Demon's Winter: Final Rating

The font I could have been looking at for the last 13 hours. Thanks for trying, Stu.

           

Demon's Winter

United States

Strategic Simulations, Inc. (developer and publisher)

Released 1988 for Apple II; 1989 for Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari ST, and DOS.

Date Started: 23 February 2011

Date Ended: 14 March 2011

Total Hours: 13

Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)

Final Rating: 45

Ranking at Time of Posting: 41/48 (85%)

Ranking at Game #453: 405/453 (89%)

          

Demon's Winter is an unusual game that originally left me numb but grew on me over time. Despite the length of time it took me to finish it, it's actually a fairly short game--I probably would have covered it in two or three postings if it had been a normal month. 

            

It is hands-down better than Shard of Spring, and it told a more compelling story with better plot twists. But it suffered the same problems with excessive linearity, and I thought there were a few character development flaws that rendered moot some of its originality in character choices.

The ending is surprisingly grim. Yes, you've managed to re-imprison Malifon, and this works out well for your party, since they all get to be kings or immortal, but Ymros has lost all its gods and towns and is now covered in permafrost. That's what passes for "winning" the game!

Let's see how it rates.

1. Game World. The world of Ymros itself is nothing special: a standard high fantasy realm populated with interchangeable towns and temples. The back story of an imprisoned demon seeking to wreak havoc on the land is also nothing new. A few times I made joking references to The Wheel of Time series; this isn't because I thought the game was copying the plot (the game predates the first book) but because the trope is so familiar. Nonetheless, it's done well, and the game is one of the only ones from this era (or indeed any era) to measurably change the game world as the plot moves forward. I made fun of how the developers gave away the plot twist in the title, but to be honest, it did come as a surprise: by the time it happened, I guess I figured it was a metaphor or something. Zink said it pretty well in a comment yesterday: "This game...actually manages to create a feeling that $&#@ is quite definitely going down."

On the negative side, the developers seem to have spent a lot of effort on a religious system that has no bearing on gameplay, peppering the land with temples that essentially just sit there. It was a good idea that could have been developed better. Final score: 5.

There are more than a dozen of these temples for virtually no reason. Then they all get destroyed.

          
2. Character creation and development. The game gets points for the inclusion of some interesting classes (scholar, sorcerer, visionary) with unique abilities, but then loses them again by making the abilities somewhat useless. There aren't enough traps in the game to justify the thief; I barely had enough call for magic at all, let alone the sorcerer's custom spells; and the ability to see around corners doesn't help much when enemies are unavoidable no matter what you do. Still, I found the game easy enough that I wish I had picked one of the custom classes just to see what it was like.

The skill system is also original--there's really nothing else like it in the era--but also somewhat poorly executed. Because the cost for acquiring skills outside your "class" is so high, you're effectively limited to a small selection until late in the game, when level increases have hopefully increased your intelligence. It was also needlessly difficult to acquire some of the skills. If you didn't start with Spirit Runes (which are the only really necessary spell class in the game), you have to trek all the way to the north pole to find the college. I just realized that I never found the school that teaches turn undead [Edit: turns out it wasn't a school but rather part of the priesthood skill.]

        
Leveling is satisfying because it happens infrequently and you get attribute upgrades when it does occur. I can't forgive the game for removing the ability to level up without any warning (or even with warning; the moment experience points cease to be relevant, battles stop being fun), although this is somewhat mitigated by the relative ease of the final dungeon. [Edit: I was wrong about this, too; I just didn't find the one town that survived.]

Finally, I liked that there were some class-specific encounters in one dungeon and class-specific end-game bios. Final score: 5.

3. NPC Interaction. There are a couple NPCs, including the Ancient One and Eregore the high priest. Talking to them is necessary to understand the plot of the game and advance the main quest. In the second conversation, we get actual "dialog options." Not the first in any CRPG, but still unusual in this era. But overall, NPCs are few and the interaction is mostly one-way. Final score: 4.

4. Encounters and foes. Maybe it's just me, but only a day after playing the game, I honestly couldn't name more than four of the game's many monsters. I never saw them as more than icons to be pummeled. I know that they had different attacks, strengths, resistances, and so on, but they just never stuck, partly because the game manual describes only a few of them, and very cursorily. There was only one encounter in which "role-playing" mattered, with Eregore, but that's one more than most games of the time. I really hated the lock-step regularity of combats (especially at sea), but it did help when level-grinding. The balance between regular and fixed encounters was good. Final score: 5.

