Fallthru: Final Rating

I played for a lot longer than 1 hour and 34 minutes. The game only considers your last session in making its tally.

Fallthru

United States

Independently developed and published, at one time offered through PC-SIG

Released 1989 for DOS

Date Started: 27 June 2014
Date Ended: 14 July 2014

Total Hours: 26

Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)
Final Rating: 32
Ranking at Time of Posting: 86/150 (57%)

Ranking at Game #457: 301/457 (66%)

Well, Fallthru is certainly an odd and original little offering: a text RPG that doesn't really seem to be aware that it's an RPG. It follows few conventions of the genre, and judging by the evidence, I'm not sure Paul H. Deal ever played an RPG prior to developing this one.

It's rare to play a text game that isn't also a text adventure (or, at least, adventure/RPG hybrid). It's even rarer (perhaps unique) to play one with the geography structured as a typical RPG. Most text games elide long transitions between areas, and almost every screen has some kind of useful purpose. Fallthru, on the other hand, revels in its vast areas, with coordinates stretching into the thousands on each axis, at least 10 million explorable squares, and long journey times between important points. As I noted last time, the actual coordinates may very well be infinite. But they're not just a bunch of numbers; drop a coin on one of those generic squares and it will still be there when you return. Every coordinate also has its own odds for a random wildlife encounter or a random warrior or NPC encounter.

In this, the game is more akin to a top-down, tile-based RPG like Ultima V or Dragonflight rather than a typical text adventure. It would be absurd to try to map and catalog every tile in Ultima V just to record the few cities and dungeons that occupy the landscape. Instead, you simply record the locations (including coordinates, if you have a sextant) of the important places. Fallthru's version of the sextant is the "Wherstone," and once you have it, you technically don't have to map. You can just write down where important cities and dungeons are and let the coordinates be your navigational guide.

Although I sometimes groused about it, the enormous geography of Fallthru actually serves a few valuable purposes. First, it makes it feel like the world is a real place. Go wandering in the woods near your house, and I doubt you'll find a dungeon or treasure every 100 feet. Instead, you'll find a bunch of trees that look the same no matter which direction you travel. Second, the distances help serve the game's "simulation" purposes, by which you have to occasionally find food, water, and a good place to rest. Third, much of the challenge in Fallthru is piecing together bits of lore, logic, and tools to find these key locations. There are virtually no places that you can stumble upon by randomly setting out into the wilderness.

Fallthru is fairly well-written, although almost clinically so. The text is economical--hardly any location features more than a single paragraph--and yet manages to sketch out a strong sense of geography and situation. There are hardly any spelling or grammar errors to break the immersion. But there's also no real sense of wit or humor in the text. I'm not sure the game had a single joke. That's not exactly a complaint--I usually complain the other way, about too much goofy humor--but it is odd to find a game that takes itself so seriously.

The game's primary problem is one of pacing. In the opening stages, you have to grab a throwing knife and find a hunting ground, and you spend hours collecting food for personal use and sale, but after that, you never have to hunt again. By the time you can survive in the far-flung places where animals give you 20-30 rations upon killing them, hunting has ceased to be necessary. A lot of thought was put into other ways of making money (bagging and selling sand, trading grain, even stealing) that also swiftly become superfluous, as a single successful combat against a warrior nets you more ralls than a dozen expeditions with your backpack full of grain.

There's a period where your explorations are confined mostly to the cities and the roads in between, and during this period, you collect lore from warriors and citizens, carefully record warrior levels, and occasionally fight them to increase your own power. But pretty soon, you max your level (and end up with absolute loads of cash) and hardly ever fight again for the rest of the game. For me, the last half of the game was solely about piecing together hints and finding key locations and items.

The constantly-nagging need for food, water, and rest provides a logistical headache throughout the game, but not a hard one. It's comparatively easy to carry loads of food and to find water sources (which are also usually good resting places), so all the dynamic does is force you to interrupt exploration every few minutes and spend a long time typing EAT, EAT, DRINK, REST, DRINK, REST, EAT, DRINK, etc. It would have been nice if the author had gone one way or the other with this. The first way would have been to make it authentically challenging: food more expensive or rare, your burro unable to carry much (or no burro at all), watering holes and springs rare features of the landscape, and so on. In such a game, you'd have to carefully prepare for each long expedition, spend time hunting in the field, and actually note locations of springs and wells for later visits.

The second way would have been to allow the player to purchase some kind of "bag of unending food" and "canteen of limitless water" the same way it allows the purchase of the "Flyr" and the burro just when aspects of inventory and travel distances start to get annoying. I would have preferred this.

I mentioned that the game isn't much of an RPG. This is true in a few ways. First, the only development comes from the nebulous "combat level" statistic. There are no separate attributes (although missile weapon experience must be tracked separately, behind the scenes), and your maximum health and fatigue levels never increase during the game. Second, there are hardly any monsters to fight! There are warriors to duel, wild animal attacks (which are binary; either you're strong enough to fend them off automatically, or you're not) and sometimes one monster at the end of a dungeon. Finally, except for hunting animals, you never kill anything--not even the final demon, Zugg. Instead, the game makes it clear that you just beat it into submission or retreat.

I drive a demon to retreat instead of preventing it from ever mauling adventurers again.

The warriors and few monsters you encounter don't have any compunctions killing you, however, and that's where I have to bring up the last major negative: death has no consequences. You don't even have to reload from your last save. When you die, you have the option to continue from a few squares prior as if nothing happened.

Finally, before the GIMLET, I want to address the multi-player options. Fallthru offers the ability for three separate players to play cooperatively, but it's simply impossible to imagine full games in which three people sat still long enough to win this way. With the player rotating every 20 turns, you'd have just enough time to get through an EAT, EAT, DRINK, REST, EAT, etc., cycle before you had to turn it over to your friend. The characters can't fight in combat together, so the only benefit to cooperative play is the ability to drop resources and perhaps share key locations. If I really wanted to play this one with a friend, I'd ask him to sit on the other side of the room on his own computer. The game is tedious enough at times without having to wait for someone else to complete his actions.

On to the GIMLET:

1. Game World. Fallthru offers essentially no back story. From the manual, there are suggestions that your character is a "foreigner," just arrived in Faland, who needs basic information about the land. On the other hand, the INFO command allows you to call up detailed information on places, people, and historical events, and it's unclear how a newly-arrived PC would have this knowledge. There is no comprehensive history of the land offered, though some of the INFO entries allude to an ancient king named Morag and the "Demon Wars."

