Keef the Thief: Won! (with Final Rating)

The sad part is, there's actually a plot-related reason behind the baby with a mohawk holding an electric guitar.

Keef the Thief: A Boy and His Lockpick

United States

Naughty Dog (Developer), Electronic Arts (Publisher)

Released 1989 for DOS, Amiga, Apple IIgs

Date Started: 18 August 2013

Date Ended: 22 August 2013

Total Hours: 17

Difficulty: Moderate-Difficult (3.5/5)
Final Rating: 38
Ranking at Time of Posting: 117/142 (82%)
Ranking at Game #403: 323/403 (80%)

Keef the Thief is a game with some innovative elements and a decent plot, hurt by its own idiocy. I realize that I continually open myself to accusations that I'm humorless, but I don't think that's the case. I like good humor--humor that flows from context, character, and situation. I don't like relentless silliness, especially when the writers think they're being more clever than they are. Keef is the CRPG equivalent of Carrot Top.

In my rush to get out of the very decade that would produce such a game, I played far too much of it since my last post. I should have issued four full posts about Keef plus a separate "final rating," but I didn't want to drag it on that long, so you're getting some heavy summary here.

The game has the outlines of a good plot and main quest, although both only slowly become clear through exploration. Much of the main quest involved breaking into these various locations, navigating the mazes, and stealing the artifacts. This, in turn, involved a couple of major challenges, one fair, one not.

1. Maze navigation. There were several very large, multi-level indoor mazes, all of which required extensive mapping to ensure I didn't miss key elements. Hidden treasures and secret doors were so plentiful that I learned to "search" every step and while facing every wall, lest I miss something, although this slowed down navigation considerably. One maze in particular, in Mem Santi, would have had me tearing my hair out if I hadn't already lost all of it. The corridors freely went under and over each other, and entering certain doors caused me to teleport back to the beginning of the maze. Exploring mazes brings other challenges, such as ensuring that you have enough food (it turns out there's a spell called MAKUS FOODUS), light spells, and lock picks to go the distance. There were also a few places where I had to cast a special spell for searching (it was obvious when I entered a clear quest location but didn't find anything with the regular "search") or unlocking a door. Altogether, maze navigation was very time-consuming but not unfair.

You have to search for secret doors on every wall in this game.

2. Disarming traps. This system, which I covered briefly last time, turned out to be maddeningly unfair. There were three treasure rooms with multiple traps each, and each trap (unless I missed something) can only be disarmed through a long process of trial and error in which you carefully test different possibilities and absorb the damage when you're wrong. Some of the traps had 12-15 possible options! Even when I had maximum health, traps were capable of instantly killing me. And as I found out, achieving 100% in the "Disarm" skill in no way guarantees that you'll be 100% successful in disarming, even when you've identified the right course of action.

This is one of several pages of options for one of several traps. The incorrect option damages me. The correct option can automatically kill me. Fun.

The good news is that the game remembers when you've disarmed a trap, so you can disarm it, leave the room, save, and return to try the next one. The bad news is that two of these rooms were deep inside large dungeons that took 10-15 minutes to navigate, and you can't save inside dungeons. It took me hours of gameplay to both identify the right actions and disarm all the traps successfully. It's a horrible game mechanic; at least some clue as to the right actions should have been provided.

Although the area was called the "Tri-Cities," only one of them--the starting city, Same Mercon--was really a traditional city, with NPCs, shops, taverns, and such. The other two were essentially dungeons. The artifacts that I recovered from them each raised one attribute to 100%. While this was welcome, it also somewhat defeated the purpose of the grinding and leveling I'd been doing. I eventually got to the point that I found further leveling a waste of time, and I started running from every combat except for a few inescapable fixed combats.

Such as this battle against a hydra.

The magic system turned out to be slightly more complex than I covered last time. In addition to mixing the right reagents, you also have to pick the right shape in which to mix them: the Circle of Perfect Unity, the Pyramid of Directed Power, the Cube of Irresistible Force, or the Pentagram of Infinite Conveyance. Each shape was only available once I found its associated scroll. Each scroll provided a handful of the possible spells, but when I sat down and tried every combination of reagent in each shape, I found a bunch of additional ones. I don't think I missed anything; I think, rather, that the player is supposed to use the clues from the named spells to reason out additional ones.