5. Magic and combat. Physical combat is well done, and I didn't grow as bored with it as I did in Shard, although the game's insistence at starting your party on the other side of the room, facing away from the enemy, was continually annoying. You could really see the effects of high strength and speed scores in damage, initiatives, and extra attacks. There were tactics associated with positioning and whether to charge the enemy or wait for him to come to you.

Ship combat was stupid. There were virtually no tactics, and the experience rewards were overbalanced.

SSI invested a lot of time in the magic system--time that, as far as I'm concerned, was wasted. "Heal" and "Resurrect" are the only completely necessary spells. In the entire game, I only cast three or four others out of around 30 possibilities. Part of the problem is some of the area-effect spells. Some of them, like "fire storm," could theoretically be useful, but the game won't let you cast them until the second round of combat. By then, your characters are usually hopelessly intermingled with the enemy, and you risk fireballing your own people. Like Shard of Spring, I like that you can choose how many spell points to invest in each casting, though. There were possession and summoning spells I didn't even attempt.

Ultimately, all of the problems cited here boil down to the game being too easy. There's no reason to meticulously plot the battlefield if charging and pummeling almost always wins the day. Except for one time in which I entered a large dungeon too early, without enough food, and without having invested in quality weapons, I never felt in danger. Final score: 4.

6. Equipment. Another tough one. The difficulty in identifying weapons and armor was annoying, but then again it was I that chose not to have a scholar. I didn't even mention the game's vials and salves and miscellaneous magic items because I never felt any need to explore or use them. The process of identifying items and then later remembering what they were seemed overly complicated, and none of the items are ever well-described. The redeeming factor (although this applies better to "economy") was being able to enchant weapons and armor. Final score: 4.

7. Economy. Finding that I could spend all my money upgrading weapons and armor was a source of joy. Before that, I was using my money to pay for healing because I didn't know what else to do with it. I only wish I had discovered that dungeon earlier in the game. Its existence means that there's always a reason to get cash. Beyond that, I didn't love the process of buying and selling items. It took me hours of gameplay before I realized that merchants had multiple items; they just showed one at a time and you had to hit "c" to page through them. I never felt that "haggling" accomplished anything, and merchants bought my used stuff for a pittance. Final score: 7.

Every game should have this!

          
8. Quests. The game has a very clear main quest, and the fact that it's only slowly revealed is part of the fun. (Only complaint: why did Malifon reveal himself and draw the attention of a group of adventurers by having one of his minions attack some dinky little backwater?) There are a couple of different endings, but the decision is at the very last minute, and you can get the alternate ending through an instant replay. There are no side quests in the game. I like that one of the endings had character-specific epilogues, though not quite enough to see how the endings would change with different classes. Final score: 5.

9. Graphics, Sound, and Inputs. The graphics are tolerable but not memorable, except in a few special encounter scenes. The game notably declines to offer any nice end-game graphics, instead wrapping up with some lame flashes of light and an all-text finale. There are hardly any sounds in the game, and they're painful. The keyboard commands are intuitive and are offered in the on-screen dialogs, but the inability to move diagonally is a serious drag. I thought there were too many sub-menus; casting a healing spell requires the following sequence: (C)amp, (C)ast, (#)character, (4) for spirit runes, (F) for name of spell, type number of spell points, hit enter, choose character to cast on. The game also had unnecessary pauses in certain places, giving you 15 seconds to read three words of text. Final score: 2.

10. Gameplay. My biggest complaint is that the game is very linear while providing the illusion of being non-linear. It has a rather large game world to explore, but you really have to do the dungeons in a specific order or you can't finish them. On the plus side, I give points for the inventory puzzles which, while not complicated, are unusual in CRPGs. I did find the game a little too easy overall, but it was also paced well, with no sections that really dragged.

This might be the first game that I would really call "replayable"--not so much that I'm compelled to do it right away, but a party consisting of the characters I didn't choose--cleric, thief, visionary, scholar, and sorcerer--would have a very different game. It would be much more tactically challenging, you'd get different epilogues, and with a cleric the religion system might take a bigger role (e.g., you frequently "convert" to different gods to get different advantages). Any of you who say that you want to play it, try that and tell me how it goes. I recommend focusing on intelligence and speed during character creation: you'll need a lot of non-class-specific skills, and speed is vital for initiative and number of attacks.

