Eye of the Beholder III: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

 

Once again, I feel compelled to point out that at least four of these characters could have been evil.

          

Eye of the Beholder III: Assault on Myth Drannor

United States

Strategic Simulations, Inc. (developer and publisher)

Released 1993 for DOS, 1994 for PC-98
Date Started: 5 July 2022

Date Ended: 2 August 2022

Total Hours: 29

Difficulty: Easy-Moderate (2.5/5)

Final Rating: 29

Ranking at Time of Posting: 281/483 (58%)

    

Summary:

 

A short, unsatisfying sequel to Eye of the Beholder (1991) and Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon (1991). Assault has the party from the previous games transported from Waterdeep to Myth Drannor to address a nebulous threat. The game uses the same Dungeon Master-inspired engine as its predecessors and offers similar mechanics but tells a shorter story. [Ed. As commenters pointed out, it would have been better to say that it uses a recreated engine that replicates the experience of the previous games.] Aside from grating, loud sound effects, it doesn't do much that's overtly wrong; it even adds a few mechanical improvements such as an "All Attack" button and the ability for fighters to attack with long weapons from the second rank. But subtle issues of timing and balance come together to make this a less satisfying game. The game mostly wastes its Myth Drannor setting and populates its areas with a seemingly random selection of monsters.

   

*****

    

Never have I been so surprised to win a game. I wouldn't have guessed I was even at the halfway point. I figured we'd be chasing the Dark God through three or four more dungeons. I was planning to use four or five more Margaret Wolfe Hungerford books as subtitles; I figured there'd be potential places for Marvel, The Witching Hour, A Conquering Heroine, A Tug of War, An Anxious Moment, and perhaps even Moonshine and Marguerites. If you didn't figure out the subtitle puzzle, it's in Hungerford's Molly Bawn (1878) that the phrase "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" first appears. [Ed. The subtitles have all been changed to reference the works of Bishop Joseph Hall, whose works contain the first true known English use of the phase. Glad we got to the bottom of that.]

     

When I wrote last time, I had explored one level of the temple of Lathander, and there were three more levels to go, all of them relatively straightforward. We did a lot of things to clean and purify the temple, for which we received near-constant rewards from Lathander. Most enemies died in single "All Attack" actions. It was fundamentally too easy.

        

Blocking a fireball trap with a "Wall of Force."

     

Level 2 was a sprawling map full of shambling mounds and bone nagas. The shamblers were the last truly difficult enemy in the game, requiring multiple hits. Puzzles were primarily of the find-a-key, hidden button, or pressure-plate type. The game is fond of having lightning bolts or fireballs shoot from holes in walls when you step on plates or pull levers, or just walk through an area. Fortunately, my Wand of Wall of Force never seemed to run out of charges, and I got in the habit of putting a wall in front of every hole that I encountered so that the trap spells couldn't reach me.

      

I use some scrolls on the shambling mounds just to clear my inventory.

       

Statues of Lathander healed us as the god had promised on the last level. There were a few places where we put incense in censers for blessings or other spell effects, although we found far more incense than we could use. 

The level culminated in the discovery of a globe called Morning's Light. As soon as we picked it up, we got a cut scene in which Lathander appeared and gave us a two-handed sword +5 called Dhauzimmer, the Bright Blade. (I believe this is the first +5 weapon we've found since the first game.) It instantly destroys undead. This is the sword that Delmair was looking for, and I made a nod to role-playing by giving it to him and putting him in the front rank. This turned out to be a mistake, as every time he was attacked, he turned into a damned tiger and dropped the sword. The one saving grace is that from this point forward, enemies hardly ever managed to damage us.

      

We carried that orb for the rest of the game but never found a use for it.

   

As we arrived on Level 3, we learned that a "putrid stench of carrion" was in the air. We couldn't rest on the level until we purified it. This involved running around and finding brass keys that opened four rooms with braziers. We had to find four rocklike objects called Embers of Hope and burn them in the braziers. This caused four goblets to appear in a central hallway. Putting the four goblets into four niches caused a room to open in the center of the level. Every time we entered the room, we enjoyed a bountiful feast that fully healed and restored our food meters.

      

"'Final battle?' Already?" I said at this point.

             

The level's enemies were spirit nagas and banshees. Spirit nagas supposedly have a poison attack, but they never poisoned us, probably because it took significantly fewer than all of my characters to kill them. Banshees frankly ought to have been more dangerous than they were. They had a howl we could hear from across the dungeon, which I thought was supposed to kill us or something. Instead, they just died at the merest touch of Dhauzimmer. Frankly, I don't think it would have been hard to kill them without it. 

      

I don't know what's "spiritual" about the "spirit naga."

