Betrayal at Krondor: A Pox Upon Ye

 

"Again," the text forgot to mention.

      

Our narrative picks up in Chapter 2. Prince Arutha has been warned about the growing Moredhel threat, and now Seigneur James, the apprentice mage Owyn, and the Moredhel turncoat Gorath are on the road to Romney, where they hope to intercept communications between the Moredhel general, Delekhan, and the Nighthawks assassins' guild. These messages may reveal which northern city the Moredhel intend to strike first. We join the narrative on the road heading east from Malac's Cross towards the crossroads at Lyton. Romney is three more cities to the east from there.

     

The party hits the open road.

      

As before, we do not stay resolutely to the road, but rather adopt a zig-zag pattern of movement that careens between the impassable mountains on both sides of the road, allowing us to find stray treasures, NPCs, and other encounters. While engaged in such off-roading, we come across a dead body carrying three rations and a shell. Next to him is a fairy chest. We haven't had one of these in a while. The puzzle is of a different sort than before. Instead of a verse riddle, it offers five words in a row: MAGIC, DEATH, TEMPLE, BLESS, and REST. We have to input a sixth word. from the following letters:

     

S A S S T

T L I L S

A R E O E

C H R I U

     

Looking through the letter combos, I see (CHEST) as a possibility, and it turns out to be the answer, but I don't know why. The only thing I see the words having in common is they frequently appear in fantasy games. Is there some other commonality I'm missing?

        

It was satisfying to open nonetheless.

       

In any event, the chest has 74 royals, a shovel, a lockpick, and 4 uses of Flame Root Oil, which protects against cold-based weapons.

   

Further along, we come across a couple of houses with black ribbons on the doors. James tells the party this is a sign of sickness, warning people to keep away, and yet someone has clearly ransacked one of the houses recently. We enter to conduct our own investigation and find a sack of 34 sovereigns beneath the floorboards. The family being dead, James sees no reason not to take it, though he promises to "give a charitable donation of equal size to Father Tully should we ever see Krondor again."

     

This turned out to be a bad idea.

    

Unfortunately, the moment we leave the house, we all exhibit signs of plague. After thinking about it for a second, I decide to head backwards to the Temple of Ruthia rather than press our luck going forward. Alas, I forgot about the Nighthawk ambush that we evaded last time, and so we walk right into it and get slaughtered. My reload is from before contracting the plague, and I have to make that awful roleplayer's choice about whether to stay honest and do the unfortunate thing a second time.

       

I still can't beat these guys.

      

I compromise: I reload from Malac's Cross and spend 409 of my 630 sovereigns on the Keshian Tapir (haggled down from 487). I head for the ambush and buff with the only thing I have that will help: Dalatail Milk. I intend to fight until I win, then go back and get plagued, then return to the temple. I give up on this plan after about 10 tries at the battle. The problem is that the enemies always go first and always pathologically set their sights on Owyn, so he can never cast spells. On my best try, I manage to kill three of them.

        

Plague and poison are represented by percentages. If you can get them to 0, you're cured.

         

So I reload again, get myself plagued, and take my chances on the road ahead. It turns out that I don't have far to go: there's a Temple of Lims-Kragma a stone's throw from the plague houses. But before I find it, I come across the statue of a dragon. As we admire it, Owyn gasps and collapses to the ground. The statue speaks to Owyn in his mind: "I am no dragon though I wear a dragon's skin. I am the Oracle of Aal and I am the last of my race. I am ancient, older than dwarf or elf, older than dragons and older than the Valheru who were their masters." That's pretty damned old.

       

In a D&D game, we'd be on the alert for medusas.

       

The Oracle foretells that Owyn has a great destiny and will need to return to consult the Oracle again. For now, Owyn can ask him about GORATH and DELEKHAN. The Oracle says that Gorath is "not what he names himself to be," but he will be a strong ally to Owyn and perhaps even his own people. "A great destiny awaits him should he have the courage to renounce his pain." He has an even more cryptic but interesting prophecy of Delekhan: "Delekhan will never cross the boundary between the Kingdom and the Northlands, but through treachery he will strike a blow against both the Kingdom and his own Nations of the North." He is working on a "deceit" with six magicians. 

     

The Oracle plays a role in A Darkness at Sethanon. The Aal were the first race to inhabit the world of Midkemia.

       

Back on the road, we find the Temple of Lims-Kragma and soon discover that it will cost more to cure all three of us of plague than we have. Through experimentation, we find that each dose of Restoratives removes 5% of plague, and we have exactly enough for all three characters. I will not be entering any houses with black ribbons again.

