Citadel of Vras: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

That verse / is all over the place with its meter and rhyming scheme / but what's even worse / is that I spent 15 hours on the game and only got this winning screen.

           

Citadel of Vras
Australia
Independently developed; distributed by Megadisc
Released in 1989 for Amiga
Date Started: 5 August 2018
Date Ended: 22 August 2018
Total Hours: 15
Difficulty: Easy-Moderate (2.5/5)
Final Rating: 24
Ranking at time of posting: 117/305 (38%)

     

Citadel of Vras started with a quest from the Galactic Federation of Planets to find the Talisman of Truth before the pirate Sarkov could get to it. By the time I reached the end of the game, I had essentially forgotten the framing story (referenced only obliquely throughout). This is par for the course with the Bard's Tale line, which has always been more about combat mechanics and inventory than story.
         

The game consisted of 3 levels of the Nigris moon, 1 level on Vras's surface, 2 levels in the ruins of Vras, and 3 in the titular Citadel of Vras, all with relatively convenient teleporters (with codes you have to discover) back to the Nigris base for shopping and leveling. Each level requires some amount of puzzle solving before proceeding to the next level.

          

Getting from the Citadel back to Nigris involved inserting a floppy disk into a computer and getting the code.

             

The three citadel levels each introduced a new demonic foe. Level 1 has the Demon of Greed, Level 2 the Demon of Fear, and Level 3 the Demon of Power. All are immune to psychic attacks and must be encountered multiple times. When you fight them, they inevitably kill one character, but combat with them only lasts one round before they take off. After a few such combats (and associated resurrections), you finally defeat them. If you haven't defeated them by the time you reach the last square in the level, they remain there and block you until you do.

           

The Demon of Greed attacks me in a random encounter.

Finally defeating the Demon of Power.

          

The other obstacles are mostly doors that require a special key or codeword. Usually, the codewords refer to lore within the game or its framing story, but occasionally (as we saw with the Thorium riddle), you have to bring in outside knowledge of mythology or science. "Red, Green, and ______," one door on Level 2 demanded, testing your knowledge of additive color models. At another one, you have to know that Jedi use the FORCE (though not in this game).

Monsters encountered on the last levels included Dark Jedi, Shambleaus (which drain levels unless you have silver amulets in the party), Galactic Grues, Martian Erms, Trimantars, and Light Worms (which blind you). Combats got progressively more ridiculous. Basically, after the second Vras level, any combat is capable of wiping out the entire party if the enemies get the initiative. You don't get any chance to react or prevent it. "Greet" or "Retreat" are horrible options because when they don't work, the enemy gets a free round and kills everyone. Every battle becomes a quick-draw in which either the party acts first and is able to kill or incapacitate the enemies while taking no damage, or the enemy acts first and the party is destroyed and must reload. I must have reloaded 100 times on the final three levels alone. 

           

Fighting a Sith lord toddler.

           

The game also became fond of life-draining traps such as pits, walls of fire, and corridors that sap hit points for no reason. Fortunately, I had spells like "Heal All" when things got too low. I also found healing crystals and energy crystals that, when in your possession, greatly increase spell and hit point restoration rates.

           

I lost far more hit points to these than to enemies.

             

On Level 2 of the Citadel, I encountered the pirate Sarkov, who died quite fast and had on his body a sonic key, needed to progress to Level 3.

           

Poor little guy. He doesn't even have any minions.

          

Level 3 was mostly just a standard maze of rooms and corridors. The compass went haywire and stopped working. Some of the doors required a blue diamond to open, and I only ever found two of them. I kept getting stuck and having to reload earlier saves to explore new rooms.

       

My map of the final level.

         

Ultimately, after about 25 resurrections, I defeated the Demon of Power. I made it to a final loop of corridors in which a pit, wall of fire, or hit point-draining square dogged me just about every step. A final door asked me what I sought, and I had to re-consult the documentation to recall that I wanted TRUTH. That brought me to the single endgame screen at the top of this entry. After that, I was returned to the Nigris spaceport. The party could re-enter the maps, level up, and keep playing if I wanted.