Anyway, final score of 5 on gameplay for a final rating of 45. This is reasonably high; my median right now is 34.5. The game is strong on story but weak in logistics. I do recommend it, and if I didn't seem to enjoy it more while I was playing, it's probably because unrelated life stuff was creeping into the tone of my postings.

Next up: Dracula in London turned out to be not even remotely a CRPG, and I'm having issues with Eamon, which is actually a 1980 game that only received a DOS conversion in 1988, and a buggy one at that, so it's off the list until I can get it to run. Looks like Evets: The Ultimate Adventure.

   

****

Further reading: Check out my coverage of this game's predecessor, Shard of Spring (1986).

Demon's Winter: Won!

More than I enjoyed your font and color choices.

Well, if there were any towns that survived the breaking of the Shard of Spring, I couldn't find them. (Question: when the Shard of Spring is destroyed, why does it automatically become winter? Why not autumn?) Even Pirate's Cove, which was inside a dungeon, was destroyed. This meant no more leveling for my characters, even though they probably could have gone up another one or two. Fortunately, the dwarf dungeon survived, and I took my 40,000 gold pieces there and enchanted the hell out of my weapons and armor. Nothing else to do with money. With no towns to repair my ship, I fled from every combat and still barely made it.

My ranger is a little less useless.

Oh, and thank the Ancient One for hunting! Without that skill, my characters would have starved to death, with nowhere to buy food. In fact, all of this seems to make the game too hard. Have I just overlooked the one surviving town?

With nothing left to do, I headed for Malifon's volcanic isle. The island had a volcanic center, where Malifon lived, and three long "arms" sticking out from it.

From Andrew Schultz's map.

True to what the Ancient One had told me, walking around on the island produced a constant drain on my health. But I had to tough it out, travel to each of the three glyphs at the end of the arms, and cast the "uncurse" spell to open the bore.


Then came an annoying 20-30 minutes when I had to wait out the day/night cycle about six times so I could sleep, heal, and regain magic points for the end. I kept getting attacked during this period, which set me back a bit. Even when fleeing ship combats, enemies sometimes got a lucky shot, and I ended the game with my ship at 2 health.


Into the Dark Chapel I went and immediately encountered some wind dragons. This would be a good time to mention that late in the game I discovered a "reorder" option that allowed me to choose a better starting battle formation. It didn't fix the problem by which the characters were always facing the wrong way, but it did provide greater maneuverability at the initial stages of each combat.

It pays to read the game manual ahead of time.

I used the mirror taken from cathedral on a circle of light, and for reasons I don't fully understand, I was transported back in time 10 thousand years (before Shard of Spring, even!).

The creators got a lot of mileage out of this.

The game gave me another rune puzzle. A priest asked for a password that finished a sequence beginning "power, spirit, divinity..." Around the room were four sets of runes. I could figure out from the number of letters which runes represented which words and translating from those runes, I determined that the answer was VOID. This opened a passage to the center of the volcano.

Nothing like wandering around lava.

The volcano was a maze, but not a particularly difficult one. I just kept following a right-most path. There were random fights throughout, all producing heaps of experience and gold that I couldn't use. Finally, I came to a bridge where I took on two great dragons and a demon lord:

Attacking a great dragon with your hands...how awesome is that?

I next came to a Hall of Illusions where I traveled through pieces of previous dungeons in the game. There was one battle, possibly random, with elementals, but nothing overly difficult. Sensing the end was near, I started recording and found, to my surprise, it was very near. In fact, I went one step too far the first time and had an interesting death, then reloaded and won the game.

It turns out there are three endings:

1. You go too far in your wanderings, enter Malifon's chambers, and have your life snuffed out.


2. You cast the imprison spell before going into the chambers and choose, when the Ancient One offers, to become immortal, guiding Ymros for eternity ("until, in the distant future, the volcano begins to rumble").


3. You cast imprison but choose to remain mortal. The game then tells you a bit about what happens to your characters: Mathemas (paladin) becomes king of Ymros; Grendel (barbarian) spends the rest of his life fighting monsters and becomes a legend; Constans (monk) just wanders off into the mountains; Triamour (ranger) rebuilds the city of Woodhaven and retires; Clinschor (wizard) starts the quest to construct a new Shard of Spring.


