Game 522: Local Area Dungeon (1993)

       

Local Area Dungeon

United States

BCS Software (developer); published as shareware

Released 1993 for Windows 3

Date Started: 3 July 2024

Date Ended: 10 July 2024

Total Hours: 16

Difficulty: Hard (4.0/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)   
          

Local Area Dungeon is a fiendish little graphical "roguelite" from author Mike Berro. If you're not familiar with roguelikes or roguelites, go ahead and look at those entries in my glossary. It gets the latter designation because it allows for some limited saving, but it's still pretty hard. It took me about a week to win, playing a few hours a day and a lot on the final days.

         

With little explanation, the game starts you on Level 0 (a town level) of "The Dungeon of CompuServe" (the game was originally distributed there). You play a fighter/wizard on a nebulous quest to recover something from the 13-level dungeon below. You don't know at the outset of the game what "it" is, just that every time you try to go home (to the house icon on the town level), your family calls you a "deadbeat" and tells you not to return until you have found "it."

         

The "backstory."

      

The existence of a town level suggests that Berro might have been influenced by Moria (1983) rather than Rogue directly; it also has a full set of statistics like Moria, but the similarities mostly end there. [Ed. As discussed in the comments, the more obvious source is Larn (1986), which I should go back and finish some day.] The only choice you get during character creation is whether to play on "Easy," "Normal," or "Hard" difficulty levels. There isn't a huge difference. "Normal" starts you with 12 points in all statistics, a walking stick for a weapon, and leather armor. "Easy" bumps your luck statistic to 14 points, gives you a leather armor +1, and has more inventory slots. "Hard" starts you with all your attributes at 10 (luck at 8), a walking stick but no armor, less inventory space, and no automatic map of the town level. Apparently, monsters are more aggressive, too.

    

The town level randomly distributes a selection of services, a few items, and a few easy monsters. Monsters occasionally respawn. Services are:

    

• Your house, where you will find no succor.

     

The town level. My family is ruthless.

      

• A hospital, where you can pay to heal hit points.

• A Wizard's Rest, where you can pay to restore spell points.

• A bank, where you can deposit and withdraw gold and sell gems. You get 2% interest per cycle, which doesn't sound like a lot, but actually adds up very fast. 

     

Late in the game, I was grateful for the interest.

      

• A Dungeon College, where you can pay escalating amounts of money for "courses" that increase attributes and maximum spell points. The cost doubles each time you take a class, starting at 250 gold pieces. It's worth taking a few, I think.

• A Dungeon Shop where you can buy items. It has the weirdest selection. There is no basic starting gear here. Everything is relatively expensive, up to the 1.3 million gold piece Vorpal Blade +1. I don't know how you'd ever legitimately buy that.

      

One wonders who the Dungeon Shop's regular customers are.

      

• A Pawn Shop, where you can sell unwanted items.

• Training Grounds, where you level up if you have enough experience. This is unusual; in most roguelikes, leveling happens automatically, when you cross the threshold. 

• The Wizard of What, who identifies unidentified items. I wish every roguelike had one of these.

    

Stairs go down to the first level of the 13-level dungeon (not counting the town level). In a departure from roguelike norms, the levels are mostly fixed. Specifically, the layouts are fixed and some of the enemies, treasures, and special encounters are fixed. There is room for some randomization, particularly in enemy respawning and the treasures that enemies drop. Like Moria, but not Rogue, treasures are gated by level.  You're not going to find a Long Sword +9 on Level 1. 

       

A lot of times you die, you have no idea why.

     

A lot of the mechanics in the game will be familiar to roguelike players. You fight enemies by bashing into them, although you can use missile weapons and spells to nail them from afar. When you find items, they're unidentified the first time, but once you identify one by using or paying to identify it, all future items of that type are identified automatically. The game does away with assigning them random colors or materials; potions just appear in your inventory as "Potion" until identified.

 

As you explore, you slowly get more powerful via weapons, armor, spellbooks, and rings. Rings generally add points directly to your attributes. Spellbooks add to your inventory of available spells, which are generally far more powerful than your melee weapons, but spell points recharge exceedingly slowly.  

     

Assembling, and losing, an inventory on the first level.

     

Other aspects will not be familiar. Roguelikes are typically fair. Players can be horrendously unlucky and end up with unviable characters, but generally a cautious player who knows the rules can find a path forward most of the time. Local Area Dungeon depends much more on dying horribly, learning not to do that thing again, and reloading from the town (the only place you can save). For instance, on Level 2, right next to the stairway, is a room with two insanely difficult foes called giant banana slugs. They guard a powerful weapon called a Sunsword. They cannot be hurt by weapons; the only way to kill them is with powerful spells that you don't have until the end of the game. When you encounter them early on, you're dead the moment you open the door. You have to just die and then not open it again.

