Ultima Underworld: Om Cah Vincit Omnia

I don't know if this is the first game to show toilets, but it is the first to depict them in a 3D engine.

           

Origin, I have long accepted your retcons of geography, history, and zoology from title to title, but could you at least not screw up the mantras? The one thing that has remained consistent for the past three games? I mean, you may or may not need a rune to chant them, and you may need to chant them one time or three times, but at least we all know what they are, right?

While exploring Level 1 of the Underworld, you come upon a room shaped like an ankh. And if that isn't enough to drive it home, in the middle of the room is a standing ankh. What you do, after you've gained a level or two, is speak to the ankh and chant a mantra, and the ankh will bestow upon you an increase to one or more of your skills based on the mantra.

Now, individual skills have their own mantras. I don't know what they are yet, because I haven't found them, but they exist. But you can increase several random skills within a class (magic, stealth, or combat) by chanting the mantras associated with truth, love, and courage, which plaques in the ankh room give, respectively, as MU AHM, OM CAH, and SUMM RA.

          

Using the mantras to improve skills.

        

How is SUMM RA the mantra of courage? Those are the mantras of honor and valor smashed together. Now, I admit there is some confusion on the subject of the mantra of courage. "Courage" isn't a virtue but rather a principle of virtue, and it's never explicitly assigned a mantra in previous games. It's likely that it has one, however, because all the gargoyle principles of virtue have them (UN, OR, US). Courage is, of course, assigned a syllable: COR, part of the three-part VERAMOCOR. If anything ought to be the mantra, that probably ought to be it. If not, I would accept something from The Book of Lost Mantras. There are at least four in there that aren't a virtue mantra, a gargoyle mantra, or something stupid like BANG or MEOW. BEM, maybe. Or NID, PEY, LIS, or MHO? No matter what, if you were going to create a "mantra of courage" by cramming together the mantras of the individual virtues, you need them all. It ought to have been SUMM CAH RA OM. Truth ought to be AHM BEH SUMM OM. How did "love" end up as the only one with the mantra of spirituality (OM) and somehow not get compassion (MU), which derives only from love? This was amateur hour, Origin. Did you not have any Venn diagrams left over from Ultima IV?

Aside from that, no complaints on the first level. It was a nice mix of combat, treasure upgrades, and NPCs, and overall an easy way to introduce the player to the game's conventions.

One of those conventions, and perhaps the one least familiar to players who grew up on the previous 10 years of RPGs, is the use of 3D space. The level is full of slopes, staircases, bridges, and drop-offs, essentially creating three "stories" within the single level, so you're constantly moving up and down. A river with several branches threads through the level's base, and some locations are accessible only by swimming, which is perilous because you take regular damage (I think it depends on the "Swimming" skill) and you can't fight while in water.

         

Trying to swim after falling off a platform.

       

On the plus side, except for a couple of bridges, spaces rarely overlap. This makes the automap easy to read; I thought I had remembered that it was an unholy mess, and I'm glad I was wrong. The automap is also extremely useful to identify locations with secret doors. You can see their outlines in a well-lit room, and when you click on the wall with the eye icon, it quite frankly tells you "secret door," but you still might miss a few if you don't look for obvious blank spaces in the map.

           

The map half filled-in. I can tell I'm missing a secret area in the southwest.

         

The jumping puzzles started sooner than I expected. I had forgotten how important jumping is to the game. In the southeast section of the level are two areas that you can only reach by jumping across platforms. One has the ankh cross that lets you level up, so it's pretty vital. It takes a little while to master the jumping mechanics. Jumping after running (with the "W" key) sends you farther than jumping after walking (with the "S" key), but either way you end up sailing farther than would seem humanly possible. You also bounce off any wall you hit on the other side, which can be inconvenient when trying to land on a particular platform. I spent a lot of time in the drink before I got comfortable with the controls.

           

Aim is everything.

          

It turns out that three non-hostile factions live on the first level: gray goblins, green goblins, and human exiles. Each of their areas was marked with ankh banners. Each had at least one NPC who imparted a bit of lore, and each had at least two willing to trade. I thought that I remembered that they were barely civilized, prone to turning hostile at the slightest bump, but it turned out they were authentically friendly.

The outcast humans were led by a guy named Bragit. The impression was that they'd all been cast into the Abyss by Baron Almric for various crimes. Bragit told me that Almric's soldiers had recently invaded the Abyss (presumably chasing Arial) but were defeated by the goblins. 

            

Bragit gives me some advice.

         

Bragit himself had recently been imprisoned by the gray goblins but managed to escape by pressing the cage release button with a pole. When I later visited the goblins, I found the cage, the pole, and a note that Bragit had left behind.

           

The scene as Bragit described it.

         

Most of the other outcasts had no names, but they offered some information about the Abyss and its inhabitants. They confirmed that a troll had recently been seen carrying a young woman through the level.

The gray and green goblins hate each other--the feud apparently predates their colonization of the Abyss--but I never saw them in combat with each other. The gray goblins' chief, Ketchaval, warned me of a giant spider named "Navrey Night-eyes," who I think I defeated. I didn't get an option to tell him that, though. He also said that Cabirus (the guy who founded the settlement) was a "fool" who killed himself when he realized his dream had failed.

Another gray goblin named Jaacar warned me not to wade around in the privies because one of them had a long drop, presumably to a lower level. Finally, the area had a locked door that said "Keep Out!" I did so in the interests of role-playing, but part of me worries there was something important behind there.

          

I wasn't planning to go splashing around a goblin's outhouse anyway, but it's nice to know there's a shortcut if I need it.

       

The green goblin chief was named Vernix. His bodyguard, Lanugo, warned me that I should bow and scrape when I spoke to him. Lanugo also gave me his personal recipe for rotworm stew.

