The Search for Freedom: To Provide New Guards

 

More of the backstory.

     

Guest post by AlphabeticalAnonymous 

     

Long before the public sphere came to seem so polarized, spoilers (sneak-peeks of the ending of a book or movie) were perhaps the most polarizing topic in my marriage. I can’t stand them; I insist on following the path of narrative discovery set out by the media’s creator, while my wife loves nothing more than to page to the end of a book before reading it, read a review of a streaming episode before watching it, and so forth. We recently finished watching the latest season of Strange New Worlds (a sad mistake for the most part, alas), and during several episodes I couldn’t shake an irrational, niggling distraction at the back of my mind, because I knew that she knew what was going to happen. 
       
I say all this only to absolve myself from feeling embarrassed about my party members’ names. Had I known that my primary adversaries had names like Macbeth—sorry, Macabath—and Camisole—sorry, Kamazol—I feel as though I might have tried harder to come up with more apposite character names. But none of the back story is presented until after party creation, so here we are. I hadn’t bothered to save during my first attempt, so I had to start the game over again. Without much information one way or another about ideal party composition, I decided to stick with the same party—as we’ll see below, that may have been something of a mistake for at least one character. We form the party, read the introductory text, and set out again.

      

Page six of nine from the game's initial exposition. None of this was mentioned in the manual.

       

Once again, we pick the door to our cell, and immediately visit our only living neighbor, the Insane Creature, a few cells down. From this I conclude that superior mental health care was not high on the list of Macabath’s or Kamazol’s priorities. I suppose it isn’t high on ours either, because we quickly batter it to death again; we would probably argue self-defense, since it attacked as soon as we opened the door. In any event, we learn something interesting: loot drops are at least somewhat randomized. Instead of dropping a leather armour, this time the Creature leaves a hammer (2D4 damage) and knife (1D3). I give them to my characters with the best to-hit stats, and we break out of jail.

         

This time we manage to explore a good chunk of the town—just about all of it, really—without blundering into the midst of a nigh-unwinnable battle with guards. The Majik Shoppe sells several +1 weapons and armor, along with Speed Potions; all of these cost ¤150 or more and so seem too extravagant given our current status as fugitives from local justice. On the other hand, unlike in some other CRPGs, none of the items costs thousands of gold. The vendor also sells Level 1 Spellbooks for mages, but at $200 each, I decide to skip those as well. There are also fortune cookies for sale: the manual intriguingly notes that “no one knows for sure the story behind these strange items” and that “[t]hey are addictive.” I suspect the latter comment is meant figuratively, but the last thing I need is a party of cookie-junkies. We move on.

      

Only magic could keep such a small, narrow hat standing upright.

         

Nearby we find the Training Hall, where we can pay to level up once we have sufficient experience. Two other doors provide quick encounters presented entirely in text: in one, a friendly old lady tells us about Macabath's attack; in the other, a young man mocks our ability to fulfill the prophecy of Smythetown. That’s fair enough; probably he heard how our predecessors broke out of jail and were immediately destroyed by the city guard. 
           

We find a tavern called the Red Oyster Bar & Grill (a reference to the Red Lobster chain, perhaps?) and go in. Here we can buy food to heal, buy a drink, tip the barkeep, or mingle. We feel cheap so we just mingle, which allows us to hear what seem to be short hints. Mingling takes no time and costs nothing, so we do this over a dozen times before we start to see duplicates. Examples include:

• "The more powerful an undead is, the harder it is to turn."
• "Paralysis usually wears off at the end of combat"
• "Hawkslayer's tomb lies in the deepest chambers of Blusfor, where he must guard the blade of Soulseeker in his undeath, for eternity."
• "Silver can harm some undead which normal steel cannot."
• "Boats are a rarity in this land"
• "Luckily, lycanthropy is not contagious"
• "Always set a watch, to wake the party in case of trouble."

         

We don’t need food, so we try to leave, only to be told that we must first buy a drink! I didn’t see anything about that on the sign out front, but we knuckle under and pay.

We find the town’s Market Square on the eastern edge of town. This features Fred’s General Store (selling torches and lanterns), Ted’s Armory (selling four kinds of armor, and shields), a street vendor selling suspiciously cheap shields at half of Ted’s prices; and the Blacksmith’s Shop which sells weapons. The town may be rather inbred, because to our eyes all the vendors look identical:
       

But we've only just met.

       

After considering the prices and the manual’s detailed description of item statistics, we buy three leather and three cloth armours, and two short swords and two hammers. Between the armor and our dexterity bonuses, this gives everyone but Elphaba two points of armor protection. As for weapons, the mages have the short swords and everyone else has hammers—except poor Becket. As a cleric, he can’t use bladed weapons (or bows), and his strength of only 7 makes him too weak to wield the only non-bladed weapons available for sale (mace or hammer). I’ll have to prioritize getting his magic capabilities online.

