Keys to Maramon: Won! (with Final Rating)

I think this is the first game to end with the PC giving a speech.

 

The Keys to Maramon

United States

Mindcraft Software (developer and publisher)

Released 1990 for DOS; 1991 for Commodore 64 and Amiga

Date Started: 18 August 2014
Date Ended: 21 August 2014

Total Hours: 5

Difficulty: Easy-Moderate (2.5/5)
Final Rating: 36
Ranking at Time of Posting: 110/158 (70%)

Ranking at Game #457: 351/457 (77%)

 

I have a friend who thinks he's funny. When you take him out for a meal, and later ask him how it was, he'll often say, "It satisfied its core mission of providing base nutrients to my organs and fending off starvation." This is his obnoxious way of saying that it wasn't very good. If he played The Keys to Maramon, I suspect he'd say, "it satisfied its core mission of preventing me from being unamused for about five hours." It did for me, anyway. I spent most of those hours waiting for a delayed flight in an airport, so I'm not ungrateful, but I don't think my life will be any different now that I've finished it.

The game is excruciatingly linear. You encounter monsters in a multi-level dungeon. The various parts of the dungeon are separated by doors requiring various types of keys; you find the key to the next area just as you finish killing all the monsters in the previous area. A few monsters require special weapons to kill; you find those weapons just before encountering those monsters. Eventually, you reach the final encounter and the game is over. There really isn't a single role-playing choice--or even much of a character-development choice--along the way.

Finding the final key to Maramon.

  
As I covered in the first post, the core quest of the game is to save the denizens of Maramon from the monsters that keep swarming out of the city's towers at night. Monsters appear every night at 20:00, and you want to try to kill them all before the morning, leaving dungeon exploration and character development for the daytime. For a while, I was afraid of the consequences if I didn't return to the city at 20:00 to deal with the latest assault, but eventually it took so long to get to the last-explored dungeon level and back that I stopped going back to the town. It didn't seem to have any consequences.

Occasionally, I could anticipate what tower they would emerge from, and just kill them as they came out. Otherwise, I had to chase them around town all night.

  
The monsters progressed in difficulty throughout the game, using the same creatures introduced in The Magic Candle: orcs, goblins, wolvingas, gnolls, trolls, barges, fermigons, zorlims, darkwolves, and so forth. Towards the end of the game, the most difficult creatures were packs of darkwolves and "tigrets," often led by someone called a "wolflord" who invariably had the next key.

The RPG elements were weak and provided little challenge. Every 1,000 experience points, I could level up and choose to increase one of my attributes by one point, but this only happened 15 times throughout the game against a collective base attribute total of 135. Thus, my character only improved by 11% throughout the game. I'm reasonably sure that you could win the game without ever leveling up.

The NPCs had little of value to contribute. The weapon shop and armor shop provided a few upgrades throughout the game, but these were quickly overshadowed by special weapons and armor found in the dungeon (which mercifully never break).

The library offered tomes (at 200 gold pieces per reading) on the major challenges in the dungeon, indicating that I'd need "Kalb's Mace" to kill demons called "Bazards," a "Star Axe" to slay dragons, and a "Brightsword" to defeat an evil magician--all of which were somewhat unnecessary to read, as these weapon upgrades all occurred immediately before the enemies that I needed to kill with them. It would have been impossible to miss them. [Edit: apparently, the weapons don't show up in their storerooms until after you've read the relevant books, so the tomes are necessary.]

Fortunately, I found a Brightsword moments before needing it.

Combat remained a blunt, SPACE bar-mashing process throughout. The only "tactics" were in the use of the environment to avoid letting enemies attack from multiple sides. Dropped gold also served this purpose--for whatever reason, enemies won't walk on it. There was also some minor strategy associated with when to use missile weapons and wands, both of which were too expensive to rely on exclusively.

Melee combat remained absurdly deadly: even average enemies are capable of killing even the best-armored character in a few seconds, especially if the character is accidentally facing the wrong direction. Mushrooms mitigate this danger, and before particularly difficult combats, I would load up on nifts, migrets, luffins, and gonshis. These are so plentiful throughout the game that I never had to buy any from the herbalist.

I thought the numbers were how many she had in stock, but they turn out to be how many you're purchasing at a time.

