Game 582: The Odyssey (1993)

       

The Odyssey

United States

Independently developed and published as shareware
Released 1993 for the Macintosh
Date Started: 20 July 2026

     

This is not Odyssey: The Legend of Nemesis (1996), but rather an intriguing shareware effort from David Larkin of Brooktondale, New York. When I fired it up, I thought that the timing worked out particularly well on this one, as I just finished listening to a Teaching Company course on "Famous Greeks" and was planning to see the new Christopher Nolan The Odyssey that weekend. It turns out that game, though, isn't based on any existing legend, nor is it set in any kind of history. It uses names and themes from Ancient Greece to tell its own story.

   

The game is set in the city-state of Athenia. Rome is mentioned but it has already fallen. The city has been besieged by demons whose leaders will not explain what they want. The PC is an Athenian guard who is one day summoned to the chambers of Damocles, Seer of Athenia. The Seer has had a vision that the monsters are controlled by a "Chaos Master" named Nok Hurthtu. His vision further showed him that the PC is the one person who can defeat the Chaos Master, and to do so, he will need to descend into the earth, past sewers, crypts, and caverns.

     

The Seer lays it out for me.

       

No sooner has the Seer finished explaining his vision than Nok Hurthtu (or a vision thereof) appears in the chamber, howling wordless sounds. "It is a primeval mass of bestial desires and turbulent motions only sporadically able to assume the semblance of reason," the Seer observes. The Chaos Master manages to get out a few threats before disappearing, leaving a couple of chaos rats in his wake.

     

Man, don't have a hernia.

      

Character creation consists of only a name. There are no attributes that I can see, except attack and defense scores based mostly on inventory. The character has a level, but I'm not sure what causes it to go up, as there are no explicit experience points. Health is purely ordinal, starting at "good" and proceeding through "scraped," "hurt," "wounded," "mauled," "badly wounded," and "critical" before death.

    

The interface suggests an Ultima influence, but one light enough that I wouldn't call it a clone. It similarly has roguelike elements without being quite a roguelike. Commands are movement (no diagonals), talk, attack, use, look, and (in something of an innovation) scroll the window without moving the character. There are icons and keyboard backups for these commands, though the keyboard backups use the Command key, which is a little awkward.

        

My once-per-Mac-game reminder that if my screenshots were honest, you would always see the menu bar. As it is, you can always see a bit of the game's folder behind the game windows.

             

The character is cast immediately into combat with the rats, a la Ultima VI, but the battle is an easy one. It is nominally turn-based, but the game assumes a "pass" if the player doesn't act within a few seconds. To fight, the player clicks on the "attack" icon and then the enemy, at which point a little pop-up menu appears with options based on the character's equipped weapon. Having no weapon (odd for a guard), my options are to kick, punch, or block. The rats die quickly, leaving hunks of meat behind.

    

I naturally speak to the Seer and get a text box. I will soon discover that about 50% of interactions in the game involve no input from the player. That doesn't mean that they're the one-line NPCs of Ultima and Ultima II, however. Some NPCs have a lot to say, and the character has a lot to say in return, all unprompted by the player. The dialogues can get fairly verbose. Here's an example with Homer, a farmer:

       

PC: "How's it going, Homer?"

Homer: "Terribly. We lie here like slugs under the sun, waiting for our life to burn away and for our little souls to flee to Hades." 

PC: "All of our souls have to go to Hades eventually, Homer." 

Homer: (angrily) "We should all go out and fight the Chaos demons! I try to tell people this but they're all cowards. We should all fly from the walls and live or die in one glorious battle. Enough of this besiegement! Better a quick death than a slow one." 

PC: "You would throw all the city's lives away when there's some chance they could be saved?" 

Homer: "You're one of those fools who thinks there's hope. Why should we believe that? The mists and the demons have never stopped coming." 

PC: "And we have never stopped fighting. And we will fight, Homer, to the last man, to protect those who cannot fight for themselves. Meanwhile you will ensure that the city has enough to eat. That is your duty. And I will thank you to stop whining about how the world isn't arranged to your liking. We all have to suffer now."

       

The game isn't shy, as you can see, about giving a fixed character to the PC. He's brave, noble, intolerant of despair in others, intolerant of those who shirk their duty, unafraid to speak truth to power.

      

Achilles not being very Achillesque.