Just north of the Market Square is the Temple of Good Faith, where characters can pay to be healed and where clerics can donate gold. In this case, the donations serve a very special purpose: the manual says that “once a sufficient donation has been given … [one can] learn the new spell level.” There’s no indication how much of a donation is sufficient, but our careful accounting has left only two gold coins in our purse—probably not enough to earn new magical capabilities. 
      
The game is filled with music and little sound effects. I haven’t sampled them all yet by any means, but entering most establishments seems to cause a specific, characteristic MIDI-style tune to play. Combat combines two themes, one of which is almost certainly the thematically debatable “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” (Why are there so few CRPGs set in the old west? Ghost miner forty-niner, cursed cowboys, etc…) The Armorer’s shop plays a tune that I definitely recognize but can’t immediately place; the Temple recognizably plays the first verse of “Adeste Fidelis.”
        

Is it just me, or does this priest look extremely sketchy?

       

Decked out in what gear we could afford, we head back to the Sentries. With only two gold left, we could technically afford a single torch and try to go down and explore the catacombs. But I worry that it might run out only after a short (and unknown) length of time, leaving me stranded in a dangerous situation. Our choice is justified by what we find: this time not four, but only three Sentries stand before us. Thus, both rewards and enemies are randomized, at least to some degree. Things go better with our new loadout: they rid me of my troublesome priest, but the rest of them go down. The survivors earn . . . 15 XP each. It could be a long time before leveling up! They also leave behind a chest: Ruxpin goes to pick it but instead sets off the trap, knocking himself out as well. Inside we find 81 gold and a torch.
     
We return to the Wayfarer’s Inn, pay seven gold for a room, and rest. The game has an interesting resting mechanic that I haven’t fully explored yet: it seems that one can potentially pitch camp anywhere, but the manual warns that at least one character should always be left to stand watch. It cautions that if everyone rests all at once, enemies can potentially ambush the party. Since we’re close to the inn (and feeling flush with our winnings), we all rest at the inn. The two characters who were knocked out recover at the same rate as everyone else, one HP per hour. Full death occurs when HP reaches minus nine. It can apparently be reversed at the temple, but only at considerable cost.
        
In short order we take out the Sentries in each of the three remaining towers. Each time we lose one character but otherwise triumph to receive 20-25 XP per character, roughly 100 gold, and an occasional weapon or armor that we can sell for a few paltry coins. After the third victory we finally have enough gold to buy Becket the right to his spells. By process of elimination (and a reload), I learn that a cleric must donate around 200 gold to learn their first level of spells. That makes some sense; it’s the same cost as the Mage's spellbooks. I almost decide to also just pay 21 gold to heal Tyrion's seven remaining HP, trading gold for time, before recalling that Becket must anyway rest for 12 hours to fully learn his new spells. After another seven-gold-piece stay at the Inn I finally have a functioning magic user. He only has 13 magic points, but this is enough for six castings of Light, four of Magic Compass (provides a compass while underground), three of Fear or Cure Light Wounds, or two of Sleep; the last three spells seem to be the only potentially-useful combat spells.

We head to the final turret and find five Sentries. In combat we try to use some narrow gaps in the walls as cover. At an opportune moment, Becket dives into the fray to cast Sleep (at Level 1, he can only cast it on adjacent enemies). All three targeted Sentries resist the spell. Uh-oh. The following round I’m told that he manages to successfully instill Fear in two of them... but it must not be enough fear, because those same two immediately slay him. I decide that when the rest of the party realizes that one of their clerics won’t touch most weapons, can’t lift the weapons he might touch, and can’t even cast useful combat spells, they decide they’ve had enough and head for the hills. Routed, they try to escape over the border of the combat map—only to be told that we can't even flee the battlefield, because of a "magical barrier." In the resulting chaos, we suffer our second full-party death and are forced to reload again.

I still haven’t said much about combat yet because I continue to hope for it to really prove the worth of its tactical grid. No question that the potential is there: much like the gold box, the party starts together with enemies at least one round's movement away. I’ve neither seen nor inflicted any ranged attacks, so everything happens at close quarters. The main strategy seems to be surrounding an enemy from all sides and hammering away, then moving on to the next one. When an enemy attacks a party member or is attacked by one (or vice versa!), both usually turn to face each other. After someone has been attacked once in a round, any character can attempt to backstab (for extra damage, with a bonus to hit) by attacking directly from behind. Enemies can backstab the party members too, but their AI seems poor enough so far that this rarely happens; whoever does it, it’s not always successful. A high degree of randomness seems to be involved in all aspects of combat, since in our second time against this group of five we lose only Elphaba before we triumph (Becket’s spells again proved ineffective). Past them is a storage room with our first set of high-quality loot: a Long Sword +1 and Chair Armor +1.
      

