BRIEF: Shadow Sorcerer (1991)

 

       

Shadow Sorcerer

United Kingdom

U.S. Gold Ltd. (developer), Strategic Simulations, Inc. (publisher)
Released 1991 for Amiga, Atari ST, and DOS

Rejected for: No character development

      

Shadow Sorcerer is a maddening game with some elements of a good game. I spent days vacillating between BRIEFing it and giving it an honest try. Every time I seemed to be settling on the latter, I'd fight another baffling, frustrating combat and ragequit for a few hours before sighing and trying it again.

     

The game is the third in a series developed by U.S. Gold for SSI, the first two being Heroes of the Lance (1988), which I covered, and Dragons of Flame (1989). (These games are sometimes called the "Silver Box" series, and the designation sometimes includes the SSI-developed strategy game The War of the Lance [1989].) All three games tell stories involving the heroic Companions from the Dungeons & Dragons Dragonlance universe. These stories take place around the War of the Lance, a conflict between various good armies and Draconians led by the evil goddess Takhisis. Sorcerer specifically takes place after the events of the novel Dragons of Autumn Twilight (1984), in which the Companions invade the Draconian fortress of Pax Tharkas and free its slaves. I guess that plot was recounted in Dragons of Flame. I probably should have BRIEFed that first.

      

The box was not, in fact, silver.

      

As the game begins, the Companions are marching out of the front gate of the city with 800 slaves behind them. They decide to bring the slaves to the dwarven kingdom of Thorbardin. They just have to survive long enough to get there--and keep the slaves alive and marching. 

 

A little backstory.

 

Along with Journal Entry #1.

        

The interface is the culmination of a natural evolution in the series. Heroes of the Lance exclusively used a side-view interface. Dragons of Flame kept the side view for local events but contrasted it with a wide-area, top-down view for moving the party across distances. Sorcerer retains these dual views, but for local events, it abandons the side view for an isometric grid much like those used in Legend (1992) a year later. It's a uniquely British point of view that I think we determined goes back to Knight Lore (1984).

     

The overland map (what the game calls "wilderness view") has 663 hexes, arranged in 34 rows that alternate between 19 and 20 hexes per row. One of the neat parts of the game is simply exploring those hexes. Each one has an underlying "tactical view" that you can access by clicking on the party or hitting "0." Sometimes, if there are enemies in the hex, you're taken to the tactical view automatically. Before transitioning, you're given a brief textual description of what the hex is about, some of them referring you to the manual, which has 21 "journal entries" just like the Gold Box RPGs.

       

Exploring the wilderness map.

     

Once in the tactical view, you might find treasures, monsters, encounters, or entrances to caves and dungeons. Tactical view is also where you can look more closely at your characters, trade equipment, and give them default orders for combats.

     

An example of tactical view.

     

As for those characters, you start with Raistlin Majere, Caramon Majere, Goldmoon, and Tanis Half-Elven. They all have default attributes, levels (4-8), spells, and equipment, and--this is key--they do not gain levels during the game. If this party is wiped out, they'll be replaced by other Companions. If they're wiped out--well, then the original party comes back. I don't really understand this. I don't think it's possible to lose the game by having the characters die. It seems that they'll always be resurrected behind the scenes and return. The only way to "lose" is to let too many of the refugees die, and even then, as we'll see, you don't really lose. 

   

Raistlin's statistics.

      

The refugees themselves follow you as you move across the map, represented by their own icon. Various things will cause that icon to split into multiple groups. You're supposed to scout ahead to find safe places to rest, find food, and keep armies of Draconians from harrying them. It's extremely frustrating because they never move where or when you tell them to move. Moreover, the game is constantly stopping to ask you to meet with the "council" that the ex-slaves have formed, and you have to decide how to deal with them, with options to plead, reason, threaten, or use physical force. There's some science to this that I might figure out if I played a lot more. Whatever you choose, groups of the ex-slaves might decide to turn around and head back, stop where they are (and what? Build a town?), or continue on.

       

I probably shouldn't have chosen "use physical force" every time.