         

The final puzzle.

          

An interesting but mostly flawed effort. On a GIMLET, it gets:

          

• 2 points for the game world. The framing story is highly derivative of popular science fiction, as are the themes found during gameplay, which freely mixes lightsabers, sonic screwdrivers, and Vulcans. There's no consistency to the theme and few in-game references to the plot.

• 4 points for character creation and development. You get 5 slots for 6 classes. Creation is otherwise pretty RPG standard. Leveling up during the game feels rewarding because of the extra hit points, spell points, and attacks.

          

My final stats for my Lamian Elfin character.

           

• 0 points for no NPC interaction.

• 4 points for encounters and foes. Enemies are mostly goofy, but some have special attacks and defenses. Scripted encounters are sometimes interesting, at least graphically. The puzzles weren't challenging enough to be truly satisfying, but they punctuate otherwise-monotonous levels.

        

Special encounters like this didn't offer any options, but at least they broke up the game.

      

• 2 points for magic and combat. A boring Bard's Tale derivative in which tactics don't matter and (random) initiative is everything. The game entirely wastes its system of mental abilities, since most direct-damage abilities under-perform physical attacks. You basically need healing, resurrection, a couple of incapacitation spells, and a couple of navigation spells.

               

I only ever used a few of these powers.

          

• 3 points for equipment. You get one weapon, one piece of armor, and a variety of utility items. Weapon class and armor class statistics help determine effectiveness. Weapons have interesting names--towards the end of the game, I was wielding death rays and wearing shimmer fields--but are otherwise distinguished only by damage.

• 1 point for the economy. You need credits mostly for leveling up, and I always had plenty.

• 2 points for a main quest with no choices.

• 4 points for graphics, sound, and interface. All were adequate.

• 2 points for gameplay, mostly for its moderate length. It was otherwise very linear, not replayable, and not very challenging. Despite what I said about the insane difficulty of combat in the final levels, you can also save every step and reload when things go astray.

          

That gives us a final score of 24, which is admittedly the highest score out of Australia so far. The other two were The Stone of Telnyr (1990) and Dungeon of Nadroj (1991). I'm compelled to note that two out of three Australian games so far have featured the developer's name reversed in the title.
     

We only see a dozen more Australian RPGs through 2009 (and I'm not convinced that some of them, like 2008's Neopets Puzzle Adventure, are true RPGs), so I'm glad I had a chance to fully document a somewhat rare origin. I hope that the country eventually has a chance to develop its own traditions within the RPG titles instead of copying American RPG mechanics and popular culture.

            

The author offers whatever the opposite of "fan service" is.

          

As commenter 6530 helpfully pointed out, the game was reviewed in the January 1990 Australian Commodore and Amiga Review. It had been sent to Megadisc with a note that said, "Put it in your public domain collection or throw it away." Megadisc decided to publish it. The reviewer, Paul Campbell, uses the term "no frills" at least six times in his discussion of Vras, but he seemed to like it overall, failing to note any of the issues that I've discussed.

What's more interesting is that the article names the author as "Gyan Sarvagata," whereas the documentation that came with my download uses the name "Sarva Engelhardt," sometimes abbreviated "Sarv." The latter name is also given as the author of 1995's Sword of the Elder Isles, a strategy game that seems to have been inspired by Warlords. Deepening the mystery even further, an e-mail address in the "Read Me" file for Sword suggests that the author's name is in fact Lutz Engelhardt. It's possible that "Sarva Engelhardt" was a pseudonym for two people working together, but on the other hand, someone named "Sarv Engelhardt" wrote a letter to the same magazine in April 1991 looking for help finding the ninth tear in Drakkhen (I had the same problem!). Googling "Gyan Sarvagata" and "Sarva Engelhardt" produce no substantial results not related to this game, but there's a Lutz Engelhard living in Western Australia in the 1990s who would have been 47 when Vras came out. Meanwhile, "Gyan Sarvagata" seems to be a Hindu term meaning "knowledge pervading all things" rather than an actual name. My best theory is that Lutz Engelhardt used both of the other names as pen names and just switched in the middle of all this. Barring a visit from the man himself, I guess we'll never know.