Late in the game, I started finding more "potion jars," which instantly heal the character to full hit points. Once I had read all of the rare books in the library and stopped having to save money for that, I used that money to load up on these potions. When I first went to buy them and saw that the price was 50 gold pieces, I thought this was expensive but fair. Then I discovered that the 50 GP charge includes eight of them. This is absurdly cheap for what they do, and I ended the game with dozens of them still in my inventory. The ability to instantly regenerate all hit points for $6.25 makes the late game far too easy.

The end of the game featured a series of quasi-bosses, starting with "Bazards," requiring Kalb's Mace to kill, then followed by dragons, requiring the "Star Axe" to kill. Again, both weapons were found in storage rooms immediately preceding these encounters.

A dragon breathes fire at me as I charge him with the Star Axe.

The library had given me the impression that the final encounter would be with an evil wizard, and that I'd need a "Brightsword" to defeat him. Reading the tome about wizards actually damaged my character, leaving him with only one hit point and permanently reducing his hit point total by one.

Eneri finds the ultimate weapon, which I never actually got to use.

When I found the Brightsword in the dungeon, I knew the end was near--in fact, it was on the very next screen. Disappointingly, it played out entirely as text:

Eneri has found the lair of the evil wizard Alvirex! Eneri recognizes Alvirex from a picture in the book in the library! Eneri remembers when bargs and gnolls were her biggest worries. She gathers her courage. She demands: "What is the meaning of this!!"

"Ahh! The hero!" says Alvirex. "Eneri, is it not? I must congratulate you. You have been quite annoying. Shortly, however, you will cease to be a problem."

"I am delighted that the Hero of Maramon takes an interest in my work," says Alvirex. (Eneri detects a subtle hint of sarcasm.) "I have come to Maramon to experiment with . . . you might call them portable teleportals. With them, I have brought the minions of Darkness to Maramon from all over the continent of Gurtex."

Eneri is furious. "You have treated Maramon as your playpen and its people as your toys!"

"I have no time for childish oratory," sneers Alvirex. Eneri can wait no more. She must destroy this monster of monsters!

Eneri crashes into an invisible energy shield! Even her Brightsword cannot penetrate the shield. Alvirex lifts his staff. A ball of dark energy speeds towards Eneri! Eneri raises her Brightsword. The ball of energy flows into the blade of the magic weapon. The sword blazes bright.

Alvirex scowls. "We seem to have reached a standoff. Perhaps you should leave." Eneri refuses.

"Perhaps we can settle our dispute another way," says Alvirex. "What say you to a foot race? Name the distance."

For a moment, I thought the game really was going to end with a foot race. That would have been a unique, if stupid, RPG ending.

Eneri is tempted. She has never met her match in such a contest. She would have jumped at the challenge a month ago. Yet Eneri has learned something in Maramon. Humility? Maybe. Caution? Surely. Wisdom? Who knows?

The air beyond Alvirex begins to shimmer. "My studies here are complete," says Alvirex. Alvirex turns. As he steps through the shimmering portal, Alvirex lifts his staff. The walls shake. Alvirex vanishes! As Eneri leaves the chamber, the waters of the Sea of Oshmar pour into the cave!

Fleeing the deluge.

What follows is a sequence in which I had to flee the caverns across the tops of rocks as they flooded with water. I'm not sure if there was a time limit to the thing, but if so, I got out in time.

It's about time NPCs started treating me like this.

I reached the surface to meet cheering townsfolk. After a quick parade through the streets, Mayor Andello gave me a set of blue pearls and the key to the city. I delivered a "short but inspiring" speech, concluding with me trying to decide whether to return to Deruvia or "travel onward to Castle Oshcrun and Gurtex." The game concludes by letting me save Eneri for use in The Magic Candle II.

Hence, the game's title.

The footrace thing was a bit weird, and I was slightly disappointed that the final confrontation didn't involve any actual playing or decision-making, but overall not a terrible ending. It suggests that the entire game is something of a prologue to The Magic Candle II. I have a feeling we'll run into Alvirex again, and perhaps even his teleportals.

Here's the GIMLET:

• 4 points for the game world. In this, I'm not giving it credit for the overall Magic Candle universe, but its little piece of the game world is still reasonably-well outlined, and the back story fits well with the gameplay.

The "pay to study" system was an interesting, if ultimately unnecessary, way of introducing the game's lore.

• 3 points for character creation and development. Creation offers only two options: class and name. Leveling up is a matter of studying a tome in the library, which raises a chosen statistic by one and your hit point total by two. Neither really has the effect of making you feel stronger or more capable.

