Game 569: The Cursed Chambers (1981)

 

I'm glad we eventually settled upon "role-playing game."

          

The Cursed Chambers

United Kingdom

Independently developed and published; later re-published by Kuma

Released 1981 for Sharp MZ-80; re-released in 1983 for Sharp MZ-80, 1984 for Sharp MZ-700 and Tatung Einstein 

Date Started: 2 March 2026

Date Ended: 4 March 2026

Total Hours: 5 

Difficulty: User-definable, but easy-moderate (2.5/5) in general.
Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later) 

       

A few years ago, I told the story of how I and some classmates developed War Plus, a card game based on War. My third-grade teacher banned War because it offers no strategy or decision-making, so it was in no way educational. My friend Hiram and I went home and worked out some new rules that would overcome the teacher's objections. It not only worked, but it spawned a brief craze in which practically every kid in the class came up with his own version.

   

I often think about War Plus when I encounter a game that has made an effort to adorn a much simpler base game. In the case of The Cursed Chambers, that base game is The Wizard's Castle (1980), which itself goes back to Star Trek (1971) by way of Hobbit (1975). Where Star Trek and Hobbit were mainframe games, The Wizard's Castle was widely disseminated as type-in code and thus spawned plenty of "pluses," including The Yendor's Castle (1986), Leygref's Castle (1986), Mission: Mainframe (1987) and Bones (1991). These games all share:

 

• A quest to recover a MacGuffin that has been randomly placed in the dungeon, usually an orb of some kind (the original is the Orb of Zot).   

• A game map consisting of a multi-leveled grid of rooms.

• Random encounters in each of the rooms, including monsters. 

• A small inventory to assist with those encounters.

• A short game time and limited or no saving. The game is meant to be highly random and replayable.

• Small inventories, including usable items. Basic RPG attributes that go up and down frequently.

    

The Cursed Chambers is another such Wizard's Castle Plus, this one earning its "plus" more than most of the others, with the exception of the roguelike-influenced Mission: Mainframe. Compared to most variants of this line, Chambers has a bigger inventory of useful items, more attributes, more complex combat, and a greater variety of special encounters. It is also the only version, and one of the few RPGs, released for two lesser-known platforms available in Europe in the early 1980s: The Sharp MZ series and the Tatung Einstein.

      

An ad for the game in the January 1982 Personal Computer World.

          

The goal in Chambers is to find the Almighty Sphere, hidden somewhere in a one-level dungeon. The dungeon is always 10 squares wide, wrapping, but the y-axis is player-definable, between 15 and 200 rows. Advertisements for the game say that it supports up to 4,000 rooms, but the Tatung Einstein version, at least, won't go that high.

  

In addition to the size of the dungeon, the player specifies a message speed and an overall difficulty of the game from 1 (easy) to 9 (hard). Based on my limited experience, I think the difficulty only affects the ratio of monster squares to other squares. It doesn't seem to affect the damage that monsters do or take, or if it does, the difference between even 1 and 9 is small. I felt that paradoxically I found more gold on higher difficulties, but I'd have to play longer to be sure.

      

Outfitting the character.

          

The player also has the choice of meticulously outfitting his character from a pool of 5000 gold pieces or starting quickly with an "ordinary" character. The ordinary character has 40 in each attribute (strength, IQ, dexterity, food, water, stamina), three flames, five arrows, a mace, a suit of chainmail, a lamp, and 500 gold pieces left over. A player who insists on outfitting his own character does not have enough gold to buy all these things; he's about 1,300 gold pieces short.

       

All the attributes are important. If any of them reaches 0, the character dies. Dexterity affects the likelihood of hitting in combat; strength affects the damage done; IQ affects the power of spells and magic items. Developing these attributes both initially and throughout the game is vital.

        

A mid-game character status.

         

The game always starts at coordinates (3,1) in the dungeon, and the player has to return here to exit with the Almighty Orb. Each round, the player can choose to rest and restore some attributes (with a chance of some misfortune that causes attribute and gold loss), drinking an elixir, checking his statistics, and moving on. Unlike many games in this lineage, Chambers offers no way to call up a map of the dungeon. On the other hand, the game does give your coordinates every time you move, and there are no teleporters to fling you from one place to another as there were in Castle.

   

(The Wizard's Castle has frequent environmental messages that appear as the player moves from room to room: "You stepped on a frog"; "You smell monster frying"; "You hear a scream"; "You see a bat." Chambers has these, too, but oddly they only come up when you use the U)pdate command to check your inventory and statistics.)

            

Starting statistics for an ordinary adventurer. I wouldn't have known I slipped on a frog if I hadn't checked.

       

The dungeon wraps east/west but not north/south, so the player that insists on playing with a 200-row dungeon may face a long trek from the starting square to the Almighty Orb. Each room that he enters may have one of several encounters:

   

• A monster. More on them in a minute.

• A random amount of gold.

• A gemstone worth a lot of gold. You can sell them to traders, and that gold is key to character development.

• A magical treasure: luckstone, ring, wand, or cross. The character can only carry one of these (each) at a time.

• Food, which might be poisoned.

     

Lesson learned: When exploring a dungeon full of monsters, bring your food with you.

     

• A random number of spells between 1 and 3.

• A random number of flares between 1 and 3.

• An elixir. Quaffing it immediately raises a chosen attribute to 100. 

