BRIEF: The Tomb of Drewan (1982)

 

      

The Tomb of Drewan

United Kingdom

Audiogenic (developer and publisher)

Released in 1982 for Commodore VIC-20; 1983 for Commodore 64

    

The Tomb of Drewan sends an adventurer on a quest to recover the Amulet of Kartos and the stones of earth, fire, air, and water from the titular Tomb of Drewan, an ancient prince who built the tomb to protect the amulet from those who would use it for evil. Now the evil gods have filled the land with monsters, and a white warrior must reassemble the amulet.

   

The tomb is organized into 400 rooms of a 20 x 20 configuration, randomized for each new adventurer. Each room contains exactly four treasures and four guardians. The guardians, distinguished by both icon and color, are divided into three types of "mortal guards" and three types of "magical guards"; the former can attack you only in melee, the latter with spells from up to five squares away. You have to kill or avoid the guards while assaying the treasure.

     

A Tomb of Drewan room. I'm facing a mortal guard and attacking with my sword. I have "Chaos," "Fire," "Jump," and "Petrify" spells, plus an elixir. There are four treasures remaining in this room, any of which could be the amulet or one of the stones.

    

The game's originality lies in the various tools at your disposal to kill or avoid the guards. If nothing else, you always have a sword that does a predictable 3 points of damage per round. The enemies also do predictable amounts of damage per round. No amount of luck or cleverness avoids this, so every room becomes a question of the hard math. If you see a black mortal guard in a room, you know that you can kill him with your sword in 2 rounds but he'll do 8 points of damage to you in those rounds.

  

To avoid taking damage, you can use a variety of spells. "Fire," "Water," and "Chaos" all do predictable damage. You can temporarily "Paralyze," use a "Mirror" spell to deflect an enemy's attack, or shoot a golden arrow at him. You can also use a "Remover" spell to get rid of a section of wall or simply evade or leap over the enemy. You can also "Jump" to a random room. You can only carry one copy of each of these spells at a time, as well as one elixir to fully restore your health. Every chamber is an exercise in analysis and math, although the enemies are moving in real-time, and the pathfinding is pretty good, so you can't take too long. If that's not enough to keep track of, vampire bats occasionally enter the room, fly up to you, and bite you. The only way to stop them is to have a "Vampire" spell handy. 

         

A useful "Help" screen goes through the spells.

      

Some of the treasures are gold. Carrying it causes your strength to deplete more rapidly (this isn't a huge issue since standing still causes it to return to 100%). If you die, the Tomb Lord will appear and demand a bribe of anywhere from 1 to 100 gold pieces and resurrect you if you can afford to pay. Otherwise, death is permanent, but you can save and reload to tape.

     

Fortunately, I can afford this.

          

The game would be fun except for a couple of things. The first is a nightmare of a control system. I grant you that the movement cluster (@ ; : /) makes sense on the Commodore keyboards, but what is less supportable is having separate keys for turning right and left (L and =) irrespective of movement. You have to be facing enemies to attack them, and you have to be facing treasures to inspect and take them. This means, infuriatingly, that you cannot attack enemies (or inspect or take treasures) that are above or below you, only right or left. Enemies have no such weakness. A ton of the game is trying to get sequences of move-turn-attack right with unfamiliar keys. Irrespective of movement, the game otherwise does a great job mapping each individual action to a unique key and making it clear (with asterisks) on the screen at all times which actions you can take.

    

I only explored about 12 of 400 rooms this time.

    

The second problem is the sheer size: 400 rooms is far too many to search for the pieces of the amulet. I spent 40 minutes with the game and didn't even finish the first column. It would take over ten hours to explore half the rooms (with no way to guarantee victory without abusing save states). That's too much time for a game of such limited content. As it doesn't have any character growth and combat success is based solely on your inventory, it fails my definition of an RPG.

   

Still, it's an interesting game. I can't identify its pedigree. It plays a little like the Dunjonquest series, perhaps as filtered by the simpler Quest games, but I'm not 100% sure about that. It doesn't really share any of the same commands or terminology. I can't find any evidence that its author, Trevor Pitts, worked on any other games or that its publisher, Audiogenic, published another RPG.