Let's head back to our headliner now while I simultaneously try to figure out Die Dunkle Dimension.

Citadel of Vras: There at Last

We finally arrive at the Citadel.

After my first session with Citadel of Vras, I expected a somewhat boring 9-level, 3600-square dungeon crawl. The game has ended up being a bit more than that, although not so much more that it really breaks any new ground. As with many games of this era, I typically play with Netflix going on another monitor, which is rarely the sign of a masterpiece.

It turned out I was a bit confused as I started Vras. (In the first entry, incidentally, I failed to note that the name is the reverse spelling of the developer, Sarv(a) Engelhardt.) My initial outing was not in the titular citadel; it wasn't even on the planet. Instead, the first three levels of the game are on the spacestation on Vras's moon of Nigris. Level 4 is on the surface of Vras. Levels 5 and 6 are in some ruins beneath the surface. Only when you reach Level 7 do you enter the citadel itself. I'm assuming there are three levels of the citadel, but you could read the manual to say that the citadel itself has 9 levels, not counting the ones outside. I really hope that's not the case.

Moving from level to level generally involves solving some kind of puzzle. The three Nigris levels introduced a weird convention for hidden doors. At key points in the dungeon, you find doors that are only visible from one side. Once you open them, they become accessible from both sides. This allows the game to force you along a particular track for a while, but then provide an easy shortcut back to the beginning.

Another important exploration option in the Nigris levels has to do with a "weird gadget" that removes the wall in front of you. These gadgets are one-use only and cost 30,000 credits, and you need a handful of them to open the way to all of the station's hidden areas.

            

This special encounter was relatively easy to defeat.

            

On Level 3 of the spacestation, I found a "matter transmitter" with 5 buttons. These ended up beaming the party to different parts of the third level, ultimately allowing us to explore all of it. At some point, we killed the "moonbeast" that a note on Level 2 had warned us about.

The level culminated in an encounter with an old man. The game asked me what I wanted to talk with him about, and because of a note left on a Jedi on Level 2, I knew the answer was COORDINATES. He asked me to pay him, and another note had suggested that the amount he wanted was 65,000 credits. When I offered that much exactly, he gave me the 5-digit code to beam to Vras. 

           

Until now, I didn't realize I wasn't on Vras.

          

Teleporting to Vras meant using a second matter transmitter found in a walled-off area of the first level. You need to use the gadget to get in. Any code other than the correct one kills you instantly. But with the right sequence, I soon found myself on the surface of a brown planet.

          

This place looks bleak.

           

The 20 x 20 map of Vras's surface held only one single-square building, plus a message with the code necessary to return to Nigris. (The only shop and place to level up, at least so far, are there.) The building was a weird 99-story tower of one square per story. When you reach the top and go through the door, you find yourself back out on the surface, at the same place you came in.

To figure out what to do, I had to turn and face every wall until I found a little diagram on the wall on one of the upper levels. This showed me the correct path to walk before trying to enter the building via its blank west wall. Following these instructions takes you to the first level of the ruins.

        

Interpreting this was a fun challenge.

             

The first level of the ruins comprised four major areas accessible by doors, each of which posed a riddle. Three of the four can (and must be) discerned with no in-game information:

• "Name the visible energy." (LIGHT)
• "To enter, speak slowly." (SLOWLY)
• "God of the 90th element?" (THOR)

To get the last one, I had to look up a periodic table online. I could see era players getting stuck there.

             

Alas.