         

And yet it still sounds better than Manhattan Clam Chowder.

         

Vernix had the most dialogue of all the NPCs once I stopped asking him things directly and started saying complimentary stuff about his clothes and decorations. He mentioned good relations with the mountain-folk and seers below (which makes sense as the way down is through his territory), and he warned me that while the lizardmen understand "the common tongue," they can't speak it. "Sseth" and "click" mean "yes" and "no," but he doesn't know which is which. He was also kinder in his remembrances of Cabirus, calling him "a born leader" who "had all of us working together so well." But while he'd heard of the eight talismans, he didn't know anything about them. 

         

As much as I want to know the information in options 2-4, I need to ask #1 to get him to keep talking.

        

Both goblin tribes had a few members willing to trade. Trading in the game is fairly straightforward: you highlight the items you want in the other character's inventory, highlight the ones you're willing to trade in your inventory, then make the offer. I mostly used it to get gold for some on of my surplus.

             

Offering gold for a shield.

          

Enemies on the level included rogue versions of the gray and green goblins, slimes, rotworms, bats, giant spiders, a skeleton, and a beast in the water called a "lurker" that I was unable to kill because it's hard to fight someone in the water.

            

Soon.

        

A couple of the bats got away because they can fly, and I lost track of one goblin when I knocked him off a bridge into the river. Overall, the combats were simple enough.

        

In other news that I don't want to talk about just yet, I downloaded Kingdom Come: Deliverance over the weekend and was amused at how similar the combat is to this 26-year-old game.

       

Special encounters and puzzles included:

• A silver sapling growing out of the ground. A sign nearby encouraged me to plant its seed, and indeed when I messed with the sapling, it turned into a silver seed (anticipating the subtitle to the add-on to Ultima VII Part 2). I haven't figured out where to plant it yet.

• The aforementioned ankh room. 

• A room with four levers. I haven't solved this puzzle yet.

            

I didn't see any hints to help me with this puzzle, and I didn't feel like fiddling with it randomly.

         

• A healing fountain behind a secret door.

           

A well-placed fountain of healing.

       

• The first time I slept, I got a vision of the same guy who came to my dreams shouting "treachery and doom!" This time, he spoke of the importance of visiting the civilized races.

           

Mysteriously, all the important words are elided.

        

• At the top of a long jumping puzzle, the gravestone of a man named Korianous, "the Master Builder," who labored to re-design the Abyss under Cabirus's direction.

        

Wouldn't this game had been better if instead of "Cabirus" and "Korianous," they'd drawn from NPCs actually in previous Ultimas?

       

• An orb that showed me a vision of "bizarre creatures [floating] in space" and "a green path, flanked by a black void on either side." The vision concludes: "Somehow you know the path leads to Britannia."

• Several jumping puzzles where I had to trust my automap and leap into the darkness, assuming there was something to land on on the other side.

             

I rose to Level 5 during the level and used my "meditation slots" to improve abilities of all three principles, particularly concentrating on mana. I had failed to note during the first entry, because I had nothing to cast yet, that I started with only 2 mana points. This wasn't enough to cast anything. Only once I had meditated for more mana could I start to cast spells, including "Light" (In Lor), which was vital because I ran out of torches and spent about an hour exploring with no light source. I have this vague recollection that there's a way to make more torches with sticks, and I've been carrying around two sticks for that purpose, but I don't remember how. Funny how this plagues me two games in a row. Anyway, I'm not sure I'll use any more torches because the "Light" spell does a much better job. 

           

The detritus after a battle with a skeleton.

          

As I end the level, I can't spare the weight for another inventory item. This is partly because I'd been carrying around a lot of junk hoping to sell it, but the individuals who would trade didn't have that much money, or indeed any items I wanted to trade for. I'm wearing a full suit of leather armor: cap, gloves, vest, boots, and leggings. I'm wielding an axe, which has become my weapon specialty and will likely remain so unless I find a magic something-else first. I have 29 gold pieces and a wooden shield. Among six containers, I have 2 loaves of bread, an apple, 3 day-old pieces of meat, 2 edible plants, 2 sticks, 2 ears of corn, a bottle of water, 2 badly worn shortswords, a hand axe, a cudgel, 7 sling stones (I sold the slings), a serviceable leather vest, a leather helmet, a buckler, badly worn leggings, 2 bottles of oil, a bone, a skull, 3 spools of strong thread (recovered from a giant spider's lair), 2 keys, a lock pick, 3 spikes (for keeping doors closed?), 5 candles, 2 rubies, a couple pieces of paper, a "resilient sphere," a bottle of ale, a bedroll, 2 clusters of leeches, a pole, and an "unblemished scepter." And I still left plenty on the dungeon floor.

I think this is the first time I've encountered spikes or a 10-foot pole in a CRPG, as much as they're staples of tabletop RPGs.

I'm headed down to Level 2, but I'm a bit concerned about the lever puzzle I'm leaving behind and also the fact that I didn't find any of the eight talismans. Fortunately, I can always return.

          

The next level beckons.

         

One persistent problem I'm having is the mysterious loss of hit points for no reason. I'll drink at the fountain and get restored to 50/50, then walk for about two minutes, and suddenly I only have 46/50. I don't know if I'm losing small numbers by walking into walls or something.

      

Other than that and the mantras, it's been a great game so far--much faster-paced than I remember, with much smoother and easier movement. It probably doesn't help that my primary memories are playing on a Mac with SoftPC running, having to do all "right-clicking" with a keyboard workaround because the Mac only had one mouse button.

I still don't love combat, but I can hardly complain since I've won all of my battles and the only deaths I've suffered have been from jumping, falling, and drowning. I assume that will change by the time I encounter golems and gazers.

Time so far: 5 hours