• 3 points for NPCs. The game offers them but makes them mostly inconsequential. Most of them hang out in the two taverns, and every day you can talk with a different selection of them, but most of what they tell you is either obvious or red herrings.

• 4 points for encounters. Enemies come in three varieties: those that hit, those that hit harder, and those that shoot things. The dynamic by which they swarm the city at night--forcing you to track them down and wipe them out--is reasonably original. Theoretically, you could grind against them indefinitely, postponing visits to the dungeon, but the nightly attacks get old after a while. There really aren't any other puzzles and special encounters in the game.

• 2 points for magic and combat. Combat is a bunch of action RPG key-mashing, and there isn't any magic aside from magic wands.

Taking on a bunch of darkwolves.

• 5 points for equipment. The character can have one type of armor at any given time but can carry a large number of melee weapons, ranged weapons, and wands. There's nothing special here, but just as with The Magic Candle, I give the game credit for creative use of mushrooms to increase abilities. The game also deserves some credit for the "fire globe" mines.

"Pearl plate" was the best armor in the game. Maramon has a thing with pearls.

• 5 points for economy. With money needed for studying, buying weapons and armor, buying and recharging wands, buying arrows, fixing weapons, and (theoretically) buying mushrooms, gold has value through most of the game, and you don't find very much of it. Only towards the end of the game does the character get too rich.

Considering that a new longsword only costs 50 gold, I think I'm going to pass.

• 3 points for quests. The main quest is clear, and the nightly attacks form something of a "side quest." There are no choices or alternate outcomes, and the endgame is a little lame.

• 4 points for graphics, sound, and interface. I found the graphics and sound tolerable--nothing particularly creative, nor anything particularly bad. The keyboard interface mostly worked, but I found the directional keys unresponsive in the worst place: combat. The game is incapable of registering more than one key at a time, so you cannot effectively turn while also hitting the SPACE bar to swing your weapon, and it takes more discipline than I have to calmly stop swinging in the middle of combat, pause, turn to face a specific enemy, and start swinging again.

• 3 points for gameplay. Not very challenging and extremely linear, the primary virtue of the game is that it doesn't drag on. I guess you could consider it mildly replayable in that the different classes face slightly different levels of difficulty. I suspect a scholar faces the most difficult game, as his primary strength is in the use of magic wands, and they cost quite a bit to recharge.

This gives us a total of 36, just on the cusp of what I call "recommended." It certainly doesn't hurt to play it for the few hours that it takes to win, and when you're done, you have a character for use in The Magic Candle II. But like Hillsfar--another game weirdly sandwiched between bigger titles--it's not really worthy of its franchise.

This won't be the last time Mindcraft does this. We'll return to Deruvia in The Magic Candle II: The Four and Forty (1991). In between that and The Magic Candle III (1992), Mindcraft published Siege, set on Gurtex. Then, between Magic Candle III and Bloodstone: An Epic Dwarven Tale (1993), we got Ambush at Sorinor. (Both Siege and Sorinor are strategy games that don't appear on my list.)

In the September 1990 Computer Gaming World, Alan Emrich praises Maramon specifically for its simplicity and brevity and seems to like all of its mechanics. However, he also notes that he is not an RPG fan in general ("I am not Scorpia," he says), and he admits that "some might consider [Maramon] a cheese puff when they really wanted a steak." I'm fine with an occasional cheese puff, but I don't think Maramon works particularly well even as that. MobyGames's round up of reviews finds mostly middling ratings, with even the easily-impressed Dragon giving it only 3 out of 5 stars.

At best, the game serves up a preview of themes to come in The Magic Candle II, and I look forward to playing this true sequel next year. Next up, we'll be toggling Captive with Ultima: Escape from Mt. Drash.

Game 159: The Keys to Maramon (1990)

 

One theme that emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s is the use of an existing, admired property to tell somewhat minor stories in between the big titles, often using a version of a larger game's engine. We get Hillsfar in between Pool of Radiance and Curse of the Azure Bonds; the two Worlds of Ultima games in between Ultima VI and Ultima VII; Chaos Strikes Back between Dungeon Master and Dungeon Master II. Here, we have a minor game that occupies a brief space between The Magic Candle (1989) and The Magic Candle II (1991). It's set in the same world as the Magic Candle titles, maintains familiar themes (such as creatures and the types of mushrooms), and even uses a version of the Magic Candle engine.

