Game 475: Curse of Vengeance (1992)

 

The game is more creative than you'd expect given that the author was named Scott McNab and he named his company "Mac-Nab."

      

Curse of Vengeance

United States

Mac-Nab Software (developer); published as shareware

Released 1992 for Macintosh

Date Started: 23 November 2022 

Date Ended: 24 November 2022

Total Hours: 5

Difficulty: Easy-Moderate (2.5/5)

Final Rating: 18

Ranking at Time of Posting: 135/483 (28%)

     

I've always liked text adventures--not as much as RPGs, of course, or else this would be a different blog--but I'm also not very good at them. I like the process I use to play them, which is to systematically map everything and annotate puzzles and dead ends as I find them, then make a second pass, trying to solve the puzzles. This system usually carries me through about three-quarters of the game, but it only works so long as it's clear there's a puzzle to solve. One by one, locked doors and rusty grates give way to the keys and oil I've found in other places, but eventually there comes a time in which there's still something to do and yet I've run out of obvious puzzles. This is where some adventure games expect you to make what seems to me a superhuman leap--to recognize that you must fiddle with some random rock, or search a blank wall, or climb a specific tree that looks like every other tree.

   

Curse of Vengeance is such a game, or at least it seems to me such a game. It was written by Scott McNab of Davenport, Iowa (home of Bix Beiderbecke, which I'm throwing in for absolutely no reason, but at least I'm doing it in parentheses) using an interactive fiction kit called TADS: the Text Adventure Development System. The kit, written by (then) CalTech student Michael Roberts, was first made available in 1990. (For more on TADS, read Jimmy Maher's 2017 article.) The kit is still being used, with version 3.1.3. released in 2013. It supports some limited RPG mechanics, although most games created with the kit seem not to have used them. Curse is the only TADS game that is also an RPG listed in the Macintosh Repository database, where I found it. MobyGames lists one more: Magocracy (2004) for Amiga, Atari ST, and DOS. I know that some kits will eventually pose a challenge regarding when to say "enough," but TADS doesn't seem to be one of them.

      

The backstory text.

     

Curse casts the player as an unnamed mercenary who's heading to the village of Drakkar to meet a resident named Fallon Shires. Shires has sent the PC a note asking for his help. The character starts the game with no possessions, as he's recently been robbed by other mercenaries, although he somehow has 500 gold pieces.

   

Gameplay begins in a forest square near the village of Drakkar. The scant documentation that comes with the game only gives you a few tips on commands, but it's easy to figure out. TADS may be its own thing, but it's part of the Infocom hegemony: You can toggle descriptions with BRIEF and VERBOSE; the "I" key brings up inventory; "G" repeats the last command; "Z" causes you to sleep. You WEAR and HOLD armor and weapons, LIGHT lamps, TAKE or GET objects on the ground, and so forth. There's even a grue. I never had any issues figuring out the right commands. The parser supports entering multiple commands at once with commas in between.

   

My map of the game has 173 screens; the author says in the accompanying text file that there should be about 200. Going from screen to screen is generally a straightforward process of typing one of the eight cardinal directions. Only a handful of times do you go UP or DOWN, and the author only rarely messes with directionality by having you, say, exit one area from the east but arrive at the next from the south.

      

My Trizbort map of the game world. You should be able to zoom in to see details.

      

Area descriptions are brief and contain few unnecessary details. About 80% of the areas have only a few words of description, like "East-West Path" or "North, South Passage." Usually, when there's something to do in an area, it's immediately obvious; SEARCH, OPEN, and READ handle the vast majority of your interactions.

          

There are a lot of sections in the game like this.

    

The game's RPG credentials center around random monsters such as giants, kobolds, and ogres, which you can encounter anywhere except the town of Drakkar. The system is extremely basic. All you can do in combat is attack or try to flee. The character has an attack rating and armor class based on currently-equipped items, and you and the enemy simply whittle down each others' hit points round after round. Critical hits are possible. 

