Game 287: Silvern Castle (1988)

It's rare to fire up "AppleWin" these days.

              
Silvern Castle

United States

Independently developed and published
Finished in 1988 but unreleased until 1999 for Apple II

Date Started: 4 April 2018

Silvern Castle is an ambitious independent title that begins like just another Wizardry clone but slowly reveals mechanics that transcend the original. Sir-Tech, which spent the 1980s re-releasing the same engine five times, could have learned a few lessons from this one. 

Alas, Sir-Tech was on its way out when Silvern finally saw the light of day. Author Jeff Fink sold it to Softdisk in 1988, but Softdisk stopped publishing for the Apple II before they issued the game. Fink wrestled back the rights, though it took him several years, and released the game as shareware in 1999. It has been updated continually since then, the last release (9.5.1) in 2014. In some ways, therefore, I'm playing a game that's only 4 years old, but even though it wasn't published in 1988 (which is my usual standard), it was supposed to be published in 1988, so I've left it there.

            

Exploring a wireframe dungeon again.

         

(The title is offered on a dedicated site, hosted by the author, and is apparently a bit of a pain to set up. I owe thanks to reader "J." for sending me a prepared disk image that I could just mount and start playing.)

The game takes place in the titular castle, where the king's right to rule is symbolized by a Crystal Orb. When the last king died, the arch-wizard Ragon put the Orb in a maze below the castle to await the next king. But an evil wizard named Drachma stole the Orb and brought ifwt to his laboratory deeper in the dungeon. Parties of adventurers have tried to find the Orb to no avail; until they do, no king can be crowned. Cue the present party. (This is actually just the "first scenario," but I'll talk about the others later.)
             

My characters in the "menu castle." I used ROT13 for party names. I won't be doing that again.

           

The game supports 30 characters of which 6 may adventure at a given time. There are sexes but no alignments. Races are human, elf, dwarf, gnome, hobbit, and orc. Starting classes are fighter, thief, cleric, and mage, each of which has different minimum requirements with the six attributes: strength, intelligence piety, agility, vitality, and luck. Later, characters can get promoted to prestige classes--druid, ranger, monk, assassin, wizard, and mystic--but even regular fighters and thieves get the ability to cast mage spells at high levels.

Humans start with 9 points in each attribute and a pool of 10 points to allocate; other races start with higher or lower points. Non-human races are significantly penalized in the game, requiring double the number of experience points to level up until Level 8 and quadruple after that. However, except for orcs, they live a lot longer than humans.
            

Creating a new character.

         
Already, we see a break from Wizardry origins, but it gets better. Characters can change class to any other class for which they qualify, starting over again at 0 experience points, but retaining accumulated hit points, attributes, and spells. They can even "convert" to their existing classes, in case you just want to re-experience faster leveling from the early game. In another innovation, older, advanced characters can "retire," passing their skills and abilities on to a younger apprentice.
          

My thief's character sheet after a few levels.

          
Gameplay begins in a "menu town" level of Silvern Castle, with services similar to Wizardry but again with some interesting additions. The store, Quillon's trading post, sells items that will continue to be relevant throughout the game. The characters don't start with much money, and it's impossible to equip everyone with the best items available at their levels. You have to make some tough choices (e.g., short sword vs. longsword) even as you drool over some of the far-out-of-reach magic items. These include spell scrolls; spellcasters start with only "Read Magic" and have to purchase or find the other spells for their level. Quillon's will also add enchantments to weapons and armor for a very high fee.
        

I'll be back.

         
Below the castle is the dungeon. I don't know how many levels it comprises, but each is 27 x 27, or nearly twice the size of Wizardry. Silvern Castle has much of Wizardry's early-game difficulty, where every encounter could serve up 1 kobold or 5 zombies. Until the characters gain a couple levels, they're extremely vulnerable. Even after they gain levels, combat can be extremely tough because the game applies a scaling factor.

Fortunately, Silvern isn't quite as sadistic as Wizardry. You can save anywhere, and a character death doesn't automatically over-write the save. To avoid the worst scumming, the game forces you to save and quit with every save, but at least reloading is possible if the party gets massacred. Single-character death is fairly easily reversed in the castle's temple, where it costs less than a dagger (at least at low levels) and doesn't seem to fail very often. However, resurrection ages the character a couple of years, so you don't want to get into the habit of dying.
          

Raising a character for as much money as I routinely leave behind on the dungeon floor.

        
Combat is almost identical to Wizardry. Enemies may attack alone or in multiple groups. Each character chooses whether to fight, parry, flee, cast a spell, use an item, or change equipment. (In a neat addition, if you choose the last option, it applies to this combat only and your original equipment is restored at the end.) "Using" an item includes the ability to throw any extra weapons, pieces of armor, lit torches and lamps, or broken items. All characters can attack and be attacked, although enemies do seem to target forward characters more than rear ones.
           