Tyrion's statistics after equipping our first +1 magic items.

      

As you see above, we give both magic items to Tyrion, who has our highest to-hit statistic. I think 15 means a roughly 25% chance to hit; I should start keeping track of hits and misses, like at a baseball game, to see if that’s correct. We give Tyrion’s hammer and leather armor to Elphaba, who even with a short sword (and despite being a mage!) has been surprisingly useful in melee combat due to her high strength. Leaving her to continue in that role for the time being, we use our gold to buy our other mage, Kizke, a spellbook. He has to rest for 12 hours without interruption in order to learn the spells in his new book (Becket had to do this, too, after donating to learn his first-level spells). Kizke has 30 magic points and now has access to all nine first-level mage spells. Besides the always-popular "Magic Missile," these include "Detect Traps," "Trap Zap" (disarm), "Open," "Light," "Locate" (get coordinates), "Armor Enhance," "Clumsiness," and the previously-disappointing "Sleep." With nothing left to do in the city, we head down into the catacombs to begin the hunt for Macabath in earnest.

Time played: 5 hours. 2 deaths. 1 reload.

 

*****

    

Previous entry in this series 

Yendorian Tales: I'm a Miner, not a Fighter

I hear that copper is going to be worthless soon.

           

Yendorian Tales has either a brilliant early-game economy or an infuriating one. I spent most of this session trying to decide. I spent the entirety of this session trying to train my characters to the levels they had achieved before ultimately having to admit defeat. Normally, I'd excoriate a game for making leveling so expensive that you functionally can't do it, but here I think it's meant to be a strategic choice. Most RPGs that require "training" to level make it cost such a trivial amount that it might as well cost nothing. The authors of Tales wanted it to compete with equipment upgrades, attribute boosts, and other ways to spend cash.

          

The cost of education just keeps going up.

        

To my mind, a game with a perfect economy would have:

      

• A lot of ways to make money, roughly proportional to risk and effort.

• A lot of ways to spend money, none obviously better than the others, so that how and where to spend becomes a strategic or role-playing choice.

• An open economy, so that if you make bad spending choices, you haven't put yourself in a "walking dead" situation. 

       

So far, these are the valuable things you can spend money on:

      

• Weapon and armor upgrades. I still don't have the best shields for sale in the first town.

• Training characters to level up.

• Potions with a variety of effects.

• Mining equipment, including torches and tools, to offset what you lose while mining.

• Turning regular gear into magical gear, and increasing the enhancement of existing magical gear.

• One-time-only permanent attribute boosts. (I've only found one of these so far, which I paid for during this session thinking it would increase sale prices. I assume others exist in other towns.)

     

Time to hit the bars!

      

• Lodging for the night to fully heal wounds and restore mana.

• Maps of part of the world.

• Processed Nuore, vital for casting spells.

• Horses. 

   

As for ways to make money:

   

• Financial rewards attached to quests, as discussed below.

• Fighting monsters for both direct cash and incidental cash when you sell their loot.

      

My accumulated loot after a visit to Thieves' Guild.

       

• Mining for ore and fixing mine tracks, both of which are slow but endlessly repeatable.

• Gambling, but as we saw last time, either at poor odds or with low betting caps. 

• Selling Ancient Scrolls, keys, and magical artifacts to the archivist in the Athaneum. (I just found my first Ancient Scroll in a random treasure mound during this session.)

    

Cha-ching.

     

Through either careful testing or luck, the authors managed to hit the mining balance just right. If ore were just a little easier to find, or sold for a bit more, or if picks didn't break so often, mining could easily wreck the economy. But like a good farming or crafting system in a modern RPG, the effort/reward ratio is calibrated so well that even though it provides reward for virtually no risk, it isn't the obvious thing to do.

          

I never thought I'd be angry to see my characters ready for the next level.

        

I have to praise the gambling system as well, with the caveat that it's easy for an unscrupulous player to save-scum his way to riches. The developers shouldn't have allowed saving in the town. They put the gambling hall at the end of a long, twisty building that takes a few minutes to reach. If the player had to reload from outside every time he lost a game of "Twenty-One," he'd probably think twice about walking all the way back to the tables instead of just heading for the mine.

      

In any event, as in real life, there is an enormous attraction to gambling. More than once during this session, I was in Helsingor (the town with the casino), I had leveled up one miner, and I had discovered that I was just a few hundred gold pieces shy of leveling up the other one. Knowing I could walk a few buildings away, drop 1,000 pieces on the table, and win enough to prevent me from having to come back to the city (for now) was hard to resist. 

        

Outfitting myself at the mining shop.

