Quest for the Unicorn: Won! (with Final Rating)

Quest for the Unicorn

United States

Independently developed and distributed as shareware

Released 1990 for DOS and at some point between 1990 and 2010 for Linux and Unix; DOS version last updated in mid-1990s. "Hardcore" version released for Windows and Linux/Unix in 2010, last updated 2014
Date Started: 26 February 2015

Date Ended: 1 March 2015

Total Hours: 18

Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)
Final Rating: 35
Ranking at Time of Posting: 117/174 (67%)

Ranking at Game #458: 335/458 (73%)

Quest for the Unicorn's mechanics satisfy the basic RPG craving of explore, earn experience, find better equipment, get stronger. As with many roguelikes, the content of the game isn't quite up to the mechanics. The one-line bits of lore make the wandering people more like fortune cookies than NPCs; the many dungeons, almost all using the same tiles, lack any personality; and even the enemies don't differ much except by strength and icon. My own playing was hampered by a lack of documentation. I had some fun for a while, but eventually I rushed the ending just to get further through 1990.

After the last post, I spent a lot of time exploring random dungeons, loading up on as much loot as I could carry before making trips back to town to sell, identify, and spend. As you enter each dungeon level, the game tells you the sum of the experience points of all the enemies there. I soon discovered that the harder dungeons might require a lot of reloading, but the experience point rewards were worth it: I sometimes went up an entire level from a single combat.

Equipment rewards were also better in the tougher dungeons. It takes far less than one dungeon level to fill up the backpack, so I would eventually resort to carrying items in the most unlikely of places before lumbering back to town to identify the unknown stuff and sell the stuff I didn't need. As Mike Riley pointed out in a comment, identification applies to the entire class of item, so you only need to identify a Ring of Fire Resistance or a  Staff of Striking once.

My backpack is full, so I'm carrying a horn on my shoulder and a scarab on my belt. The game lets you put any item in any slot--it just doesn't always work there.

The lack of documentation for the game hampered me when it came to equipment. I was never sure which items just need to be equipped and which actually had to be (U)sed to have an effect (e.g., Scarab of Protection, Luckstone). For those that needed to be equipped, I didn't always know where they needed to be equipped (e.g., does a Cloak of Displacement go in the "Robe" slot, and are gems held or worn?). A lot of items seemed to produce no effect no matter what I did (e.g., Horn of Valhalla, Necklace of Adaptation, Gem of Brightness, Sphere of Annihilation, Pearl of Power), probably because I was holding or using it wrong. One artifact item, a Phaser, was an awesome weapon when I shot enemies on the main screen, but it didn't work at all when I transitioned to the combat screen, and I'm not sure if this was a bug or some side-effect of the weapon itself. At worst, these were valuable sale items that got me things I did know how to use. Boots of Speed, a Ring of Regeneration, Scrolls of Magic Mapping, Potions of Extra Healing, and a Ring of True Sight--the latter reveals traps and secret doors automatically--were all vital to exploration.

Leveling is relatively rapid through about 16, after which it slows down even in the hardest dungeons, requiring millions of experience points to advance. As my paladin increased levels, he started getting spells at around Level 9. I found the spell system, at least for the paladin, reasonably well-balanced: spells like "Cure Serious Wounds" and "Continual Light" helped ease the pain of exploration rather than rendering it too simple. It would be interesting to play the game as a mage to see the difference that spellcasting makes.

Gaining a new spell upon leveling up.

       
There are a couple of ways you can change classes throughout the game. The first is involuntary, through a change in alignments, which happens when you kill NPCs. This is easier than you might think, as they wander unmolested around dungeons and often get caught in the crossfire. I'm not sure how it works for all classes, but my paladin progressed from lawful good to chaotic good to chaotic neutral to neutral to lawful evil to The Essence of Evil. Upon reaching the last alignment, his class shifted to "Assassin" (not otherwise selectable in character creation) and his level reverted to 1. I reloaded an earlier game and made sure to occasionally pay for "Restore Alignment" at the healer's.

The second method is by joining the "Cavalier's Guild," which becomes available after you reach around Level 10 in your previous class. I kind of wish I hadn't done it, as I stopped gaining spells, and the only benefit I could really determine is that at the beginning of each year, I could go collect a salary of $1,000 x my character level. There might have been other, behind-the-scenes benefits that I couldn't determine.

I could get this in about 10 minutes of dungeon exploration.

         
Eventually, I found a pegasus NPC in some dungeon who was willing to join me, thus saving myself $125,000 at the transportation shop. With the ability to fly, I was able to explore the totality of the kingdom and find the dungeons mentioned in the lore. The game world consists of nine 100 x 100 maps, for 90,000 total overland tiles in the game. 

