Realms of Darkness: A Smashing Good Time

Second quest solved!

      

Our second quest was to deal with a cursed crystal ball. Its previous owner had learned from the ball itself that the solution would be found in the ruins southwest of the city of Grail. The ruins ended up being four levels, and it took me about six hours to fully explore them and complete the quest.

   

In contrast to the odd shapes and sizes of the levels in the first dungeon, the four levels here were a relatively uniform 16 x 16, although with some oddities clearly meant to prevent the player from getting too complacent. Level 1 had a single square jutting out from the otherwise perfect cube of a level. The other three levels each had between 1 and 3 squares of dead space. Each level also continued to offer relatively pointless one-way doors and one-way walls in odd locations, although some of them offered more consequential one-way walls. Teleporters and illusory walls were rare but still a mechanic of the game.

     

The first level of the second dungeon. What is that one stupid square doing there?

         

Let's take the puzzles level by level.

   

Level 1

    

• Two pointless rooms, each of which teleported the party to the other. Both were across the hall from each other. The hallway in between had a message: "Don't get lost!" It would have been impossible. The whole thing had no purpose. It wasn't even a momentary distraction.

• A corridor in which we were driven back by a "dazzling display of lights." We had to find a pair of sunglasses elsewhere on the level and activate them with the text parser. It was not the worst anachronism of the evening.

    

I couldn't think of an appropriate quip.

      

• A door for which we had to find a red key.

• An electric fan found on the floor in a maze of single-square rooms with a lot of one-way doors. The fan came into play on Level 4.

   

Level 2

   

Accessed by a chain from Level 1, Level 2 started in a room that opened into an adjacent corridor. In one square, we saw a sign that read: "Future home of stairs." The corridor wrapped around past a voice that warned "Danger ahead!" and dropped us down a pit. I thought we had dropped to Level 3 at first and started mapping it as such, but it turned out that the pit and the destination were on the same level.

  

It took me a while to figure out how to get back to the beginning of the level, via a one-way door. The enemies were hard enough that while I was searching for the way back, I suffered my first full-party death. As long as one party member remains mobile, the party can keep exploring, try to get back to the surface, and pay the temple for resurrect. But once the eighth person falls, the game says that the monsters have won and instructs the player to insert the boot disk to erase them from the character library. I declined to do this and restored the game from a backup of the disk. I have been playing honestly and paying for resurrection when individual characters die.

       

If "any key" includes the power button, we're good here.

      

Elsewhere on the level:

    

• In a nook in one room, we found a dwarven smith selling merchandise. He also said that his wife had been kidnapped, and he asked us to rescue her, giving us a Wizard's Key we'd need for that purpose. We found his wife elsewhere on the level and brought her back, for which he gave us a "stairway kit." We also bought a bunch of studded maces and leather armor from him, the best items in the game so far.

     

Rule #1 of a happy marriage: Don't move your wife to a dungeon.

     

• As we entered one area, a voice boomed out, "Let the tournament begin!" This small 6 x 5 area had walls to suggest an arena and random encounters every few steps. There didn't seem to be any way to "win" the tournament, but perhaps I just didn't spend enough time there.

   

The "tournament" area had a lot of these guys.

    

• In a room off the arena, a box held a suit of chainmail, the best armor found so far.

• A door to one room announced the "Rogue Alliance branch office," but there was no one there. I had to pass through here to find the dwarf's wife, however.

• In the northwest corner, we found instructions for building stairs. This, coupled with the stairway kit from the smith, allowed us to build a stairway to Level 3.

   

Level 3

   

• A wishing well. We later found a dime in a secret area and tossed it in (I guess regular gold pieces weren't good enough). A message told us that: "If you can find someone to willingly take on the cursed object, your mission will be accomplished."

      

All right, which one of you wished for that?

     

• A bridge preceded by a sign that warned us there was a weight limit of "four characters." For the first time, I had to break the party into two groups of four, then reunite them on the other side. It was a trite use of the mechanic, but it was clearly meant to get the player used to it.

    

Identifying the members for the second party.

    

• On a desk, we found and read a manual titled Programming: The Trial and Error Method. 

        

Who wants to be the first to work it out?

      

• A painting on a wall of "ten strange white towers." Examining it led to a message that the "towers" were set up in a triangle. We had found a large black ball earlier on the level, so the whole thing put me in mind of an arrangement of bowling pins. Sure enough, the BOWL keyword led to us rolling the ball through the wall. The stairs to the next level were on the other side. 

    

It was a cute puzzle, but I feel like one of my spiked maces should have been able to accomplish this.

        

Level 4

   

• In three or four places, a "frantic gnome" was running around, screaming about his lost "seismic device."

• A statue of a knight in a nook said, "Those who do not impress me do not pass." I brought up the parser and tried FIGHT, DANCE, JUGGLE, and a bunch of other keywords to no avail. Looking through the screenshots of previous messages, I remembered the programming manual, and I tried PROGRAM. The knight was satisfied and opened the wall for us. Groan.