Where the geography of the world makes it feel like a real place, other aspects don't. Everyone is a warrior or a peasant; there is only one unique NPC. The land seems to have no government, the people do little but farm and trade, and warriors only seem to fight each other. Finally, we have the issue of the horribly unimaginative names, like the "Glu'me Forest," "Th'em'ty" desert, "Hi'mtn," and the names for the various earth-like beasts. Overall, a mixed bag. Score: 4.

The LORE command, fleshing out aspects of the geography and history, is perhaps the game's strongest contribution. But how do I know all this stuff?

2. Character Creation and Development. As previously discussed, somewhat poor. The only creation option is your name, and the only development option is your warrior level, which caps at 76, well before the end of the game. There are theoretically some "role-playing" options in that you can attempt to STEAL from markets (failing gets you tossed into the wilderness in exile) and murder peasants for their valuables, but doing either nets you "dishonorable" status and makes the game unwinnable. On the other hand, building honor through good deeds (giving food, water, and coins to peasants) is a reasonably-fun role-playing dynamic, especially in the early game, when you need all the food, water, and coins that you can collect. Score: 3.

The consequences of thievery.

3. NPC Interaction. NPCs consist mostly of wandering peasants and warriors that you meet on the road. Everyone has a bit of lore to impart, drawn randomly from a lore bank, and dependent (I think) on both your level and the region of the world you're in. These NPCs offer some light role-playing opportunities (in giving them charity), but none of them are uniquely memorable, and you don't have any options in your own dialogue except HELLO. Score: 4.

Collecting a valuable hint from an NPC warrior.

4. Encounters and Foes. Except for NPCs, covered above, there are no real encounters in the game. Even the puzzles are mostly just a matter of having the right item. As for "foes," they're pretty banal. Wild animals attack you, and who prevails is solely a matter of your combat level. Prior to Level 7, you don't want to go into Hyen territory; after Level 7, you automatically drive them off every time they attack. The warriors are identical ciphers with procedurally-generated names. The demons are just generic monsters who deal melee damage, although there is at least one that requires a bow and arrows to kill. The game had INFO entries for some of the monsters you meet but not others.

I suppose I should give some credit in this category for the navigation puzzles in some of the dungeons. I found them more "challenging" than "frustrating," in the sense that logic and creative use of the interface could generally suss out the solution. Score: 3.

5. Magic and Combat. Also poor. There is no "magic" despite the game world clearly supporting magic in the form of magic items. Combat consists solely of typing the FIGHT, SHOOT, or THROW commands, with success dependent on equipment and character level. There really are no tactics, and much of the success or failure is based on random rolls. Minor credit: the game is rare in allowing you to YIELD against warriors and pay a tribute to end an unwinnable combat. Score: 2.

6. Equipment. Much of the main quest is about assembling the right artifact items, but almost all of them have some valuable secondary purpose, such as the silver amulet warning about nearby dangers and the gold amulet healing injuries. There are a handful of weapon types, one armor type, and lots of other bits of equipment useful for adventuring, including salves, shovels, lamps and oil, navigational aids, and packs, sacks, and burros to help you keep it all organized. While it sounds strong, equipment is generally binary--either you have what you need to succeed in a particular place or you don't--and thus it felt like for most of the game, equipment was about puzzle-solving rather than a standard, flexible RPG inventory. Score: 3.

Finally collecting the scimitar was a rewarding moment.

7. Economy. Strong at the beginning, when every rall counts, and you're hoping to save up for a burro, the Flyr, a Navaid, armor, a sword, and other important pieces of equipment. Right about mid-game, you've bought everything already, and yet you continue to amass ralls for no purpose except to buy occasional (cheap) food. Score: 4.
  

8. Quests. The main quest--to get "home"--is pretty pathetic, given that the game doesn't give you any sense of who you are, where home is, or why you're so eager to get back there. There are steps on this main quest--indeed, the entire world seems structured around serving it--but there are no side quests, no alternate endings, and no role-playing. All of this is too bad, as these things are arguably easier to program in a text game than in a graphical game. I was extremely disappointed in the ending. Score: 2.

9. Graphics, Sound, and Interface. A text game is mostly about the interface and the quality of the descriptive text. As I mentioned above, the text quality here is good. The parser is easy to use, and the game offers welcome one- or two-letter abbreviations for most of its verbs. There aren't many synonyms, but the command list is short enough that it's easy to memorize.

I didn't like how random encounters took a second to appear in each screen, forcing me to pause and wait between movements when traveling over long distances. I also thought the logistics of moving items from one place to another were needlessly complicated. The only sound that the game offered-- a beep when one of the games eight-hour periods changed--was startling and annoying every time it happened. Score: 3.

The game occasionally offers ASCII "graphics" on signs. I never found anything valuable at "Sturk Beach," incidentally. Not even sturks.

10. Gameplay. Fallthru deserves some credit for non-linearity, at least at the beginning, when all you're trying to do is build your fortunes and combat level. The main quest path has a mixture of steps that can occur at any time and those that require some precursor steps, and towards the end of the game, it started to feel very linear. I don't see it as being "replayable," except to try to beat your time. A few elements--the locations of trees and water sources, primarily--are randomized between games.

I think the difficulty is about right but the pacing is poor, and overall the game lasts too long for the depth of content that it offers. Score: 4.

The final score of 32 puts it slightly below what I consider "recommended," at least as far as playing the whole game. It certainly is worth checking out for a few hours. There's a good base here, and a few tweaks--tightening the last act, offering a more interesting plot resolution, allowing the player to buy something that dealt with the food logistics--would have propelled it well above my "recommended" threshold.

I can't find any contemporary reviews of the game, so I don't know what kind of reception it got in its era. (Though Paul Deal's comments, below, suggest people didn't like it, or at least it wasn't what they were expecting.) As a shareware title, it probably didn't receive wide distribution. For at least a time, it was picked up by PC-SIG, a Sunnyvale, California-based distributor of shareware titles and publisher of a monthly magazine focused on shareware. Despite an international distribution network and at least the appearance of success, the company abruptly and mysteriously went out of business in 1993. It's notable that PC-SIG marketed the game as a "text adventure"; I think most text adventure lovers would have found Fallthru confusing and alien, which probably explains its low sales.

