Dungeon Master II: The Legend of Skullkeep: Summary and Rating

 

       

Dungeon Master II: The Legend of Skullkeep

United States 

FTL Games (developer); Interplay Entertainment (publisher)

Released 1993 for PC-98; 1994 for FM Towns and SEGA CD; 1995 for Amiga, DOS, and Macintosh

Date Started: 15 August 2022

Date Ended: 21 October 2022

Total Hours: 37

Difficulty: Moderate (3.0/5)

Final Rating: 44

Ranking at Time of Posting: 429/483 (89%)

    

Summary:

A worthy sequel to Dungeon Master, Skullkeep offers a similar experience (first-person tiled movement, action-oriented combat, lots of puzzles) but with a few additional CRPG trappings. Weak storytelling, constant respawning, and poor pacing and balance hurt the title, but excellent character development, a variety of combat tactics, and superior enemy AI save it. In a sea of clones, there is only one Master.

     

****

    

As examples of their particular sub-genre, it doesn't get much better than Dungeon Master and Chaos Strikes Back. They both have that "tight" quality that I discussed in relation to Quest for Glory and for which I still need a better term. They don't do everything a "full" RPG does, but what they do, they do to near perfection. They're challenging but fair, meticulously laid out, with room to breathe but with no fat. If I had been rating Dungeon Master clones, I would have given them a near-perfect score. But I was rating RPGs in general, and I deduced points for elements they lacked.

   

In some ways, Skullkeep feels like someone read my comments and took them to heart. They threw in an economy and town, offered some explicit weapon statistics, made the world a little more open, improved enemy AI, and made the puzzles more diegetic--that is, integrated with the theme and reality of the game world rather than purely abstract. The result is a game that loses some of the "tightness" of its predecessors but shows that FTL can offer a Dungeon Master experience using more conventional RPG trappings. If I was writing in 1993, I would say that this bodes well for the series, and I'd be looking forward to the sequel..

 

As I discussed last time, I spent some more time on the final battle. I thought I could defeat Dragoth by standing across the void from him and summoning one attack minion after another, but I guess the game is programmed so that the more minions you summon, the more Dragoth summons. I saw some people online recommending minions as a strategy, but mine seem to get killed almost immediately, leaving half a dozen of Dragoth's minions to hassle the party.

     

Taking on Dragoth one more time.

        

I was able to defeat him with hit-and-run tactics. My concerns about Dragoth healing during my absences were apparently unfounded. I spent some time fighting him with weapons and spells until my characters had only about half-health, then throwing myself off the platform to the surface, healing, and teleporting back into the tower. It took about half a dozen rounds of this before Dragoth started hustling back to his own realm for healing, at which point I unloaded on him with the Numenstaff.

I have a lot more to say about the game, but most of it falls comfortably within the categories of the GIMLET, so I suppose I'll just launch into it:

     

1. Game World.  I've never felt that the series was strong with its stories, and I don't think it improved much here. FTL loves to tell elaborate framing stories that are well-written but needlessly complicated and often kind of silly. The story here, at least until the ending cinematics, is perhaps a bit more sensible than the stories of its predecessors, but not by much.

   

A key problem is FTL's almost pathological aversion to including any reference to the story, or any sort of world-building, in the actual game. It's as if they subscribed to some ideology that in-game text is bad. Where its contemporaries and competitors, including Lands of Lore and the Eye of the Beholder series, filled their games with textual cut scenes, NPCs with dialogue, books, and scrolls, FTL seems to want you to get all your information about the game world from what you can hear and see in the environment. For instance, the hint book calls the various outdoor areas the "Sun Clan Area" and the "Moon Clan Village." I guess you're supposed to intuit those names from the symbols on the obelisks. There will come a time in which graphics and sound are advanced enough to support such an approach, but we aren't there in 1993. I want to know the names of enemies I'm facing, and the villages I'm visiting, and why this world has such a weird combination of technology and fantasy.