      

Dungeon offers two features that I haven't seen in other roguelikes:

      

• Inevitable Weapon breakage. Every turn of the timer brings a chance that something you have equipped will break. Everything breaks eventually. Before I learned to carry backup items--and even sometimes after that--I routinely found myself with no weapons and armor. You go from having 5 rings, a sword +5, ring mail +3, and feeling pretty damned powerful, to having every one of these items broken, without even a single battle in between, in as little as five minutes. Late in the game, you get a "Repair Items" spell that mostly deals with the problem. Until then, it's pretty infuriating. At one point, I paid a lot of money for a Long Sword +9 only to have it break before I'd fought a single combat with it.

     

I really thought I had prepared with excess armor.

       

• Time limit. You have to win the game within a certain number of turns, or you drop dead. The counter at the outset (on all three difficulty levels) is set to 320 cycles. Each cycle represents about 120 moves. Some magic items and special encounters can add or subtract from the number of cycles. I thought this would be a bigger issue than it was. I ended up winning the game with 129 cycles to spare.

      

I had to work hard to get this screen.

       

• Trap doors. They cannot be detected unless something I haven't yet found detects them. They send you plummeting to your doom with absolutely no warning or recourse (sometimes you "land gently," but you have no control over this). There's even one of them on the town level.

      

The interface is annoying but not infuriating. As an early Windows game, it's a bit too in love with . . . well, windows. The exploration screen, the inventory list, the list of current spells in effect ("Powers & Curses"), your list of available spells to cast, and a "History" window showing what items you've identified are all separate windows that can be minimized, maximized, resized, and moved around. This sounds great, but there's no configuration that works perfectly, particularly when the dungeon levels start taking up more than one screen and you need access to the scrollbars that the other windows always seem to be on top of. However, the individual windows can be called and dismissed with function keys, so I found the best way to mimic the interface of, say, NetHack, is to dismiss all but the exploration window and then bring up the others when you need them with the appropriate function key. I just wish the author had tied inventory to "I" rather than F5. 

         

I juggle various windows while trying to see the action on the main screen and get to the scrollbar.

       

The regular keyboard keys aren't really used. To cast a spell, for instance, you bring up the spell list and double-click on it instead of hitting "C." You can move with the numberpad. This is thus the second game I've played recently, after Shadows of Yserbius, for which I've been grateful for the ability to move my external numberpad to the left side of the keyboard so I can move with my left hand and use the mouse with my right hand. In short, I was able to come up with an accommodation, but that still doesn't excuse a game in the Rogue tradition requiring the use of a mouse at all.

   

The graphics are a bit too small and complex for their size. It's so difficult to differentiate the hero from enemies that the game has a "Where Am I?" command that makes the hero icon wave his little arms. I appreciated the "What Is It?" menu option, which identifies other icons on the screen. It would have been better just to make them bigger in the first place.

      

The game identifies an icon.

      

The game's bestiary is mostly familiar to any fantasy RPG player. Early game enemies include bats, goblins, and orcs, all of which come in small, medium, and large varieties. You mostly fight them by bashing into them with your melee weapon. There are bows in the game, but arrows are so rare, you'd think they were made of rhodium. There are also occasional throwing weapons like throwing stars. Spells do most of the heavy lifting towards the end of the game, and some enemies (e.g., gelatinous cubes, living dead) can only be killed with spells.

   

There are a few roguelike staples in the beast list, including leprechauns who try to steal your things before teleporting away, rust monsters who ruin your equipment, and dragons who breathe at you from a distance. One original monster is a "tongue snatcher," whose unique ability leaves you unable to transact at shops. I'm not sure if there's a way to heal from it. On the higher levels, enemies like invisible daemons, metal-eating grogs, and golden dragons are basically impossible to defeat in melee combat.

       

I don't remember what level this was, but it was easy to explore.

      

Around the 2/3 mark, the game shifts from being primarily about physical combat to being primarily about your use of magic. At first, spells are at best supplements to melee combat. "Magic Missile" is a good substitute for a couple melee attacks; "Protection +1" adds a point to your armor class; "Teleport" is worth a try as a means of getting back to a lower level from the town (you can always reload if you end up in an unfortunate place). Things start to change when you get "Fireball," which is worth ten melee attacks, and "Magic Fire," which does the same thing as "Fireball" but to everyone in a radius. "Repair Items" deals with the breakage issue and gives you a stable inventory. "Annihilate Monsters" straight up kills everything nearby, no matter how powerful, no saving.