       

Everything in the early game tells you to head for the mines. The governor of Saccate specifically asks for help clearing monsters out of the mines, and the first town is full of miners who sell tools, torches, and carts. There's even a mining shop that will sell ore. All you have to do is go north. I, of course, went south, visited the Athaneum before the developers probably intended, then visited the Thieves' Guild, and got into an unending cycle of having enough experience but not enough gold for the next level.

   

The Thieves' Guild is a reasonably good place to grind, since its enemies (rogues, pickpockets, etc.) have weapons and armor that can be sold for a lot of cash. The problems with this approach are:  (a) thieves never drop Nuore, so I depleted my supply very fast; and (b) while grinding against them for money, you're simultaneously grinding against them for experience, which keeps you in the trap.

   

Still, my attempts to grind my way out of the problem had one positive outcome: While on my umpteenth trip through the guild to pay for training for my thief, I happened to notice an object on the wall that looked different from the other tapestries and wall decorations. It was the stolen painting from Helsingor. When I returned it to Olga in that city, she gave me 1,500 gold pieces—and enough experience for another level. Goddamn.

       

The thieves should have considered putting more than one work of art on their walls.

           

A couple of interesting things happened when the characters hit Level 4. First, their classes changed. My two miners  became "fighters." My rogue became a "thief" (I'm not sure that's better). My two cleric/pupils and my wizard/pupil lost their "pupil" status. I wonder whether there are further "promotions" at higher levels.

    

More importantly, the first time someone hit Level 4 (in this case, my rogue), I triggered a bit of a cut scene. It began with a pop-up message:

         

This was a bit of a bonus. Getting out of the Thieves' Guild can be perilous.

      

I was in the Thieves' Guild at the time, so I guess this weird train of people marched all the way to the Athaneum. There, we assembled in the Great Hall, where according to earlier dialogue, the wizard Zamora was due to give a big presentation.

        

I feel like "Zamora" ought to be a woman. Maybe "Zamoro" for a man? "Zamorax?"

        

Zamora began speaking, noting that lately, monsters had been becoming "stronger and more numerous." He said that he had found a solution to the problem. He produced a black orb and said that "once enchanted," it would "vanquish all evil creatures from Yendor." This is the kind of thing that you just go along with in an RPG, where "evil" is a real thing, but that would set off all kinds of alarm bells if it happened in real life.

   

Suddenly, an invisible figure appeared in the hall. Okay, that's an oxymoron. A figure that could only be seen as a vague outline appeared in the hall. It cast a spell that disabled Zamora, levitated Zamora's orb over to itself, and disappeared.

    

That's awfully lazy. You're standing like three feet away.

           

The Governor of Saccate jumped up to quiet the terrified audience, promising that the healers were on their way and the number of guards would be increased. "If any of you is courageous enough to set forth and return the orb," he said, we could join him and the other governors in the Council Chambers upstairs.

    

We did so immediately, of course. The Council is made up of the governors of Saccate, Port Hope, and New Devon, the latter two of which I have not yet visited. NPC dialogue confirms there are only three council members, but I note:

    

• There are 13 seats at their table.
• Where there ought to be a fourteenth seat, there is instead an empty gap. 

       

Were there once more Council members? Was there a fourteenth city, now lost? Am I just overthinking it? Time will tell.

     

"Why is there a missing chair?" "We don't talk about that!!"

        

Each of the governors gave us 1,000 gold pieces to help cover our expenses, but they had no leads or clues. So I headed downstairs to see Zamora in the hospital. All he could say was: "Talk to Norman."

          

"Tell him to clear my browser history."

      

Norman is Zamora's assistant, the smart-ass who gave me a picture of a musical note when I inquired about the NOTES he took for his master. This time, he had more to say, including the fact that Zamora kept a journal in his room.

   

I went to Zamora's room and found his journal—helpfully glowing—on a shelf. Unfortunately, it was locked.

     

I might have found the missing stool, too.

        

I talked to a few other people on the second floor and noticed that some dialogue had changed since the incident with Zamora. I was mildly curious what the workers preparing the Great Hall for Zamora's presentation would say now that the presentation was over. One of them, Conrad, after recapping the events I had just witnessed, told me that he saw something shiny fall out of Zamora's cloaks as the healers carried him away. "If I was going to sell something like that," he said. "I would probably try to sell it in the Thieves' Guild." I shudder to think what would have happened if I hadn't spoken to Conrad. I probably would have visited every other city in the game, taking notes, fighting monsters, leveling up, never getting a bead on the main quest.

       

We already covered this. An "invisible person" cannot "show up."

      

Sure enough, I discovered—after fighting through several more groups of thieves—the Thieves' Guild shop was now selling a Golden Key. I bought it, used it on the journal, and got the following message:

         

Wait, why do we want to disable the Orb?