     

Defeating an enemy and leveling up.

      

Successfully slaying an enemy gets you gold and experience points. Amassing experience points causes you to level up at regular intervals, increasing your maximum hit points. As you earn more gold, you can afford better weapons and armor in Drakkar, although the best items are found rather than purchased. Hit points regenerate slowly, but you can heal more quickly by drinking water from the fountain in Drakkar (you need a flask to FILL it) or by finding a hut west of the city, where the residents sell healing potions for 200 gold pieces.

     

Tip: the expensive stuff is a waste of money.

            

The game consists of four major sections: the city of Drakkar, the southern caves, the southeastern path to a wizard's hut, and the northwestern castle. Most of what's in between is filler--long strings of nondescript paths and passages to give the sense of size. It is mostly open from the beginning, although you can't enter the caves or castle until you have been "marked" by the southern wizard. The sequence of plot events goes something like this:

        

1. Visit Drakkar and stock up. There's an armory called Dirten's Weapon Emporium; I can only hope it's named after the Pool of Radiance NPC. It also has a general store, where you find most of your standard adventuring gear (rope, lamp, oil, flask), a watering hole, and a tavern.

    

2. Meet Fallon Shires in the tavern. He tells you that an evil sorcerer named Kryptic (who "lives in the caves to the north") has kidnapped his daughter. He gives the player a coin, which he says is cursed. It will not allow the player to leave the area until his daughter is rescued. He recommends that the player go to the southern wizard (not the evil one) for aid. Promising great reward if the quest is successful, he scampers off.

     

Fallon Shires sounds like a gated community outside San Francisco.

        

A desk drawer in the tavern's office has a note written by a warrior named Throckmorton, "the only mortal to ever fight and almost win a battle with the Evil Sorcerer." It says that the player will have to "master all three of the magical items" to win.

3. Visit the southern wizard. To get to his hut, you have to tie a rope to a tree to swing across a ravine. The wizard tells you that you'll need three jewels to defeat the Evil One--one shaped like a star, one shaped like an eye, and one shaped like a triangle. He casts a spell that "marks" you with the face of the cursed coin and gives you the star-shaped gem. He also tells you there are powerful items in the Great Palace in Darkkar and that a "keeper," who lives in town, has the key.

      

Jeton is a new vocabulary word for me. I'm going to use it instead of "challenge coin" from now on.

     

4. Loot the Great Palace. Technically, you could have done this earlier, but until you meet the southern wizard, you'd have to make some leaps of logic. The Great Palace is behind a locked door in Drakkar. The only person who lives in town who could possibly have the key is a villager living south of the watering hole. He attacks when you enter his hut, and if you kill him, you're led to believe you just killed an innocent villager for no reason. Knowing that you need his key makes it only a little better. Once he's dead, you have to PUT OUT the fire in his fireplace with a flask of water, then SEARCH it to find a clump of ash, then WASH the clump of ash with more water to reveal a bronze key.

     

I was proud at how quickly I figured this out.

   

The bronze key opens the door to the palace. In the main hall, you find a painting signed by someone named "Hawking." It depicts the palace and calls it "Basilica." Upstairs, you find a silver key, which unlocks the door to the armory, where you find a suit of armor--the best armor in the game.

   

5. Explore the southern caves. You can't even enter the caves unless you've been marked by the wizard. You need a lamp to get around. There are two major things to do here. The first is to kill a magician who's set up a laboratory in the caves. He has a Shield of Ogre Strength (between it and the armor, you can't get a lower AC) and a book that gives you the information needed to safely cross a set of pillars in another section of the caves.

   

Crossing the pillars puts you in front of a statue. He asks you the name of a great ancient warrior; if you searched the tavern, you know that the answer is THROCKMORTON. The statue drops the eye-shaped jewel in your hand, and you're back in town.

       

Throckmorton is also a city in Texas, west of Fort Worth.