I've been trying to connect with Paul Deal himself, to no avail. All the old e-mail addresses I find online come bouncing back, the number attached to him in public directories has since been disconnected, and a message I left at an alternate number has not yet been returned. He posted a comment onto a (non-game-related) bulletin board a few months ago, so I know he's still around. In the comment, incidentally, he indicates that his "day job" was as a microbiologist for NASA, which might make for the coolest dual-classing that I've ever heard of.

Thanks to pdw's sleuthing, we do have a couple of secondary sources for information about Deal and his take on the game. In an interview with Michael Feir in a 2003 issue of Audyssey (an electronic magazine focusing on games accessible to the blind), he indicates that he started programming the game as a "learning project" to help him write programs "to create biological simulations" (sensible, given his career at the time), which partly explains the game's preoccupation with food, water, rest, and the logistics of moving things around. He had hoped to make upgrades to the game (particularly combat) to take advantage of increased memory as the years went by, but player reactions seem to have disappointed him:

I hardly ever heard from anyone who solved the game. Mostly people called to tell me the game was too hard or that it was impossible. Very few actually registered. I finally concluded the game simply did not provide most people with the kind of game playing experience they wanted, and so I abandoned it.

In a letter to SynTax Adventure Magazine in the early 2000s, he indicated that he lost most of the files, including the "strategy document" that he created for registered users, during a move. But he also indicated in both the letter and his Audyssey interview that he was re-exploring the game and working on a new document. My guess is this evolved into his novelization.

It doesn't appear that Deal ever wrote another game. He has self-published a number of books over the last decade (I assume he retired about 10 years ago), seemingly focused on a young adult market. I hope he eventually stumbles on my blog, offers some comments about the game, and reads the comments of one player--and a number of commenters--who, if not "loving" the game, at least can appreciate it.

Despite times that I didn't enjoy the game, overall I'm grateful for showing me something new, and I wish more games had taken inspiration from it, even as I'm glad they didn't exactly replicate it.

Fallthru: Two More Dungeons

I have no idea what's compelling me to continue filling in these squares.

My explorations of Faland continue, with minor progress. You have to understand that for everything significant happening in the game, there are hours where I'm just wandering the byways--frequently having to stop for food, water, and rest--collecting lore from warriors and citizens, fighting (although only for gold at this point, and I have plenty of that), and trying to find places.

Throughout the game, I'd been getting lore hints about the "Silver Way." Its key was said to lie "beneath the seven ways of Kymira," that it was "facilitated" by the silver ring, that it touches many settlements, and that the lost city of Sorf lies within it. At the conclusion of my last adventure in Faland, I had finally found the silver key in the Hole-in-the-Wall dungeon. Later, I traded 10 rubies (almost all I had) for a silver ring at the ringmaker's in Triod.

I had mentioned that five cities had mysterious locked doors and I was going to try the silver key at each to see if it opened any of them. It opened all of them. The Silver Way turns out to be some kind of mass transit system connecting various cities. A sign in each "station" says that "only an honorable warrior with a silver ring can use this facility" and tells you to use the word TRANSPORT to activate the transporter.

Exploring the entrance to the Silver Way.

Unfortunately, after using the command, the stations all ask for a password that I haven't found or heard anywhere. I've tried random selections from lore, but to no avail.

Having reached a dead-end there, I decided to re-try Black Water Cave. Lore about this location is some of the first dialogue you receive in the game, so it seems likely that you're meant to solve it early. The problems I was experiencing were twofold: you only have about six moves before the leeches kill you, and the only thing I could find to do in the leech-infested waters was to turn a valve, but the game kept insisting I wasn't strong enough.

As commenter X hypothesized a few days ago, the answer to the "strength" issue turned out not to be level or literal strength but rather injury level. The game wouldn't let me turn the valve if my injury was lower than 7 (from a max of 8). The leeches sapped 1 point for every move, so I basically had to find the valve room in a single move.

Just like Hole-in-the-Wall, the cave consists of a small number of rooms that all twist back on each other, rendering mapping futile. What's even more futile about the cave is that there doesn't seem to be any consistency to the directions. In Hole-in-the-Wall, going east from Room 2 might take you to the north entrance to Room 3 with no way to return, but at least it does that consistently. In Black Water Cave, going east from Room 2 might take you to Room 3 one minute and Room 5 the next.

Even if you get lucky on the first move, find the valve room, and are able to turn it, you still have to find the exit in 4 moves or less or the leeches kill you. This whole area took a lot of reloading.

Finally!

Turning the valve opened a door in the caverns above the water area, behind which was an altar containing the Weyring, an artifact that I was sure would make my life easier. With the Weyring in hand, you just type WHERE IS {PLACE}, and it tells you how many moves in a particular direction. It doesn't tell you exactly where because it only does one direction at a time. If you type WHERE IS BLAH, it doesn't say "5 legons east and 7 legons south" but rather something general, like "7 legons southeast." If you travel to that location, you then have to consult it again to find out that the location is now "2 legons west."

Nonetheless, I was convinced that the ring would make my life a lot easier, but it turns out it barely helps at all. First, you have to be in the general area already; otherwise, you get a message that the location is "out of range." Second, it doesn't have any data on most locations in the game. It won't help you find any city, for instance, or THUN, or BLACK WATER CAVE. I keep hearing about a castle called MORAG, but I don't know where it is and the ring says I'm out of range. I wanted it to help me find EYRY, the city where I can supposedly get a scimitar, but it wasn't in its databanks.

So for now, the only thing I could think to use it for was Blak'mine, the mine near the city of Riven, in the far southeast. Lore had told me that the place is inhabited by a "Shabog" demon and I could find a diamond there. I wasn't sure why I needed a diamond except that "deception may be unveiled in the clarity of a diamond."

The cave turned out to have a Silver Way station, which I still can't use. Beyond that, it was simple: a shaft down, then east, then up, then east, then up again to the diamond. The Shabog blocks the last bend, and you have to fight him twice, once on the way up and once on the way down. He can only be defeated by a bow and arrows, and you have to have some practice first.

My problem with the place was again logistical. I arrived with only 4 oil in my lamp, and it wasn't enough, so I had to return to town to get more. Riven, the closest town, didn't sell it, so I had to march all the way up to Woren a few hundred squares away. Then, on the next trip, it turned out I didn't bring enough arrows, which are only sold way farther away. After a lot of long treks back and forth--of course, having to stop frequently and eat, drink, and rest on the way--I had the right equipment and made it through the cave.

Except for game animals, you don't actually kill anything in this game. You just attack until it surrenders or runs away.