     

Something we did caused a Key of Faith to appear on an altar. Later, we found a teleporter that kept returning us to the same room. But a nearby plaque read "Faith must go before all good souls." It took me a few minutes of bumbling around to realize that the game wanted us to toss the key into the teleporter before entering ourselves. This brought us to Level 4.

        

Unfortunately, Faith quit last week.

      

Level 4 began with a difficult puzzle. There were three locked doors in the room and a plaque that read, "Against these gates neither stealth nor sword nor prayer shall prevail." I searched in vain for hidden buttons or other devices. Re-reading the plaque, I realized that it covered the strengths of fighters, thieves, and clerics, but conspicuously avoided saying anything about mages. I tried a number of offensive spells against the doors before I sheepishly got them to open with "Dispel Magic." One review complained that you had to have a mage at some point, and I guess this was it.

   

In rushed the level's two enemies: shadow hounds and death knights. Both are purely physical attackers that cause no adverse conditions, hardly what you'd expect for last-level enemies.

     

Fireballing some death knights.

    

The goal of the level was to find a Staff of Life and use it to banish an image of death or shadow or something. (I confess I touched the shadow when I first found it, and he killed half of my party members, requiring a reload.) This caused a doorway to appear. We had to find a "Sun Mask" to fit into the door. Honestly, the hardest part of the level was figuring out that the Sun Mask was something that we could pick up and not just a decoration on the wall. Besides a couple of illusory pits, hardly anything on the level gave me pause.

         

Banishing some weird shadow hanging out in the wall.

      

A teleporter activated on the other side of the Sun Door, and I was smart enough to realize that something big was coming, but I still didn't expect it to be the endgame battle. I buffed with all the buffing spells I had, though I don't think we ever needed much more than "Haste."

      

Getting ready for something.

    

A cut scene began on the other side of the teleporter. The Dark God, sitting on a throne and flanked by death knights and shadow hounds, gave a villain's exposition:

    

"Welcome, fabled heroes of Waterdeep. Is my allowing you to live to see the conquest of this city not reward enough for you? I hired you fools to distract Acwellan. I didn't actually think you would defeat him. Perhaps age has finally taken its toll on that old fool."

           

I think it was more us taking the toll.

      

As we watched, his visage changed from a human one to a gaunt skull. "Now that Myth Drannor's last protector and guardian is dead, I may take what I have coveted for so long. You do not know the power you intend to challenge. Did you actually think that you can take on a god! Take them!"

         

A figure with a deformed face and black robes, sitting on a throne, telling me that I don't understand the power of the dark side. I feel I've seen this before.

      

A final battle began in a relatively cramped room. Delmair was almost immediately hit, changed into a tiger, and dropped his sword. I picked it up and gave it to Starling, figuring it might be required to defeat the creature.

      

Delmair needs to exert better control over this condition of his.

       

I pulled out a "Time Stop" scroll I'd been saving for a big battle and cast it, then swiftly took down the death knights and shadow hounds. The Dark God unfroze just as I started to focus on him exclusively. He only lasted three or four "All Attacks" before he died. If he had any special attacks or effects, I didn't experience any. 

   

When he was dead, the final scene commenced. A foul spirit left his crumpled body as Lathander appeared in the room.

      

"My friends, you have done it. You have saved Myth Drannor and thus the world from the wrath of this dark power. As we speak, other powers are at work to ensure that this vile entity shall never wreak his havoc again in this plane of existance [sic]. If the Dark God had any more time, there is no telling how many of his shadow creatures would have come through the gate.

        

With a god and mysterious "other powers" all opposing the Dark God, you have to wonder what we were doing here.

     

"Do not fret over the death of Acwellen. His task is done here. It is time for the living to protect what is right and just."

     

The scene shifted to show us outside, limping away from the ruins, greeted by the Knights of Myth Drannor. "Well met, heroes! Let us be the first to congratulate and thank you for what you have done here today for all life." They then offered us membership in their fellowship, which I guess given the endgame screen at the top of this entry, we accepted. No one was apparently in any hurry to return to Waterdeep.

         

I don't know who's speaking here, but he's the epitome of unfounded optimism.

     

I'm afraid the game satisfied me neither mechanically nor thematically. I shall outline why in the GIMLET:

   

• 3 points for the game world. I liked the Myth Drannor setting, but the plot could have used a bit more flesh. The "Dark God" needed a bit more of a backstory; it seems unlikely that he was actually a god if we were able to kill him at Level 11. The novelette that came with the game had little to do with gameplay, and even contradicted it. If I had been in charge of production, I would have insisted that the novelette weave a story that included all of the NPCs and not just Delmair.