The "infinite conveyance" spells all required the phoenix eggs I'd been stealing from that tree.

I didn't find offensive spells very useful in the game. I preferred to conserve my magic points for healing spells and trust my sword for attacks. There were a few "mass damage" spells that were theoretically helpful, but it took three or four to defeat most high-level enemies, which exhausted my spell points. None of the combats were overly difficult, not even the few "boss" combats. I think the most difficult was supposed to be the Magician King of Tel Hande.

There were some interesting side quests that provided better armor and weapons, including a series of arena combats at Tel Hande that provided me with the most powerful sword in the game, named (for some reason) "Bruce."

At one point, I found Telloc's skull and, just like Mondain in Ultima IV, cast it into an abyss. I'm not sure if this was necessary to win the game, or just a side-quest.

The main plot came together when I found Telloc's Library. It joined two separate dungeons, and I had to enter each of them one at a time and unlock the respective doors with a key I found in the Mem Santi treasury.

Once inside, I found a scroll that described how Telloc became the all-powerful god-king in the first place: he used a magic spell to fuse together all the artifacts I'd been finding, each of which maxed its respective attribute: the Gem of Wisdom (wisdom), the Globe of Power (charisma), the Plate of Strength (strength), the Arm of Wealth (luck), the Arm of Love (constitution), and the Artifact of Mem (speed). I guess after his death, his construct fell apart and the artifacts were dispersed to the respective treasuries from which I looted them.

As a CRPG player, I'm always grateful that tyrants keep such detailed journals.

The scroll provided the ingredients for the spell (ELMUS PASTUS) necessary to re-combine the artifacts. I found the scroll well before I'd found all the artifacts, but slowly I gathered them. When I had them all, I used Telloc's magic word ("TUNA") to reveal the stairway to his secret lab above Tel Empor. I climbed the stairs, cast the spell, forged the artifact, and became the new god-king. When the town elder who'd exiled me said, "I don't ever want to see you here again, not even if you do conquer the world and become God-King," I thought he was kidding.

Again, of course, the game had to sabotage itself in the endgame message, which I reprint below:

You are crowned King of the Land and you take the hand of the lovely Pink Dragon waitress, Babs. Life is good, and Babs soon gives birth to the prince, Keef the Thief Jr. Suddenly, life is not so easy. Jr. stumbles upon the +3 guitar "Jimmy," changes his name to Flem, and along with Gruk, the old king, and Al Handrata, form the heavy metal band Axe. This is just too much for Babs and she heads for the hills, where she lives on kelp and Valium with her sister, Sushi the mermaid. She leaves the falls only to work at the Pink Dragon in a futile attempt to make enough to pay her old credit card bills. You cannot stand domestic living, and soon you realize there is only one thing that will settle the emptiness. So once again you set out to kill and maim...once again you set out to live the good life...

Even after the "The End" screen above, the game lets you keep playing to clear up any additional quests, starting from your new castle. The NPCs in Same Mercon don't recognize your new status or anything, though.

I missed until late in the game that it keeps a "scoreboard" of several different meters. I had apparently found all the necessary treasure, and done all possible thieving, but I missed out on 3% of "quests" and 26% of "magic" (I assume I needed to mix and cast every spell for that; I think I mixed them all but I didn't cast them all). Nonetheless, I declined to keep going.

On to the GIMLET!

• 5 points for the game world. If you use a scalpel to cut out the nonsense, the back story and game world are actually quite compelling, and it's fun the way you uncover bits of lore from both people and scrolls. Unlike many games of the era, it actually uses its back story throughout the game itself, with key figures in the manual actually encountered in the game. And the world is persistent: doors remain unlocked, traps remain disarmed, enemies remain dead.