   

Perhaps the most useful spell is "Etherealness," which lets you walk through walls but doesn't affect your ability to fight, pick up items, or use stairs. It's the key to getting through the last few levels as efficiently as possible, but it's great on any level because if you're standing in a wall, enemies can't target you. You can kill them with impunity, unless they're capable of walking through walls themselves. You get the spell very late in the game, but it can be conferred at random by fountains or pools, and I think it's worth the risk. It lasts a long time, too.

        

I fight a "Dumb Ass."

     

The problem, of course, is that these high-level spells require a lot of spell points, and spell points regenerate so slowly that they might as well not regenerate at all, about 1 in every 50 moves. If you're lucky, you'll find a Ring of Spell Rejuvenation, which increases the number of points regained at each interval. But even with my +6 ring, it's about 200 moves to regenerate enough points to cast "Annihilate Monsters." Potions of Spell Healing (an awkward name) help somewhat, and you do occasionally find scrolls that do the same things as spells.

    

The game does a reasonably good job with its level design, varying the challenges as you descend. Levels 1-2 are small introductory levels. Level 3 is the first one that extends across multiple screens, requiring the scrollbar. It also is the first to feature secret doors, which you must find (you just bash into walls) to reach the stairway down. Level 4 introduces the need to find keys to open locked doors.

        

Finding keyed doors on Level 4.

       

Level 5 is kind of a break--a small, completely open area with a Training Ground, so you don't have to return to the surface to level up. 

       

The easy Level 5 and its welcome Training Grounds.

       

Level 6 has more keys, and you actually have to descend to Level 7 to find enough keys to open the doors on Level 6 that allow you to access the stairways up. Level 8 introduces invisible walls and, even worse, invisible stalkers. It also has a bank, a Dungeon College, and a pawn shop, again helping you avoid a trip all the way back to the surface.

      

Dealing with an invisible stalker while trying to find my way around invisible walls.

      

Levels 9-11 are all very large and maze-like, with increasingly tough monsters. Level 12 is open like Level 5, but with a lot of invisible walls. Finally, Level 13 is enormous, with a very linear maze of interconnected rooms populated by the game's toughest foes. If you spend any time here at all, you basically have to spam "Annihilate Monster." I got through it with a Scroll of Magic Mapping and "Etherealize"; I'm not sure what I would have done without either of these.

   

As you explore, a key question is how often to retrace your steps to the surface. The Training Ground on Level 5 and the bank, Dungeon College, and pawn shop on Level 8 help a little, but every once in a while, you need the Wizard's Rest to fully restore magic points and the Wizard of What to identify iffy objects. Finally, there's no point in accumulating all of that interest unless you use it to buy items at the Dungeon Shop. I never accumulated enough money for the Vorpal Blade, but I did get enough for a Light Saber, which is an unbelievably powerful melee weapon (although even it has limited utility on the lower levels). A Light Saber +1 has three times the weapon class as a Long Sword +10. There are also scrolls and rings worth saving for, such as a Ring of Protection +10 and a Ring of Spell Rejuvenation +3 (if you don't find one). One unique item to this game is a Scroll of Gem Improvement, which increases the value of any gems in your possession. You find some extremely valuable artifact gems late in the game, and I can only imagine that these scrolls are the keys to being able to afford that Vorpal Blade.

      

"Annihilate Monster" does its job.

      

Anyway, I worried about running out of time if I kept going to the surface, but I worried in vain. To get back to the depths of the dungeon, after you save on the surface, it's worth casting "Teleport" to see if it gets you close to where you left off, then reloading if you don't like where it takes you.

   

Some miscellaneous notes:

   

• The shareware version has an annoying feature where the "About this Game" box pops up every few dozen steps. You have to click "OK," to close it--you can't do it with the keyboard--but there are three "OK" buttons, and only one of them works, randomized each time the box comes up. Fortunately, author Mike Berro publicized a user name (TOMBONNOMA) and registration key (28426126) that allows you to register it. 

• The game has fountains and pools that seem to have an equal chance of doing something good (e.g., increasing an attribute, healing you) or bad (e.g., decreasing an attribute, making you sick).

      

I step into a pool and get a point of dexterity.

       

• There are objects that you repeatedly encounter in the dungeon that I could find no way to interact with. The game simply doesn't have enough commands. These include large treasure chests, statues, and mirrors. 