I rather imagined that the end would reverse the damage Malifon caused, but nope, Ymros remains locked in winter with most of its towns destroyed and all its gods dead. What was the point of going back in time?

I must say, the ending feels a tad anticlimactic. I thought there would be one final, large battle before using the "imprison" spell, but I guess the demon lord and dragons were supposed to be the ultimate fight. My characters were in pretty good shape at the end, so apparently I was complaining needlessly earlier about the inability to level up before the endgame.

A GIMLET tomorrow and then on to a series of somewhat questionable CRPGs. By the way, if you were wondering what happened to The Bard's Tale III or BattleTech, I kicked them down later on the 1988 list. They'll come back.

Demon's Winter: A Plot Twist You Won't Believe

Yeah, that's gotta hurt.

All right, let's jump right in. The moment I camped after getting the Orb of Evertime, Malifon showed up in my dreams and started with some jive-talk:

This continued the next time I camped, too:


Okay, so it turned out not to be jive talk, though: further explorations showed that all of the temples in Ymros had been converted to ruins. This sounds pretty dire, but since my god wasn't really doing anything for me anyway, I can't say that I'll miss him. Not to mention that when I returned to the ruined temple the Ancient One made me a god!


Technically, all this did for me was to give me God Runes, which allow two spells: uncurse and imprison. The former gives me the ability to remove some glyphs that destroy anyone who tries to walk on Malifon's island. The second will allow me to re-imprison Malifon. I have to do this by--get this--going back in time to the Dawn of Man and casting the imprison spell on the volcano. The Ancient One warns that I could never hope to defeat Malifon in combat.

God Runes came with 200 spell points, needed for the imprison spell, which I stupidly gave to my paladin instead of my wizard, who could have done something useful with them in the meantime. But he also got a bunch of experience points and rose two levels, so that was good.

From what the Ancient One had told me, there didn't seem to be any reason not to head directly over to Malifon's volcano, which I had already found in my sea explorations. But I knew of at least three dungeons I hadn't explored yet and I figured I'd better check them out.


The first, on the large empty island, turned out to be a trap-filled maze occupied by some random encounters and, at the end, a room full of dwarven blacksmiths enchanting objects. It transpired that the dwarves would enchant my weapons and armor, either by adding a + or a special power, for some pretty hefty gold. Still, this is exactly what I like to see in a CRPG: a game economy that always makes it worthwhile to collect gold. Well done, Demon's Winter. I enchanted some stuff, and leaving the dungeon, I had a couple of encounters with giants and dragons that provided me with so much gold, I turned around and went right back in.


The second "dungeon" turned out to be an old lady's stone hut on an island on the eastern side of the map. All I could do there was camp and sleep. The game made a show of my party being woken up in the middle of the night by a spooky noise and finding the old woman gone. I left the hut having no idea what this was about.


The third one was on the same island, south of the old lady's hut, and it consisted of a series of small dungeons joined by a small outdoor area. I found a map room telling me where Malifon's prison and the Dark Cathedral are, fought some giants guarding a dock, and kept getting a message that the sun was coming up. In one room, I killed a "bellkeeper" and entered the Bell Room where there were some carved ancient runes:


Well, damned if an early supposition of mine didn't come true. A few postings ago, I found a similar collection of runes with a translation. Using that as a Rosetta Stone, I figured out that this translation means "RIN_ _E__ __ MI_NI____. Some of the unknown symbols were identical, so soon I had RING BELL __ MI_NIG___, which I ultimately guessed as RING BELL AT MIDNIGHT.


This being a dungeon, I didn't really know what time it was, but the purpose of the old lady's hut became clear. I returned to it, slept, woke up in the middle of the night again, and hustled to the bell tower before I got "the sun his risen" message. When I rang it, I got a mysterious message about angels crying. It took me a while to figure out what this actually did, which was to open a gate at the southern part of the dungeon to Malifon's temple. Entering the temple, I was challenged by a guard who asked my name. Scanning my notes for names of Malifon's minions, I stupidly tried XERES first before achieving success with JESRIC. Later I had to use his heavy amulet to impersonate a high priest and get past his guard.