• 4 points for character creation and development. You have no choice but to play as Keef the Thief, so there's no class-specific role-playing or anything. All these points go to the "development" aspect, which does a decent job with both leveling and continual skill progression.

My stats towards the end, before I found the Plate of Strength.

• 4 points for NPC interaction. It's perhaps the most bizarre system I've ever encountered. You can ask NPCs about a variety of topics, but you have to pay them. The associated fee does not seem in any way commensurate with the value of the information they provide. Certain NPC dialogues are absolutely essential for plot progression, and certain ones are just dumb jokes from the developers, which makes it a little maddening at the beginning of the game, as you're trying to conserve funds.

This cost 3,000 gold pieces.

• 3 points for encounters and foes. The monsters are nothing special. They basically come in two varieties--brutes and magic users--but neither has anything in the way of sophisticated attacks. When they cast spells that damage you in combat, you don't even know what they're casting. They're not described anywhere in the game manual, and basically you just plow through them. I'm going to give a point to the thievery/trap system in this category because it's a kind of "encounter" and I don't have anywhere else to score it. Although it's intriguing, it's done very poorly, requiring extensive save-scumming, grinding, and repetition to disarm traps and steal items.

Well, unfortunately...

• 4 points for magic and combat. The combat system is interesting but ultimately unrewarding, as you simply charge around the battle map and hack at enemies. There are some missile weapons, but I had trouble getting them to work well, and it was easier just to charge and swing. The magic system is more interesting, with its use of reagents and spell circles, and requiring some effort on the part of the player to figure out the spells. It's too bad the spells aren't more necessary to the game, and that they all have such stupid names.

"MUTUS OMAHAUS" is a shield spell. What I want to know is if Mutual of Omaha paid for that product placement.

• 4 points for equipment. There's a good variety of weapons and armor, artifacts, and utility items such as thieves' tools. Weapon and armor upgrades arrive so frequently that you sometimes barely have time to get used to one before you have another. Through weapon score, weapon speed, armor protection, and armor speed ratings, the game makes it clear which items are best.

It is vaguely annoying that there's no way to get rid of unneeded stuff.

• 5 points for economy. You get gold from both thievery and combat, and there's a good balance between the two. As a thief, you don't have to pay for very much--you can even steal meals, rooms at the inn, and horses--but stealing individual reagents is so time-consuming that you're likely to use almost all your funds for that. After the first act, the weapons and armor sold in town pale in comparison to what you get for quest rewards, but you always need to replenish thieves' goods, and if nothing else you can pay for healing and magic recharging. And, as mentioned above, you have to pay to get NPCs to converse with you about key things. Nonetheless, I still ended the game with thousands of gold pieces, which I never like.

I could walk around and regenerate health and magic, but this is faster.

• 4 points for quests. In addition to a reasonably fun main quest, the game bucks the general trend of the era by offering several side quests with nice equipment rewards. There's no role-playing associated with any of these, unfortunately.

• 2 points for graphics, sound, and interface. If you can get past the 1980s hair, the graphics are tolerable, especially in the quest-specific locations. Unfortunately, there's no sound in the game except a horrid disco-inspired track that plays infrequently. The interface is generally annoying. You cannot rely exclusively on keyboard or mouse. The mouse calibration is slightly off, making it easy to click on the wrong item (though I realize this might be an emulator issue), and no matter what you're doing, it's easy to accidentally click on an errant part of the screen and go lurching off in an unintended direction. The game caches keystrokes, and combat has a way of ending very abruptly, meaning that as you transition back into the world, you find yourself racing around the map as the game implements the last few commands you entered on the combat screen. I also didn't like the transitions from static screens to free exploration and the changes in navigation that accompanied them.

Scenes like this are evocative, even if the text is not.

• 3 points for gameplay. I admire the nonlinearity--from Same Mercon, you can do the rest of the game in just about any order--and it lasts just about the right amount of time. But the challenge level is unbalanced, with thievery far too hard (traps remain horribly fatal even after achieving 100% in thieving skills) and combat a little too easy. There's really no replayability, either.