As we discussed last time, a big part of the game involves collecting bits of lore from the NPCs that dot the various cities throughout the game. Each lore line is like a piece of a puzzle, and you need to assemble them all to determine not only what items you need, but where they are, and how to follow the game's geography to find the right dungeons. For instance, this sequence leads from the main quest back to a specific place:

After Eshter captured the unicorns, she fled through the Gateway

Rumors say a Gateway exists from our plane to the Realm of Eshter

The Amulet of Yathun is needed to enter the Gateway

The Amulet of Yathun was last seen in Larkon

Larkon was once a major city

Larkon was destroyed during the Caldnar Droughts

The ruins of Larkon are found at the head of the Anjar River

The Anjar River is located north of the Enchanted Lands

Thus, finding the right dungeon was a matter of first finding the Enchanted Lands, then finding the river north of it, then following the river to its head, where there was a prominent dungeon entrance.

       
Every dungeon--there are about 60 of them--features some kind of major reward on the bottom level, always surrounded by some kind of electric field that saps half your hit points with every step. In some dungeons, the reward is a quest item; in others, it's a major artifact weapon; and in still others, it's a word of power that acts like a spell but without requiring spell points.

This word of power was a reward for reaching the lowest dungeon level.

The player can make these items relatively easy to find by setting the maximum dungeon levels to 1. Buy a few Scrolls of Magic Mapping, and you can be in and out, reward triumphantly in hand, in just a few minutes.

Approaching the Aurafax, one of the major quest artifacts needed to win the game. Note that I've used a Scroll of Magic Mapping to reveal the level.

       
I made the stupid decision to head right for the endgame after finding the three artifacts needed to enter the Gateway. Mike Riley had warned me that I should probably find some other weapon and armor artifacts, as well as build up my character levels more, but I was impatient to get out of 1990, so I decided to rely on Potions of Extra Healing and "Power Word: Reload." This turned out to be a bad decision.

The endgame begins when you find the entrance to the Gateway on an island off the Valley of the Unicorns. You need a flying creature to reach it. I assume the Gateway doesn't appear if you don't have the Talisman in possession, and the Aurafax must do something to allow you to enter it, but both happened automatically and didn't require me to do anything with the artifacts.

Entering the gateway--well before it was advisable to do so.

       
Once you enter the Gateway, you need to equip the Amulet of Yathun to see anything, as bumbling around in the dark is swiftly fatal. The first level of the Gateway has walls of water, the second has walls of fire, and the third has walls of electricity, all of which halve your hit points the moment you walk into them. (These are the only dungeon levels I saw that varied the wall textures.) Not walking into walls turned out to be more difficult than you might imagine.

A level with walls composed entirely of electrical fields. Since I know I won't be leaving here, a bunch of unwanted items are strewn in my wake. Fortunately, my Ring of True Sight is finding all those traps. To my northeast, a wandering NPC awaits. I hope he joins me, because my party is pretty low.

   
The difficulty posed by the walls was nothing compared to the difficulty imposed by the monsters, with creatures like demogorgons, demons, and dragons wandering everywhere and shooting at me even through barriers. Some of them were able to kill me in a single shot. Even though I loaded up on Potions of Extra Healing before entering the Gateway, I was toasted in most battles, especially after my party of NPCs died one by one (I was able to collect some more in the final dungeons, but not at a rate faster than I was losing them). I reloaded constantly, held down SPACE to regenerate after every battle, and eventually got to the point where I was saving with every step. This is nothing against the game and everything against my own stubbornness pressing forward without taking the time to collect the right items or levels.

Attacked by a demon immediately upon arrival in the Realm of Eshter.

          
Three levels of the Gateway ended in a one-level Realm of Eshter, which in turn led to a one-level Castle Eshter. There, in the usual manner of the rewards in other dungeons, Eshter sat surrounded by energy fields. I pushed through, quaffed a Potion of Extra Healing, and entered what I was sure would be one of a thousand attempts at the final battle.

Approaching Eshter in the last dungeon.

          
To my surprise, Eshter was a lightweight. She never hit me and died in a couple of shots from my Crossbow of Accuracy, at which point I got the winning message at the top of this post. The unicorns were freed and drove the evil from the Realm of Eshter, but decided to stay there so no one else could mess with them. They gave me $50,000 and passage back through the gateway, neither of which really mattered since the game wouldn't let me continue playing after the message.

Firing an arrow at Eshter in the final combat. I'm down to a single party member (a centaur).