With the diamond in hand, I was out of ideas, so I consulted my lore list for anything I hadn't yet experienced or solved. This is what I have:

• The Silver Way. Still need the password, don't know where to get it.

• The golden amulet. Said to be a powerful ward against injury, to heal wounds, and to defeat poison. It would probably have helped with the leeches in Black Water Cave, but I don't know where to get one. Maybe if I keep wandering the roads and giving things to beggars?

• Scimitars and Lithian Chains. The opal scimitar is the best weapon in the game. I've met lots of warriors with them. Supposedly, I can get them at Eyry, near Hole-in-the-Wall, but I wandered around the desert a bit and couldn't find any location. If I find one, I can apparently use it to cut the Lithian Chains on the vault in Or'gn

• Morag. A castle that I'm supposed to find somewhere and not enter by the front gates. The Weyring tells me it's out of range and I don't have any idea what part of the map it's in.

• The desert. I have lore about the positions of oases and how to survive there, just not any particular reason to go.

• Thun. A mysterious, powerful cave at the head of the Fariver on the far east side of the map. I actually took the time to trek all the way up the river until I found it, off at an eastern coordinate of 1,000--and there were still squares beyond it, meaning the number of squares in the game has now topped 1 million. My bronze ring is supposed to unveil its secrets, but those secrets have something to do with interpreting a runestone, which I do not yet have.

This was pretty cool, but it took me an awfully long time to get here, to no purpose.

• The Golden Way. If I ever figure out the Silver Way, I guess the Golden Way is next. Sorf is supposed to lie on the paths of both Ways, and the Golden Way is somehow the key to getting home.

• Prothan of Woren. This sage has some knowledge about the great demon Zugg, who I apparently need to defeat to get home. But he won't talk to me unless I have a gold ring, which costs 100 rubies at the ringmaker's in Triod--or 98 more rubies than I have now. Rubies occasionally are dropped by warriors at the ends of combats, but the idea of grinding for 99 of them fills me with despair. In the entire game so far, I've only found 14.

With no other ideas, I guess the next thing to do is hit the desert and see if there's anything to experience at the various oases. At least the Flyr will make long travel distances a bit easier. But this game is stretching on well past its welcome at this point, so I'm happy for hints on any of the above.

Fallthru: Hitting Limits

What I thought was the northern "border" of the game--until I found passages downward.

Since the last post, I have devoted an absurd number of hours to Fallthru--I seriously need to start doing something more productive with my summer--and the best I can say is I have a better sense of the lay of the land. So far, I've mapped both northerly and easterly coordinates as high as 750--making the known game world 562,500 total squares--although I know it extends more than this. The cliff at the northernmost part of the map turned out not to be a barrier. There are at least two places that you can go down the cliff into the desert, and I have no idea how far the desert extends. Meanwhile, at the far extent of the east is a seemingly endless series of forest squares. I suppose it's possible that there are no north and east borders; that the game just keeps generating squares in those directions until you run out of supplies and die.

As I've noted before, there's precious little to be found in all of these squares. I've found 12 cities, 2 external dungeons, a handful of inns, and a couple dozen generic farms. Some of the cities are at the ends of absurdly long rows of hundreds of squares.

In mapping this game, you have to treat it something in between a top-down game like Ultima IV (which you don't map at all) and an adventure game like Beyond Zork, where you would map and annotate every square. In Fallthru, it would obviously be crazy to map every square, but you don't just want to record locations as a series of coordinates, either, because you won't get a sense of the geography of paths that connect them. My Excel solution has space for every potential square, but mostly I'm just mapping roads and key locations.

The "flyr" has made travel a lot faster. I paid a pretty penny for it, but it was worth it. You set the device to any number between 1 and 20, and you automatically move that number of squares when you specify a direction, using only the food, water, and fatigue from having moved one square. Despite its obvious utility, it was a while before I trusted it enough to use it. I was worried I'd miss key locations or encounters on the road. But after some experimentation, I found that it stops you at any location you can ENTER or any person to whom you can say HELLO. Unfortunately, it doesn't stop at bends and turns in the road, so occasionally I find myself launched into the middle of some forest.

He said, "Hey, yo, get out' my SPACE, 'fore I PLACE this MACE in your #$*%ing FACE."

The central part of the map, where the game begins at Or'gn, is made up of farms and a fairly dense series of interconnected roads, with a farm (where you can buy food and get free water, although often food is "sold out") at every major intersection. You rarely have to go more than 20 squares before you can find a place of safety. To the south, a series of mountains rise, and most of the paths come to dead ends. One long road winds its way through the mountains for more than 300 squares before coming to an end at the city of Targ, where there's a locked dungeon I can't yet enter. Many cities have some kind of locked dungeon that requires a special key.

To the east, the road network collapses into a single road heading into dense forest, with different roads going off to cities called Rooden, Frgaz, Woren, and--way at the end of a winding trail that goes more than 500 squares and crosses a river--Riven. Rooden, and Woren both had locked doors. Woren also had a sage named Prothan who, lore says, could tell me about the demon Zugg, but he wouldn't see me unless I returned with a gold ring. I found where gold rings could be traded in Triod for 100 rubies, but so far in the game I've only found (or been given) about 14 rubies, so I'm a long way off.

There was some talk about a diamond mine in the wilds near Riven, but I didn't have any particular reason to visit yet, so I declined to waste a lot of time bushwhacking for now.
  

Lore tells me that my bow and arrows will help me defeat the Shabog. Oddly, there's no INFO entry on him.

  
The north, as I said, mostly ends at the top of a cliff, though there are two ways down to the desert, one called the "cleft" and one called . . . wait for it . . . "Waydn." The cleft has a dungeon called Hole-in-the-Wall on the way down, which I will cover in just a minute.

Finally, to the west the roads again converge into a single long road that ends at the sea, at the city of Oshan.

I haven't gotten anywhere near the 0,0 coordinate. The furthest south I've been able to go is 150, but that was way to the east, at the x coordinate of 750. It appears the southwest part of the map is all wilderness, and I run out of food and water if I try to go too far. This is true of a lot of places on the extremes.

Just running around and finding all these places took a good 8 hours. In between:

• I seem to have hit my max combat level: 76. None of the warriors I meet are higher than 75, and no matter how many I beat, I never reach 77. Renegades have stopped attacking me, which makes sense given that lore says renegades only attack warriors they know they can beat. I'm still "too weak" to turn the valve in Black Water Cave, so clearly something else is going on there. One nice consequence of hitting the max level is that I no longer have to spend times recording the names and levels of every warrior I meet.