           

The query on the last door was "Meet me at the ______ Factory." I had to explore one of the other areas to find that the level contains a Dalek factory, along with an accompanying battle with 55 Daleks.

            

I think this might conflict with Doctor Who canon.

          

The culmination of the level involved paying a hermit $200,000 for a "molecular key," which in turn opened a door to another matter transmitter, allowing me to go back and forth to Nigris. A simple ladder led down to the next level.

Level 2 of the Vras ruins was a maze of small walls, with the wall configuration spelling "OM" in the center. Throughout the two Vras levels, I kept finding "power cells" at the ends of corridors and in significant-looking rooms. By the time I reached the end of the level, I had so many they were crowding out my regular inventory.

          

Inserting power cells into a machine.

          

At the end of the level, their use became clear: I needed 20 of them to power a machine. It removed some kind of protective barrier around the Citadel of Vras, and then saying OM transported me to the structure.

            

At least they're "Old Ones" and not "Ancients."

       

There were a million combats amidst these 6 levels, of course. If commenter T.R. hadn't written to me off-blog and told me how to map the poorly-documented "Warp" mode to a function key, I probably would have given up, because combat otherwise cycles way too slow. In warp mode, it's over in seconds.

Enemies on Nigris included Daleks, Graids, Wurglepups, Fungoid, Durges, Combat Robots, and Vegabats. On Vras, they were joined by Vrashoppers, Graid Bosses, Klingon Warriors, Vulcan Mentats, Leucomorphs (Jack Vance's Dying Earth), and Wurgles (obscure reference to an Australian kids' book).

           

These guys don't look dangerous.

           

None of them have been very hard. They started off on Nigris attacking one at a time, and by the second level of Vras there might be 10 or more in a party, but no matter how many enemies are in a party, they all respond to psychic powers like "Freeze" and "Sleep," so it's trivial to take them out for a couple of rounds while my melee fighters pound on them. The only real concern is running out of psychic points, but they regenerate fast enough that hasn't become a concern yet. 

             

The Durges somehow got the drop on me.

              

It's a good thing, because some enemies are powerful enough to kill my characters in one round if they actually get to attack. The only time I've really been in trouble is on rare occasions when enemy parties go first in combat (I'm not sure why that happens). But by the end of this session, I had several powerful healing spells and even "Resurrection."

            

The powers of my Lamian Elfin.

          

Weapons have gotten more powerful, progressing past the "neuronic whips" of the first session to giant hammers, "VoltBolts," "Shatter Rays," and "Shock Lances." You basically have to watch the damage to figure out how powerful the items are. At the beginning of the game, some weapons affect only one enemy and some affect them all, but once the characters hit Level 6 or 7, all weapons affect all enemies. All in all, combat hasn't really been much of a challenge, but in some ways that's a good thing, because the game doesn't really give you many tactics to overcome such a challenge.

A few other notes:

             

• Exploration needs escalated as I went downward. On Levels 1 and 2, a regular compass worked fine, but after that I had to find and use a "gyrocompass." Similarly, sonic screwdrivers and diamond saws worked to open lockers on early levels, but an atomic laser was necessary by the third.

• Random lockers stopped appearing on the second Vras level.

• Flashlights last so briefly (about 50 moves) that on Nigris, I had to pretty much fill the inventories of every character with them just to successfully map a decent portion of a level before returning. Later, I realized the store sold something called an "Ever Glow" that does what it suggests.

           

Puff's inventory before I noticed the more useful item in the store.

           

• There are occasional pit traps for which you need the "Levitate" ability to get over.

              

Thankfully, you get a warning.

           

• In combat, the game oddly subtracts your psychic energy the moment you designate the action rather than when it executes. This means that if you change your mind after designating actions for all characters, you've lost those points. 

             

There's nothing horrible here, but I really won't be sad to see the end of the era of Bard's Tale clones with their endless random combats and messages on the walls.