• A treasure chest. There's about a 50/50 chance whether it has a positive result (potions that raise attributes, gold, a wizard who gratefully gives you gold for freeing him) or a negative one (a trap, a vampire whose surprise attack incurs a loss of gold and attributes). Two chests in every dungeon have an elf sword and elf plate armor, the best items in the game.

      

This sequence of events borders on slapstick.

       

• An almighty wizard. He tells you how many enemies you've killed and how many moves you've made. If you have more than 15,000 gold, he offers to sell you the location of the Almighty Orb for that much. This is a poor investment for a small dungeon but perhaps a necessary one for a large dungeon.

• A trader. He sells the same stuff that you can buy at the outset of the game, but for a lot more money. 

• A stream that you have to negotiate. Failing a dexterity check may cause you to lose attributes.

• A wall that forces the character to move one square to the south if he does not have the orb, to the north if he does.

• A pit that the character falls into. An orc shows up with a ladder, which he offers for all the character's equipment. Fortunately, there are few of these—maybe only one per dungeon. 

         

A partial map of one instance of the game. These encounters are randomized with each new game.

         

The lamp, which has 100 uses, can tell you what you'll find in each cardinal direction. Once you deal with whatever is in a particular square, it remains empty for the rest of the game. There are no wandering enemies.

     

Getting a hint for an adjacent room.

        

As for monsters, I discovered 14 types: devils, dragons, fiends, goblins, hobgoblins, horned devils, kobolds, medusas, minotaurs, orcs, rats, salamanders, serpents, and trolls. El Explorador de RPG, in his coverage of the game, says there are 20. The player has a variety of options for dealing with them, including the use of magic items (wand, luckstone, ring, and cross), use (generic attack) spells, shooting with regular or magic arrows, bribing, attacking with a weapon, fleeing, and using a "flame" to assess the monster's strengths and weaknesses when it comes to the right body part to attack.

        

This cracked me up.

        

For physical attacks, the player specifies the enemy's head, body, or arms. Each enemy has one sturdy part and one weak part. Success in all actions depends on attributes—IQ for magic items and spells, dexterity and strength for melee attacks. Some enemies cannot be hit or damaged at all without sufficient statistics. After the character makes an attack each round, the enemy gets to counter-attack, and I never once saw the enemy miss. The attribute damaged depends on what body part the enemy hits—IQ for the head, strength for the body, and dexterity for the arms and legs. Damage is reduced by good armor. Weapons can break during battle, forcing the player to flee and find a trader to purchase a new one.

         

Fighting a/an fiend. 

       

Werewolves and vampires die immediately when presented with a cross. If other enemies were particularly weak to certain items or attacks, I didn't play long enough to figure it out. Certain enemies are immune to certain items or attacks, including horned devils, who are immune to all items.

          

That's quite a hoard.

         

If you die, you get a second chance: The "almighty power of Myriah" causes you to be resurrected with 50 of each attribute, a dagger, and leather armor.  

   

Getting into battle too early in the game is a recipe for disaster. It saps attributes, takes forever, and results in gold rewards too paltry to make up for what you lost. I believe the key to victory is using the lamp to avoid early-game combats, stock up on items and treasures, and only start fighting when you've bought enough potions from a trader to raise your attributes to near-100, and ideally when you've found the elf sword and elf armor. Even then, games on easier difficulties offer plenty of gold in non-combat squares that you could avoid all enemies, get your attributes boosted to 100, and only fight the necessary enemies at the end of the game.

      

The Almighty Orb, wherever the game places it, is surrounded in all four cardinal directions with horned devil, some of the strongest characters in the game. They only respond to magic arrows and physical attacks, and you can't hope to hurt them without dexterity and strength over 50. If you defeat one, you can move past him and grab the orb.

        

"The rain is Tess, the fire's Joe . . ."

     

Once you make it back to (3,1), there's a final battle with the Devil of Doomriyah (who must have some etymological connection to the goddess Myriah; the game does not explore this). Most of the options disappear for this battle; the player can only use a weapon. He's about as difficult as the horned devils. 

   

I won the game on difficulty Level 3 with a small dungeon of 20 rows. It would be quite a feat to win at Level 9 with 200 rows, particularly since the game doesn't allow you to save. I wouldn't start that game during a Maine winter. 

         

My final statistics. A dead vampire crashes my parade.

            

I feel about The Cursed Chambers pretty much the way I feel about The Wizard's Castle: It pleasantly occupies a couple of hours and offers a vague fantasy theme, but while it might technically meet my definitions of an RPG, it doesn't offer most of what I'm looking for in the genre. It gets an 18 on the GIMLET, about the same as I've given every Wizard's Castle variant; the "pluses" that they offer don't translate to a lot on a 10-point category scale. 

    

Cursed Chambers' author was John Wolstencroft, who had a near-monopoly of fantasy-themed output for these minor platforms, most elaborations of public domain or type-in games for other computers. He wrote two Crystal Cave Adventure-like text adventures for the same machines; Quest or Fantasy Quest (1981) and Castle Quest (1983). Jason Dyer covered the former on his blog over five years ago. He also wrote Zrim (1981) essentially a copy of The Devil's Dungeon (1978). I was planning to play it as a companion to this entry, but I couldn't get it to run. El Explorador de RPG's coverage shows that, like its source, it doesn't quite meet my definitions of an RPG, so I guess I'll let it go.