• Having maxed in levels somehow doesn't bother me as much as it did in Dragonflight, perhaps because combat is such a minor part of this game and it's over quite quickly.

• Commenter X's revelation about the HERE command saved me a lot of grief. I missed it in the documentation. Previously, I had thought everything had to pass through the hands. So if you wanted to move something from the backpack to the ground, you'd have to type MOVE FROM P01 to HAND 20 RALL and then DROP 20 RALL. It turns out you can just say MOVE FROM P01 TO HERE 20 RALL. MOVE FROM HERE TO P01 allowed me to pick up the ikons and bring them back to Or'gn for sale. For the gold ikon, I got 10 rubies.

• The cities in the forests to the east sold bows and arrows. It turns out that the game tracks some bow (and presumably throwing knife) skill behind the scenes, and it has nothing to do with your combat level. I had a miserable time shooting at and missing wildlife before I slowly improved.

• The economy isn't particularly strong in this game, but it's fun that as you get to the cities in the far-flung parts of the world, everything is more expensive. Bows and arrows sell for twice as much in Riven as in Frgaz, and food sells for 9 times as much as in Or'gn. Or'gn, of course, is in the middle of a bunch of farms, while Riven is hundreds of squares in the middle of nowhere. 

      

Price-gouging.

 

• I keep forgetting to pick up my knife or arrows after throwing/shooting them. Having to replace them is annoying.

• Thanks also to X's comments, I realized you can take a shot with a knife or arrow when combat begins. If successful, the missile attack effectively lowers the opposing warrior's level by 2 or 3 and makes it an easier combat. Unfortunately, I got this information after I was near-maxed, so it wasn't much use.

    

Defeating a warrior by hitting him with a knife.

     

• Hitting various levels makes you immune to wildlife attacks. A piece of lore specifically says that warriors Level 3 or above needn't fear "eagen" (eagles). As I explored, I found I was a high enough level to automatically fend off berven (bears), hyens (hyenas), and other creatures. Unfortunately, no level is high enough to defeat ferven (tigers, I guess), and having to keep a lamp going every time I walk around on moonless nights is logistically annoying.

Hyen attack me and are driven off with no input on my part.

• Some other ways to make money became apparent, including taking sacks to a mountain quarry and filling them with sand, and killing elvir (elks) and davi (deer) for their pelts. But from combats, I already have more money than I know what to do with.

• I'm still collecting a ton of lore--about 75 entries now. They get repetitive for a while, and then suddenly I get a whole new set. I don't know if they're dependent on geography or level. I suspect the former.

   

I still don't know where "Thun" is, and I haven't covered any terrain of snow and ice. On the other side of the desert, maybe?

• As far as I can tell, there is no consequence to death in the game except that you restart on your last safe square. The only problem is if you die somewhere without food or water and there's none nearby. You get into an endless cycle of starving to death, with no hope unless you have a saved game in a better place. But some foresight--keeping plenty of food in packs, keeping full canteens--keeps this from happening.

    
Only towards the end of the session did I start to make some progress on the main quest. I had found a bronze key beneath Slavhos, and lore told me that the bronze key opened Hole-in-the-Wall. I didn't find that dungeon (nestled in the cleft in the northern cliff) until late in my explorations.
  

Well, that's promising.

  
Like a few other dungeons I've found so far, Hole-in-the-Wall was a twisty maze of passages going in any of eight cardinal directions plus up and down, with no rhyme or reason to where they deposit you in the next chamber. You could go east from Chamber 1 to Chamber 2, and then have to go east from Chamber 2 back to Chamber 1.

  
To keep it all straight, I at first tried digging holes. Every time you DIG, you dig 1 foot, up to a maximum of 8 feet. I recorded the first chamber as "1H," the second as "2H," and so on. There were more than 8 chambers, so I started combining holes with ralls. "2H1R" was a room where I dug a 20-foot hole and dropped 1 rall.
  

It seemed to be working for a while, but then it turned out that holes close themselves after time, so I got hopelessly lost and ran out of oil for my lamp. Reloading, I tried the same strategy but with combinations of ralls and ems. This allowed me to map the entire maze, but I was unable to find anything useful, and I kept getting into an area with an endless loop that wouldn't let me leave the maze.
  

There was one location where I had to defeat a demon. He wasn't remotely hard, but nothing happened after I defeated him. After I explored the rest of the dungeon and found nothing, I figured there must be something special about his chamber. Since there weren't any environmental cues, I tried just digging in the floor, and it worked: I uncovered a silver key. I think the solution ought to have been a little more obvious.
  

  
I don't know what the silver key unlocks, but I have five cities--Biclif, Targ, Rooden, Woren, and Oshan--that all had locked doors, so I guess I need to try them all in turn. Maybe by next time, I'll have something more interesting to report on the story. This game is sorely testing my patience, though. The world is unconscionably large and empty, with such repetitiveness in its encounters and locations, that I really don't understand what its fans see in it. On the other hand, I grant that there's absolutely nothing else like it on my list.

Fallthru: 400,000 Squares and Counting

Fallthru consists of vast distances with little to discover in between.

About 6 hours into Fallthru, I'm not sure I understand its point. Some commenters have praised it extensively, but I confess I don't quite see the charm. The game seems to delight in needling me with constant logistical considerations while blocking any kind of progress I try to make on the plot.

After the last post, I was determined to figure out the scope of the game world. I had made enough ralls from combat and selling one ikon (as for the two others, see below) that I could afford plenty of food. I decided to go west as far as I could and see if I could find the western border.

500 steps later, I arrived exhausted in the city of Oshan on the western sea. The city turned out to have nothing of note, so I pretty much just turned around and headed back. The trip was valuable for the journey itself. From all of the warriors I fought and defeated on the way, I rose to Level 22, and from all of the peasants to whom I had generously donated food, water, and ralls, I received several gifts in return, including a silver amulet (which warns when danger is near), two rubies, and a "wherstone" that, when you LOOK AT it, gives your present coordinates on the map from a southwest origin point.

Oshan turned out to be at 0, 625. Or'gn, the opening city, is at 500, 625. Later, I walked to the cliff that makes up the northern border, and found it at 750. However, this might not be the actual northern border because the game says that I can see a desert at the bottom of the cliff and some of my bits of lore refer to settlements in the desert. I can't get to the eastern border yet, for reasons I'll recount below. I'm still insisting on mapping, in a giant Excel workbook with the coordinates frozen in the first row and columns. It's so big that it doesn't fit on a single screen even at the lowest zoom level.

