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. 

Sandor II: Already Stuck

 

An unknown encounter looms in a dungeon.

       

Well, that was unfortunate. I'd avoided having to take a break since the beginning of the year. I really hoped this year would be the first one that I never broke stride. Alas, something always happens.

   

I'm blogging about Sandor II because I promised I'd be back today, but I can't seem to get anywhere with it. I gather that it's going to offer the same type of experience as the later Magic Tower I: Dark Stone Ritual (1992), where a somewhat open world contrasts with very linear movement within that world. The player can find multiple dungeons at the outset of the game, but he needs a key from Dungeon 1 to open Dungeon 2, and so on. I spent most of this entry trying to figure out how to get started.

       

An NPC raises more questions than he answers.

      

Only a few steps after the game began, I had a random encounter in the wilderness. An old man appeared, identified himself as Florian, and asked for a "small donation." When I said yes, the game took me to my inventory screen: Florian wanted an item rather than gold or food. Fortunately, I had an extra axe that I had bought for McCann but wasn't strong enough to equip. In response, Florian said: "I'll give you a hint. To get into Roce Fortress, you need a password. If you want to find out, first go to the ruins near Wolfsstein. Go to the middle well. Wait there until midnight. Tell whoever shows up my name. I hope you still remember it. We'll see each other again. Hahahaha."

   

I hadn't found anything specifically called the Roce Fortress or Wolfsstein, but then again, the game doesn't tell you dungeon names. Eventually, I returned to the dungeon completely surrounded by mountains that has a top-down interface rather than a first-person interface. An early message says: "The jug goes to the well until it breaks." Later on, there are three patches of water, which I figure are Florian's three wells. There's an obvious "middle" one, even.

          

What am I meant to do here?

      

The problem is waiting until midnight. There is no indication of time on the dungeon screen, or on any screen that I can access from the dungeon screen. Neither is there a way to tell time on the outdoor screen. The only screen that mentions time at all is the town screen. So I don't know how to wait until midnight. I tried just sitting there for a while, then sitting there for a while with the emulator on "fast forward," but nothing happened. If the "jug" message is supposed to be telling me something, I can't figure it out.

    

On the rest of the map:

   

• I kept returning to the Cartography School to give Sirus a few points in the skill. It took about 20 points before I could finally map a dungeon.

• I thought to make money from trade goods, but in the starting area, towns only sell tobacco and buy tea. 

• A dungeon south of a lake has a locked door only a few steps from the entrance.

• I related last time that when I tried to leave the first town, a guy appeared and asked for help with someone chasing him, but I was unable to win the battle. I encountered the guy outside of a town and, because I had more characters and better equipment, agreed to help him. The game then went directly to him thanking me and giving me a 500-gold-piece reward. 

This guy asked for help, and then didn't really need it.

• I still don't know what to do at the location that wants me to input a sequence of buttons.

• Or the one that wants me to make a mosaic out of various tiles. 

• A dungeon at the bottom of the map has a trap every few steps. 

          

Taking trap damage.

         

As I explored the map, I fought a random combat every once in a while. It would be hard to "grind" in this game since combats are comparatively rare. None of them have been hard. I noticed that the combats didn't get more difficult or more numerous as I added more characters, either.

       

Four characters take on three enemies in battle.

     

The monetary rewards from combat would have been just enough to keep up with my food usage. Fortunately, you sometimes find equipment in addition to gold. This equipment sometimes sells for quite a bit of money. Also, I found that food prices are extremely volatile. You might visit the pub and find that they're selling 15 provisions for 45 gold pieces, exit, return, and get an offer of 45 provisions for 15 gold pieces.

   

I spent quite a while logging every piece of equipment that I'd found on enemies and that I found for sale in towns or traders' wagons. The game gives you an associated weapon and armor class for each item, but it's such a nuisance to equip, assess, unequip, and trade that I've been assuming (I'm sure incorrectly) that the most expensive items are the better ones. My characters don't have the strength to wield most stuff anyway. 

          

Some of the game's equipment.

       

The game likes to put nonsense words in some of its equipment; for instance, I've found Gorf Sandalen, Toco-Platte (Eisen), Kotalan Stab, and Uta Schild. German speakers, tell me if I'm missing anything, but I don't think the words Gorf, Toco, Kotalan, and Uta actually translate to anything. My understanding of German is that they're not possessive, either; that would be Gorfs Sandalen, Utas Schild, and so forth. There's nothing wrong here, of course—Toco and Uta are maybe the game's equivalent of "Mithril" or "Daedric"—but it does add some complexity to figuring things out.

 

Adding to the mystery, there are three gold-krone (gold crowns) I can buy called "Ubu," "Kobu," and "Jacoco," and a gold chain called "Trinak." I have no idea what to make of these. 

     

Lacking any other ideas, I decided to just force my way through the trap-filled dungeon, but then, having pushed past the first three traps, I got destroyed by the first truly difficult enemy party the game has thrown at me. 

    

I didn't even come close.

      

I reloaded, limped back to town, and found that I had earned enough experience points to get my first level-up. Leveling up comes with fairly significant attribute boosts; some of my characters doubled their previous values. I decided to grab two more characters while I was at it, looking in particular for someone with a high trap-disarming ability. I didn't find such a person, but I did add a fifth character (Iain) with strong spellcasting skills.

       

Leveling up. That big boost in kraft means I can equip more items.

        

While looking for more party members, I remembered the option to listen to fellow patrons in taverns. It appears that you only get one "tavern tale" per town. Across all four towns I've discovered:

   

• A hint that the king is looking for some adventurers to "rescue him from a difficult situation." We learned what that situation was last time.

• Amidst a bunch of background chatter, some mentions of the king's daughters being missing. Again, we learned about that directly from the king.

       

A "tavern tale."

        

• A drunk claiming that "I put a few stones in there and whoosh, the gate opened." This might be a clue to getting past a locked dungeon door. I haven't found any stones, though.

• A woman going on about creatures that are "supposed to be so devilishly beautiful that you can't help but look at them," but that women are immune to the enchantment.

       

So either I've overlooked something or the solution to move forward is to keep grinding until I can take on the enemies in that southernmost dungeon. Either way, I definitely need a different game to get some momentum going again. The two on my active list are absolute killers.

     

Time so far: 6 hours

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