The subtotal comes to 38, a respectable score for the era, suggesting I liked it about as much as The Mines of Titan or Prophecy: The Fall of Trinadon. But as I said at the outset, it irks me how little faith the developers had in the integrity of the game as a serious fantasy story, and from the box art to the endgame text, they filled it with the most senseless drivel. We have anachronisms:

Dumb speeches from the game's villains:

Stupid names for foes:

And silly in-jokes in NPC dialogues:

What particularly annoys me is that this is fundamentally not a comedy game. It tells a serious plot, and all it would have taken was some changes to the text to offer the player a more interesting, immersive experience. The game is good enough that it actually pulled me out of the knee-jerk loathing that I exhibited during the first posting--but not so good that it left me with warm feelings at the end. Nonetheless, I'll decline to subtract any points for the game's misguided humor and let it stand at 38.

Upon seeing this box, there is absolutely no chance I ever would have purchased the game.

The developers were only 19 years old when they wrote the game, so they can be forgiven a certain lack of sophistication in their humor. It was their publisher's responsibility to curb it and help create a more marketable game. In fact, it seems they did the opposite. MobyGames quotes the developer's web site as saying:

Keef was a classic sword and sorcery role-playing game. While we were making it, Andy entered sarcastic text as a place holder for what he believed would be the real text in the final release. EA liked the humor so much that they decided to make the entire game a comedy. The effect that this decision had on sales was no joke, however.

If this quote truly was on Naughty Dog's site at one point, it no longer is, so without context I'm not sure if the last line means that sales were good or bad (I assume the latter). In any event, it doesn't seem to have hurt the developers very much. This is one of the few developers of the era whose company still exists, and they went on to develop the popular Crash Bandicoot and Jak and Daxter series. They have one more RPG to their credit, 1991's Rings of Power, but it was only released for the Sega Genesis and thus is not on my list.

Speaking of the list, after 14 months, we've come to the end of 1989! It somehow seems fitting that this game, with its unmistakably 80s character graphics, serves as the final game of the 1980s (at least on the master DOS/PC list). We'll move on to 1990 after a quick entry on a 1981 game called Dragon Fire.

Keef the Thief: A Bit Less Grief

The game's outer world.

Given the acid with which I started my first post on Keef the Thief, my opinion of the game had nowhere to go but up. I'm not saying it's become part of my soul or anything, but in the last session I found it, if not enjoyable, at least tolerable. The trick is to avoid reading as much of the text as possible.

Thank heaven for small favors.

The game features a character development system similar to Hero's Quest, where attributes and skills increase incrementally as you use them. It's not quite as good as Hero's Quest, I hasten to add, since there are far fewer skills in Keef, and far fewer ways to develop them. Still, I like games that in which character development is so smooth and consistent, in which every use of a skill exercises and bolsters it.

I enjoyed the process of mapping the outer world, too. This is the part of the game where you navigate by turning in the direction you want to face and moving forward, as in the standard dungeon crawler--in contrast to the cities where you navigate through static screens and the up arrow moves you north instead of forward. The switch between the two is often abrupt and I spent a few turns going the wrong direction before I remember the controls do different things now.

Anyway, I often settle into a comfortable routine with adventure games, or adventure-RPG hybrids, in which I first concentrate on mapping the extent of the world, noting its key locations, and annotating the puzzles I must later revisit. Then, in the second "half" of the game, I concentrate on those puzzles. You saw me approach The Third Courier through this basic process. The physical worlds of adventure games are almost always smaller than those of RPGs, and I ultimately find them a bit too artificially confining, but for the occasional game this routine works well, and I find it satisfying as a process even if I don't really enjoy the game.

One more square mapped in the game world.

As we started to explore yesterday, thievery is a big part of Keef. I had to shake off my role-playing paradigm of the "thief" as more of a master craftsman who helps fighters and mages with traps and sneaking and such, and recall that in its most basic sense, a "thief" steals things. Thus, I spent a long time cleaning out each house in Same Mercon and stealing various items from the shopkeepers.