    

I almost forget to talk to the head priestess at the temple. Lims-Kragma is the god of death, and James is curious what awaits him after death. The priestess says she can't tell him (or doesn't know), but "there is no joy or love in her realm, but neither is there sorrow or pain." She further relates that Nighthawks swear oaths to other gods to avoid death at the cost of their souls, something explored in Silverthorn. The temple wants 245 sovereigns to bless one of our swords--almost all we have left--so we move on without it. 

     

A random gravestone. That's sad.

      

There's another fairy chest at the next intersection, this one with a more traditional riddle: "It asks no questions, but demands many answers. Don't knock it until you are ready to see what waits on the other side." The answer is 7 letters long. I hope it's not easy because I cannot figure it out. 

   

Around this time, I noticed something interesting about the interface: despite its continuous-movement nature, time does not pass while the party is standing still. Nor does it pass if the party rotates in place. Only forward or backward movement causes the clock to advance. There are implications of this for the engine that I'm at the edge of understanding. One benefit of this approach is that when I switch screens to make notes, I don't have to worry about my characters getting exhausted in the meantime.

   

The road turns north towards Lyton, and a little way up the road, we're ambushed by four Nighthawks. We're able to defeat them. What makes the difference, more than simply one fewer foe, is that two of them are archers. While they're still dangerous, they don't rush forward and crowd Owyn, so Owyn is able to get some space and cast spells, which makes the whole thing go a lot easier. I do take a fair bit of damage, though, and Owyn is hit with a poisoned quarrel. After the battle, we even get a textual description of the poison: It is "slowly sapping his strength, draining him of everything but his will to survive."

     

And before them their rivals are deceased.

      

The poison prevents Owyn from regaining health or stamina. I try an herbal packet, and while it does reduce some of the poison, it's clear its effects will run out before the poison does. I turn around and head back to the Temple of Lims-Kragma, prepared to pay through the nose for the service, only to find that while they charge a Shkrelian cost for curing the plague, they apparently cure poison for free.

   

I'll pause here to say that in general, I enjoy the wound/poison/disease system of this game. I like that none of these conditions are trivial matters, easily healed with a spell or a night of rest. Recovering from a bad battle can take multiple days, a lot of money, or both. Avoiding wounds, or dealing with their consequences, becomes a part of the strategy of gameplay. It affects your choices of what roads and risks to take and informs your overall approach to a chapter. I'd almost call it a "survival mechanic." It adds to the challenge, the realism, and the sense of role-playing.

        

This is just a shot of us approaching the temple.

    

We find an empty chest, an abandoned inn, and some dead-end roads before arriving at a small house with a well in the back. We're zapped by magic as we try to approach the well. Owyn notices magical symbols on the house's front door, and its owner, an elderly man, surprises us as we study them. "I was out back tending some chores," he explains. He introduces himself as Flarr Wygn and says that his late brother, a mage, put protection spells on both the house and the well, which heals all injuries. He offers to let us drink for 25 sovereigns, which we accept. The ease of this healing doesn't negate what I said above, as 25 sovereigns is a hefty chunk of cash, and it turns out that he means each. I don't notice this until much later. I'm curious whether the well would have cured poison or plague, too. I'll remember that it's there in case I need it again.

    

Speaking of 25 sovereigns, a little way up the road, a group of armed men demand that much as a "road tax." They claim to represent Lord Lyton. The game annoyingly doesn't give me the option to fight the brutes, just to pay or leave. I guess perhaps there are too many of them to make fighting a realistic option. I leave and instead sneak into Lyton through the back yards of town. 

    

Arriving at Lyton through a cornfield.

      

In the town, we find:

   

• A house where the occupant is snoring so loud we initially mistake it for a monster.

• An empty barn.

• A house where we hear some noise, but it takes some coaxing to get the residents to come to the door. They assume we're tax collectors and won't accept our pleas to the contrary.

• An abandoned house whose residents left a whetstone with 5 uses, and another one where they left 15 sovereigns.

• A house where the resident is polite but doesn't want to talk with us.

• An inn where we have a drink and spend the night (after I say "yes," I don't know why I wasted money on it, since we're all healed). An NPC tells us that in Romney, the Guild of the Romney and the Riverpullers Guild "are as good as at war." Their conflict is being fueled by a "troublemaker down in Sliden," who's been sending mercenaries, including a local named Max Feeber, to cause trouble while dressed in guild clothing.