     

With some NPCs, the player gets a keyword-based dialogue box, but it's hard to find words that actually work. No NAME, HEALTH, JOB here. Rarely does the NPC say something in the previous dialogue that prompts additional discussion via keyword. The box is used more as a puzzle element, with the player feeding keywords that other NPCs have given him. The box supports full sentences, but it doesn't seem to read the keywords within the full sentence like Ultima VI did. When talking to the Seer, CHAOS MASTER gets some additional dialogue, but WHAT CAN YOU TELL ME ABOUT THE CHAOS MASTER does not?

     

Athenia is 60 x 60 tiles, surrounded by a stone wall. There is no exit, the old gate having been walled in to defend against the demons. A palace occupies the central part of the map, containing the Seer's chambers and guard quarters to the south and the king's throne room to the north. West of the palace is a farm with several workers and a couple of houses for the farmers. There's also a small lake with an island that I cannot reach. Northeast of the palace is a temple, then a bunch of small buildings. Southwest is a forest with some ruins plus the only other monster I've encountered so far: a wild boar, who I punched to death and harvested for meat. There are 15-20 NPCs, including guards and farmers, running around.

     

One key element of this game involves the passage of time. As in Ultima V, NPCs have daily schedules. They work during the day and go to bed at night, sometimes in houses or rooms with locked doors. A small window tracks the passage of time in eight phases depicting the position of the sun. (Full night, which lasts three phases, is depicted by a single graphic with a moon and stars.) The "sunrise" graphic is cute, showing a god literally hauling up the sun, which rises in the west and sets in the east.

     

That must be Helios (bottom right).

      

A full day's cycle takes between 18 and 19 minutes if the character stands still. If he moves, time passes a lot more quickly. Each move is assumed to take about three minutes, so 480 moves pass an entire day. That can happen in as little as 80 seconds if the character is moving continually. I had entire days elapse in which all I accomplished was talking to two or three NPCs.

    

As time passes, the character gets hungry and fatigued and must occasionally eat and rest. Eating hasn't been much of a problem so far, but resting causes time to pass so quickly that if the player doesn't almost immediately start clicking the button to awaken the character, he'll keep sleeping until he starts taking damage from starvation. I can only guess that game speed is tied to the system clock, but I took pains to emulate a Mac (the Color Classic) that would have been popular in 1993. 

    

You may have noticed that the inventory system uses a small paperdoll interface with slots for both hands, legs, chest, and head. There are also two windows that open independently: the character's backpack and items on the floor. You can drag from one to the other to pick up or drop items. It's a bit like Ultima VII in that regard. So far, I haven't found a single weapon or piece of armor. There's a guy named Mr. Jones who runs a shop, but it sells things like food, torches, and potions.

       

You'll note that nobody stands between me and my man.

        

That leaves the plot. The Seer didn't give me much to go on. He said I would need to descend into the sewers, but I haven't been able to find any sewers or other pathway down. King Antiphos and his guard captain, Frederick, are a bit useless. 

     

Three distinct problems (and thus, potential side quests or main quest steps) become apparent other than the demonic siege: 

    

• I heard from NPCs that there's a traitor in our midst. Someone has stolen next year's seed from farmer Marian and Paul, meaning that we'll starve to death. The guards' payroll has gone missing. The enemy seems to anticipate our troop movements. But Antiphos denies the problem and refuses to hear anyone even talk about a TRAITOR. 

• A sleepy guard named Manthos tells me about a woman living in a northeast house who only comes out at midnight. I hang around the locked houses at midnight and find a blind woman named Sarah leaving a house full of trash, cobwebs, and one locked interior door. She's waiting for her husband, Xenophos, to return from a quest. It's clear that she's a bit loopy and he probably died a long time ago.

• Theocritics and Electra tell me that their daughter, Xallas, went for a walk one night and never came home.

    

I explore everything and feed what I think are all the important keywords to every NPC, but I get nowhere for a while. However, there are many locked doors, and based on my experience with Sarah, I know that they sometimes open for a very short time when certain NPCs go about their daily schedules. I hang around a few of them and catch Bartholomew, an officious guard captain (and advisor to the king) leaving his house. I manage to sneak in as he leaves. In the corner of his room, I find a key, but it's only possible to enter this corner by walking through a fire, which nearly kills me. Fortunately, I have plenty of time to rest because he locked the door behind him, and this key doesn't go to that door.