    

I honestly could do without the entire refugee mechanic, but as much as I dislike it, what really ruins the game for me is the combat. The problem is that it takes place in real-time. (So does wilderness movement, for that matter, so a dragon can swoop down on your party when you're trying to make a decision.) The game offers the tactical options of the Gold Box but ruins them by requiring you to engage them with speed--or simply give up and turn on the "quick combat" options. It's possible that I could have gotten good at it, but I would have vastly preferred a turn-based combat system like the ones in the Gold Box or Spelljammer (2021).

   

There are other maddening things about the interface, which primarily uses the mouse, but with a few keyboard backups. Party movement is so horrible that you have to play it to believe it. The tiniest obstacle causes a character to get hung up and refuse to move with the party. When it comes to auto combat, you can set default actions for each character, including melee attack, ranged attack, cast a spell, or flee. You turn these on and off by clicking a box, which changes color, but some of them are on by default, and the manual doesn't bother to tell you which color represents "on" and which represents "off." You'd think you'd be able to tell the answer from experimentation, but the SSI developers must have consulted with their Origin counterparts, because the characters are as good as actually following their default actions as those in the two parts of Ultima VII.

       

In battle against some Draconians. I'm not sure why only two of my characters seem to be participating.

        

Despite all of this, most combats are easy, except in the case of the occasional enemy who comes along and kills a character with one blast of a spell. And I swear that enemies who shouldn't even be capable of spells occasionally cast them. A giant spider killed me with a lightning bolt; are they supposed to be able to do that?

    

Other elements of the interface are so unintuitive that it took me 15 minutes to figure out how to pick up a scroll on the first screen. I'm still not sure how to swap out equipment, or if it's even possible.

   

In short, the developers ruined what could otherwise be a fun approach--open exploration of a huge hex grid--with bad mechanics and an endless escort mission. What's particularly unfortunate is that you would never explore anywhere near the total number of hexes in a regular game, which lends it a lot of replayability.

      

Looking for the entrance to Skullcap.

      

Very close to the starting point at Pax Tharkas, you find a tower with a magical viewing device called the Eye of Elar. If you wait until dark and look through it, it will show you which hex in the mountain range at the far south of the valley contains the entrance to Skullcap, the fortress that guards the gates of Thorbardin. This location is randomized for each new game, which again adds to the replayability. 

    

I made it to Skullcap several times--you only have to walk directly there, leaving the refugees behind if you want. I didn't make it far into the fortress, however. The enemies are tough, and defeating them would require some greater expertise in the combat system, or finding useful items along the way, or both. I gather that Skullcap is the home of a wizard named Fistandantilus, the game's "big boss." I thought he was probably the "shadow sorcerer" of the title, but the Dragonlance wiki seems to disagree. I also read something that suggests you need to hit a couple of important encounters in the wilderness map before you can successfully navigate Skullcap.

   

In any event, if you defeat Fistandantilus, you continue on to Thorbardin and get a message that the gates have closed behind you, you've "accomplished a great deed," and the slaves are safe. You're then taken to a screen that shows how many experience points each character earned and how much they all earned in total. This is a "score" that players are encouraged to try to beat.

       

My best attempt.

      

Here's the kicker: You get the victory message no matter how the game ends. If you just stand in place outside Pax Tharkas, letting enemies show up to kill your Companions and all the refugees, you'll still get the message that you "feel safe in the knowledge that you have accomplished a great deed." The only thing that's different is the score. So I guess in that sense, I've "won." I could have given this a number and a GIMLET. But I don't feel like I've really won without defeating Fistandantilus and, more importantly, without really mastering the mechanics.

         

I literally did nothing at all.

       

In a February 1992 Computer Gaming World review, someone named "Todd" mostly agrees with me. I think he liked the game a bit better than I did, but he still complains about the refugee system, the interface, and the combat system. "Some more programming time on the character AI routines would have geometrically improved player satisfaction," he says. It's impossible not to agree with this assessment since a geometric curve can take literally any shape that exists.

     

I understand that some British magazine reviews are rage-inducing, claiming that Sorcerer is an improvement on the Gold Box, but alas with the Internet Archive still offline, our ability to consult old reviews is significantly diminished. I hope that comes back soon. 

   

Finally, it's worth re-reading Jakub Majewski's long and enthusiastic but ultimately accurate comment about the game from 2020. Jakub hasn't posted since 2021, but I hope he's still around and is satisfied that I at least gave it a shot.