      

I had already met the Hermit in a previous session, but instead of returning to him now, I finally decided to check out the mines. The map shows two entrances near Saccate. I went to the northwest one first. The designers did some fun things with the graphics to suggest elevation even when the party is still walking on a flat surface. This gimmick continued in the mines, too.

         

Walking "up" to the mine's entrance.

       

The mines had a lot of insect enemies, including caves in which we fought fixed battles and could "clear" them. It reminded me quite like The Magic Candle in this regard.

       

Aside from these battles, the primary reason to visit the mines is to mine ore from the walls. You need to have at least one mining tool to do this, but the more you have, the more characters can mine, which increases the yield. You also repair bits of broken track with the same tools; the game keeps track of how many sections you've repaired and rewards you back at the mining shop. Both broken tracks and ore are randomized every time you leave and enter the caves, so you could do this effectively indefinitely—except that the mining tools occasionally break. You want to enter the caves with dozens of them, which is a non-trivial up-front investment.

    

I became somewhat interested in figuring out the overall mining "yield." This is tough because it's tough to determine the most optimal way to search the mines, plus some walls never seem to yield certain types of ore. But to take an example, if I just entered the mined, searched the nearest wall until I found something, and exited (which resets the mine), I calculated from 50 sample runs that I would find ore about 50% of the time in my first search and about 75% of the time within two searches. The average yield per search (accounting for finding nothing sometimes) was 10.5 units of lead, 2.0 units of iron, and 4.7 units of copper. Lead and iron sell for one gold piece each and copper sells for two, so that means the average search produces about 20 gold pieces' worth of ore. It takes maybe 4 seconds to enter, search, and exit, and there's a roughly 6% chance that the mining tools will break (cost: 20 gold), reducing the average yield to around 18.8 gold pieces. If I did this boring task for about half an hour, I'd have roughly enough gold to get my party members from Level 3 to Level 4. Again, you can see how a slight change in these variables would either break the economy or make mining not worth the effort at all.

      

One of the fixed "room" battles.

          

Anyway, I fully searched the two non-hermit mines. I don't know that I found everything; the caves are big enough that you could easily miss a chunk. But following the right wall all the way around, I cleared out all of the fixed battles that I could find. The Governor of Saccate didn't acknowledge this victory in any way. I'm not sure that the opening quest to "save the miners" can be completed at all, given that plenty of random battles still spawn.

    

Miscellaneous notes:

 

• The game has the laziest approach to borders that I've ever seen. The land doesn't end at the water's edge. There isn't an impenetrable mountain range. It just . . . ends.

      

What's beyond the fog?

       

• In addition to paying 8 gold pieces per section of repaired track, each party member gets 4 experience points.

     

Banging spikes into track, fighting monsters . . . it's all the same thing, really.

       

• The game frequently glitches when I (L)ook at random items. For instance, looking at a particular skull in a mine caused all the graphics to go haywire. The party icon changed to a mining pick and walls disappeared. 

• Many sections of the mines require a mining cart to navigate. A party that runs out of mining tools could be trapped behind sections of broken track. If the player saved the game, I'm not sure that there's any recourse.

• Trying to pick up a crate in one part of a mine (a crate that the party cannot pick up) somehow triggered a battle with two dragons. There was no chance I was going to win that. 

           

Hey, I didn't think the crate was that important.

       

When I was done exploring the mines, I traded in the ore and finally had enough money to finish leveling my characters to Level 5. My spellcasters have a lot of spells I haven't explored yet, but I'm wary of doing so until I build up a greater stock of Nuore. You can supposedly find Nuore in the mines and pay to have it processed, but I haven't found any yet except from battles with insects.

     

Sure. We're not trying to save the world or anything.

      

I capped this session by re-visiting the hermit in his cave to the northeast of Thieves' Guild. When I showed him Zamora's journal, he said he'd help—but only if I killed a wyvern to the north of his cave. We'll continue with that exciting adventure next time.

   

Time so far: 10 hours

   

****

   

Previous entry in this series

   

 

Game 578: The Search for Freedom (1994)

 

         

The Search for Freedom

Canada

Independently developed; published as shareware 

Released 1994 for DOS

Date Started: 19 September 2025

    

This series represents a "first" for the CRPG Addict. We've had guest entries before on special topics, and at least twice (Time Horn and Die Drachen von Laas), I've allowed guest authors to finish a foreign-language game that I started. But I've resisted allowing guest entries that cover an entire game, without my having touched it. The Wargaming Scribe's coverage of Les Six Lys a few months ago was supposed to be the first, but since the game was so short, I figured I could maintain the blog's original vision by giving the Scribe most of the review but still playing it myself. Given that it took—spoilers!—seventy-two hours to win The Search for Freedom, I don't think that will be happening again.