There was another set of runes that I interpreted as: AT COMETFALL CAST THE SPELL TO BREAK MY BINDING. Pretty much the opposite of what I want to do. Soon I found a room with the binding-breaking spell, indicating that it had already been cast. Bollocks. Maybe I shouldn't have stopped off at the dwarven dungeon first.


As I approached Malifon's high priest, Eregore, the Ancient One contacted me and told me that Malifon had stolen the Shard of Spring and was intending to break it.


Eregore turned out to be a bit of a spaz. After I slew his minions, I had a series of dialog options with him:


Each one offered me the opportunity to lie or tell the truth and reveal intelligence to Malifon. I told the truth anyway. The upside is that Eregore totally lost his cool and directly confronted Malifon (through a mirror) about whether he intended to use the Shard of Spring to destroy Ymros and thus leave nothing for Eregore to rule.


Eregore committed suicide by dagger while Malifon mocked him. Malifon then spouted some verse at me and shattered the Shard of Spring. I took the mirror, hightailed it out of the dungeon, to find...


...the titular Demon's Winter has at last arrived. (Other SSI titles: The Elder Scrolls IV: Martin the Dragon; Starflight: The Endurium Ancients; Ultima IV: The Answer is "Infinity.") And with it seems to have come the destruction of (near as I can tell) every town on the face of the planet. Does this mean there's nowhere to raise levels, heal, fix my ship, and identify equipment? Because if so, that's a bit of a raw deal. I'm sure I gained enough experience for at least two levels.

There were some tough battles with dragons, giants, master thieves, high-level mages, and a demon lord, but having two characters with spirit runes really helped with the healing and resurrections. When I got done with this island, I had some mad gold: more than 30,000 since I last visited the enchanting dwarves. I hope they're still around at least.

Will the next post be the end game? It sure feels like it.

Demon's Winter: The Main Quest At Last

The main quest finally surfaces.

The ruined temple, which I had just entered at the end of my last posting, turned out to serve up the main quest. First, I witnessed an ancient conversation, replayed between two ghosts. One ended up sacrificing the other to his "god," who was stuck in a dormant volcano. I accidentally skipped part of the conversation, but the neat thing is that the game has a "(r)ead description" command that lets you re-view any text you encounter; sort-of a spiritual ancestor to games that let you re-watch cut scenes.

I'm sick of CRPG NPCs calling me "fools."

Soon I ran into Jesric of the High Temple of Malifon (the name making its appearance in-game for the first time) who said he was seeking the Demon Crystal. (Thanks, Jesric! I wouldn't have even known to look for it otherwise!) He attacked me by himself, and I was able to use my "surround him with my four best fighters and pummel him to death" strategy. He served up a lot of experience (1000) for not being so tough, plus a "heavy amulet."

If you could only attack diagonally in this game, Clinscho would have something to do.

A nearby cave contained a "prayer scroll," and towards the bottom of the dungeon, I found an ice door with a hole in it, which turned out to accept the icicle I had found yesterday. This teleported me to an altar room, where using the prayer scroll summoned an ancient god who gave me the main quest.

Could they have been a little more descriptive about "drawings of the creation of the universe"?

It transpires that some beings or gods called Ancients imprisoned Malifon under the mountain with a spell. The spell weakened over time, and with "outside help" (presumably Lanfear and the other Forsaken), the spell has been broken. Unless he is bound again, he will "sweep Ymros clean of life." Fortunately, an ancient order called the White Knights created an Orb of Great Power that can channel the One Power of the Ancients and create a new binding. I needed to go get it from the Vault of the White Knights.

I had done pretty poorly on my first trip to the Vault, which was only one level ago, so I decided to hang around a port town and do some level-grinding, alternating between ship combats (which give the most experience but no gold) and land combats (which give paltry experience but are the only way to get gold). The number of experience points needed to advance ended up getting so large, though (>10,000) that after a couple of hours, I had only gained one level. Fortunately, it was enough to get Fire Runes for my wizard (at last) and get one of my other characters skilled in Spirit Runes so I have two healers.

A gleeman recounts my past glories.

I also explored a huge continent on the western side of the map that, near as I could tell, had only a couple towns and a dungeon and otherwise mostly empty space. Like Faery Tale Adventure, the game brags about its size ("32 times larger than Shard of Spring," the manual says), but like Faery Tale Adventure, I find the world to be mostly empty and boring. To be fair, the enemies change with the terrain, which would be a positive if the enemies themselves were more memorable.