     

We find Lord Lyton in his manor a bit to the east of town, and it turns out he's not quite the villain that we assumed. His town has fallen on legitimately hard times since the death of Earl Presser of Romney, and he needs to raise funds. Now he's been ordered to send 12 fully equipped knights to Malac's Cross. He says he can stop the toll patrols if we can deliver 6 suits of standard king's armor to him. This is a tough quest, and not primarily because of finding the armor; we left four sets on the Nighthawks down the road. I can, at best, carry three sets at once without giving up some of my items, and he won't take one at a time. 

     

I've been avoiding screenshots of lots of text, but here's one just to remind you that they exist.

       

Knowing where we can get four sets, we set off to find the other two. I decide to go west of Lyton, looping around the city to avoid the patrols. We come to a house at which we're immediately ambushed by four Quegian pirates. We make short work of them and find they have exactly two suits among them. I take a save at this point, as I don't know if what I'm about to do is going to work. We drop a lot of stuff on the ground outside the house, which the game represents as a sack. We load ourselves up on armor and head back to the dead Nighthawks to get the rest. 

       

Packing my inventory with armor.

     

We return to Lyton, who "rewards" us with a virtue key and a note that offers the passwords to three chests in the area: RIVER, SWORD, and ICE. None of them are long enough for the chest I abandoned earlier. 

    

With the toll-takers gone, I head back to where I dropped my stuff, only to get attacked by three Nighthawks along the way. We deal with them, return to the sacks, and find one of them empty and the other one missing some stuff. Damn it. I needed some of that stuff. Stashing our things in an abandoned house in town doesn't work (it doesn't offer enough room), nor does stashing it in a regular chest (things disappear). Eventually, I go all the way back to the fairy chest that I opened with CHEST and store stuff there, which works, although it doesn't accept much. I only just clear enough space for four suits of armor, so James and Owyn have to give up their own. We return the armor to Lyton, go all the way back to the CHEST chest to get our things, then get new armor from the slain pirates. The whole enterprise took us about 90 minutes real time and a week of game time and leaves me thoroughly annoyed.

    

I decide that rather than continuing direct to Romney to the east, I'll go west as far as Sethanon. I'm hoping to find a shop there to sell my excess stuff. On the way, we find a house and barn. The house is vacant; the barn has a chest with four seals for the glazer's guild. This clearly has something to do with the upcoming quest, so we take them. 

     

I like games that let you stumble onto quest items before you get the quests.

        

Our next stop is at the Six Toe Tavern, where we meet a woman named Nia whose late father ran a goods store across the road. She's closed the store, which has a valuable sword for sale, because of a ghost on the premises. She says that she'll give us the sword if we can get rid of the ghost. There's also a gambler in the tavern, and on a whim I put 50 gold on a dice game and win. 

    

That sounds too easy.

     

Across the street, the game just tells me that the shop is closed. I have no way to interact with it. I lurk around all night looking for a ghost but don't encounter anything. I do note a nearby cemetery, where one of the graves has an inscription indicating that it belongs to Nia's father, Jared Lycrow. Although digging it up seems like a bad idea--the sort of thing that would cause a haunting--there's nothing else we can do with it. When we open the casket, Owyn notes that one of the corpse's hands is missing. During the conversation, the game notes that Gorath once said that the Moredhel use graves as secret caches. I don't remember this, but I guess it's what gives us license to dig up graves throughout the game. I try the others in the cemetery; one has a couple of doses of Naptha (you can apply it to blades); the others just have bodies.

    

We finally arrive at the road to Sethanon. As we turn north, we are attacked by a shade. We kill it without too much trouble, but two steps later, we're attacked by four shades, who absolutely tear us apart. Reloading, we try various other approaches, but it's no use. Something clearly doesn't want us to go to Sethanon.

   

One was hard; four are impossible.

      

Sighing, we head back east. A short distance from Lord Lyton's estate, we deal with a remarkably easy trap and then find, in a copse of trees, three fairy chests:

   

• "An untiring servant it is, carrying loads across the muddy earth. But one thing that cannot be forced, is a return to the place of its birth."

• "With sharp edged wit and pointed poise, it can settle disputes without a noise."

• "Power enough to smash ships and crush roofs. Yet it still must fear the sun."

          

"You guys think maybe we should just walk between them?"

      

For the answers, see above. I think I would have gotten them without Lyton's hints--particularly the last one. I remember all too well the power of ice to destroy roofs. The chests had various useful items that I had nowhere near enough space to carry.

   

Moving on, we meet a man named Abuk who said he was summoned to Lyton to help pick a "Webber lock." James counters that a Webber lock cannot be picked. The two of them argue for a while; finally, Abuk agrees to train James in lockpicking for 70 sovereigns. When James protests, Abuk raises the fee to 80. Suspecting I'll regret spending this much, I nonetheless say "yes."