Combat options when faced with multiple parties of warriors.

           
Obviously, there aren't many tactics in the early game until the spellcasters start to acquire more incantations. There are 7 spell levels for both divine and arcane casters, and casting draws from a pool of spell points rather than dedicated "slots" as in Wizardry. The author does some fun tricks with the spell system. First, a lot of the spells are shared between classes: both mages and clerics can cast "Sleep," "Light," and "Silence," for instance. To avoid having multiple spells that do the same thing at different power levels (e.g., Wizardry's HALITO, LAHALITO, and MAHALITO), you have the option to put more power into certain spells like "Fireball" or "Breath Shield." Finally, a handful of spells are "reversible," so instead of both "Cure Poison" and "Cause Poison," you have just the former but with the option to reverse it.

Post-combat, you may find items or money, which comes in four forms: platinum, gold, silver, and copper. You're given the option to take or leave each type of coin, which makes sense because the game has a complex encumbrance system of which money is a part. Since copper pieces are worth 1/100 of a gold piece, it's hardly worth picking them up. On the other hand, the economy is so tight that those copper pieces may eventually add up. Fortunately, there's a money changer back in the tavern who will convert low-value currency to platinum or gold if you can haul it all the way to him. You also have the option to cache money within the dungeon and collect it later.
           

That's a lot of weight for a haul worth 0.15 gold pieces.

           
As in Wizardry, experience rewards eventually allow you to level up by sleeping in the inn. Also like Wizardry, when you level up, random attributes will change. The manual warns that they can go up or down, but I haven't seen anything decrease yet. The neat thing is that if you don't like what increased or decreased, you can visit the "proving grounds" and "sell" attribute points for credits that can be used to buy points in other areas. The higher the score, the more you get for selling and the more it costs to buy. This isn't very useful in early levels, but later in the game I can see how it will make a difference to sell useless statistics (like piety or intelligence for fighters), or to mold the character in a way that he can convert to another class.
       

I can sell one point of agility and buy one point each of vitality and luck and still enough left over for some piety.

       
I created a party of all humans, figuring I'd earn some wealth and items and then maybe introduce demi-humans later when they had more experienced party members to work with. Later, I realized that the reverse would have made more sense, as early-level demi-humans are much more effective than humans.

The game comes with a pretty good automap, which annotates special encounters and stairs. Nonetheless, I've been creating my own maps, since the automap takes a few seconds to render and you can't refer to it continually as you explore.
       

An automap of Level 1 in progress.

        
I had a decent time on Level 1. It was challenging but not punishing. Character development and equipment rewards came along just often enough to feel satisfying. On the other hand, I think the map was just a bit too large and empty. As I said, I don't know how many levels there are, but if the developer went with the standard of 10, that will be too many.

The first level didn't have any navigation puzzles, spinners, traps, pressure plates, dark squares, anti-magic squares, or anything of that sort. In fact, the entire level was "illuminated" so I didn't need a torch or "Light" spells. There were a few secret doors, but oddly leading to blank areas with nothing special in them. There are a few inaccessible areas. The level is oddly fond of rooms in 2 x 3 configurations. I found the overall layout random and uninspiring, but perhaps it's meant to be an introductory level and the levels get more interesting later.
            

My map of Level 1.

         
There were a few special encounters, signaled by squares on the floor. These included a door that I need a key to open, a group of mystics looking for a "power crystal," and a square labeled "alternate portal activation site" with a keypad on the wall. There were two staircases down.
           

A message warning me about "Drachma's guardians, the powerful Maze Demons."

         
Amidst the zombies, kobolds, orcs, rogues, fighters, and mages that I fought and killed, I'm not sure I faced anything that seemed like a fixed encounter. I was a little concerned by how the game scaled enemy difficulty to match my character development. When I first started, enemies attacked in single groups of 1-4; by Level 3, they were sometimes attacking in groups of 2 or 3, and with up to 8 members per group. Fortunately, "Sleep" helps a lot against these stacks, and the cleric's "Dispel" against zombies. Also, I think the game scales the maximum encounter difficulty rather than the minimum or average; I still got a fair number of one-orc encounters, too.
 
Having mapped all of Level 1 and part of Level 2, my primary complaint about the game is that it's slow. Even with AppleWin cranked up to 300%, combats can take up to 30 seconds to load, and other screen transitions also have a maddening delay. There are a few too many random combats as you roam the hallways, and there's no pre-combat encounter screen with an option for the entire party to flee.
        

This Level 2 encounter was the first "boss" encounter in the game. I lost.

          
Silvern Castle replicates the Wizardry experience well, and adds a bit to it besides, and I probably would have appreciated its inclusion in my monthly subscription to Softdisk. For my blog, on the other hand, it promises to be something of a momentum-killer, as I have to spend hours exploring featureless levels with (probably) few plot developments. It's certainly a contrast to Ultima Underworld.

Time so far: 5 hours