Returning to the Vault of the White Knights

Even though I didn't feel quite ready, my crew headed back to the Vault of the White Knights to obtain this Orb. The Vault was the largest and most interesting dungeon in the game so far. A spirit guarding the Orb of Evertime told me that I needed to pass a number of tests to prove myself worthy of it.


     
The tests all involved single combat for each of my five characters against a foe specific to that character. My wizard had to fight an imp, my barbarian a dragon, my monk a "karate master," and so on. None of them was terribly difficult, except for the ranger, who isn't very skilled at...well, anything.


     
There were rooms for characters I don't have, and the spirits in those rooms just "let me pass." I'm curious what foes the game would have provided for scholars and visionaries. At the end of the combats, the spirit let me march up and take the Orb.

Except for one battle with some high-level magic users, the game didn't throw many tough combats at me, meaning my first visit must have been a fluke. I should have held to my old Might & Magic credo: wait until an area kills you three times before you declare defeat.

Next up, I guess, is a trip back to the ruined temple so I can give the Orb to the ancient god.

A few other miscellaneous things:

• The day/night cycle is starting to annoy me a bit. Every 200 moves or so, the game world closes in on you to simulate getting dark, and the game forces you to camp and sleep. Triple that number of moves would have been nicer.
• I just discovered today that you can flee combat. I did it accidentally, while moving a character near the edge of the screen. This will make traveling by ship a little more feasible.
• Of my five characters, the most useless is probably my ranger. His hunting ability became moot once I started to make money, and his vaunted "monster lore" ability is really pretty useless. He sucks in combat (partly because I didn't hold out for a high strength score). If I wasn't so far into the game, I'd ditch him for another monk.

Presumably, this is to help you plan your battle tactics, but I haven't found much use for it.

• Getting the Kung-Fu skill turned my monk into a real bad-ass. Now he ends up stunning his opponent on about 30% of his hits.
• Enemy spellcasters keep freezing my characters, a condition that lasts permanently until you cast the "melt" spell, which I didn't have until after the ruined temple because I didn't save enough intelligence points to get my wizard Fire Runes. Every freezing means a trip back to a town with a healer. Another common problem is to be bound in chains, the antidote to which is a "break bonds" spell, but it's part of Metal Runes, which I also don't have.
• Final judgment: there are a random number of moves in between land battles but a fixed number in between dungeon battles.
• A weird buggish thing: when I enter a dungeon, only the few squares around me are visible, presumably because it's "dark" and the game wants me to use a torch or a "magic torch" spell. But if I just go into camp and exit again, everything is lit up and visible.
• A few times, when desperate, my monk has prayed to his god. Not once has this had any results. The game manual and all the churches in the game make a lot out of a religious system that has virtually no effect in terms of actual game play.

I wish I had some idea of where I stood in terms of total game progress. In some ways, I feel like I'm just beginning, but there aren't that many dungeons on the map!

One final, somewhat amusing, note: although I've done surprisingly well following my rules (especially the no spoilers rule), today I found myself exercising an obvious loophole. My rules say that I can't quit and reload just because I don't like a certain result. If a character dies in battle, I need to raise him myself, have him raised in a town, or replace him. Naturally, this is something of a pain in the neck when it happens deep in a dungeon.

If my entire party dies, on the other hand, not much choice there. I need to reload. You can see where this is going. If a battle goes poorly and I lose a couple of characters, suddenly my other characters lack a certain motivation for victory. You could even say that their depression makes them distressingly suicidal. This hasn't cropped up in a lot of other games because most of them are either single-character or limited-save. In Might & Magic, when I could only save in towns, it was always worth it to haul dead characters back to a temple, lest I lose all that adventuring time. But in games where you can save every step, like Demon's Winter, the dynamic changes.

In modern games, like Oblivion and Baldur's Gate, I get around the problem by forcing myself to only use auto-saves. If the last auto-save was 30 minutes ago, no way am I going through all that again just to avoid spending the 3000 gold to raise Jaheira. In this era, without auto-saves, I either have to establish a rule limiting my saves or just force myself to try to keep my party alive, no matter how convenient it would be if they all died.

Demon's Winter: Exploration

My crew turns out to be a bunch of sissies.