   

Nice beard. I think it was on the top of another NPC's head.

      

Just outside Sliden, there's a-goddamned-nother trio of fairy chests:

   

• "He got it in the woods and brought it home in his hand because he couldn't find it. The more he looked for it the more he felt it. When he finally found it he threw it away." Irene happened to be outside my office when I read this one, and she suggested TICK, which I thought was a good answer, but it had 5 letters. This got us thinking about other things that you might pick up accidentally in the woods, and I thought about BURR (too short) and SPLINTER (too long) before getting it with (THORN).

• "Death to our Enemies! no Living adversary shall Escape the new King of these Isles. He will lead us to glory And provide new lands for our people!" The odd capitalization leads us right to the answer.

• "Today he is here to trip you up and he will torture you tomorrow. Yet he is also there to ease the pain when you are lost in grief and sorrow." I get this one (ALCOHOL) partly by logic and partly by studying the possible letters.

      

The first chest has a receipt indicating that Isunatus of Cavall Keep received 20,200 sovereigns in rubies and gold from an unknown payee. There are a couple dozen sovereigns in the chest and another 30 or 40 in another. Again, I have to leave a lot of stuff behind.

   

As we approach the city, we're attacked by three rogues who, in a scripted event that we can't avoid, throw disease-ridden dung at us. After we win the easy combat, we're all plagued again. We duck into Silden long enough to buy restoratives and herbal packets at the shop, then head back outside and camp for a couple of days while the medicines do their work. 

       

I keep wanting to write the city's name as "Slidell," which ironically also has a less-than-reputable history with fish people and slavery.

      

Silden is a menu city. In it, we find:

    

• Hakha's Cajunlo, a magic shop. We're able to sell an extra scroll, some rubies, and a few other items for several hundred sovereigns, but the things the shop sells cost a lot more, including 10 magic scrolls and lots of buffing potions and weapon treatments.

         

This will take me a while to save for.

     

• A ship called the Mist Devil (Silden is on the River Rom just before it empties into the sea). The captain offers to take us to the Isle of Eortis for 30 sovereigns. I'm curious, but I don't have any reason to visit.

• A house with a brass-plated lock that James declines to try to pick.

• The Anchorhead Tavern. A dwarf offers a gambling game with cards. A man named Joftaz suggests the rogues who gave us plague were acting at the behest of someone called "The Crawler." A depressed knight has been banned from tourneys because he was caught drinking a potion first; he gives us the remainder of it. The barmaid sells spoiled rations. Owyn tries his luck at barding and makes 14 sovereigns.

        

I wonder if the moose on the wall is supposed to be a homage.

    

Alas, there was no armory to sell the weapons I've been saving for just that purpose.

 

Some miscellaneous note:

    

• Every temple I've visited has had a pit of fire in the center. In every one, when I click on it, the game says: "The fire was cold. Unnerved by the unnatural flame, [Locklear/James] decided to explore elsewhere." Is there ever any purpose to these flames?

      

You think he'd be used to it by now.

     

• The game also offers a generic NPC who recurs at several taverns. He's rude and tells us to go find a "jongleur" because he doesn't have time to entertain us.

• The gambling "games" are all described in text. The game just gives the player the option to bet certain amounts of money. I have no idea whether the result is based on probability or whether it's scripted.

      

Where does the rest go? To taxes?

      

• If it's possible for the characters to get drunk, it's after far more pints than it would take a normal person (and more than I'm willing to buy).

 

I end this session still quite over-encumbered, camped outside Silden, looking up the road to Romney. Krondor is so packed with encounters that I can get more than 3000 words out of  walking a little way up the coast. But now there's only one town between us and our destination. Perhaps we'll solve this guild business and learn more about The Crawler.

   

Time so far: 20 hours

 

Enchantasy: The Quest for the Eternal Grimoire: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

  

This is perhaps the most backhanded reward I've ever received.

       

Enchantasy: The Quest for the Eternal Grimoire

United States

EGA Computing (developer); Orion Innovations (original publisher); Point of View Software (later publisher); also published as shareware.
Versions released between 1993 (maybe 1992) and 1996 for DOS

Date Started: 8 July 2024

Date Ended: 3 October 2024

Total Hours: 47

Difficulty: Moderate (3.0/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)   

         

An enjoyable independent game inspired by Ultima V, Enchantasy takes you on a tiled, iconographic quest to recover the Eternal Grimoire to confront a nebulous evil. The plot and quest are interesting, and the game adopts some of the best elements of Ultima when it comes to NPC dialogue and combat. Most RPG mechanics stall around the half-way mark, however, leaving the balance of the game as a series of adventure-style item puzzles and fetch quests.