         

6. Explore the northwestern castle. As with the caves, you need to be marked to even enter. In a bedroom in the castle, you find a Sword of Burning Dragons, a ridiculously powerful weapon. Until you find it, the best weapon in the game is the long sword, which has a weapon rating of 6. The Sword of Burning Dragons has a weapon rating of 100. Once you have it, enemies basically die in one hit.

A trap door leads to the attic, where you find a beholder. He asks the name of the palace (BASILICA) and then gives you the triangular jewel. Again, a flash, and you're back in town.

          

A palace and a basilica aren't quite the same thing.

      

This is where I'm stuck. I have all three jewels, but I can't find the supposed "caves" in which the Evil One lives. An obvious place would be near a beach northwest of Drakkar. There are nine interconnected squares here making up the beach, but I can't figure out anything to do here. Unused items include a flask with an explosive liquid, a pouch with red powder, and a bunch of sand. The most obvious thing would be to throw the explosive bottle at the cliffs north of the beach, perhaps causing the cave to open. But the game doesn't recognize the word CLIFF and just throwing the bottle generically doesn't do anything.

        

A close-up of Drakkar.

        

Let's cover somer oddities and bugs of the game:

   

• There's a fatigue system, but it's weird. You don't get tired until about 600 turns into the game. Assuming that the game doesn't take much longer, whatever I have to do, you could probably win in fewer turns. The game warns you repeatedly that you need to sleep. If you ignore it, you eventually pass out and wake up with all your inventory gone. You can only sleep on beds, but there are only a few places with beds in the game. If you find one and sleep, the game says you wake up refreshed, but it doesn't seem to actually reset the fatigue meter. You keep getting messages that you're exhausted and eventually pass out. You end up having to drop all your inventory, pass out, then pick it up again to avoid this problem.

       

Sleeping for hours and hours only to still be exhausted is the type of thing I play games to escape from, not experience.

     

• There's also a hunger system, but I didn't get hungry until turn 1,200. There's only one food item in the game, so I guess 2,400 turns is the limit.

• The game's parser gets confused when it comes to items with multiple words. The general store sells both Stone Oil and Lamp Oil, but if you try to BUY either of them, it tells you that it doesn't know what you're talking about. If you just BUY OIL, you end up buying the Lamp Oil. I can't figure out any set of commands that lets you buy the Stone Oil. Maybe that's crucial to winning. Similarly, trying to refer to any of the jewels is difficult, as the screenshot below shows.

      

And this is how Chester became an atheist.

      

• In the room where you find the Sword of Burning Dragons, you can TAKE it, but the game doesn't register it as gone from the room. After taking it, if you don't leave the room immediately, it disappears from your inventory.

• To wield a weapon, you have to HOLD it. To unwield it, you have to UNHOLD it. But if you DROP it without UNHOLDing it first, the game registers it as gone but not unwielded. From then on, you can't wield any more weapons because you didn't unwield the previous one, but you also can't unwield the previous one because you dropped it. (This remains true even if you pick it up again.) Clearly, the "something is wielded" flag is distinct from the specific item that is wielded. But you retain the weapon rating of the previously-wielded weapon even if you drop it.

        

My inventory at one point in the game.

     

• The game has a scoring system. For most of the game, no matter how far you progress, the score remains stuck at 0 ("itsy-bitsy ant doo-doo"). Then at some point around Steps 3 or 4, it suddenly goes up to 10,100 ("scrawny") but never budges from there for the rest of the game.

• In general, TADS supports a lot of commands that the game doesn't use. In particular, Curse has no way to interact with NPCs. The game gives you generic responses to things like YELL, SAY, DIG, TURN, PUSH, and so forth, which might make some players assume those commands have some utility in this specific game.

       

If there's nothing useful to PUSH or DIG, then the game should just tell you, not string you along.