In its thievery system, Keef seems to simply assume that you're going to do a lot of experimenting and reloading. Especially at the earliest stages, when your skills are low, traps are so difficult and lethal that there's no way (that I can see) to approach them without effectively save-scumming. It's easy to tell when an area or item is trapped because the "remove traps" command suddenly becomes available. When you click on it, you're presented with several options for attempting to remove the trap. Only one of them is effective--all the others damage or kill you in some way--and the game offers no clue as to which is which. Even when you select the correct disarm option, there's a decent chance that it will fail and you'll die.

Trying to choose the right disarm option. There's a second page of them, too.

Disarming the trap is only half the battle. After that, you must successfully steal the item, and no, its theft is not a foregone conclusion despite the fact that you're alone in an untrapped house. It's somehow possible to fall and sustain a fatal injury while trying to pick up a necklace.

This screen appears a lot.

Thus, through a long process of testing and reloading, I burglarized every residence in the city and sold most of the proceeds to a collector and merchant in one of the bars. The net gain--around 4,000 gold pieces--was enough to have every conversation in town but one. I should also note that the thefts merge well with the game's lore; there's a book on antiques that describes some of the most valuable artifacts in town.

The consequences of stealing from merchants are a little less severe. If you fail, you either injure yourself or get attacked by a single guard who's relatively easy to defeat once you've achieved a few levels. If you kill him, everything goes back to normal--no bounties, no more guards, no banishment from shops--but I've typically been reloading because I don't like the idea of having killed a guard. Anyway, through a long process of stealing, I managed to get a bunch of books and magic reagents. I even managed to steal a horse (a Clydesdale worth 9,999 gold pieces) from the Bavarian Horse Works. The game doesn't show you riding the horse--it just shows up in the inventory--so it wasn't much use until later.

As I indicated, the books and conversations started to uncover a little of the game's lore, and some of it is interesting except that you have to maddeningly separate it from the game's goofy interpolations. As I noted in my previous post, the game world is the remnants of an empire that collapsed when the "god-king," Telloc, disappeared. Much of the game's lore deals with the intellectual struggle over whether Telloc was fundamentally good or evil.

This is the kind of game where you don't know if a reference to "the Antichrist" is supposed to be a joke or what.

A book of lore says that Telloc was the son of a peasant farmer and rose to power through a mastery of magic, using it to assassinate the old king of Mercon, assume his throne, and rule for 666 years. The writer of the book notes that Telloc also had enormous charisma, and despite the way he started his reign, 665 of his years were prosperous and relatively peaceful. His disappearance occurred during widespread unrest brought on by a famine, but there's a rumor that his friends betrayed him, not the common people. His generals and mages retreated to the city of Tel Hande, where one of them, "the Magician King," seems to be on the verge of rediscovering the source of Telloc's power. All of this is interesting and handled relatively straight.

During my explorations, I found a mermaid bathing in a waterfall, and she told me that Telloc was "her love," and that because of their love, Telloc wasn't as evil as he otherwise could have been. Of course, the game manages to spoil what might have otherwise been an interesting plot point with a bunch of flapdoodle.

Not only do I know all the lyrics, I know that the song title doesn't have a comma.

 
Thanks to my theft of reagents, I was also able to start exploring the magic system. It's similar to Ultima IV and Ultima V in that you mix reagents of various properties to create ready spells which you invoke when needed. Casting a prepared spell costs a certain number of magic points.

Mixing reagents to create a healing spell.

The interesting twist is that there's no master list of spell recipes anywhere; instead, you have to find them on various scrolls and in books. The further twist is that even when you find them, the formulas aren't explicit. For instance, the "Scroll of Unity" indicates that the basic healing spell, called--groan--"Bandus Aidus," is composed of "the flower named for the Greek boy" and "the garden plant whose flavor is used so often to mask unpleasant taste." You have to do a little analysis of the ingredients to realize it's talking about narcissus root and a peppermint sprig.

This one seems to require dragon's drool, glow grass, and eye of owl.