           

In this case, scraps of paper on the floor. Google the reference. It's a fun story.

          

If I could go back in time and make one change to RPG history, I'd force the developers of Wizardry to put a one-paragraph title card at the end of each level, advancing the plot bit by bit as the player moves forward. That trope would likely have propagated to the Bard's Tale and Dungeon Master lines and would make playing clones of both a lot more tolerable.

Time so far: 10 hours

Game 300: Citadel of Vras (1989)

A clear homage to Space Invaders?

           
Citadel of Vras
Australia

Independently developed; distributed by Megadisc

Released in 1989 for Amiga

Date Started: 5 August 2018

Citadel of Vras is a low-frills dungeon crawler inspired by The Bard's Tale for its mechanics and any number of science fiction books and television shows for its content. (These facts are relayed right on the copyright screen.) It does nothing particularly wrong, but it's the type of game that exposes all its secrets by the end of the first level, and all that's left is to repeat that experience eight more times in pursuit of what will almost certainly be a underwhelming "winning screen."

The characters are agents for the Galactic Federation of Planets, sent to the planet Vras to recover a Talisman of Truth before the pirate Sarkov and his evil band of Graids from the planet Saluté can get to it. The Talisman was left behind by an ancient species called the Old Ones, and it's apparently the key to the next step in the evolution of sentient races. The party assembles at a spaceport on Vras's moon, Nigris, and then assaults the 9-level citadel. All levels are 20 x 20 and all exploration is in first-person view.
          

The Nigris Spaceport serves as the main menu.

            

Five characters are created from six classes: Jedi knight, Arcturian giant, Horb ant warrior, Denk Mentat, Lamian Elfin, and Sirian Lizard-Man. I believe Arcturian giants are a reference to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Mentats come from Dune, but I'm not sure about the others (aside from Jedi, of course). It feels like Sirian Lizard-Men have been in a lot of things. Each has strengths and weaknesses in the seven attributes: weapon skill, intelligence, dexterity, constitution, luck, life force, and psychic energy.
         

Character creation. This Mentat does indeed look pretty Denk.

       
As the game begins, the characters have no weapons or psychic abilities, and their only armor is basic spacesuits--which you have to equip immediately to avoid taking damage every few turns. Enemies start attacking immediately, so you spend a lot of time reloading until you find the store and training center to get some entry level weapons and base-level psychic abilities.

After that, the game is a lot like The Bard's Tale with a sci-fi patina. You march through featureless hallways and burst through doors, fighting random combats with aliens and robots (including Daleks), in search of the two or three squares per level that have anything interesting. Vras is somewhat easier than its cousins in that a) you can save anywhere; b) the combats on the first level almost never offer more than one enemy; and c) both hit points and spell points regenerate as you walk around.

Combat follows the basic structure established in Wizardry and retained by the Interplay titles. When you first meet an enemy, you have options to greet, flee, or attack. When the first two fail, they give the enemy a free round, so they're not often good options.
          

Initial combat options.

         
If you attack, you specify an action for each character: attack, defend, or use a psychic ability. These actions execute all at once, in character order, at the end of the round. You watch the outcomes scroll by, designate a new set of actions at the end of the round, and so on until the enemy party is destroyed. You get experience, credits, and sometimes items from each slain enemy, equally distributed among party members.
        

Combat actions slowly scroll by.

         
The psychic abilities, which function like spells in a fantasy RPG, make things a little too easy because (at least on the first two levels) they never fail. The Denk Mentat has a Level 1 ability called "Illusions" that distracts all enemies for one combat round. Its cost is so low that you can usually cast it on every enemy party and kill them before they can recover, then recover those psychic points before the next combat. At Level 2, the Mentat gets "Sleep," which lasts even longer. The Jedi similarly gets "Freeze Foes" at Level 2 that amounts to the same thing.
          

Jedi powers alas do not include Force Lightning.

