Game 148: Halls of Death (1981)

Halls of Death

United Kingdom

Stewart Sargaison (developer); Supersoft (publisher)

Released 1981 or earlier for Commodore PET; 1983 for Commodore 64

Date Started: 9 June 2014
Date Ended: 9 June 2014

Total Hours: 2

Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)
Final Rating: 10
Ranking at Time of Posting: 5/143 (3%)

[Note: I played Halls of Death as if it was a Commodore 64 original, released in 1983, but some later research shows that it was actually first released for the Commodore PET, at least as early as 1981 and perhaps one or two years before that. Pending further discoveries, I'm carrying it now as a 1981 game.]

Halls of Death is one of those games that was probably a lot of fun when it was released, but a month from now, I'll have to read my own review to remember anything about it. It's one of several dozen games released for non-DOS platforms in the early 1980s that I originally skipped because of my "DOS-only" rule. While I now recognize the rule was stupid, it did have a certain utility. DOS may have been the worst platform in the early 1980s, but that means that anyone who took the trouble to port a game to it generally had a good game. Games that only existed for a single platform, like this one, are more likely to be instantly forgettable.

A typical Halls of Death screen. I'm on dungeon Level 3 (out of 6) and I've been in the dungeon for 153 moves. The partially-revealed map shows white dots in squares I've explored, circles at traps, and checkerboards at stairs. I've accumulated 451 in gold, and thanks to some lucky equipment finds, my strength has risen from 9 to 36. My constitution is very low, however, and I need to get out of the dungeon.

In Halls of Death, you maneuver a nameless adventurer through six levels of randomly-generated mazes. Each square in the maze can contain a monster, a treasure, a trap, a stairway, or nothing at all. The goal is nothing more or less than to amass treasure and increase your overall score.

As an RPG, it's very primitive. There's no character creation process--everyone starts with 9 strength, 15 psi (magic) points, and 9 constitution. If any of these fall to 0, the character dies. There's no equipment or inventory: magic items that you find in the rooms convert directly to one of the statistics. (Swords become strength, stamina potions become constitution, psi helmets become psi power, and so on.) There are no combat tactics except knowing when to retreat, when to cast a spell, and when to trust the sword.

Battle with a troll.

The game has only four spells: sleep, teleportation, lightning, and fireball. Each depletes a large amount of psi power, and it's unlikely that a player will be able to cast more than a couple in any one expedition, so they're mostly "hail Mary" options for when you're up against a tough foe. Physical combat is just a matter of trading blows until one of you is dead.

Putting a dwarf to sleep.

Enemies faced in the dungeon are standard D&D fare--trolls, dwarves, bandits, gargoyles, ogres, and the like. Some undead creatures have special attacks. Mummies can kill you instantly; wraiths can only be damaged by magic; and skeletons deplete constitution. Naturally, the lower you go in the dungeon, the tougher the enemies you face.

The game is almost entirely about luck. Every time you step in a new square, the game makes a random roll for what you find there. If you're lucky enough to get a few magic swords, bolstering your strength, you might be able to survive a few combats. If you encounter a tough enemy right away, you'll probably die.

Horribly.

In an emergency, you can trade strength for psi power or vice versa, at a cost of 3 points for every 1 point gained. The bigger problem is constitution. You lose a point for every combat you fight, win or lose, so the value acts as a sort of timer that counts down battles before you have to get back to the surface. Explored squares remain empty, so you can usually find a trail back to the surface if you need to.

Back on the surface, the game gives you a score based on how much treasure you collected and what enemies you've slain. Your strength and constitution regenerate if they're depeleted, and you have a chance to re-enter the dungeon and try again.

On the fifth and sixth levels, you occasionally encounter caverns with dragons guarding hoards of treasure. Naturally, these beasts are very tough. They have a lot of hit points, and they do significant damage with breath attacks. But if you can defeat them, you'll collect more treasure than you would in hours of roaming the upper floors.

Taking on a dragon guarding his hoard.

The manual suggests a sort-of "main quest" to achieve the rank of "Ruler of Light." But the manual doesn't tell you anything about where this rank lies in comparison with the others. I worked my way from "peasant" to "hero." Can we all just agree that there really isn't any "main quest" and I don't really have to play for hours and hours to achieve "Ruler of Light" to "win" the game?

"Hero" feels pretty good.

The game doesn't fare well in a GIMLET. With no game world description, no character creation, character development that consists only of finding items, no NPCs, primitive magic and combat, no controllable inventory, and so forth, it scores only a 10. I do give it credit for relatively brisk gameplay, an easy-to-master control scheme, and innovative use of color in an era where things tended towards the drab and monochrome.

The game cover.

In a broad sense, Halls of Death--just like Gateway to Apshai and Expedition Amazon--achieved exactly what it set out to achieve. It provided a reasonably fun dungeon romp in an era where the typical computer game was an arcade game. C64 players who transitioned to Halls of Death from, say, Space Invaders must have been enraptured by the idea of a persistent hero who could be saved to tape and could continue to grow more powerful. It's a dynamic that started with The Dungeon ("pedit5") on PLATO and continued throughout this era with the variations on DND and Telengard. It's just that, by now, Ultima III and Wizardry had shown what was possible with more evocative worlds, deeper stories, and more intense combat tactics. We stop seeing games like Halls of Death right around 1985, when the Silver Age offers titles like The Bard's Tale, Phantasie, and Might & Magic--all games that still stand up reasonably well in 2014.

Halls of Death is credited to Stewart Sargaison, who might be the same programmer who shows up working for Psygnosis in 1993, with credits on Bram Stoker's Dracula and Microcosm. He also might be the same person credited as a "3D programmer" on the 2000 Vin Diesel film Pitch Black. Given his two publishers were British, I'm guessing he is, too.

The game was published by Supersoft, a British company founded in 1978. Almost all of their offerings were arcade and action games; this and Lord of the Balrogs from the same year--coming up in a few games--are the only RPGs I can find in their catalog. The original version, for the Commodore PET, now seems to be lost, but a 1981 ad in a Commodore magazine attests to its existence, the "rave reviews" that it supposedly obtained, and another lost game from the same era called Wizard's Lair.

I'm not going to get my Pulitzer for this post, but I do appear to be the first person to have written about Halls of Death in any detail (no Wikipedia or MobyGames entries), so my blog has once again served the purpose of cataloging the obscure. Back, I suppose, to Dragonflight.