    

*****

        

What a stupid place for me to have ended my last entry. I could have wrapped it up in another four paragraphs. All I had left was the final battle.

   

When I last wrote, the party had the Eternal Grimoire in hand and was heading to Xanoc's castle to defeat him, rescue the prince, and end the threat once and for all. The endgame began when we arrived on the Isle of the Dead and marched to Xanoc's castle, ringed by mountains.

     

Ideally, you'd want the castle on top of a mountain, I'd think.

     

The front door was magically locked, but a spell took care of that. As we entered the foyer, Xanoc's voice taunted us: "Soon you will be dead and the Grimoire will be mine!" It did feel a bit irresponsible to bring it right to him. Flames erupted as we explored the various rooms, requiring the Scroll of Flames to calm them, although we learned to avoid them in the first place by walking the perimeters of the rooms.

   

We fought battles with various groups of guards and twisted creatures as we explored. The dungeon was generous with "MP Manna" (full MP recharge) potions, so I was generous with "Thunderclap," which did 27 damage with the Grimoire in hand. 

      

Finds like this meant that we didn't have to hold back.

     

The corners of the castle had locked doors with ladders on the other side, suggesting additional floors, but none of these rooms were accessible, and I suspect they were just there for show.

       

We'll never learn where those ladders go.

     

We explored the east and west wings first and found the prison in one of them. The Prince--I never did find out his name--was behind one of the doors. He offered that Xanoc planned to kill us, take the Grimoire, and rule Savallia. He encouraged us to use the tome to defeat the evil wizard. "He lies through the door north of the castle entrance," he finished, before running off to return to the Royal Castle. I was surprised by this. Something someone had said--I can't find the comment right now--made me assume that when I found the Prince, he would join the party.

    

What is your name?!

      

The north door led to a series of small rooms with barrels. Again, these were generous with potions. Duke Hawthorne met us in one of the rooms, wasted a party of "death guards" on us, then attacked us himself. A few spells and arrows later, he was dead.

       

It's the "hahahaha" that really sells it.

        

Xanoc continued to taunt us as we moved forward, and he kept casting fire fields in our path. He finally attacked us with a bunch of "X guards" and elite archers. It was a tough battle because in addition to mass-damage spells, Xanoc was capable of healing himself. He also had a couple of actions per round and was immune to most spells. It took us a couple of reloads before we got lucky with fewer mass-damage spells from his fingertips, allowing us to kill him before he killed us. I should mention that the Mystic Bow was extremely valuable in these final battles, but I never employed the Mystic Sword because it would have taken too many rounds to even get in melee range.

       

Xanoc and his army.

Xanoc is immune to poison.

      

The game had an additional surprise after we defeated him: We hadn't actually defeated him. He popped up in the next room, taunted us, and attacked again with the same group of companions as before. The battle was as difficult as before for the same reasons. Again, we prevailed, but just barely.

     

Fixing ourselves after the second battle.

     

Rudimon gated in as we neared the final door to Xanoc's throne room. He healed our party (which duplicated what I had already done) and had a little speech:

        

I am very proud of you, my young apprentice! I am proud of you all!! You have vanquished the evil from Savallia and gained control once again of the Eternal Grimoire. Your task is now completed. I always knew you would succeed! We'll meet later at the Royal Castle. 

             

How come I don't have the "Teleport In and Out of Places" spell?

       

But when we continued forward into the throne room, there was Xanoc, alive again through unknown means. He delivered a Trandle Oratory:

        

Well . . . it seems my plans have failed . . . temporarily, that is. He who is the possessor of the power of the Eternal Grimoire shall rule the world! And, rest assured, one day the Grimoire will be mine! This is not over yet . . . It has only just begun. HAHAHAHAHA!

      

Xanoc and Hawthorne have the same sense of humor, it seems.

   

The game fortunately did not make us retrace our steps back to the Royal Castle; it took us there automatically. There was a fun ending sequence--I'm always a sucker for these--that featured every NPC icon in the game. Even RICH9000 showed up. The four characters stood before Rudimon, the Prince, and his girlfriend, Jennifer, with every NPC icon in the game watching the proceedings. Rudimon gave my Level 65 character "the full title of Mage" and appointed me to the Mage Council. I don't know what my friends got. Hopefully, they were at least able to keep their magic weapons.

    

"The Prince and Jennifer were wed and became the King and Queen of Savallia," the game informed me. "All of the hideous creatures suddenly disappeared from the land." The Eternal Grimoire was given over to the Mage Council. 