     

This is 25% of all the text in the game.

    

The final cinematic came out of nowhere and could have been replaced with almost anything else. (I'm always amused by games that add a "twist" to a story they never competently told in the first place.) To the extent that Lord Chaos was ever interesting, it was in the context of an event that split the original Gray Lord into two extremes. The revelation that Order was just as reprehensible as Chaos--that any pure extreme was inherently bad--should have been the end of the concept. If they weren't going to stop there, I would have liked to see Chaos's reappearance in Chaos Strikes Back balanced by Order's reappearance in the sequel. Continuing to use Chaos as a villain retcons the first game's resolution, both narratively and thematically. Score: 3.

 

2. Character Creation and Development. I liked the character development system here about as much as the original. I'm not sure I favor a use-based system over more standard experience-and-leveling, but we see so many examples of the latter that the former is at least refreshing if not universally better. I like the option to have characters either generalize or specialize (I did the former but wish I'd done the latter). Leveling happens neither too often nor too rarely, and it's always satisfying when it does. Magic leveling is particularly gratifying; you go from one spell wiping out your entire mana bar to, by the end of the game, struggling to deplete it as fast as it refreshes.

   

I'm not a huge fan of the convention established by the series where you choose your characters rather than create them. I also think the choice is somewhat arbitrary, since whatever strengths and weaknesses the various characters exhibit are quickly smoothed out by leveling. There really isn't any replayability in character selection unless you just want to look at different portraits. Score: 5.

       

I never got sick of this.

     

3. NPC Interaction. Unfortunately, there isn't really anyone in this game that I would call an "NPC." The shopkeepers don't really count. They don't have personalities of their own; they're just visual instruments of the bartering system. Score: 0.

   

4. Encounters and Foes. We start to get into the game's real strengths with this category. As longtime readers know, I've started using it to include the quality of puzzles, but even if I didn't, Skullkeep would deserve a few points for its enemies. Some of them are recognizable from other games (skeletons, wolves), but most are original creations, and even the derivative ones have original AI. The varying ways that monsters behave make up one of the best parts of Skullkeep. Some keep their distance; some rush you. Some snatch items out of your hands. They grab items from floors and alcoves and put them to use. Some can be blocked and cornered; some fly right past you. Many of them flee when their hit points get too low. Some have spells. Some are actively hostile; some only attack if you get near them. None of them move in predictable patterns. They use the same movement tricks that the party does to get an advantage, including actively dodging to avoid missiles and spells. (I particularly can't get over how the trees advance when the party's back is turned.) They push buttons, activate switches, set off traps, and in places try to undo the party's progress. There aren't many 2020s games in which these things are all true.

     

These guys live to stoke the furnace and only attack when you interfere with their job.

     

Respawning is perhaps a bit too rapid, particularly towards the end of the game with the minions. Fortunately, the respawning doesn't really pose a huge threat. You ignore and run past many enemies. Their presence also facilitates as much grinding as you want. But I do like to occasionally "clear" an area, and that's not really possible in Skullkeep.

   

I can imagine that some players prefer the puzzles of the original two games. I admit there's something attractive about a puzzle system that only has six or eight core mechanics but with lots of potential creative combinations. But I rather preferred Skullkeep's puzzles, for which there was less repetition, better integration with the environment, and more options for potential solutions. I was recently playing Far Cry 5, which has a few dozen puzzles in which you have to find ways to open the vaults of Montana "preppers." Most of them involve some kind of visual interpretation of the environment--for instance, tracing electrical wires from their destination to their source so you can turn on a breaker. I love that we live in an era in which graphics are detailed enough to allow such interpretation without any abstraction. Skullkeep strikes me as the beginning of this era. You can trace conduit along the walls to find switches and places where fuses and gears are needed, for instance, and the Zo Link mechanism has visible tendrils running throughout the castle to all its component parts.