The game features a single character fighting the forces of darkness on the island of Maramon. The game world is quite small, occupying only a little city and four towers that connect to a common multi-level dungeon. Combat is regrettably action-based and devoid of tactics--not unlike Times of Lore or Prophecy: The Fall of Trinadon--and the whole thing seems destined to take no more than my six-hour minimum.
  

Much of the game involves protecting the city from marauding beasts at night. Here I am on Day 9, with 2,030 experience points and 107 gold. My life is down to 12 from around 40; I'll need to heal soon. But I only have 1 monster to kill before I can go to sleep for the rest of the night.

  
The game manual opens with the news that King Rebnard--the ruler of Deruvia from The Magic Candle--is planning to move his court to an ancient castle called Oshcrun, on the island of Maramon, in the Sea of Oshmar, somewhere between the islands of Deruvia and the lands of Gurtex, the source of the evil demon Dreax. Lord knows why Rebnard is doing this, but towards the end of The Magic Candle, there were rumors of evil powers worse than Dreax assembling in Gurtex, so perhaps Rebnard wants to take the fight to the enemy. 

Maramon, from the map in the game manual. Much of the game involves finding various keys to it. Hence, the title.

  
Unfortunately, the enemy is all too aware of Rebnard's plans, and companies of monsters have been swarming out of four dark towers at nighttime and harassing the townsfolk. (I'm not sure if they were always there, or if they only recently arrived and decided to take up residence in the towers.) The back story opens in the Deruvian city of Knessos, where an emissary from Maramon has arrived seeking a hero. Four potential heroes hear the emissary's plea: a fortune-seeking huntsman, a glory-hunting young blacksmith, a dutiful female king's courier, and an aged scholar obsessed with finding magic.

The manual suggests that all four came to Maramon on the ship, so I don't know what the other three are doing while I play the hero.

  
The player gets to choose just one of these four characters; this isn't a party game like The Magic Candle.  Each comes with various strengths and weaknesses in terms of attributes (strength, speed, dexterity, and magic skill), starting equipment, and starting gold. The blacksmith is naturally the strongest character; the huntsman and courier are the fastest; and the scholar has the most magic skill. The huntsman starts with a longbow and leather armor but only 50 gold; the courier has no starting equipment but has the most gold (200).

My character at the end of this session.

  
It's funny how completely different games make connections with each other. I've played three games this week besides The Keys to Maramon: Super Quest, Captive, and Fallout: New Vegas, and this game has connections to all of them. The most obvious is Captive: they were both published by Mindscape. Before playing Super Quest, I don't remember any games where hitting the direction key moves you continuously until you stop, but Maramon does that as well.

As for Fallout: New Vegas, the moment I saw that one of the Maramon selections was "courier," I knew I'd have to choose that character. I like her back story, too; the manual has her fighting male prejudices and condescensions everywhere she goes, and no one believes she can really do the job.

Aside from the name, there's no other character creation process. You immediately start in the town of Maramon on a bright Monday morning. The town has several shops (weapons, armor, magic, mushrooms), inns, two taverns, and a town hall. You can talk and transact with their various denizens. There are also three "storage buildings," to which the citizens of Maramon give you the key when you arrive. You can rest and store items there.

Every night at 20:00, monsters come spilling out of one of the towers and start pillaging and vandalizing the city, and it's up to the player to stop them. You have until 08:00 the next morning to track all of them down and kill them, or else some of the businesses get vandalized and you lose out on a full experience reward. If shops are vandalized enough, they may have to close for a few days. During the day, the character can sleep (inns will only let you sleep during the day), shop, and explore the dungeons (see below), but every night she needs to be back on the streets on patrol. The town apparently has no other militia.

If you can identify the right tower, you can wait outside and kill the monsters as they appear.

You get a little "status report" every morning.

The dungeon is accessed by four towers that each require different keys, none of which you start with. For a while, I didn't know what I was supposed to be doing other than killing monsters every night. Eventually, through one of my conversations with a citizen in a tavern, I got a suggestion that I'd need to review the library's "rare books" stack to proceed.