      

Geologists are particularly happy with the endgame.

     

The final screen is author Erick Abel's dedication to his daughter, Jennifer, who died in 1988 at age 14. As we discussed in a previous entry, Erick ("Ricky") Abel himself died in 2022 at age 70 (making him about 39 when he wrote Enchantasy). His obituary mentions a son, Kyle, who died in infancy. He had two other children. Despite a clear intent to make a sequel to Enchantasy, it sounds like this was his only game. 

    

Sadness tinges the game's final celebration.

      

Enchantasy was a well-structured, well-programmed, competent game. I appreciate its intricate plot, its lack of goofiness, its side quests, and many of its mechanics. There were problems with other mechanics, and with pacing and length, but overall I admire what Abel accomplished and would have encouraged him to make the sequel. Abel is one of the few developers who was capable of adapting the best elements of the tiled, iconographic approach. Ultima V remains the highest-rated game on my blog, and I don't think enough has been done with its interface--not by Origin, which never liked to use the same engine twice, nor by the industry's many cloners, who for simplicity's sake seemed to prefer the earlier Ultimas.

    

Here's the GIMLET:

    

• 5 points for the game world. It's a little derivative, but it makes up for that with a greater amount of depth and breadth than we typically get. NPCs and books impart a sense of history and lore, and there are some minor ways in which the game world evolves with the player's actions.

• 2 points for character creation and development. That's almost all for development, since there's no creation. Leveling, training, and acquiring new spells are rewarding up to a point, but about mid-game, the game stops giving you any rewards for both higher experience levels and higher skill levels.

      

My statistics at the end of the game.

     

• 4 points for NPC interaction. I always like keyword-based dialogues and visible, persistent NPCs who speak in paragraphs and have personalities. I wouldn't have minded more role-playing opportunities or some karma system to give more weight to the interactions.

• 3 points for encounters and foes. Enemies are just icons, really, except that some have bows and magic. Most of the credit here goes to puzzles and non-combat encounters, which were occasionally fun.

• 4 points for magic and combat. A gridded, tactical interface is usually what I want from this kind of game. Enchantasy replicates Ultima V fairly well in that regard. I could have used more spells (although I did enjoy the various exploration spells), and the whole thing got more pointless as the game went on.

      

From the battle with Duke Hawthorne.

      

• 3 points for equipment. There are a few weapon and armor slots, and one thing I like is that the game offers clear "weapon strength" and "armor strength" statistics. On the other hand, the acquisition of gear was a little too linear and predictable.

• 3 points for the economy, which was tight and rewarding for the first third of the game and meant nothing after that.

• 4 points for quests, including a main quest and several side quests (e.g., the Mystic Bow and Mystic Sword) that earned experience or gear. There were no role-playing opportunities or choices during these quests, alas.

• 3 points for graphics, sound, and inputs. Aside from the beautiful title screen, I found the graphics functional enough but nothing special. I felt the same way about sound. I found the keyboard interface easy to master, particularly with the comments offered on-screen.

• 4 points for gameplay. It earns credit for its nonlinear approach and its medium challenge. I would not call it "replayable" since there are no alternate choices to make, and I would have preferred it to come in at closer to 25 hours.

    

On the last point, I was never exactly bored with the game, but it doesn't keep a good balance of plot and mechanics through the end. It starts out with an enjoyable quest, combat, economy, character development, and so forth, but the last 15 hours are all just about the quest. Still, it's hard to do well, and I'm not going to come down too hard on an independent developer for not getting it right when many AAA games of the modern age make the same mistake.

     

Although I didn't engineer it that way, I like that the final total comes to 35, the rough threshold at which I consider a game "recommended." It has its flaws, but it deserves to be better remembered than it is. Except for my own victory and RandomGamer's, I can't find much evidence that anyone else has seen it through to the end.

 

The Internet Archive's hopefully-temporary outage has put the kibosh on a lot of the other stuff I'd normally do at this point, such as search one more time for any magazine mentions or take a final look at Erick Abel's old AOL page about the game. Perhaps I'll post an addendum later. For now, pleasant journeys, Mr. Abel. Your magnum opus lives on.

Game 530: Swords and Serpents (1990)

"Dear graphics department: Not that kind of serpent."

        

Swords and Serpents

United States

Interplay (developer); Acclaim (publisher)

Released 1990 for NES

Date Started: 8 October 2024

    

Commenters have been on me to try this one for years. It is a rare console game, and even rarer NES game, from a western developer. It clearly draws upon Interplay's experience with The Bard's Tale and other games of its ilk; indeed, its original lead designer, Paul O'Connor, also led the creation of Dragon Wars the same year. It benefited from slick marketing, which included cover art by Boris Vallejo and a rare (for the genre) television commercial. [Ed. To clarify, I didn't play it because comments have been on me for years. It was the product of a random roll.]