There's a "Book of Bad Poetry" that seems to consist solely of spell hints, and I haven't fully parsed it yet. My progress is partly hampered by the extremely slow process of stealing reagents one-by-one from the herbalist; I may resort to simply buying them for speed's sake.
 

My exploration of the outer world featured plenty of combat, rendered easier by my purchase of good armor and my theft of a magic sword called "Charles" from one of the residences. The enemies are as varied as undead (skeletons, ghosts), goblins of various levels, anthropomorphic plants, and local fauna (bears, giant chickens). None are terribly hard, and there aren't many tactics to use against them except to charge up swinging. You can try to maneuver around the battlefield in such a way that you draw them out one-by-one, but I have trouble getting this strategy to work well. I've yet to encounter a single fixed or plot-relevant combat, but I haven't done much indoor exploration yet.

Maybe the baby ogre and baby eater could just go after each other.

Combats occasionally provide bits of equipment. I have a long list of weapons and armor in my inventory, ordered by power (easily assessable by viewing the resulting weapon and weapon speed scores), and as far as I know there's no way to sell or drop unneeded items. I guess it doesn't make any difference, since there's no weight score. I bought a decent selection of thief's equipment--lock picks, a rope, oil, a knife, flint and steel--from a shady character in the bazaar. I steal whatever I can and try to save my money for conversation options.

Equipping items requires double-clicking on them, but the mouse mapping is a bit off in this game, and you end up having to click slightly above the item you want to equip.

I'm just getting started on the puzzles. My conversations with the king's daughter suggested that she prized gifts. When I tried to give her some roses, she swatted them out of my hand, so I returned with the more expensive Mem Flower, and she was happy--happy enough to give me access to the palace treasury. The enemies there have proven too difficult to fully explore. Similarly, in the wilderness, I ran into a hermit named Al Handratta, who told me he was looking for a Clydesdale to replace his dead and fondly-remembered horse. Since I happened to have one, I turned it over, and was given a key to access to his maze.

In other areas, the mermaid wants me to recover a ring from a cave behind the waterfalls, the curator at the temple of Mem wants me to recover a holy relic. In general, most of the puzzles in the game seem to involve mini-mazes. You either get access to the mazes as a reward for solving the puzzles, or you must explore them to find items that the quest-givers want. Anyway, now that I've sketched my map of the world, it's time to get serious about these puzzles. I still don't have a thread on anything like a "main quest."

A location I've yet to explore.

A few other notes:

• As you explore, you have to carefully watch three meters: health, sleep, and food. Health regenerates (slowly) as you walk around; you can use spells or pay for healing to get a quicker boost. Food can be purchased in only a couple of places, and it's annoying that you can't take any in your pack for the road, but the meter depletes quite slowly. You can sleep absolutely anywhere. I think when the sleep meter gets low, it starts affecting your performance on things like combat and disarming traps.

• You can save just about anywhere in the game, but not in the indoor areas and mazes.

• The game has no sense of time. You can spend hours wandering back and forth along a street to regenerate your hit points. You can sleep any time. It never gets dark. Shops never close. I guess most adventure games and adventure-RPG hybrids don't have day/night cycles, but it's been a long time since I played one that didn't. Hero's Quest, B.A.T., and The Third Courier all had time considerations.

• There's a tree in the wilderness that seems to offer unlimited opportunities to improve disarming and stealing skills in an attempt to steal a "phoenix egg" (a spell reagent). Every time you climb up, there's another one there. It's pretty hard to steal without damage, though, so your quickly-declining health meter discourages you from spending too much time grinding at this one location.

I'll be surprised (and annoyed) if it takes more than one more post to win this one.

Game 110: Keef the Thief: A Boy and His Lockpick (1989)

"Gee, I wonder in what decade this game was made" -- no one.

Every so often, while going through the games on my blog list, I fire up a new game and get in a bad mood from the opening screen. This is what I'm going to be staring at for the next couple dozen hours?, I think, and start thinking of ways I can avoid it. I can't pretend I have emulator problems, because a dozen of my readers will pipe up and say it works fine for them. Maybe I could just quietly drop it from my list? No, that won't work: I've been mentioning it for the last two postings. I could write one short posting, move on, and hope they don't notice. That worked for Moebius. Then again, I had about one-third of my readership back then. Dammit! I guess I'll just postpone it for several months and hope I die before I get to it.