• If you hold down one of the keys on the numberpad to move consistently in that direction (e.g., to get down a long corridor), the character instead moves erratically. I don't know whether this is a bug or whether the author just didn't want people holding down a movement key. 

• There are altars in the dungeon, sometimes blocking passageways. When you encounter them, you're asked if you want to donate, which takes half of your gold. If you have enough gold, you get a message that the gods are pleased, but I never noticed what this did for me materially. Oddly, sometimes I said, "No," and I still got a benefit, such as increased attributes.

       

Saying "no" still gets you some benefits sometimes.

       

• One enemy, not unique, is "Gollum." He always drops a ring when you kill him.

       

Gollum dies and drops a ring.

        

• A "boss key" command opens up a facsimile of the Windows Notepad application in front of the game window.

• When you first go down to a new level, the game doesn't put you on the staircase going back up. It puts you on a blank square. You have to find the staircase to return to any upper level. Once you find it, the next time you descend to the level, you appear on the staircase.

    

It took me about 13 hours of play, often losing all my progress and having to reload from the town, to make it to the final level. I actually never finished exploring Levels 11 and 12. Towards the end of the game, I adopted a strategy of casting "Teleport" from the town, exploring for only a few minutes, and then risking "Teleport" to return to an earlier level. One of these expeditions landed me on Level 13. I had been saving a Scroll of Magic Mapping for this purpose and revealed the entire dungeon when I arrived. Fortunately, the scroll also reveals treasures, so I could see items scattered all over the place. "Etherealize" helped me go right to those treasures instead of wending my way through the maze.

        

Blasting a bunch of nearby foes on Level 12 with "Annihilate Monster."

       

A message on Level 1 had said, "The item you seek does what bells do," so I was already primed to look for a ring. Pretty soon I found something called a Ring of Winning. Figuring this must be it, I took a chance on "Teleport" to get out, wound up on Level 4, and walked the rest of the way. Unfortunately, my family still wanted nothing to do with me.

       

What the hell, fam?

      

I returned to Level 13, again via "Teleport," which got me to Level 11. I walked the rest of the way. This time, I ran around picking up every single item I could see, blasting collections of enemies with "Annihilate Monster." I got very low on spell points but was ultimately able to grab everything. There were a lot of rings on the level, including Rings of Intelligence, Charisma, Agility, and Strength, plus two more Rings of Winning. In the end, it turned out that my family wanted a random Ring of Strength. I verified this by dropping everything else. I'm thus not sure what the Rings of Winning were about.

       

Collecting everything on the final level.

        

Once you step on your house with the artifact, a screen pops up and recaps your mission, assigning a final score based on the difficulty level, time remaining, and number of saves that you made. You can keep playing after this.

       

I could have been more conservative about saving. I didn't know it was being counted.

       

Except for the interface, I enjoyed this one. It was a solid challenge, and despite the Moria base, it had a lot of original elements. This entry is getting very long--I probably should have split it--so I'll just summarize the GIMLET rather than stepping it out. I give it a score of 33. It does best in "equipment" and "economy" (both 6s), worst for not having any NPCs, not much of a backstory, and not much to recommend in the "graphics, sound, and interface" category. The author spent a lot of time on graphics that you really can't see.

    

Local Area Dungeon was a side project for author Mike Berro, who started his career in video and computer effects for television and films. About the time this game was published, he was in his late 30s and was making a career change to computer games. He took a job at Mass Media, which under both its own name and Philips P.O.V. Entertainment Group, specialized in games with embedded videos. Berro's credited titles at the company include Voyeur (1993), Thunder in Paradise Interactive (1995, starring Hulk Hogan), The Game of Life (1998), and Jim Henson's Muppets Party Cruise (2003). None of his games are RPGs or show any RPG influence, but clearly he had been exposed to roguelikes at some point and enjoyed them. 

    

From information on his web site, this version of Local Area Dungeon is actually the second one released. I couldn't find any evidence of an earlier one. (His web site, confusingly, calls this game "the original" from 1990, but notes in the readme file clearly say it's the second edition from 1993.) He also offers a modern Windows game on his site called Simple Dungeon (2021), which offers a number of easy, medium, and hard roguelike scenarios using the same dungeon engine.

       

A screenshot from the "A Simple Dungeon" module of Simple Dungeon (2021).

           

I tried to contact Mr. Berro through his web site but had not heard from him at press time. Mike, if you find your way here, you earned the shareware fee for this one.