       

Given all of this, the game is surprisingly lame. I've taken plenty of shots at console games of the era, but I know that the platform was capable of better than this dumbed-down Bard's Tale in which every mechanic is more limited than any multi-character CRPG from five or six years earlier. I think I might have enjoyed the unrelated 1982 Intellivision game more. Nonetheless, I had a little fun with it, particularly when I started mapping. I'm never completely dissatisfied when I'm mapping. 

      

The party fights what I guess is a zombie.

      

The developers wasted no time on the story. Four adventurers have entered a dungeon on a quest to find and kill a serpent who has made "the crops go bad, the milk turn sour, and the earth heave with foul indignation." One wonders if the serpent isn't being scapegoated here, as I don't remember any setting that gives dragons the power to disease crops or sour milk. The default party--the one described in the manual--includes one warrior (Ajax), a thief (Mask), and two magicians (Iago and Erin). You can create your own, rolling for strength, intelligence, and agility on a scale of 2-14. I decided to go with a less magical party and played two warriors, a thief, and a magician. A few hours into it, and I think I'm going to regret not having two magicians.

    

An NPC--whose survival in this dungeon is unexplained--gives us the main quest.

     

I should mention that the game supports campaigns with two or four players--two with both game controllers and four with a four-player adapter. One player has to be designated the "lead"; he can move the entire party while the others can just control their character actions and inventories. This system strikes me as so pointless and annoying in a blobber that I can't imagine that anyone ever did it.

       

Rolling a new character.

     

The game begins in the top level of a dungeon of what I guess is 16 levels, since the blank maps provided in the manual go up to 16. Each level is 16 x 16 squares. In the tradition of other gridded blobbers, the dungeon is peppered with messages and encounters, including plenty of battles. The graphics offer only the most basic textures, and you don't see anything in the environment. The most banal, repetitive tune plays on an endless loop, and the game offers no ability to turn it off. I had to mute sound entirely.

    

Enemies respawn continually, with a chance of attack every time you move or turn. The game cycles through your characters in order of their appearance on the screen, and if you just mash the "A" button, you'll execute a default attack and get the battle over quickly. Health meters for the enemies monitor your progress. You theoretically can target the enemy's head or legs by holding the up or down directional buttons while hitting "A." Maybe this becomes important later, but I didn't notice any difference in the zombies, spiders, guards, and bats that I encountered on Level 1.

 

I imagine this is some kind of ogre.

     

Mages can naturally cast spells by hitting the "B" button during their turn. They start with only "Flash Fire" and "Heal," but I found "Sting" fairly early on Level 1. ("The ways of magic are scattered through the maze," a message offers.) The manual indicates that the game offers 16 possible spells, and that I'll eventually find mass-damage spells like "Phalanx" and "Thunder." For now, "Flash Fire" and "Sting" don't seem to do much more than physical attacks, so I've been saving my points for "Heal."

    

Late in the session, Kirk goes to cast a spell.

     

Despite the need to cast an occasional spell, I found combat exceedingly boring even holding down the TAB key in Nestopia to speed it up. If I weren't mapping at the same time, I'm not sure I'd put up with the relentless repetitiveness of this one.

    

Slain enemies reward the party with gold and experience and occasionally an item. The party gains experience and levels as a unit rather than as individual characters. Gold can be spent at an armory on Level 1. I assume that armories are found on other levels, but I'm not sure. I mostly used the armory to sell things, but it offers Swords +2 worth grinding for.

     

Leveling up.

       

Levels 1, 5, and 10 (according to a message) also offer temples, which heal you for free. These are the only places to raise dead characters. I imagine they're good places to grind, since you can just mash "A" with abandon and then turn around and get healed. I got the party up to Level 4 doing this, while earning enough money to buy one of those +2 swords.

        

My primary fighter's equipment late in this session.

       

On Level 1, I learned that to slay the dragon, I would need to collect seven "ruby treasures" which had belonged to a previous adventurer. One of them is apparently a ruby sword, which lies "at the point of the sword." An NPC in a 1 x 1 room asked for the "black crystal," but I never found it on the level, so I guess I'll be coming back here later.

     

Rude!