          
Physical attacks depend heavily on the weapon. At the beginning, you only have enough for staves, but soon you start finding weapons post-combat. Another source of treasure comes in the form of randomly-encountered lockers that you need some kind of tool to open. Pretty soon, characters are wielding needle guns, plasma axes, atomic lasers, blasters, and so forth. On Level 2, I found a weapon called a "neuronic whip" that damages all enemies in a party, not just one.
          

Lockers pop up randomly as you explore.

      
Other items found in the shop and abroad include various pieces of armor (tangle fields, repellor belts, carbal cloaks) and utilities like flashlights and sonic screwdrivers. There are a bunch of things whose use is unknown to me, like silver amulets and gold plates (they may just be for sale). Some enemy attacks damage spacesuits, so it's best to keep a few spares.
           

My inventory. A character can only hold 9 items.

            
When you level up, you get a boost to a random attribute, more hit points and psychic energy, and the ability to learn a new psychic ability. By the time I hit character Level 3, the monsters on the first two dungeon levels were trivially easy.
       

The game's version of the "review board."

       
In addition to its facilities, Level 1 had a couple of squares with messages. One said "...1 to here," echoed by a similar message reading "...3 to here" on the second level. They probably refer to some kind of teleportation schema I'll later discovered. Another message on Level 1 warned me to "beware the moonbeast!"
           

A message very much in keeping with the Bard's Tale roots.

          
Level 2 had less obvious structure than Level 1. It was dark, and flashlights run out pretty fast, so I had to load up before heading down. In one open area, I found the remains of a Jedi, along with a note that said an old man on the levels below knows something about coordinates. More important, the Jedi had a lightsaber, which I gave to my own Jedi. It works as both a weapon and a tool, but it only damages a single enemy.
           

In Star Wars, it wouldn't be something as pedestrian as a "tape recorder." It would have to have "holo" in the name.

         
A final message on Level 2 said, "Face a wall you don't want and use the gadget!" I figured this referred to an "unknown gadget" sold in the shop on Level 1 for 30,000 credits. Ladders are one-way, so I had to find the way back up to Level 1 before my flashlight inventory ran out. When I got there, I spent my accumulated money on the gadget, and sure enough, it destroys any wall you're facing--once. The gadget is destroyed in the process, which is a pretty hefty expense to remove a wall. Still, when I did it in front of a single enclosed square on Level 1, it led me to some kind of portal.

So far, the levels haven't offered any navigation obstacles like teleporters or spinners. They've mostly featured large, one-way sections, with a couple of basic nods to rhyme and reason in the macro structure of the corridors and rooms.
       

Level 1 of the Citadel of Vras.

         
The control scheme works well, supporting both mouse clicks and obvious keyboard commands. I'm avoiding the mouse because the jackasses that "cracked" the copy I found insisted in replacing the mouse cursor with the logo of their little club. They also might have messed with other aspects of the game. At one point, trying to load a saved game, I was instead taken to the "warez" screen with the message "naughty, naughty" for no reason that I could see. I'm going to have to rely mostly on save states for this one, but that's not really cheating because the game lets you save anywhere.

A couple of things make Vras slightly annoying beyond the fact that the game is a bit boring. First, random encounters (including enemies and lockers) don't trigger until you try to move out of a square. The graphics show you moving forward just before the enemy appears, but what really happens behind the scenes is that you get kicked back to the square you just left. This makes it easy to lose count of where you are when trying to map long corridors. Second, combat is slow. There's a speed setting, but even at the maximum setting, watching the actions crawl by is mildly torturous. I've tried speeding up the emulator, but nothing in WinUAE's settings seems to do the trick--I can't find anything akin to the "warp" mode of the C64 or Apple II emulators that I've come to love.

The developer, Sarva Engelhardt of Western Australia, has at least created a competent game here, but I suspect Levels 3-9 are just going to offer more of the same experience. Let's hope I'm wrong.

Time so far: 4 hours