    

I suppose my only complaint is that the puzzles were a bit too easy. I had to ask for help several times with Dungeon Master and Chaos Strikes Back, but in Skullkeep the only real difficulty I faced was in the final battle, not in any of the puzzles. Score: 8.

         

The enemy catches us in a spike trap.

   

5. Magic and Combat. There remain many things to like about combat, particularly the sheer number of options that you have. Games in which combat is integrated with exploration almost always afford more tactics than those with separate "combat" screens. Between melee combat, offensive spells, buffing spells, missile weapons, throwing items, magic items, leading enemies into traps, summoning minions to fight for you, hit and run tactics, and other uses of the environment, Skullkeep supports just about any playing style. I'm not particularly good at action-oriented combat, particularly with the mouse as the primary controller, but I still recognize the game's strengths.

   

Unfortunately, I'm not a fan of the spell system. First, I don't like the use of abstract runes. They just don't work with my brain. I've played over 100 hours of Dungeon Master games, and I probably couldn't draw more than two or three of the runes from memory, and I wouldn't be able to tell you their names. I was constantly having to look up the sequences even for spells that I cast frequently. Second, trying to cast spells in the midst of combat is just too hard. If some of you don't think so, more power to you, but I don't excel at keeping one eye on the screen and one hand on the keyboard to dodge enemy attacks while putting the other eye on the spell panel and the other hand on the mouse and trying to hit the right rune combination.

 

While I ultimately figured out what most spells did, I didn't love the experience, and I'd rather have had explicit names. I didn't realize until after I'd won the game that there's a "Light" spell that's better than just plain FUL. The "Push" and "Pull" spells remained a mystery the entire game because I never tested them while facing something that could be pushed or pulled. I supposed this is my fault, but I didn't have a strong handle on the different minion types. I didn't use minions as much as I could have because their utility seemed extremely variable. I now know that this is because one of the minion types doesn't even attack; he just carries objects. That's kind of a cool option, and I suspect that 80% of players never learn about it unless they read the hint book.

 

Nonetheless, I give the game credit for the sheer number of options, and this still ends as a strong category. Score: 6.

    

6. Equipment. Another strong category--there are lots of wearable and usable things--including craftable things--and it's a bit easier to tell their relative strength and utility than in the previous games. As we get deeper into the 1990s, I'm going to levy more criticism at games that always put the same items in the same locations, reducing replayability and any sense of surprise, but in this regard, Skullkeep wasn't doing anything that most other games weren't doing. Score: 6.

       

An attack damage evaluation meter tells me that this is the most powerful weapon in the game.

     

7. Economy. Well, the Dungeon Master series finally has one, and I love that the developers put their own spin on it with the various pieces of currency stored in a money box, handed to you individually by shopkeepers over a table. To my surprise, I never got sick of the mechanic. Hand-placing coins and gems into that box was surprisingly rewarding--much more interesting than the generic "gold" statistic that we find in most games. 

   

The economy is a bit overly generous, but not outrageously so. I would have had to scrimp and loot to afford the "Voraxes," the best weapons in the game, for instance (until a commenter pointed them out, I didn't even really notice them). The economy isn't particularly necessary to the game, but it offers some additional options. A cautious player could grind in the early areas and then purchase some of the best equipment, for instance. The tavern means that you don't have to hunt thorn demons and digger worms every time you get hungry. Some players will see it as an unnecessary appendix to the Dungeon Master experience, but I thought it supplemented the game nicely. Score: 4.

       

I never got sick of the bartering process.

     

8. Quests. Alas, we're back to a weaker category here. There's a main quest with some optional areas, but no real "side quests." There are choices involved in solving some puzzles, but no choices in the overall direction of the plot. There are no role-playing options, and you don't even get a (bad) alternate ending as you do in the original. Score: 3.

   

9. Graphics, Sound, and Interface. There was a lot I liked in this category and a little I didn't like. Graphics and sound both benefit from the fact that this is technically a 1995 game, and you get nice effects like the constant thunderstorms outdoors, the vibration of the Zo Link generator, and the cackling of electrical fields. The monster portraits are a bit less absurd and cartoonish than some of the game's contemporaries. Perhaps most important, the ability to interact with and move so many items in the environment makes the game so much more interesting than its contemporaries that feature nothing but textures.