      

Thus, for the first time, I present a guest commentator's full series of reviews of a game, from title screen to GIMLET, including all subtitles and captions. Let's see what we all think at the end of the series, and I'll decide whether or not to do it again. If I don't, it won't be because of the quality of the series, which I think is excellent.

   

Our guest commenter is AlphabeticalAnonymous, who left his first of over 250 comments on this blog in the summer of 2021. He is a science professor working in Kansas. He has previously lived and worked in Boston, California, and Germany.

    

I will comment occasionally [in italics and brackets] but the words in this series, beginning after the asterisks below, are otherwise his. His compiled review of the game is almost 30,000 words and over 100 pages, so I will be alternating them with my own entries for a while, which should give me some breathing room to enjoy a vacation and otherwise get caught up after a difficult spring. Thank you, AA!

     

*****

         

I’ve been playing shareware games, on and off, for decades. The earliest that I can swear to playing was EGA Trek (1988), which hooked me with both its bold colors and vivid sound but undoubtedly even more by virtue of the (wholly unlicensed) Star Trek theme. The author was one Nels Anderson of far-off Framingham, Massachusetts, a location that seemed distant and exotic (I was living in California at the time); little did young Me know that decades later I would be a daily rider on the Framingham-to-Boston commuter train. Anyway, Mr. Anderson gladly took my $10 registration and sent me the latest version of the game along with an eclectic 3.5-inch sampler pack of other offerings. Imagine my disappointment when the new, registered version turned out to have its explicit Star Trek references all safely anonymized: for instance, Klingons and Romulans were now Mongols and Vandals. The gameplay was identical, but my satisfaction was palpably diminished. I suppose it was an early lesson in the power of name brands. The earlier version still offers me a quarter-hour of nostalgia every year or so.

The Search for Freedom is another shareware game, but more modern and with far more complex gameplay than my old EGA Trek. Although the documentation states that Freedom is Howard Feldman’s first game programmed on “the IBM,” the result is no small fry:

     

[The game] will require a minimum of 60 hours to complete successfully. In all, there are 4 towns, 22 dungeon levels, each 20 squares by 20 squares, and 2 outdoor areas, each 32 squares by 32 squares. There are well over 60 magical spells to master, over 120 monsters to battle.

         
The first town and dungeon comprise the free portion of the shareware game, after which one must pay to register the game and open up the rest of the world. The game is still available for download on now-Dr. Feldman’s website and he is still accepting registration at $10 each—in nominal terms the same that I paid for EGA Trek, though rather more affordable 35 years on.
    
Aficionados of computer-based RPGs or adventure games will be familiar with Dr. Feldman through his curation of the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History (MOCAGH). The online-only Museum provides:

    

High-quality scans of the boxes, disks, manuals, clue books, maps, and accompaniments to thousands of computer adventure and role-playing games, most of them curated not from other sites but from scans that Feldman has made of the items in his physical collection. He also has complete sets of gaming magazines, newsletters, and hint books.

       
This description comes from the other exposure readers of these pages will have had to Dr. Feldman, as the author of the freeware CRPG Quest of Kings (1990, link to CRPG Addict's 2020 coverage). That game, his first serious production, was in some sense the prototype for the more elaborate Freedom. This second game was written in Turbo Pascal while he was a senior in high school, and so far seems that it would have provided good value for the money spent on the shareware registration.
     
Although I’ve been playing games via various types of emulators for two and a half decades, I had a surprising amount of trouble getting the game to run at all. Whether I tried the official version offered on Dr. Feldman’s website or the various (so-called) “abandonware” versions available on the web, I would repeatedly get errors telling me that “This is not an original copy of Search for Freedom” and to reinstall using my “original game diskette.” Even applying a patch from the game’s official website didn’t solve the issue. But every cloud has a silver lining; in this case, mine was discovering the eXoDOS project, which seems to provide a unified launcher and curated customization parameters for over 7,000 DOS and PC-Booster games. It installed (even on my Linux laptop, which is no small feat) and ran Freedom without any hiccups. 
      

From a bit later in the game. At least we'll recognize our enemy—the evil wizard Macabath—when we meet him.

       

The game begins with the player creating a party of six adventurers. These can be of four races—Human, Elf, Dwarf and Teddy (more on that in a minute)—who can be any one of four classes: fighter, thief, cleric, or mage. A Dwarf cannot be a thief or a mage; a Teddy cannot be a fighter or a cleric. You “roll” for your usual statistics: strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, endurance, charisma, and luck (which “can protect the player from danger when all else fails”). I sampled 50 rolls and they seem to be consistent with natural 3D6 in each category. Some classes also have minimum statistics in their prime requisite. Regardless, you can either take the statistics or roll again without limit, but there’s no option here to recreate your favorite adventurer who just happens to have stats of 18 in all categories. Then you pick a name and save the character.
      