The parts I've mapped. The road heading west goes for about three more screens before it ends at Oshan.

With so much space--at least 412,500 squares so far--it would be a waste of time to aimlessly wander the wilderness, hoping to find dungeons or special encounters. Lore and signs point you to places you need to go, and almost everything of value is found on a road. I've been mapping farms, forest, and plains when I have to leave the road for a particular reason, but mostly I've been concentrating on the street network.

Despite the value of the journey, long trips are tedious for several reasons. First, if a warrior or commoner is going to appear in a square, it takes a couple of seconds for this to happen after you arrive. If you're rapidly typing W-ENTER-W-ENTER-W-ENTER, you'll blow past them and never have any encounters.

Second, food, water, and stamina steadily deplete during the trek, and every so often you have to eat, drink, and rest. Although you can carry some food and water with you, this generally means finding a farm or inn where you can buy food and get free water. About every 10 minutes of game time, you've got to find a stopping point next to a well or spring and enter some series of commands like this:

MOVE FROM BACKPACK TO HAND 5 FOOD

EAT
DRINK

REST

REST

DRINK
REST

EAT

REST

EAT

EAT

DRINK

DRINK

REST

REST

You've got to keep switching between them because if you do nothing but rest for 5 rounds, you'll end up really hungry and thirsty. You might even die of hunger while you sleep. And apparently eating and drinking brings on the fatigue. It's a bit of an effort to get all the values to their max score of 8 at the same time.

I feel like Tuco Ramirez.

This was an interesting logistical challenge early in the game, but now that I have enough money and storage for plenty of food and water, and have mapped most of the water locations in the area, it seems a little unnecessary. It would have been nice if the game had just decided, after a while, "All right; I'm going to assume that you're all set on food and drink now." It doesn't even really make sense for these things to deplete at the same rate.

Transferring items also continues to be a pain in the neck. By the time I got back to Or'gn from Oshan, I had enough money for a burro, which the game named "Pecos." I haven't reached his max carrying capacity yet, so it's nice to have something that can carry a lot of food and water. It's just annoying to have to keep moving stuff from hand to backpack to burro. Late in the last session, when I had enough money for a "Flyr"--a device that allows rapid traveling--I hauled my backpack full of ralls into the store to buy it for $300. I don't see any reason I couldn't have just typed BUY FLYR and had it automatically deduct from my backpack. But it insisted that I drop them on the counter first. Unfortunately, owing to the other stuff I was carrying, I could only handle about 100 ralls at a time. Thus, BUY FLYR became:

MOVE FROM BACKPACK TO HAND 100 RALLS

DROP 100 RALLS

MOVE FROM BACKPACK TO HAND 100 RALLS

DROP 100 RALLS

MOVE FROM BACKPACK TO HAND 100 RALLS

DROP 100 RALLS

BUY FLYR

Yes, there are shortcuts for the commands (like "MV" for MOVE) and some of the objects ("P01" is the first backpack), but they don't save that much time.

On to content. The primary thing I've managed to accomplish since the last session is defeat a bunch of warriors and get my own warrior level up to 32. Such combats are lucrative enough that I've also managed to buy a sword and armor. It took me a while, but I've figured out the logistics of the system. Basically, any two warriors at the same level are evenly matched as long as their equipment is the same. So if I'm Level 20, wearing no armor, and carrying an axe, and I meet ALI-FU, who I know is also Level 20 and is carrying an axe, my odds of defeating him are about 50/50. The odds seem to increase by around 10% for every variance in levels, so if I meet a Level 15 warrior with the same equipment, my victory is essentially inevitable.

But the equipment makes a big difference. Every weapon upgrade (knife to mace, mace to axe, axe to sword) is worth around 2 levels, with scimitars worth an extra 2 or 3. Armor is worth about 5 levels.

Thus, if I'm Level 20 and armed with an axe and no armor, and I meet a Level 15 warrior armed with a sword and wearing armor, his functional level is more like 15+2+5=23, and he's going to win about 80% of the time. 

I know from past experience that ASOECOEVI is Level 30. But his knife vs. my sword means that I can subtract about 6 levels.

When you encounter a warrior, you have three options: accept his challenge and FIGHT, say HELLO and get his level and some lore, or just walk away. If you use the HELLO option, he leaves immediately afterwards, so you can't fight him until you encounter him again. But NPC warriors never increase in levels, and their equipment changes all the time. So if I previously met AYUANA'GO and I couldn't defeat him because he was 5 levels higher and carrying good equipment, I might run into him an hour later and find that thanks to my own level improvements and lesser equipment on his part, I can easily beat him. I mostly decide to attack when my odds are higher than 70%. If my opponent wounds me to less than half my hit points, I'll YIELD and pay a few coins. Occasionally, I die, but death doesn't have major consequences.

Victory! Rewards for successful combat vary between 1 and around 30 ralls. I think it has to do with the level variance between you and your opponent.

The game does scale the level of encounters with warriors. Now that I'm above Level 30, I never encounter warriors at Levels 0-20 anymore. Rarely, I'll meet one who's 25. Mostly, I run into 30-45. Again, since warriors never increase in levels, the game keeps up by just generating new names. Weird names. Some examples: EZE, BA, ECA'NOASE, AZOEGU'WU, ACO, AHOAQO'PU, VE, EYEEJEAJU.

On the plot side of things, I'm having trouble making much progress. A few things I've tried to do:

• My attempts to explore the fringes of the map--including finding the eastern terminus--have been hampered by "renegade" warriors who attack immediately upon encountering them. This is a problem because most of them are higher levels than me, and I don't like having to FLEE, which doesn't always work. These renegades are responsible for most of my deaths. I've  never encountered them towards the center of the map.

Bastard.

• As we discussed last time, I explored a small dungeon beneath Slavhos and found a treasure room with rubies and several ikons. I was able to carry the bronze ikon back to Or'gn for sale, but even if I'm not carrying anything else, the game insists I'm not strong enough to pick up the gold ikon or any of the stone ikons.

• Beneath Forod, there's something called a "stone maze." I haven't explored all of it because I keep stumbling upon silver ikons and--you guessed it--I can't pick them up.

• The silver amulet opened up the door to Black Water Cavern, which I found beneath a grassy mound northeast of Odetn. The dungeon dumps me into a watery maze full of leeches who quickly sap my health. I can find my way to a valve, but if I try to TURN it, the game says, again, that I'm not strong enough.

