Knightmare: A Few We've All Had

You've spent 8 hours on a task only to find that you're only 25% done.

    

Ugh. I don't know about this one. At first, I was looking forward to some classic Dungeon Master-style gameplay, but Knightmare isn't satisfying that urge so far. In fact, it's doing a good job living up to it's name. Let's take a little tour.

You're starving and there's no food

If you've ever thought, "I really like Dungeon Master gameplay. If only it existed in a world where food is so sparse that you have to chase rabbits around the map for hours just to survive," this is the game for you.
    

The blue-ish shading on the character's torso and legs serves as a food meter.

    
I started the first quest without understanding the importance of food. I didn't even notice the "food meter" (admittedly, because I didn't read the manual carefully), which is actually a subtle shading of the character's paper doll in inventory view. Apparently, when the meter runs out, you no longer recover health, stamina, and magic when you rest. Meanwhile, if your stamina bottoms out, you start taking hit point damage every few seconds. Thus, a starving character finds himself in an inescapable death spiral unless he can get to some food. I had made it about halfway through the first dungeon before I realized what was happening, and I had to hightail it back to the forest to kill some rabbits before I died.

Fortunately, rabbits continually respawn, so getting enough food is just a matter of time. I didn't return to the dungeon until I had backpacks full of rabbit pies.

You're in front of a bunch of people in your underwear

I've never met a game stingier with inventory. That's not a complaint. It's just funny. As I noted last time, the characters apparently start nude because their inventory slots are soon equipped with t-shirts and shorts. Later, I found some sandals, blouses, and skirts. There was one baseball cap. That's as good as the armor ever got.
   
Weapons weren't much better. Most games would give you swords and maces right away, but after scouring the first dungeon, I discovered that the final room produced, as the ultimate reward....a kitchen knife. It replaced a regular knife I'd been holding in my off-hand.

You try to fight, but all your attacks are useless

More than both Dungeon Master and Captive (and Eye of the Beholder, for that matter), Knightmare relies on tricks to prevail in combat--tricks such as the much-maligned "combat waltz" and crushing enemies in closing doors. A head-on battle is suicide. At first, not even the waltz served me well. It would take forever to kill a four-pack of trolls. For most of the first level, I led almost every pack of monsters back to the nearest push-button door and slammed them in it repeatedly to kill them. There was also a fun corridor where pulling a lever caused a fireball to roar down it and kill everything in its path.
    

Crushing gnomes in a door while I fight them.

    
(If you're just joining us, games using engines like Dungeon Master's let you damage enemies with parts of the environment, including closing doors and grates. This usually does more damage than regular combat. The "combat waltz" is when you attack an enemy from the side, then turn and side-step before he can turn and attack you. When he walks into your previous square, you attack again, then turn and side-step. You continually walk boxes around the enemy this way until he dies, denying him the chance to attack head-on. It works as long as your digital dexterity holds out.) 

My strategy didn't work in a few places in the game where enemies occupy islands and you can't lead them to a door. It took forever to kill them. At least, at first. As time passed, I began to re-acquaint myself with the combat waltz, and I realized I'd been doing it too gingerly. You don't swipe once or twice between side-step turns: you line up a row of weapons for your first two party members and sweep across it, right-clicking that mouse furiously, giving yourself carpal tunnel syndrome in the process. If you're fast, you can do 100 points of damage per turn instead of just 15 or 20. I did much better in later combats.

Nothing works the way it's supposed to

I end this session not understanding a bunch of aspects of the game, and it's beginning to annoy me. My two rear characters, for instance, regain stamina extremely slowly when they sleep. In fact, sometimes they lose it for the first minute. (Sleeping can take a few minutes to restore everyone fully.) If they're almost out, they might lose the rest of it, then start taking hit point damage while they're sleeping specifically to recover health and stamina. It's not because they have no food. I've checked that.
    

Sleeping as Armea's stamina refuses to budge.

    
My priest has a staff that allows her to cast various spells, but the healing spells only ever seem to target the character in Position 2. And one spell, "Aid," which is supposed to cure injuries, doesn't seem to work at all. A couple of my characters have red boxes around some of their body parts, indicating an injury that doesn't heal over time. "Aid" is supposed to help with those, I think, but does nothing. If you see anything I'm doing wrong, please let me know.

You're drowning--in piranha-infested waters

I found out the hard way that walking into water is instant death. There were a number of water squares in the first dungeon, and the only way to cross them is to find a boat. If you do that, you're in good shape--except for the piranhas (or whatever--the enemies aren't named) that rear out of the water and do massive damage. Fortunately, they die in a few blows, but they can easily kill you in the meantime.
   

A piranha jumps out of the water and kills my front two characters.

    
Let me cover the first quest dungeon briefly. Like Captive, Knightmare packs a lot of enemies and content in a small space. The map below doesn't look very big, and indeed if it was a Fate map, I would have traversed it in 30 minutes. But in Knightmare, it took nearly 5 hours. One in three or four squares has something that slows you down: a monster, a button, a door, a pressure plate, a talking head, or some minor puzzle to solve. At the beginning, I was annotating grates in the walls and floors before I realized they were just environmental features.
    

The major part of the fist dungeon.

    
The level was very linear, and in retrospect I didn't need to map it at all, since each puzzle simply led to the next immediate area. To say "puzzles" is generous. Given the nature of the show, I was expecting some mentally-challenging obstacles. Instead, the puzzles were of the trite Dungeon Master sort: find a hidden button, weigh down a pressure plate, and so forth. These can be challenging if done well (cf. Chaos Strikes Back), but they were very easy and obvious here. Maybe the later levels get harder.