 

There are more ambient sounds than the typical RPG, and I like that you can hear enemies in the distance and identify them by their unique sounds. I don't like that so many of their unique sounds are so aggravating, particularly the mechanical clanking of the minions.

   

The interface requires far too much mouse work for my tastes, and I continue to demand more keyboard redundancy. My complaint about the spell system could have been handled by allowing, for instance, the "C" key to activate the casting panel and then the number keys from 1-6 to select the chosen rune. A fireball at full strength would be C-6-4-4-ENTER. Of course, keys for attacking is something that Dungeon Master's competitors had been offering for years now.

   

I didn't find the magic maps very useful. They show too small an area and no consistent orientation. I liked that at least one (the one that summons minions) could be used for puzzle-solving, but I found the rest mostly useless. Seeing the positions of enemies in a four-square radius doesn't really help that much, since you can just look around the area yourself. I held on to about half a dozen magic maps for most of the game when I could have spared myself the inventory space and just sold them. Score: 5, and before you flood the comments, recognize that I'm rating three things in this category, not just graphics and sound. Games that scored higher do so because they have good interfaces as well as graphics and sound.

        

This, on the other hand, is an interface element that every game should have.

    

10. Gameplay. There's some early-game nonlinearity that I enjoy, and I think the overall length and level of difficulty are just about right, although there are some balance issues. As commenters have noted, the pre-Skullkeep portion of the game, which is open and sprawling and almost completely devoid of puzzles, clashes with the five linear, densely-packed Skullkeep levels. There were times that things were a bit too easy. I'm not sure we needed so many portals back to town, for instance, and food and water was never much of a challenge. I'm still not happy with the sudden spike in difficulty during the last battle. Finally, I don't really see the game as "replayable" except in a mild sense of trying different character builds. Score: 4.

 

That gives us a final score of 44. It surprises me that it's lower than the 47 I gave Dungeon Master. As I said in the opening, I recall Dungeon Master as arguably a better game but not necessarily a better CRPG. I rather thought that the concessions Skullkeep made in service of the broader RPG genre would propel it to a higher total. But I played Dungeon Master during my flawed first year of blogging, and I see category scores that I couldn't justify today. I suspect if I rated it again, it would fall to more like a 41, which still doesn't make the sequel a lot better but does recognize its innovations.

 

The advertisement emphasizes "creatures and characters that actually think for themselves and react to your actions." This element deserved more recognition in reviews.

      

Then again, maybe I'm forgetting aspects of the original that justified the higher rating. Contemporary reviews definitely did not agree with my suggestion that the sequel makes for a better CRPG. Owing to the delayed western release, Computer Gaming World didn't get to it until October 1995. For the first time I recall since I started reading her reviews, Scorpia couldn't finish the game. It was the last battle that held her up:

   

You're on a small patch of clouds, trying to avoid shots from both the minions (coming from all directions) and the big D, doing fancy footwork to keep from stepping over the side and falling back to earth. There is no place to hide, nothing to duck behind, because it's all open . . . . [W]henever it seemed the party might be getting somewhere, those attack minions popped up and ruined everything.

     

This was one of many things that led her to characterize Skullkeep as a "dreary experience" that disappointed her more than even Ultima VIII: Pagan. Most of her other complaints echo mine--abstruse spellcasting system, overly-rapid respawns, no NPCs, annoying minions. She has nothing to say about the enemy AI, economy, or other improvements since the original game: "Very little has changed for the better," she says," and there is much that is worse." One of those things for some players, though apparently not for Scorpia, was that the game had some problems with SoundBlaster cards. I had to laugh at her report that a patch was available "on many online sites, including the Internet." (Yes, I know that "online" meant a lot more than the Internet in 1995; it still sounds funny.)

