Game 447: Forest of Long Shadows (1986)

 

Starting a new game of "FLS," as the kids call it.

      

Forest of Long Shadows

United Kingdom

Independently developed; published as code in the October 1986 Sinclair User

Code provided for ZX Spectrum

Date Started: 2 March 2022

Date Ended: 2 March 2022

Total Hours: 2

Difficulty: Very Easy-Easy (1.5/5) as a single-player game

Final Rating: 12

Ranking at Time of Posting: 45/460 (10%)

     

Putting Forest of Long Shadows on my master list is forcing it to compete above its weight class. If author Martin Page is still around, he doesn't deserve to come here and see me compare his type-in program to Might and Magic and Starflight (both released the same year). He was creating an afternoon game for bored hobbyists, and in that respect he did just fine.

      

The first page of code. I found a version that someone else typed in. I'm not crazy.

     

Forest appeared in the October 1986 issue of Sinclair User as 3.5 pages of code. It creates what the magazine describes as a "very neat role-playing graphic adventure" for 1-4 players. The goal is to be the first to explore the small land, find four castles, and then return to the starting point at the Jolly Aardvark Inn. If you're playing as a single character, it's hard to lose.

      

One of the four castles I have to visit.

     

When the game begins, it creates a randomized map of roughly 9 x 9 squares, each one holding either a fixed location (e.g., The Lake, Craigmoor Castle, The Fountain, The Village of Lowmarsh) or a generic descriptor (e.g., shady pathways, sinister glade, open clearing). Your character has five attributes--strength, endurance, agility, personality, and magic--and these are rolled randomly from roughly 2 to 8. They do the expected things, with endurance serving as a hit point pool and magic serving as a spell point pool.

        

The map of my winning game. Each time you play, the map is randomly configured. I like to think that "Sorbozon" is a prestigious French clown college.

    

Enemies and friendly NPCs are also seeded throughout these maps. Enemies for each game include an orc, a goblin, a zombie, a golem, a balrog, and a dragon. Fighting them is an automatic affair involving your variances in strength and agility. There are no real tactics except to try to run from the ones that are too hard and cast a spell if necessary. Killing hard enemies occasionally gives you a couple of attribute points, but for the most part you only kill enemies because they're in your way.

     

Trading blows with a skeleton.

      

Balancing enemies are a handful of randomly distributed NPCs--ranger, warrior, paladin, knight, monk, and one or two others--who give you helpful gifts if they like you. Whether they like you is based on a personality check, but if they don't react favorably, you can just repeatedly "greet" them until they do. They give you things like weapons, armor, and magic scrolls, all of which have direct effects on your attributes. For instance, a sword raises your strength by 3 and a helmet raises endurance by 2.

   

A ranger helps a brother out.

     

The ease of the game depends a lot on the distribution of castles, enemies, and foes. If you're lucky, you'll meet a few friendly NPCs before any seriously difficult enemies and thus face your first combats with elevated attributes. If you're really lucky, the four castles will be clustered near the starting area and you'll hardly have to explore at all. But even if you're unlucky enough to meet a demon in the second square, and you can't successfully run away, the game gives you four starting resurrections (you basically start the game with five "lives") and you can earn more from NPCs. It would take some serious effort to "lose" the game.

   

Some squares have storms or other weather events that cause you to miss a turn, but that's only important if you're competing against someone. One persistent annoyance is that the screen will suggest that you can go in a particular direction but you find it "blocked!" when you actually try to go there.

    

I needed a sense of accomplishment today.

       

Forest does its job as a programming exercise and an afternoon distraction. It might even be fun to play in a boardgame-like way with another person. It gets just a 12 on my GIMLET with 0s in "game world" and "economy" and 1s and 2s in everything else. Mr. Page wrote a couple of other Spectrum games in the 1980s, including Goblin Mountain (1987), which Spectrum sites list as an RPG. Thanks to reader P.W. for bringing this one to my attention.

   

Edit from a few days later: Commenters made me realize that I didn't say anything about Forest as a multiplayer game. With more than one player, each character gets a single turn before the game passes to the next player. Players who occupy the same square can choose to fight each other, including from the first moments, when all of them are gathered at the Jolly Aardvark Inn. (Any character slain here loses a life and then resurrects in a random square elsewhere on the map.) A board game like this might be fun, but with a computer game, only getting one action per turn is annoying. It would be tough to pass control from player to player, especially if the maximum of four were playing.

Speaking of board games, commenter HappyChef may have identified the source in a 1980 game called Mystic Wood. The map and its locations are similar, and it has the same 4-player maximum and randomization of the map for new games.