I didn't expect so many combats. Again, I thought it would stress puzzle-solving over fighting. But the dungeon was swarming with walking trees, gnomes, and trolls (again, I'm guessing at the names), some of whom took a long time to kill even with the standard strategies.

The game began in a small corridor with a key. Throughout the first dungeon, I routinely found keys right before the doors that they opened, so I won't mention this every time. There was also some kind of dancing plant in the corridor that a talking head told me was "the Sprig of Life and Death." I couldn't find anything productive to do with it. Maybe it resurrects people? I didn't try.
    

When a sign warns you not to do something, don't do it.

     
Further on was a corridor with a lever on the wall. A talking head warned, "Do not play with fire." I pulled the lever and a fireball came roaring down the hall, killing everyone. I later used this corridor to kill some difficult enemies.
     

Dungeon Master had all these puzzles without the hints.

   
Further along: a pressure plate with a talking head that said, "Keep the pad down." I had to toss some random item on it to open a secret area. Later, there was another pressure plate that toggled a hidden door on a nearby wall.

The tunnels led to a place labeled "sewer entrance." They seemed to dead-end in a 2 x 3 area, but a pressure plate opened a hidden wall and a bunch of enemies attacked. After I defeated them, I reached a 3 x 3 dead end, where another pressure plate opened another hidden wall, and I had many more enemies to fight.
     

This is a "first" for a Dungeon Master-style game.

    
Past them was a corridor full of water and a boat. Moving in the boat is no different than moving on land, but the corridors tended to be more restricted, and I had to fight enemies without doing the waltz. There were a few patches of land ringing the water area, with numerous trolls. There generally wasn't enough room to waltz them on land, so I took to fighting from the boat, darting up to them, attacking a few times, and backing away. It took a long time.

Getting out of this area meant finding three buttons to open hidden walls, and some of the buttons are very obscure. You basically have to turn, face, and study every wall. Eventually, I crossed through a small corridor to another boat, which dumped me off by a portal.
    

Would you have noticed that button?

    
The portal took me to a large area labeled "the prison" with a gated area in the middle. There was no obvious way to open the gates. After I'd mapped everything and checked every wall twice, finding no buttons, I sighed and started testing them for secret doors. You can do this one of two ways: by walking into them (taking damage) or by throwing something at them. When I saw a dart sail through one of the walls, I knew I had a secret door. Until this moment, I wasn't aware that such secret doors existed in this game, and now I wonder how many I missed in the opening area. Looking at the map, I guess I can only see a couple of areas where they would have fit into the empty wall space.

The secret door led to a button, which opened one of the prison gates. For the next 90 minutes, I killed every troll, gnome, and walking tree that came out of the prison. This wasn't helped by the fact that they had a tendency to wander into the portal going back to the sewers. So I'd think I had everything cleared, and then "bling!" another party would blunder back through the portal.

In the prison area proper, another button opened another hidden doorway that led me to the final area. Here, through a gate, I encountered the first "new" enemy in a long time--some kind of cloaked figure with a sword. At first, I tried fighting him while the gate crushed him, but he was too smart for that and went wandering away after a few rounds. So I had to chase him down and waltz him to death.
    

After a level of goofy-looking trolls and gnomes, this guy was a little terrifying.

    
Then, I faced the final enemy: some kind of troll blocking a corridor. He refused to budge, so no waltzing or door-crushing possible. After exhausting my missile weapons, I walked up and took him head-on. I had to retreat and heal a couple of times, but ultimately I killed him in regular combat.
     

This guy won't budge.

    
Just beyond the troll was a pressure plate. Stepping on it rewarded me of an image of a shield. The actual Shield of Justice was on the ground nearby, where a talking head said, "Well done! Quest One completed." Finally, a pit dumped me back in the forest. The game is clearly copying Chaos Strikes Back here, where finding every bit of Corbum Ore was followed by dropping through a pit to the starting area. There, the geography made sense, but here it doesn't.
     

It's a nice graphic, anyway.

    
Other notes:

• Spellcasting is weird, probably because Captive didn't have a casting mechanic. You have to find wands specific to the spellcasting classes. When you first acquire them, you can only cast the most basic spells of that class. Practice allows you to cast higher-level spells. You can also vary the amount of power that goes into each spell, from 1 to 6. I find I'm only able to cast a few spells with each rear character before they need to rest. My rear characters spend most of the game not doing much of anything.

    

Setting the spell power and type.

   

• The more I think about it, the more I realize that Crowther pulled a fairly blatant ripoff of Dungeon Master for the character development system. Captive was clearly inspired by Dungeon Master but had a lot of its own mechanics; most of those are gone here, and the makers of Dungeon Master probably should have gotten a co-credit. In Captive, you had standard experience points that you spent on skills. In Knightmare, you advance in each of the game's classes as you use weapons and skills specific to those classes. Knightmare even copies Dungeon Master's hierarchy system: novice apprentice, adept, expert, and so forth.

   

My use of a variety of weapons has leveled me in several classes.

    

• There is no economy in the game, and monsters generally don't drop anything at all.

I haven't tried yet, but I assume that the Shield of Justice is the "cover" that one of the trees is looking for, and the other two will be satisfied with the sword and cup. The final area will thus lead me to the crown, which makes sense because one of the squares in the outdoor area tells me to bring the crown there.

I really hope the puzzles get more complex in the rest of the quests, but perhaps buttons and pressure plates is all that this engine supports.

Time so far: 8 hours
Reload count: 8