Everything about Keef the Thief annoys me. The title annoys me. The goofy portrait of the protagonist on the main screen annoys me (but not nearly enough as the box cover). That I have to play as "Keef the Thief" annoys me; would it really have broken the game engine to allow the player to name his own character? The logo for the damned company that makes the game annoys me:

Any company that has the word "dog" in its name generally annoys me.

The copy protection questions that I have to answer when the game starts, forcing me to consult an long and poorly-organized list of possibilities, annoys the hell out of me. The disco music (way to break the fantasy immersion, jackasses) annoys me--I turned it off. The interface annoys me--it's way too easy to click on an unintended thing.

Why didn't they just use an online authentication code or something?

Perhaps what annoys me the most, however, is how clever the game thinks it is. A rumor has it that the game was originally supposed to be a standard, classic high fantasy adventure, but that during development, one of the creators entered a bunch of joke text on each screen as a placeholder. EA liked the joke text so much that it decided to change the game to a comedy. If that's true (and I'm not convinced it is), I hope the EA executive that made that decision was fired. The "comedy" in the game is almost universally horrible.

Ho ho ho. Anachronisms are always a riot.

Can I find a way to argue that it's not an RPG? No, I guess not. It has attributes, and the combat that we're going to have to discuss seems to be based on them; it's got a proper CRPG inventory; and the character does gain experience and levels. It has adventure game trappings, to be sure--another hybrid--but it definitely qualifies as a CRPG.

The game rolls random stats and gold when you first start. You can start-scum to get better values if you want.

Nothing to do but suck it up and play it. But if you grouse about it enough at the beginning of your entry, you'll only have to write a few paragraphs of gameplay. Also, you can spend a bunch of the first entry summarizing the back story. Sigh. Fine. Let's get to it.

The game has you playing in the guise of (duh) Keef, a young thief who has just been kicked out of his home city by the disgusted Town Council after efforts to train him as a priest, a wizard, and a fighter have failed (though not without leaving him with some associated skills). The Eldest One has led him out into the jungle, weaponless and penniless, pointed him in the direction of the city of Same Mercon, and told him never to return, "not even if you conquer the world and become God-King."

The game is set in the remains of a collapsed empire, in an area called "Tri-Cities," a designation that immediately takes me back to 2002, when I spent a night in Kennewick General Hospital, howling in agony, after trying to impress my friends by casually tossing some exotic variety of chili in my mouth and chomping it down. But I digress. These tri-cities used to be ruled by an emperor named Telloc, who disappeared while trying to cast a spell on himself to ward off a prophecy that he would disappear. The city of Same Mercon ("jeweled city") is the old capital; the city of Tel Hande ("emperor's shield") is a walled fortress where the inhabitants live in a "police state" and believe the emperor will return; and the city of Tel Santi ("emperor's roost") is a huge temple where the inhabitants guard some wondrous artifact.

Keef is the fourth adventure-RPG hybrid we've seen this year, and like all but Hero's Quest, the result of the cross-breeding is sterile and deformed. Exploration in the game is an odd mix of static screens (as in B.A.T.) when you explore in towns, and 3D navigation (as in the "Gold Box" games) when outside or in dungeons. As you move around town, the directional perspective frequently changes. A little compass attempts to keep you oriented, but I keep getting confused and going the wrong direction.

You want to call her "lovely," it's up to you.

The game has plenty of characters with whom you can talk; unfortunately, every dialogue option costs money. It's a bit crazy. I only started with 107 gold pieces, and if I want to ask someone about his job, I have to spend 5 of them. If I want to ask a fellow thief about good pickings in town, it'll be 40. I suppose you could "talk-scum" by asking the questions and then re-loading the game (you get a single save slot), but that strikes me as unconscionably lame and against my rules, plus part of me worries that the game needs to "register" the dialogue for certain plot events to unfold. (Even when I know that this isn't true, I'm usually paranoid that it is.) Within a few minutes of exploration, I had spent all my starting money on a couple of dialogue options, a dirk, and a rope.