    

I'm tempted to record this one as "not winnable" under the assumption that some bug is preventing me from finding the endgame, but I suppose that's a bit dishonest. Plus, it would interfere with the glorious streak of "Nos" in the "won?" column that I've amassed this month. I have reached out to the author, who promised a map of the world and a hint booklet for the $10 shareware fee, so hopefully he still has that, and I can append an addendum to this entry after turning it into a win.

   

For a GIMLET, I'm giving it an 19 [Edit: see below for a modification]. It has a couple of serviceable puzzles, though I would have liked to see more, and of greater complexity. It's about the right length for its mechanics. It doesn't do well in most standard RPG categories, including combat, character creation and development, and NPCs (all 1s). I'm still awaiting a truly great RPG/text adventure hybrid, but an occasional shareware effort helps keep the torch alive.

     

*****

     

Addendum from 6 December 2022

   

Thanks to the help of an anonymous commenter, I was able to log a technical win on this one, but it required so much outside help that I don't feel great about it. The last act of the game embodied the worst tendencies of the worst text adventures, requiring unintuitive leaps of logic as well as guessing the particular verb chosen by the author.

    

I was right that the beach was important. The pouch of red dust that you find somewhere in the adventure turns out to be--how did I not see this?--a magic inflatable raft. You just have to add water. Not just any water, of course--you have to be standing on one of the seven beach squares for it to work. If you try to FILL POUCH in any of the other places with water, the message you get is not something like "this is not the right place to do that," but rather: "Putting that into the pouch might ruin the powder."

   

FILL POUCH in the right square of waterfront causes it to start to expand. To avoid death, you have to THROW POUCH at the water. The game tells you that you "missed" the water, but the pouch does continue expanding into an inflatable raft. 

       

Kudos to my character for waiting for "what seems to be days." I would have given up well before then.

      

For a short while after this, I had no problems. You ENTER RAFT. It takes you across the lake to another section of the wilderness. A long, linear path leads you o the front door of a castle. There are three receptacles for the gems on the front door, and you have to put each gem in its appropriate receptacle, although somehow they remain in your inventory. The game asks for a registration code, which my anonymous commenter helpfully extracted from the game file via hex editor.

   

The castle has a loop of rooms--kitchen, den, slaves' quarters, and so on--with nothing important in them. A message in the slaves' quarters that you feel a "bit of a draft" is your hint that there's a secret door somewhere. I got that. I even figured that it was in the floor, because if you try to go (D)own, the game says, "you can't go that way yet!" The only thing about the room the game notes is the beds, so I tried to PUSH, PULL, MOVE, LIFT, DESTROY, BURN, and do a bunch of other things to the beds. I did not think to LOOK UNDER them, which is the correct answer.

   

Looking under the bed reveals a grate, which opens to a couple linear levels of sewer, including one downward tunnel that is too slippery to get back up. There are a couple of servants' quarters where servants attack, but combat was trivial to me by this point in the game. 

    

The pile of bodies is never explained.

      

The only thing to find in the sewers is a single square where the game notes a painting of a hand on the wall with a dot on the raised index finger. Again, I tried PUSH, PULL, PRESS, and just about everything else but the correct answer: TOUCH.

   

A secret door opens to the final encounter with the evil wizard. He blasts you with a spell that's instant death unless you have the magic sword, armor, and shield from other parts of the game. When this fails, you enter standard combat, and although he starts with thousands of hit points, the overpowered sword still manages to kill him in about six rounds.

       

I'm not sure where all of his "faithfull" go post-combat.

         

The endgame text has you rescuing Fallon Shires's daughter from a cage, at which point Shires somehow magically teleports the two of you to his house, where he gives you a bag of gold and tells you to hit the road. 

       

Why will I see him again? Is his daughter going to be kidnapped again? Is he Liam Neeson?

     

I'm subtracting 1 point from the GIMLET for being so ungenerous with synonyms in the last act. Also: what was the Curse of Vengeance?