The manual strongly recommends taking one character of each class. After thinking about it, I decided to take a slightly more interesting path with my two “extra” characters being a mage and a cleric. I couldn’t help but take advantage of the chance to recruit at least one Teddy; members of this unique race are: “Small, adorable creatures who won't think twice about swiping money or other possessions from under your nose. They are very fast, and are often charming conversationalists as well.” In other words, charismatic thieves. They receive stat bonuses to Dexterity, Charisma, and Luck but penalties to all other stats. I finally settled on the following party:
       

• Ruxpin, a Teddy Thief with low wisdom and endurance but high Dexterity, Charisma, and Luck. 

• Becket, a Human Cleric with low Strength and Charisma (perhaps he’s deformed) with otherwise decent scores in the remaining categories.

• Tyrion, a Dwarf Fighter with abysmal Charisma (4), poor Luck, but good physical stats.

• Kizke, an Elf Mage with low Endurance but very high (17) Intelligence.

• Durkon, a Dwarf Cleric with good Strength and Endurance and with top marks (18) in Wisdom. And finally,

• Elphaba, a Human Mage with high Intelligence and middling-to-decent stats in most of the other categories. 

      

Starting statistics for Teddy Ruxpin. I like the fairly detailed overview of so many statistics that the game offers.

       

After forming your party of six characters (no more, no less), the game begins with nine screens of expository text. It ably lays out the plot and introduces Kamazol, the evil arch-mage and (I presume) the game’s “Big Bad.” After slaying his parents and “ruling the continents for quite some time,” he was in turn (apparently) slain by a hero bearing the sword “Soulseeker.” But as so often happens in these tales, “in death he [Kamazol] would find life” and “did not truly die.” In fact, briefly killing him made matters worse because it allowed him to conquer Aegea (essentially, Hell). He is now a lich with a growing army of evil forces on both planes of existence. In 1000 days, a triple-lunar conjunction will open a portal for Kamazol to return to our world' it is of course our job to stop him. “The prophet of Smythetown” predicted that we six heroes would reforge the broken Soulseeker, find a portal to Aegea deep on the Island of No Return, and defeat the evil. However (the narration continues), upon our arrival in Smythetown the “beautiful little town” was overrun by the evil wizard Macabath and his minions. They work for Kamazol and threw us all in jail. But we are then slipped a lockpick and 250 gold along with a message from “The Viper Alliance” that reiterates the main points of the quest. Thence, the game begins.
       
The action begins in a locked cell within the City Jail of Smythetown. The initial gameplay seems immediately recognizable to anyone familiar with the Gold Box and similar games; after all, the game manual’s introduction notes that the game was “inspired by such RPGs as Pool of Radiance by SSI, Shard of Spring by SSI, and [The] Bard's Tale by Electronic Arts.” It offers a tile-based, first-person view with simple, solid-color-filled wireframe walls and doors. Either the color scheme is intentionally chosen for high contrast, or Macabath’s evil has manifested in a mandate to paint all of Smythetown’s walls in bright lime-green. Movement is with the arrow keys. 
      

In fair Smythetown's jail cell, where we lay our scene.

     

The interface seems promising, with quick keyboard shortcuts for most actions (the mouse does not seem to be supported). You can see the options in the screenshot above. Magic-users begin with magic points (MP) but they will have to pay at the local magic shop or temple to learn any spells to cast. View gives each character’s detailed stat sheet as shown above. "Encamp" offers options to rearrange combat formation, share or distribute items, rest, save, and so forth. "Search" seems straight out of the Gold Box: turning it on allows the party to notice hidden doors and other interesting phenomena, but at the cost of each tiled step taking 10 minutes instead of just 1. I don’t know how to feel, yet, about that 1000-day time limit, but I leave "Search" on for now. "Look" is just a one-time "Search." "Utter" gives the ability to say something. Finally, one can always view the automap.

     

The games offers several handy options. First, the full manual can be accessed via a text-viewer within the game. I could find no way to search for text, but one can at least jump to desired page numbers as indicated in the table of contents. The same manual is of course also available as a 20,000-word text file with detailed instructions, including a list of over 60 magical spells, 50 types of monsters, and nearly 30 different types of items. The same text-viewer seems to double as the adventurers’ notepad within the game, automatically recording key phrases or scraps of information; unfortunately, it does not seem to allow manual text entry, but then that’s what I have Emacs for. Finally, there is the more-than-serviceable automap that tracks one’s explorations and adds some basic annotations. Between the automap’s “you are here” feature and the blue-on-white compass arrow in the first-person view, it promises to be a game in which getting lost, at least, is not a serious danger.

      

The automap after some initial exploration. A surprising number of those black areas seem to be utterly inaccessible. Completionists, beware.