    

In my last posting, things looked pretty bleak. It turned out I underestimated my ability to escape the dungeon, heal up, and return. I noted that there's a random encounter every 43 moves, but they vary wildly in difficulty. The difficult ones killed me and caused me to reload; the easy ones I defeated and was able to save. When I got out of the dungeon, two of my characters were dead, but I was able to make my way up to the town of Woodhaven, heal, rise a level, and return. This time Xerxes fell in the first battle, and only my wizard died, costing another 900 gold to resurrect. 

       

I was tempted to declare "Won!" at this point.

        

As far as my characters were concerned, they had won, defeating the demon that had unleashed the kobolds on their home town. Only an old man's warning that Xerxes was just a "puppet" kept us from celebratory feasts. 

          

I was pretty flush with cash, so I treated myself with some weapon and armor upgrades. This would be a good time to mention that I really dislike the inventory system in this game. When you find objects, they are unidentified, and unless you have someone with the identify item skill, you have to take it to a town and pay 85 gold to get it identified. Even the identify skill doesn't much help because it only works once per day. Most of the stuff is nonmagical, meaning the identify fee is a waste of money. When you've identified a magic weapon or armor, the game doesn't change its name to something like "short sword +2"; instead, it puts a little * symbol next to it and you have to go into camp, view the character, page through to his equipment, then select the particular piece of equipment to see what it actually is. 

     

Unmemorable symbols designate magic items.

           

At this point, I had no idea where to go next in my quest, so I started sailing around to the different islands, exploring, and getting into high-experience-winning sea battles. I leveled up a couple of times. I finally found the college of fire runes, but they told me my wizard wasn't smart enough. That hurts.

      

Where I grew up, we'd kill a man for saying that.

           

On a large island in the northeast, I found the College of Kung-Fu and gave a boost to my monk's fighting skills. I also found the College of Spirit Runes nearby. My wizard had started with spirit runes, and I had hoped when I found it I could give the skill to some of my other characters--they all have spell points, and nothing to cast with them. Alas, none of them had the requisite intellect. 

     

I wasn't ready for this place.

          

Close to the College of Spirit Runes, on a mountainous island, I found a dungeon called the Vault of the White Knights. Figuring any port in a storm, I started exploring it, and I promptly got massacred by a large party of mountain giants. 

     

This is about as bleak as it gets.

            

I kept exploring west and I came across another dungeon called The Crystal Cave, "carved out of a large glacier at the base of the mountain." A few steps into it, I figured I'd again stumbled into the wrong place: 

             

But the ice dragon turned out to be surprisingly easy. Beyond him, I found the College of Ice Runes, which I didn't need, and in another corridor of the dungeon--past an easy battle with a yeti--I found an icicle. There seems to be no place to use it in this dungeon, so I stuck it in my inventory, which is just about bursting with stuff I've picked up from various dungeons. I'm not sure what I can safely get rid of. A nearby island gave me the town of Aurora, which unfortunately doesn't have a dock; my ship is dangerously low on health, and I'm at the north pole. And a third island in the area held a ruined temple, where my party explores as I say goodnight. Hint time: was there something I was supposed to find in Qoorik that would tell me where to go next? (I left the place with a ton of equipment I never got a chance to use.) As far as I know, the main quest (the Demon's Winter) still hasn't started.

Demon's Winter: A Slight Thaw

I don't like this guy.

   

When we last left Demon's Winter, I had finished two dungeons and I was a little uncertain about the game. But I was also exhausted, having just finished an entire month on the road, and my perception was a little skewed. Since then, I have warmed to the game a bit.

My next step was to travel to a dungeon called Qoorik on an island south of the mainland of Ymros. (I kept calling it Zoorik in the last posting; the odd game font is a bit confusing.) To get there, I needed to purchase a ship from one of the port cities. Once I had the ship, though, I was in no particular hurry to get to Qoorik, and I spent some time sailing around the game world and visiting various temples, and training guilds. There are a lot of temples in the game, which is odd given that they have such a limited purpose.

The world of Demon's Winter, courtesy of Andrew Schultz, who I talked about in a posting last year. I'm not 100% sure that a game map came with the game, so I might be viewing massive spoilers here.

There are a bunch of places to train, but with only a limited number of skills that each character can learn, I was a bit wary about spending any of my points. I had my paladin master fencing, I gave berserking to my barbarian, and my wizard mastered wind runes.

Is it just me, or does this sound a bit lewd?