     

The levels all have names, which you can check by going to the party status option. Level 1 is called "Destiny Awaits." Level 2's name is "Who's Zoomin' Who?," which refers to the first appearance of "zoom tubes," or fast transports from one level to another. A couple of early messages explained how they work. Late in the level, you step into one (after a couple of messages of warning), which takes you back up to Level 1, in a spot near the store and healer. The tube is only two steps away from the stairs to Level 3 in terms of coordinates, but it's 60 steps given the wall patterns. I assume that later, when I'm trying to transition levels quickly, I'll be expected to use the mage's "Passwall" spell.

        

There was nothing wrong when they were just "teleporters."

      

The return trip to Level 1 was welcome, as I needed to heal, and I had a lot of items to sell. When I was done, I had enough money for a second +2 sword. I also found various armor upgrades during my explorations--helms, shields, scale mail, and such. Watching your armor class slowly increase is an experience that never really gets old in any game.

    

Nintendo was capable of the "+" symbol, correct?

    

The northwest section of Level 2 was taken up with a maze of 1 x 1 rooms. I wish developers wouldn't do this. They offer no navigational challenge, yet they're a pain in the neck to map. The only things to find in the maze were a +1 sword and the "Shield" spell, which increases armor class by 1. It can be cast out of combat, which is useful, but it doesn't last all that long.

     

An oddly prophetic name.

      

Level 2 had a 2 x 2 area that I couldn't enter plus a door in the southeast corner locked with a gold key. This meant, as with the black crystal (and a 1 x 1 area) on Level 1, I'd have to come back at some point. I'm glad I'm mapping.

      

My map of Level 2.

     

Level 2 had the same spiders, bats, guards, and zombies as Level 1, though they seemed harder. It also had some warty-faced thing that was probably meant to be an ogre. There were four of these guarding the way to Level 3 in a fixed encounter, and it took me a couple of tries to beat them. The party rose to character Level 5 before we took the stairs down.

Level 3 ("The Threshold") began with a tough combat against a new enemy--some kind of sorcerer, I guess--which put us at character Level 6. A corridor brought us to a central room with four doors, but only the southwest one was unlocked. Each door led to a different quadrant, and the shtick of the level was that we needed to trip a switch in each section to unlock the door to the next one. (If we couldn't figure it out, an NPC helpfully offered, "Locked doors have remote triggers.") The southwest quadrant had a tube back to Level 1 and a horseshoe.

       

My map of Level 3.

      

The northwest section had a little maze and the "Deadeye" spell, which improves accuracy for one character in one battle. It hardly seems worth it. The southeast quadrant offered the laziest of all gridded dungeon designs: a spiral. I suppose in this case it served a purpose, as it ended in a blank wall, where 99% of players were bound to test for secret doors. If you hadn't already figured out how secret doors work, this section would teach you. As if to drive it home, an NPC on the other side says, "Ah . . . that was a secret door."

       

That David played and it pleased the Lord?

       

The northeast quadrant was full of traps, but a message in the southwest had warned, "To avoid the traps to the northwest [sic], stay near the walls." In addition to the stairs leading down to Level 4, the quadrant also held a fountain where mages could restore spell points and (behind a secret door) a gold key. I used it back on Level 2 and found the Ruby Glasses. 

     

The game makes it sound like Chet is doing something wrong.

        

The only new enemy I noticed on the level was some kind of skeletal thing. It seems too early for liches, but I don't know what else is skeletal and floats. As with Level 2, the bats, spiders, guards, and zombies seemed to hit extra hard.

     

I asked ChatGPT, "What is a good punchline to the riddle, 'What is skeletal and floats?'" It came up with: "A buoy-t." I don't know what it means, but that's what I'm calling this enemy from now on.

     

Let's talk about saving. As I usually do, I've tried to adhere to the game's intended difficulty by walking all the way back to the temple when a character dies, and by not otherwise using save states to undo bad luck or bad choices. I am not, however, adhering to the game's intended process for loading and reloading when I suffer a full-party death or end a session. Despite appearing three years after Zelda had no trouble with saving, Swords requires you to write down a 10- or 12-character code for each character, plus another 14-character code for the game itself. Remember, you have to re-enter all these codes by arrowing around an on-screen keyboard with the directional pad. "Reloading" must have taken half an hour. Even then, the code doesn't save the experience points you've earned towards the next character level, nor the auto maps, nor the exact dungeon level the party was on. Instead, when you reload, you return to the closest temple. Screw that.

    

I'm curious how players who encountered this game on the NES felt about it. I'm conscious these days that I look for a different experience with console RPGs than computer RPGs, and I'm not sure that paper maps and external notes are part of that experience. And surely the music lovers turned the music off for this one, right?

   

Time so far: 5 hours