Being nibbled to death by leeches while I try to get through this area.

Clearly, "strength" is a thing in the game, although there isn't any kind of visible strength statistic. I wondered if it somehow was affected by combat level. To run a test, I found a farm, where you can gather all the rocks you want. I dropped everything and picked up rocks until I couldn't carry any more. Then, I started a new game with a Level 0 character and did the same thing. Both carried a maximum of 45 rocks. So either strength has nothing to do with combat level or carrying capacity has nothing to do with strength.

Lore tells me that "opal scimitars" increase a warrior's strength. I also know from lore that opal scimitars are the only things that can cut through the "lithian chains" on the vault in Or'gn, and that I can find one in Eyry, which is "west of the cleft, outside the gate of Hole-in-the-Wall." This is somewhere along the cliff that marks the northern border, so perhaps this is my next trip.

A useful bit of lore.

A few other quick notes:

• More creatures! I had already encountered squal (quail) and rabir (rabbits); to this, we can add squir (squirrels), hyens (hyenas), and davi (deer). I encountered most of these critters in the "Glu'me" woods. As an anonymous commenter pointed out, creativity in naming wasn't Mr. Deal's strength. Davi can be hunted, though apparently not with knives, so I need to buy a spear. If it turns out I need the food and money, I'll do that.

I don't particularly want to kill squirrels, but I'm hungry.

• In a game obsessed with logistical issues, you thankfully don't have to feed and water the burro. Moreover, he appears "in hand," as if you're carrying him. You have to DROP him to go up a tree or down in a dungeon.

• The game keeps track of lives, adding one to your count every time you restore. I was worrying about this, thinking I might run out or it might subtract from my combat effectiveness, but I just noticed that it resets the count every time you restart the game.

• The Flyr allows you to move up to 20 times normal speed, which is really handy if you're traveling a route that you've already taken. It's not handy if you're trying to map all of the paths, or if you want to encounter warriors or NPCs along the way.

 

I still have lots of roads and pathways to explore, but I wouldn't mind if the game started offering a little more in terms of content and plot betwixt these vast distances of featureless farms, forests, and roads.

Fallthru: Hunting and Gathering

Hopefully, I can stop scrounging for food now.

Another six hours in Fallthru has produced little reward, but I finally feel like I'm getting the hang of the game, and towards the end I started to make some real progress.

I spent a couple hours just screwing around with sample characters so I could get a sense of the map layout and the game mechanics. The game's "odometer" system, which records the number of steps taken in a particular direction until you switch directions or RESET, helped with mapping. In addition to the starting city of Or'gn, I found the locations of three other cities: Slavhos, Odetn, and Forod, as well as a bunch of farms that dot major crossroads.

The cities and farms all took up a maximum of five or six squares, so there's really no need to map them separately. Cities all have a shop or two and a well, and most farms sell both food and grain and offer free water. 

I manage to kill a bird moments before I die of starvation.

With water fairly plentiful, the primary survival obstacle in the early game is food. Food, water, and fatigue tick down at a rate of 1 every 25 moves, and you die if any get to 0. Restoring fatigue is a simple matter of typing REST, although this usually has the consequence of depleting water and food. It's hard to get them all back to their maximums at the same time.

I finally found a good hunting area in the wilds to the northeast of Or'gn, where squal (basically quail) and rabir (basically rabbits) appeared at random or with the use of the HUNT command (which takes two hours). I learned to THROW KNIFE when they appeared. If I was lucky enough to hit them, I then had to TAKE my knife back and PREPARE the animal, which converts it to food: 2 rations for squal and 3 for rabir.

Hunting is a tedious but necessary process in the early game.

At first, I was just interested in getting enough food to stay alive, but it later occurred to me that I could sell it in Or'gn for 0.09 ems each (100 ems make a gold rall). For about an hour, I had to type repeatedly:

>HUNT

>THROW KNIFE AT SQUAL (or RABIR)

>TAKE KNIFE

>PREPARE SQUAL

>HUNT

After a while, I had a backpack full of meat. I sold it in Or'gn and repeated the process a few times until I had enough money to buy an axe.

A "navaid" is alas far in my future.

As I had been wandering around, hunting and mapping, I ran into a bunch of NPCs and warriors. I still wasn't any match for the warriors, I thought, but I began noticing the same names multiple times. When a warrior approaches, you can accept his challenge by typing FIGHT, or you can say HELLO and find out his level (along with a little bit of lore). I noticed that each named warrior had the same level, though sometimes different equipment, every time I encountered him. Many were Level 0 like me. I started taking notes.

Once I had my axe, I tried a policy of fighting any warrior who was Level 0 and didn't have manifestly better equipment. The strategy paid off. Through my combat victories, I got about 30 rall and swiftly rose to Level 3. I noted, however, that the number of rall you receive from defeated foes seems to be related to the variance between your level and theirs, and as mine rose, the rewards grew slighter. Occasionally, my hit points dipped and I had to YIELD combat and pay a tribute of a few rall to my opponent. A couple of times, I died and had to RESTORE.

Victory!

During this time, I had encountered multiple wandering NPCs and tried to help them when I could. If they asked for food, water, or ralls, I happily typed GIVE. Eventually this paid off when a little girl handed me a ruby. This was consistent with a bit of lore I received from an NPC that said, "Those who persist in good works are rewarded."

What goes around comes around.

I wanted to sell the ruby and buy a sword or some armor, but another piece of lore said, "jewelry of Faland has value beyond money," so I suppose I should hold onto it.

Lore is a vital part of the game. It works much as it did in The Land. Each NPC, when greeted with HELLO (the only dialogue option) plucks a random selection from a "lore database." I've recorded 38 lines so far. Here's a sample:

• The emerald of Thun deciphers the runestone.
• Hole-in-the-wall lies east of Biclif.
• A warrior gains honor through clarity.
• Rings can be obtained from the ringmaker in Triod.

There were three overtly related to the  main quest:

• If you truly seek home, then you must learn how to fight Zugg, the most powerful demon in Faland.
• It is said that home lies at the end of the golden way.
• The golden way runs through Sorf.

Aside from providing direct hints, these bits of lore also give me some ideas for things to look up with the INFO command. For instance, INFO THUN (from the first comment above) gives me:

Thun is an ancient cavern, known to the earliest peoples of Faland as a place of great power and mystery. It has not been occupied for many generations and is little visited due to its remoteness and the forbidding nature of the surrounding terrain. It is said now to be a lair of felven. Rumors that the cavern hides a great treasure have long circulated.