    
On the sea, I was introduced to the joys of sea combat, which hasn't changed appreciably since Ultima II: I basically hit the (f)ire key and shoot at other ships and the occasional sea snake. These battles give an absurdly high amount of experience--at least 10 times the average land battle--but it comes a high cost. If the ship takes on too much damage, it sinks, so I have to repair it frequently, which costs a lot of gold. Some of the battles inexplicably take place in areas surrounded by walls, and if I miss the enemies, my cannonballs ricochet off the walls and smash back into my own ship! I fought on the sea until I was out of gold and then headed for Qoorik.

Bland but rewarding combat with pirate ships.

     
In a couple of towns, I got interesting hints about the main quest. I had thought that the game didn't reference Shard of Spring, but I was wrong:


       
The next town served up a reference to the villain in this game:
     

       
After reading both of these, I realized with a start that the main quest of Demon's Winter hasn't even begun! For all my characters know, they're just trying to figure out why the pack of goblins attacked Ildryn. In other words, the "Demon's Winter" of the title hasn't actually started. This comment by Giauz had gone over my head the first time I read it, but he's right. If SSI had made Baldur's Gate, they would have titled it Child of Bhaal.

Qoorik turned out to be invisible, but I knew where to look and ended up stumbling into it. The experience I got from ship combats served me well, as the dungeon knocked up the level of monsters significantly, throwing demons and high-level spellcasters at me. My wizard become essentially a healer only: I needed his healing spells too much to waste spell points on offensive spells. I had to resurrect characters a couple of times.

This troll turned out to be a lying bastard.

    
The dungeon was huge and multi-leveled, and I don't know if I explored all of it (I find it too hard and unrewarding to make maps for isometric games). Amidst a number of fixed encounters with Xeres's minions, I solved several inventory puzzles. A troll blacksmith game me a broad sword that he said was designed to kill Xeres, but when I had it identified in town, it turned out to be cursed. I found a black wand that I had to use on an archway to teleport between levels. A skeleton key opened a door in a crypt and took me to a shifting maze of tombstones that I had to navigate.


       
An old bookcase concealed a secret door that led to a skeleton holding a piece of paper that said "Ymros is Mine!" There were runes painted on the wall, that have the same number of characters: perhaps this is a code key for a later puzzle?


       
In another room, I found a bag, used it to scoop up some red dust that I then burned in a censer, and I got an image of a demon who said: "The father of demons sees all. Only those who possess the demon crystal can escape his sight." Other items I haven't figured out the use for, including a piece of papyrus, an ancient tome, vials of goblin's and unicorn's blood, and a microscope (it doesn't seem to do anything with the blood).

A Ouija board in a "gypsy room" told me to "walk along river Styx until you find the ferryman." I did that, and gave him some black coins I'd found to take me across a river. There, I encountered a tough battle with a "gravekeeper":

      
When I finally killed the gravekeeper and his minions, my characters were nearly dead and my spellcaster was out of spell points. I limped my way through a fire-shrouded maze and, at last, encountered Xeres, whose screen shot leads this posting. He slew me without much trouble--several times.

One thing hasn't changed from Shard of Spring, although in the first posting I thought it had: the game throws a "random" encounter at you every 43 movements, no exceptions. This makes it particularly hard if you're stuck deep in a dungeon with low hit points and spell points; you can't trust luck to carry you back to the exit. This is where I stand now: stuck between Xeres, who I can't defeat, and the long return to the entrance, which I can't make. I'm also almost out of food, so walking around and repeatedly resting isn't an option.

Though I'm not looking forward to starting over again, there are several things I've come to like about the game. The inventory puzzles have been intriguing and the encounters more memorable than in Shard of Spring. The dungeon was a fun challenge to navigate (though I wish I hadn't gotten myself stuck).

I'll keep throwing myself at Xeres and let you know what happens. I may have to start over. In the meantime, here's a video of my most successful battle against Xeres. You can see how combat works. The monsters move around the screen in odd patterns, making it tough to gang up and kill them one-by-one.

I actually managed to kill the demon himself, but his minions finished off my characters. I never got this close again in six or seven other combats. I suspect I erred in assuming that the cursed sword was a fake and tossing it; maybe it really was intended to kill Xeres.

Keep in mind, this is still the beginning of the game! I can't imagine it gets easier.