I'm just glad Ultima V didn't adopt this system.

With some experience with adventure-RPG hybrids under my belt, if you asked me what I must want from such a hybrid, it's "adventure-game style puzzles with RPG-style combat." But like most hybrids, Keef doesn't quite measure up. The combat system, I must admit, is highly original: a real-time mechanic in which you maneuver around a battlefield in 360 degrees (though not continuously scrolling). You can charge up to enemies and attack, or back off and hide behind obstacles to regain your strength.

Fighting some drunken bar patrons.

I absolutely hated it before I realized you could maneuver with the arrow keys and attack with the SPACE bar--a mechanic that makes the process more fluid and exciting (clicking with the mouse in the tiny combat window is an exercise in futility). As you attack, blood spatters appear on the faces of the enemies when you hit.

Though innovative, there are a few problems with it. It's devoid of any tactics beyond maneuverability; the tiny view window (which appears if you're wearing a visored helmet or something) feels confining; and my color-blindness means that I can't really distinguish myself, enemies, and obstacles in the tiny battlefield map at the top of the screen. Still, I started this post ready to absolutely excoriate it, but I've progressed to just not thinking it's very good.
 

Keef is, of course, a thief, and part of the gameplay is theoretically about stealing. You have the option to steal from shops and to break into houses in town, though my pre-game experimentation suggests that I need better attributes before I can hope to be very successful at either. The burglary system is particularly vexing. You stand outside a row of houses and wait patiently for the guard to pass by, then choose a house to enter. No lockpicking or anything.

The guard sidles by as I case the property.

But once inside, every time I try to steal something (provided the house has something worth stealing, which it rarely does), I fumble and hurt myself and fail to get the item. Honestly, how is it even possible to fumble and hurt yourself while trying to steal a goblet? In any event, I'm not sure what purpose it serves to steal stuff since there's no "sell" option at the shops. [Later Edit: Thanks to VK, I now know that you can sell the items in a bar. The command to do so is a little obscure.]

If you time things poorly or spend too long in a house, the guard catches you and attacks, and so far I haven't been able to defeat him. Guards also show up if you repeatedly try and fail to steal things from shops.

This, granted, makes sense when what you're trying to steal is a horse.

 
If there's any main quest thread I'm supposed to have picked up, I haven't found it yet. I've mapped the city of Same Mercon and made notes about things to buy and people to talk to once I have more funds. Honestly, I'm not sure if I'll be able to keep my rule against save-scumming when dialogue options cost money. I have to pay 3,000 gold pieces to hear an ogre's response to "Want hear poem?" in the Pink Dragon bar, and if it doesn't deliver, I'm either re-loading or quitting permanently.

***

I don't know how long this game will take me, but I'd like your comments about what happens after this one. I fired up Rings of Medusa for a couple of hours the other day, and I have to admit it seems like an intriguing game, with some nice graphics and innovative elements, but I can't see it as an RPG, not even a hybrid like Sword of Aragon. I can't find evidence that the main character and his units level, and the "inventory" is of a strategy game style where units either have it or not, which is a little different than I think of it for RPGs, in terms of finding interesting magic items, weapons, potions, scrolls, and such to equip and use. That leaves only one of my core criteria present in the game.

This is something I might forgive if there were authentic role-playing choices in the game (as in Aragon), NPC dialogues (as in Space Rogue), or some other common RPG element, but I don't see these here. Instead, the game seems to offer a primarily logistical challenge as you build finances, field large armies, build mines, engage in trade, and administer conquered cities. These are not the types of things I particularly enjoy in games. I'm also finding the interface very frustrating.

It's not a pure strategy game; it's a hybrid of something. I'm just not sure that "something" is an RPG. But I haven't played it for very long, so perhaps I'm missing something. You have a few days to try to sway me one way or the other.