    

For the first time--again, we're jumping a couple years ahead on this one--I get to quote a GameSpot review. The site gave Skullkeep a mere 50/100: "The computer gamer will easily be able to find better-looking, faster-playing, more immersive fantasy games out there, without the epic yawn-factor found here." Ouch. Another choice quote comes from the U.K.'s PC Format (December 1995; 60/100): "Are you really willing to fork out over forty quid for a game which could just as easily have been written seven years ago?" The German PC Joker (August 1995; 67/100) called it a "museum piece." Generally, continental magazines found more to like than English ones, but almost all of them use terms like "nostalgic" and "old-school." Apparently, a lot is going to happen in the world of CRPGs over the next couple of years if Skullkeep was outdated by 1995. I look forward to it.

     

I went looking for a hint guide and was surprised to find three of them. Interplay published an official one, with the subtitle Unlocking the Secrets of Skullkeep, in 1995. But before the DOS version of the game was even released, an outfit called Sandwich Islands Publishing (SIP) released an "official" strategy guide. I guess "official" doesn't have any legal meaning, because it also appears on Prima's guide from 1995. The SIP guide includes an interview with FTL's Wayne Holder, who says that the team considered an Underworld-style free-movement engine for Skullkeep, but they ultimately thought it would ruin the types of puzzles that Dungeon Master fans would be looking for. I agree with his reasoning, but he certainly didn't "read the room" with some of his comments: "A lot of the free-movement games are tedious to play because you spend so much time bouncing off the walls. Personally, it gets very tiring." As if to mock Holder's own comments, the guide accompanies them with a screenshot from the far-more-successful DOOM. 

        

If Holder really found free movement "not that hard to do," FTL should have done it first and made a fortune.

      

The interview contains no information about why FTL prioritized Japanese releases for Skullkeep, but clearly there was something lucrative about the Japanese market, as one of FTL's last acts before it folded in 1996 (Skullkeep's sales were miserable) was to license the name and interface to Tokyo-based Victor Interactive Software. The result, Dungeon Master Nexus (1998), is the last game in the Dungeon Master series, released only in Japan, and only for the SEGA Saturn. Reviews of the SEGA CD version of Skullkeep noted that the interface doesn't work well with the SEGA controller; I'm not sure if or how they overcame that for Nexus.

     

Holder and original Dungeon Master designer Doug Bell wrote a book on Java programming for games in 1998, but otherwise they have mostly slipped below the radar. Holder seems to have worked on a large variety of independent technology products since then, and Bell has held positions at a variety of information technology companies. He returned to gaming in 2010 with a position at Riot Games, then designed the micro-transaction platform for Trion Worlds' MMO Defiance (2013). His LinkedIn profile shows him most recently working for a workplace automation software provider called ServiceNow.

The manual for the game is needlessly cute when it comes to the roles the various programmers played. I would love to know who gets the credit for the excellent enemy AI. It may be "monster trainer" Bill Kelly, but if so, his talent was largely wasted. After Skullkeep, he worked on only one other game, a bicycle messenger simulator called Courier Crisis (1997). He passed away last year, just shy of his 50th birthday.

  

It's too bad that FTL had to go out with a whimper, under the perception that Dungeon Master was its crowning achievement, Chaos Strikes Back somewhat lesser, and Skullkeep even lesser still. All three games have their charms, and while I might have also rated them in that order, I don't think any of them are clearly better or worse than the others. Holder may have been a bit tone-deaf regarding the future of free-movement engines, but that doesn't mean that tiled gameplay is inevitably "retro"; it's just one way of doing things. It grinds my gears to see so many mid-1990s reviewers dismissing technology that produced fantastic gaming experiences just because something newer and shinier came along. I'm grateful that thanks to such "old-school" titles as Legend of Grimrock (2012), Might and Magic X (2013), and Aeon of Sands: The Trail (2019), I'll always have a reason to stock some graph paper.