        

I should show him what it took to emulate this game.

     

We found a boulder teetering on the edge of a ledge, and it seemed obvious to me that we'd be able to use it to smash the crystal ball. From the gnome constantly whining about his seismic device, I figured we'd have to find it and use it to cause the boulder to fall. (I tried reaching the ledge with rope & hooks to no avail). But before we found the seismic device, we found a goblin running a pawnshop who offered to buy the ball for 10 silver. I declined, but I wonder what the consequences are for solving the quest this way. It's nice to have a role-playing choice.

   

The seismic device was found in an area of fog that we had to use the electric fan to disperse. (No idea where we found power for it.) Once we had it, we returned to the boulder. It took me a minute to figure out how to use it—I had to EXAMINE it, note that it had a lever, and then PULL LEVER. Fortunately, the game saved us from doing this while standing directly under the boulder.

        

Again . . . mace.

       

Eventually, I got the sequence right and smashed the crystal. We warped back to the surface (more on how in a second) and returned to the nobleman. He rewarded us with a Staff of Healing and told us we could use "his" bridge. I was wondering how the game was going to offer any more quests given that we'd already explored the only two dungeons.

       

Is the river laughing with me or at me?

      

Enemies naturally got harder and harder during the session, with many of them capable of stunning, blinding, and poisoning. I had to leave the dungeon a lot for healing. Between healing, food, and the few equipment upgrades I bought from the dwarven smith, I ended the session dead broke. 

     

Getting paid 1 silver coin per combat doesn't help.

      

Getting in and out of the dungeon was facilitated by a couple of Blades of Escape that we found. I've been having my sorcerer collect all the equipment we find and painstakingly cast "Item Identification" one at a time whenever we return to town. For a while, I found nothing but standard items, but slowly that started to change, and this session delivered several daggers +2, staves +1, and three Blades of Escape.

     

The blades perform adequately as weapons, but more importantly, when I)nvoked, they cast "Teleport," long before I would have gotten the spell from leveling. It turns out that "Teleport" in this game just lets you teleport by level, not to specific squares. It's risky to use on the way down; my read is that it won't work if there's some puzzle you have to solve to get to a particular level. Every time I tried to use it to travel to Level 4 of the dungeon, we just bounced into solid rock and took a lot of damage (fortunately, unlike Wizardry, you don't instantly die in such situations). But traveling back to the surface has so far been pain-free.

    

I'm still mostly enjoying combat. It's challenging without being punishing. Every time I finished up a level, before heading back to town, I found a completely open square (no walls) and spun in place to generate random encounters. When you have no adjacent walls, all characters can fight in combat. This "grinding" only amounted to three or four battles per level, though. Usually, by the time I finished exploring a level, I was in rough shape.

    

One of the more memorable enemies on the level.

 

I have so many questions.

Never mind. I have new questions.

       

We saw that the distance from Level 1 to 2 and from 2 to 3 were each 1,000 experience points, but it increased to 2,000 to go to Level 4 and then 4,000 (8,000 total) to go to Level 5. My characters are all Level 5 at this point, but it's going to take a while to get to Level 6. Earning a few hundred points per battle, it's hard to see how we're ever going to get Level 8 spells unless the game lasts a long time.

    

Speaking of spells, each level has brought a few new spell slots, and I haven't been as adventurous with them as I should be. For instance, I tend to spend all my sorcerer Level 1 slots on "Fireball," but it sounds like "Absentmindedness" (makes monsters forget to attack you) could be equally useful. I've been using priests mostly for healing, but they have some Level 2 spells ("Confuse", "Blind") that I should try more often. I'll try to give a full spell update next time.

   

Miscellaneous notes:

   

• There's a Level 2 priest spell called "Gnihton Spell." This is, of course, "nothing" backwards. The manual says that it makes the party feel invincible, but it doesn't promise that it does anything. The same spell appears in Tangled Tales, the next game from the same authors.

• In interests of full disclosure, I should mention that after completing each map, I have been checking them against the ones that Abacos uploaded to StrategyWiki, because I haven't felt like checking every perimeter wall for secret doors.

• Every time the game asks me who will dare approach a chest and try to disarm it, it amuses me that I named my thief "Timid."

    

Everyone looks at the thief and snickers.

    

Winning the second quest opened a bridge to the other side of the southern river and added 15 new outdoor squares to the game map. There are two dungeon entrances plus a store named "Willy's Weapon Warehouse" that sells long swords. I'm not sure what the next quest will be, just that the guard in Grail said that he heard of "trouble beyond the river" and that a fisherman on the river warns that the other side of the bridge is the territory of someone named "Gorth."

     

Doesn't sound like the kind of place where you want to pitch a tent.

    

By next time, I should have an idea of who Gorth is and whether he's my nemesis or benefactor.

   

Time so far: 15 hours