater variety of special attacks and defenses, which I'm guessing is intended to force the character to make more thorough use of inventory options. 

 

!Zarg is a new enemy who shoots you from afar.

        

• Most importantly, the Windows BOSS does not delete your character when you die. 

        

The greater enemy difficulty meant that it took me longer to complete the first dungeon. My character was Level 13 when I killed Seattle's boss. But if the game had featured permadeath, I think it would have taken me until at least Level 20.

    

If I were going to continue with any version, it would be the Windows version, but of course that's a 2025 game and not a 1993 game. I don't dislike either version, but just as with Moria and Angband, I don't have the time for them. BOSS might be a quicker version of Moria (and the gods know, it needed one), but it's still not quicker than Rogue or NetHack.

   

BOSS earns 39 on the GIMLET, and I was surprised to see it rating a few points higher than Angband (36) and even one point higher than Moria (38), both of which I liked better, except for the length. I gave BOSS 1 point for the game world, even though its post-apocalyptic, futuristic "setting" is deeply unconvincing, and I significantly prefer the implicit fantasy worlds of the previous two games. This is one of those times in which my GIMLET fails to account for the fact that the absence of a variable is sometimes preferable to a bad version of it.

       

They could have at least told us what "Jarwangians" are.

         

Where this branch of roguelikes does very well is in "equipment" and "economy"; in these entries, I barely touched upon the huge variety of weapons, armor, disks, potions, wearable items, usable items, regular guns, ray guns, and so forth, allowing the player a lot of tactical and strategic options. Returning to the surface with a pack full of loot to identify, distribute, and sell never gets old, and I often ache for the simplicity of Moria's system when I'm playing NetHack and individually dropping items to analyze their sale prices while getting attacked by mimics.

    

So we'll leave BOSS to the Roguelike Addict and move on. It has been a long time since I felt in such an utter slump, and I really need to push past it.