Felven turn out to be "felines of unmatched power" whose attack cannot be withstood by any weapon, armor, or magic. Fortunately, they only attack on moonless nights because they avoid all light. Basically, they're this game's version of the grue.

Lesson learned: you don't want to be out in the wilderness on the night of the 15th day.

Some of the INFO entries have filled in a bit of the back story of the game. Some entries make reference to the "demon wars" of long ago and an ancient evil king named Morag. Unfortunately, although there are entries on almost every location, creature, and piece of equipment (making it one of the few games of the era with weapon and armor descriptions), there are no entries for some of the things that would be most obvious, like FALAND, DEMON, and PHARG (a creature I encountered underground).

Among the lore entries were this sequence:

• The weyring is a remarkable instrument. If you have one, the command WHERE IS {place} can help you find numerous locations.
• If you have the wit and courage to find the secret of Black Water Cave, you can wrest a weyring from it.
• Black Water Cave is beneath a grass-covered mound.
• A silver amulet opens the door to black water cave.

The "grass-covered mound" is somewhere near Odetn--I've seen it from the tops of trees--and I have a shovel that I can use to DIG if I get there, but I'm not sure where to get a silver amulet. I've seen them hanging around the necks of random NPCs, but I don't want to kill them or STEAL them, as wandering warriors attack immediately if you get "dishonorable" status. Laying down money and trying to BUY or TRADE doesn't work, and lore says "amulets cannot be bought."

Lacking other ideas, I decided to explore the catacombs beneath Slavhos, which according to INFO used to house slaves in the days of King Morag. Getting through the area involved a lot of juggling of the lamp, the bottle, and oil, but basically it was a 5 x 5 area in which I kept getting attacked by "Pharg" (no idea) but managed to defeat them (rising to Level 4 in the process). A single room led DOWN to a small chamber with a key, which in turn opened a gate that led to a treasure room with a ruby and 5 "ikons." The ikons were too heavy to take out all at once, so it looks like I'm going to have to tote them one-by-one back to Or'gn for sale.

Entering my first Fallthru dungeon.

Combat in the game is pretty rote, the only variables being your weapon, whether you're wearing "armor" (there's only one type), and your combat level. The experience looked like this:

>FIGHT
The savage horror aims a blow at your head. Nice dodge!
>FIGHT
You swing. Good hit! The nasty brute is bloodied!
>FIGHT
You duck under razor claws and deliver a powerful blow.
>FIGHT
You dodge too late. Claws rip your flesh!
>FIGHT
You strike, then take a blow and dance away!

In the end, I don't actually kill the pharg. I just drive it off.

After this, I have a few options, including continued exploration of the road network and a cavern beneath the city of Forod. In addition to a sword and armor, there's at least one item I'm saving to buy: a "flyr," which greatly increases movement speed and thus lowers depletion of fatigue, food, and water over long distances.

A few miscellaneous notes:

• The only sound in the game is a startling system beep whenever one of the game's eight-hour periods rolls over.

• I've mapped close to a thousand squares, but less than 1 in 100 has anything special in them. Most are generic descriptions, like "you are in a slightly rolling region of well-kept farms."

• When moving down the road, you can't type too fast because you'll miss warriors and NPCs.

• I guess you could make money by buying and selling grain, too. Most farms sell it for something like 0.02 per pound, and you can sell it in the city for 0.04. A sack holds 29 pounds and costs 0.45 to buy, so it would take one trip just to make a profit. Subsequent trips would yield about half a rall each (you can only carry one full sack at a time). I think hunting is easier.

The farmer spells it out.

• Juggling inventory items is tedious and annoying. The whole process of trying to buy oil and fill my lamp was a comedy worthy of the Keystone Kops. To buy oil, you have to have an empty bottle--you can't buy ounces to fill a partly-full bottle. It has to be on the ground. So do the ralls that you're buying it with. Then you have to pick it up and fill the lamp, but the lamp has to be on the ground to transfer the oil. The bottle will hold 12 ounces but the lamp only holds 8. I naturally made mistakes at every stage in this long process.

Let's talk briefly about the book before I go. A few days ago, I bought a copy of Fallthru: The Mentat Warrior by game author Paul H. Deal. The paperback version is a large 678 pages; I read the equivalent of about the first 40 of them.

The plot concerns eight people from Earth, none of whom know each other, who wake up in an inn in Faland one morning and have no idea where they are. There are two men (including Martin, the main protagonist), two women, two young boys, and two young girls. All have been plucked from various places and times, and the only thing they seem to share in common is that most were fatally ill and hospitalized before they appeared in Faland. They wake up in perfect health.

Shortly after waking up, they meet a man named Engar, who explains that they're not on Earth, though Faland is similar in many ways, including a roughly 24-hour day and a 360-day year. It is occupied by a race of human-like beings who speak a form of English, and humans have apparently been mysteriously appearing once a year, in groups of 8, for about 20 years. No one knows why this is happening, whether the humans died back on Earth, or what. But while generally pleasant, Faland is a tough place to live, and the humans will be sold into slavery if they can't learn a trade, so Engar says that he'll be training them in fighting, first aid, scouting, hunting, and whatnot for the next month. Slowly, through training and testing, the group figures out what skills suit them best. Martin shows some promise as a "Mentat," a warrior with special mental abilities.

While the writing is perfectly adequate and some of the descriptive passages are quite good, the dialogue (the hardest part to get right) is stilted and sometimes cringeworthy. The eight humans don't talk, think, or act like real people who have suddenly awakened in a strange place. They accept their situation a bit too readily and express no remorse for the people they (presumably) left behind, nor for the inconveniences of being transported to a medieval-level society. Where I'd be alternately screaming, crying, swearing, looking for hidden cameras, and throwing up, the characters in this book happily wander off to breakfast (me: "Don't eat that! It's an alien planet! Can you tolerate the microbes? You don't know!") and sit around and ask questions like, "What kind of life do people have here? Do they raise families?" and "Do warriors get paid?"

Engar offers way too much exposition in just a few pages. None of the characters have any traits or flaws that make them feel like real people. Finally, at times it feels like too much of a game adaptation, with Engar referring to his combat "level" literally.

It's possible that some of these things change, or receive explanations, as the novel goes on, but I should probably avoid reading ahead for spoiler reasons anyway.

This switching back and forth has worked out for me pretty well. I'll keep playing Fallthru, but let's see if we can finish off Dragonflight first.