        

Our motley band assesses the situation. As promised, we have 250 gold pieces, but no lockpicks or any other items to speak of. I suppose the picks are implied by our ability to unlock doors. Regardless, they immediately prove their worth when I try to move through the door to our cell. This presents me with options to pick the lock, bash the door, or cast the OPEN spell. I have no spells and don’t want to attract the notice of the guards, so I have Ruxpin, my thief, pick the lock. He fails several times, but each attempt takes no time and seems to have no negative consequences (the manual mentions that later on, some doors and chests will have traps with various negative effects). After a few tries, the lock clicks open, we step through the open door, and Ruxpin gets +5 experience points (XP). Each character starts out at Level 1 with 300 XP, and reaching Level 2 requires 600 XP in total. That’s a lot of locks to pick, so I hope that enemies provide more experience than that.
     
I soon have a chance to find out: we soon open another cell and find a ourselves face-to-face with a so-called "Insane Creature" and are immediately thrust into combat. I’ll cover combat in more detail once I have some spells and better understand the mechanics. For now, suffice to say that the party and its adversaries find themselves on a 21 x 21 tactical battlefield grid that more or less represents the local terrain (i.e., walls). Depending on their dexterity values, my characters have 9-15 movement points each. Characters can only move up, down, left, or right—no diagonals—and use two movement points per space. Attacking, casting a spell, or using other items requires at least three movement points. In this case, the enemy has only 20 HP. Although my characters are armed with nothing but their fists (1D2 damage, plus strength modifiers), they make short work of the Insane Creature. I also note that this enemy isn’t mentioned in the manual’s bestiary, so presumably there will be other surprises along the way. The Creature leaves behind one Leather Armour and six gold, and the party earns a disappointing 2 XP per character. Maybe picking locks is the way to go, after all.

We pick open several other cells containing dead men, "cause of death probably being old age." The only other clue we find in the jail is a man with a viper tattoo (the sign of the Viper Alliance) who is chained up. When we talk to him, he says not to rescue him but to instead “go on” and that someone named Arthur will rendezvous with us and provide further instructions. “To find Arthur, knock on door of Big Blue House and say ‘WHITE KNIGHT SENT ME.’”

Beyond the jail, I find myself on the loose in Smythetown, although the appearance of the environment is unchanged. I first go south and quickly find stairs down to the catacombs, where Macabath is said to reside. It’s pitch-black, and anyway we’re definitely not ready to take him on. Heading the other way, we quickly find the town Library. The game suggests to us that we need to save the world and don’t have time for books, but I know better. After all, libraries hold something infinitely more precious than gold: knowledge. My perseverance is soon rewarded when we go into the back room and find a book entitled Mastery of the Magic Art. Here I am offered my first real choice: do I want to spend a day (of my precious 1000 remaining) so that my mages can study the book? I decide to take the plunge. While the rest of the party twiddles their thumbs, Elphaba and Kizke pore over the tome for a full day. They emerge, exhausted but smarter: both of their Intelligence stats increased by two! So long as the 1000-day limit turns out to be a true challenge, I like this option of trading time to boost my capabilities for later in the game. But even if the time limit doesn’t really matter, I suppose we still made the right choice.

Continuing north, we pass the entrance to the Wayfarer’s Inn, but we feel nervous without weapons or armor and so continue hunting for a shop we were promised would be somewhere in town. We continue past a so-called Majik Shoppe to the northernmost edge of town, where we find that the main city gates are all locked by Macabath’s evil magic. Between that and the shareware registration, there’s clearly no way for the party to leave Smythetown at this point. We head west and pass through an unlabeled door, only to be informed that "Macabath has guards in each of the four turrets. They attack!" Uh-oh. We enter combat with four Sentry guards, each with 27 HP and 3 armor points (I think that armor reduces damage from successful attacks, rather than affecting a character’s likelihood of being hit). This is bad news because three of my party only do 1D2 damage and so are useful only as cannon fodder. The other three do 1D2+4 due to their better-than-average strength: between that and a few lucky critical hits we manage to miraculously kill two of the Sentries. By that point we’ve already lost a few party members and are too weak: the remaining pair of Sentries slaughters us. We are told that "The Earth is doomed. You have failed in your quest,” which at least doesn’t bury the lede. I’ll have to avoid that door next time.
     

Becket and Ruxpin were not far behind.

 Time so far: 1 hour. 1 party death. 0 reloads.

     

****

   

Next entry in this series

    

For further reading:

    

• Quest of Kings (1990), this author's first game.
• Pool of Radiance (1988), the first "Gold Box" game,  which heavily influenced this title.
• The Shard of Spring (1986), another influence according to the author. 
• The Bard's Tale (1985), another influence according to the author.