• 3 points for character creation and development. Creation is fine, but my characters gained only two or three levels in the entire game and fell far short of the game's maximum level, which I don't even know how you'd reach. I don't think that a different party composition would offer a substantially different experience. I never experienced two whole mage spell levels and one cleric spell level. Has anyone? How?

• 3 points for NPC interaction. It's nice that a few NPCs can join the party, and at least nominally have their own quests. What's less fun is that once they join the party, they cease to have any personalities of their own, and they never even acknowledge when you've solved their individual missions.

• 4 points for encounters and foes. The D&D bestiary usually has a satisfying variety of strengths and weaknesses, but I wasn't satisfied with the selection of foes in this game. They seem to have been chosen (or invented) more for how they allowed re-use of existing graphic assets rather than for any thematic value. For one of the first times in a D&D game, I didn't find myself substantially changing my tactics to different foes, with the exception of the living mucks on Level 1 of the temple. There were a couple of noncombat encounters, but often with unsatisfying dialogue options. I found the puzzles too easy, but many of them at least had a theme, and they're worth a point.

       

Most puzzles in this game were fundamentally too easy.

     

• 4 points for magic and combat. D&D rules and Dungeon Master gameplay were always a poor fit, but never more so than here. Combat is so easy that most of the spells are wasted. Even worse, I found that I took more damage trying to fiddle with spells than if I just danced around and kept hitting "All Attack." Despite this, spell effects are decently implemented, and I liked some of the additions to combat mechanics, such as the ability to attack with polearms.

        

When Father Jon started casting "Ice Storm," the shadow hounds were at least two squares away.

      

• 4 points for equipment. I suppose this is one of the stronger parts of the game, with a lot of slots and six characters to spread items around. I wouldn't have minded if the game had included some boots. And I never understand why items always have to be found in fixed locations and always have to be the same for every game and every player.

• 0 points for no economy. All I'm asking is for a merchant wagon on the outskirts of Myth Drannor with a few items worth saving for (and harder overall gameplay so you value those items).

• 3 points for a main quest and one optional area.

• 3 points for graphics, sound, and interface. The graphics are fine, particularly the cut scenes, but the sound is a cacophonous horror show. The keyboard and mouse work well together in the interface, but the game loses points for timing issues that must be experienced to truly understand.

• 2 points for gameplay. It's far too linear and easy, and I wouldn't call it replayable. Given that it was a bit boring and easy, I'm happy that it wrapped up quickly.

   

That's a final score of 29, a poor showing for a sequel to games that earned 41 and 40. I tried to find things to like about it, tried to keep the experience positive, but the game just felt perfunctory. It didn't feel like anyone had created it with love, or tried very hard to innovate above what the genre had already offered.

     

"Petite finale" probably wouldn't have sold as many copies.

        

My reactions are not unique. Scorpia, writing in her tenth anniversary issue of Computer Gaming World (August 1993), mostly criticized the game. She thought its graphics were worse than Darkmoon. I'm not saying I disagree, just that if they were, I didn't notice it. But she agrees with me on sound ("aurally, the game is a nightmare"). She hated the anti-magic area even though she adopted the same simple solution that I did: "I used [the Helm of Water Breathing] to keep a fighter/magic-user alive to map out the section and cast spells to find the limits of the anti-magic zones. Then, I restored the game and raced the party through to the spot where magic worked again."

   

She agreed that "the big fight at the end is a letdown," even mentioning using a "Time Stop" scroll as I did. "Supposedly a god in mortal form, he gave us far less trouble than Dran Draggore in The Legend of Darkmoon." Amen. "Overall," she concluded, "Assault on Myth Drannor is a disappointment . . . What started as a series with great promise has, alas, ended on a mediocre note." MobyGames's review summary has a median score in the 60s, compared to around 90 for Darkmoon and about 82 for the first game.

     

I suppose if it were 1993, and I were itching for a sequel to Darkmoon, this would have at least kept me occupied. It would have been easy to ease into. But it doesn't seem to advance a sub-genre that's begging to be advanced. It doesn't even respond to the challenge of Dungeon Master clones with more open worlds, like Ishar, let alone grittier, less abstract titles like Ultima Underworld. In some ways, Assault feels less "bad" than tone deaf. Only hours after playing it, I'm thinking of it less as an unpleasant experience and more as an unnecessary one. 

       

Endgame credits are becoming more common as the years pass.

       

I'll be curious to see how it stands up against Dungeon Hack, SSI's last release of the year. I had been hoping to hear from lead programmer John Miles, whose email address I had from our correspondence on Mindtrap, but he never wrote back. His next RPG will be Dark Sun: Wake of the Ravager. His strengths seem to lie more in third-person games (e.g., Ultima V, Dark Sun: Shattered Lands), though I'm guessing that his Assault came with the dual shackles of an existing engine and a very tight deadline.