      

Bartholomew's secret corridor.

         

Sixteen hours later, when he comes home, I rush outside and start trying the key on all the nearby locked doors. It opens a nearby door into a short hallway where I find a scroll. It's a note from Bartholomew to the Chaos Master, indicating that Bartholomew has been following his orders to steal the seed and the payroll and to report on troop allocation.

   

Frederick tells me to bring all evidence about the traitor to him, but I can't get him to acknowledge the scroll or Bartholomew's guilt. I thus take it directly to the king, where I have an option to show it to him. Bartholomew is summoned, denies the charges at first, and finally confesses. King Antiphos throws him in jail and rewards me with a Scepter of Lordly Might, which when used increases my level (permanently) to Level 2.

     

Nice sobriquet.

         

For a while, I can't figure out any other leads. There are four locked buildings, plus the locked door in Sarah's house, plus a locked door in a ruin in the forest. There are three locked doors in the palace, but two of them just go to the chambers of the Seer and Mr. Jones, neither of which have anything. I finally find that one of the locked buildings has a window. It turns out to be the jail, and I can see Bartholomew inside and talk to him through the window. He has a little more information to offer, including that the Chaos Master used to leave him notes in the sewers and that he has the sewer key. At my encouragement, he gives it to me. He also says  that he hid the payroll and seeds in a room and threw the key on the island. Unfortunately, I have no way to cross the water.

     

I do not want to know how he managed to keep the key on his person in jail.

        

Bartholomew's key doesn't open any of the locked doors, so I'm stuck again for another hour or so, to the point I start mapping the city and inspecting every individual tile. Eventually, I find a section of wall with a keyhole, open it, and find another key plus a ladder down. I run around town with the new key but can't find any door that it fits. I return, go down the ladder, and immediately die at the claws of a "shadowy stalker."

     

Ah, so it's going to be this kind of game.

            

On multiple subsequent reloads, I encounter this situation in the sewers:

   

• The first room has a Scepter of Lordly Might and a helmet. Unfortunately, it also has an invisible shadowy stalker, who can kill me in two hits. If I target empty squares, I can sometimes hit him, but never kill him before he kills me. There's a ladder I can take immediately to a lower level. 

• On that lower level, a pressure plate opens a wall. There's a wraith and two goblin archers behind the wall. Every time I approach them, I get killed by arrows. They will not budge from their positions to chase me around corners and get into melee range.

• If I try to ignore the wraith, the only place to go is a corridor where a cannon is constantly shooting cannonballs down it. No matter how I time it, I can't get down the corridor before the next cannonball. Even if I could, the chamber at the other end is absolutely packed with enemies.

    

I return to Mr. Jones's shop looking for items that might help. The Potion of Invisibility is out of my reach, but I buy a minor wand (which stuns enemies) and a bottle of Greek fire. It takes about 10 reloads, but I'm eventually able to stun the shadowy stalker and kill him. I loot the chamber; there's also a Potion of Invisibility under the Scepter of Lordly Might. The scepter brings me to Level 3. I have to wonder whether there's any traditional leveling in this game or whether it's all scepters.

      

The only exit from this chamber other than the two ladders is locked, so I go down to the lower level with the pressure plate and cannonballs, but whatever I try, I cannot make headway against any of the obstacles here.

     

One of the places that I keep getting killed.

              

Just as I'm about to give up, I discover that there are a couple of squares in the lake around the island shallow enough to let me cross. I find a key, which opens the doors in the ruins to the southeast of town, where I find the stolen payroll and seed. Returning the payroll to my friend Joseph gets me a dagger, while returning the seed to Paul gets me a tunic. Before you get all excited, these two items do absolutely nothing to help me against the enemies in the sewers.

    

It's become clear to me by the end of this session that this is not a typical RPG. It, or at least its beginning, is extremely linear, and every battle is a unique puzzle that has to be solved with the right tactics, items, or both. I might already be in a "walking dead" situation because I've already spent too much of my starting money with Mr. Jones and have no way of earning more.

   

Mr. Larkin charged $25 for the game and promised a hint book for anyone who paid the fee. I made contact with the author, and he said he no longer accepts any money nor makes the hint book available, but he directed me to a video series (starting here) that solves the game. I hope I don't have to consult it, but I'll let you know.

         

Time played: 3 hours

   

****

   

Next entry in this series

07/27/2026