Maramon's library has a few purposes in the game. The "open shelves" contain information on topics important to the setting, such as keys, towers, mushrooms, and the library itself. "Closed shelves" can be visited for 20 gold pieces and contain books that increase your strength, speed, dexterity, and magic skill by one point--but only once every 1,000 experience points. "Rare books" cost 200 gold pieces to visit, but these books actually serve to advance the plot in some way. The one on "Keys" delivered me a copper key, which I used to access one of the towers and a few rooms of the dungeon.

Reading this book allowed me to find a copper key in one of the store rooms.

Once in the dungeon, a counter in the lower left tells you how many monsters remain in the portion you've accessed. As you find more keys and open doors, this number increases (or resets, if you already cleared the previous areas). The four towers all eventually connect to each other, but different combinations of keys are needed to open the doors. So far, I've collected bronze, brass, and copper keys, but I've found doors that require iron and steel keys as well.

Kind of a security overkill.

It takes a long time to amass 200 gold pieces, and there are plenty of other things to buy in the meantime, such as weapon and armor upgrades, magic items, ammunition, weapon repairs, and mushrooms.

Seriously? I'm pretty sure I only paid 50 for it.

A night's worth of monsters might drop 20 or 30 (along with some mushrooms). Fortunately, you get a 100 gold piece "salary" at the end of every week from the town hall, but you have to fight seven nights' worth of monsters in between.

Yes, I noticed your're not wealthy. Despite the fact that I'm trying to save the town, your librarian makes me pay to use the library.

Exploration of the dungeon has to occur during the day, or during the portions of the night after you've cleared the monsters. I've found I might have a few game hours to explore the dungeon before I have to return to the surface, rest up, and restore my hit points in time for the 20:00 attack. There's not a lot of breathing room in the game.

Having covered the basics, I'll say that I absolutely hate the combat system. It's so far on the other extreme from The Magic Candle's tactical screen (reminiscent of Ultima IV) that it's hard to believe they were created by the same developers. For melee combat, you have to charge up to an enemy (they rarely come to you) and start mashing the SPACE bar to attack. The problem is that if you're not facing their precise direction, your attacks do nothing while they pound on you. When surrounded by enemies, I find it extremely difficult to turn and fight with the keypad; I inevitably spend several rounds swinging in empty space while the game ignores my furious commands to turn and face a different direction.

Dammit, Eneri! TURN SOUTH!

Being in melee range, meanwhile, is survivable for only a few seconds against even the weakest enemies.

Enemies won't step on bags of dropped treasure, so I try to use them to funnel them to me. Unfortunately, the enemies could care less about my presence. They won't come and attack unless I get closer to melee range.

Ranged combat doesn't help much. If you're not in melee range, enemies wander around randomly and quickly, making it very difficult to line up a shot. And arrows and magic wands are so expensive that it's not a very viable option anyway. Wands, incidentally, are the game's only use of the "magic" skill. There are no spells.

I suspect everything would be easier with a joystick, but my attempts to get one working with DOSBox have only ever ended in failure, and I can't seem to find the last one I purchased anyway.

Mushrooms help a bit. They're expensive, too, but enemies frequently drop them. Most of them do the same thing as in The Magic Candle: Sermins heal (instead of restoring stamina), Mirgets increase strength, Gonshis increase speed, Luffins increase dexterity, and Nifts increase armor class. The supply is somewhat limited, so I've been erring on the side of conservation, even when it means a lot of reloads.

Finding a pouch of nifts post-combat--along with another key.

The flexible keyword-based dialogue system from The Magic Candle is gone. Instead, you just talk to shopkeepers and people in the tavern, who vary and have different things to say depending on the day. While you do pick up some lore from them, it's not nearly as interesting as Candle.

A vital tip.

The character doesn't really develop very fast. The "closed books" allow for a one-point upgrade of any statistic every 1,000 experience points; so far, I've been able to use 3. This also conveys an extra 2 hit points. Where you already start with attributes in the 25-40 range, an increase of 1 doesn't feel like it does much.

Eneri gets an extra strength point from a tome on "physics."

The game does offer what I think is one "first": in addition to wands, the magic shop sells something called a "fire globe." You place this on the ground, and it erupts the next time an enemy walks over it. It's essentially a land mine. I don't recall any other games so far in my chronology that have offered the ability to put traps in places of the player's choosing. (Ultima VI had bear traps and caltrops, but I don't think the player could pick them up and place them where enemies would step on them.)

Nice. If only they didn't cost so much.

In total, not a fantastic game. At least it feels like a quick one. One more posting will probably do it.