In a GIMLET, I give the game:

• 2 points for the game world. There are tantalizing allusions to history among the game's lore and names of lands and dungeons, and it would have been so much better with the documentation and full back story. Alas, I must rate what I played.

I question whether a dragon wouldn't have also worked.

      

• 5 points for character creation and development, one of the best parts of the game. Although cut from the standard Dungeons & Dragons mold, Quest for the Unicorn does everything competently and even has a few surprises with the class changes. I only wish the player could choose the leveling of skills rather than have them happen randomly.

A mid-game character. Since I've been favoring the bow, all of those points in "Edged Weapons" and "Pole Weapons" are being wasted.

• 5 points for NPC interaction, a key part of the game. It's just too bad that there aren't named NPCs with any personality, or any dialogue options with them. The ability to get NPCs to join the party is a nice touch, allowing you to build parties that complement your own character's strengths.

• 2 points for encounters and foes. The enemies in the game aren't really well-defined except by a) whether they can use ranged attacks; and b) how hard they hit. Yes, there are a couple that cause sleep or poison, but neither is a major concern after you gain a few levels, and I never found myself adjusting strategy in the game the way I would for, say, NetHack. (The inability to see any but the toughest monster in approaching parties contributes to this.) Except in the assembly of lore, there really aren't any puzzles in the game (unlike The Land).

• 3 points for magic and combat. As with The Land, there are more tactical options than you might notice at first glance, particularly in the composition of the party, the use of items, and the various spells--but the overwhelming number of combats encourages you to settle into mindless attacking (and reloading when you lose) rather than carefully plotting each battle.

My party versus a demogorgon and some allies towards the end of the game.

     

• 5 points for a decent equipment system, with a lot of items and item slots, a sensible item identification system, and some useful artifact items. It might be higher without so many seemingly useless items. Again, I have to rate what I played.

A late-game inventory shot.

     

• 8 points for the economy. I almost never give a rating this high, but this shareware title achieves something that almost no other game does: an economy that remains relevant from beginning to end. There are loads of things to buy--equipment, transportation, manuals that increase attributes, training at the university, lore, item identification, alignment restorations, potions, scrolls--and almost all of it is priced exactly right. There's never a moment when you feel that you have too much money, nor ever any moment when it's impossible to find a close dungeon and earn some more.

Improving my character by taking some college courses.

      

• 2 points for a main quest. Mike Riley has said that the game is mostly about mechanics (equipment, leveling, economy) and the main quest is somewhat incidental. This unfortunately shows during the gameplay.

Approaching the Talisman, a step on the main quest. Something looks familiar about it...

       

• 2 points for graphics, sound, and interface. Although the icons aren't bad, the unvarying tiles and textures get old quickly, and the only sounds are piercing boops during combat. (There's an option for some background music, but I couldn't get it to work. I probably wouldn't have liked it anyway.) The keyboard interface works okay, minus some bugs that I discuss below, but I didn't like the long screen refresh times (even with DOSBox cranked up).

The enemy icons are pretty good. If only every dungeon combat didn't take place on a blank floor.

        

• 4 points for gameplay. It's non-linear until the end and somewhat replayable with different classes. The difficulty is highly customizable, and my own experience aside, it offers a decent challenge level to a player willing to put in the extra hours to achieve items and levels.

The configuration file lets you set several options to adjust the game's difficulty.

Alas, I'm going to have to subtract points from this version for bugs. Mike Riley has already identified or fixed most of these in subsequent versions, but I'm playing a DOS version similar to what a 1990 player would have experienced, and there are bugs galore. Some are trivial, such as misspellings; others are nearly game-breaking, such as the player not re-appearing at the same coordinates where he saves in the outdoor map. (Before I had a flying mount, I ended up getting stuck in mountains this way.) Enabling the "bones" option is supposed to make levels permanent, but it doesn't work and you often lose level maps even while in the same dungeon. I found that even the outdoor maps would often "forget" my exploration progress under some circumstances. Dropping an item on the stairs erases the stairs. You can break the inventory system simply by hitting "x" (exchange) when there's no item in the "up in the air" slot, and it's extremely easy to lose valuable items in this slot. Searching for lore in town crashes the game. I ran into one bug that prevented me from buying any more food, and I had to reload a much earlier save. There are a dozen more. It was these frustrations, more than anything, that made me want to end the game quickly, and I subtract 3 points from the final rating.

But even with the subtracting, the final rating is pretty good, at 35, right on my "recommended" threshold, something that hardly any shareware game of the era achieves. It's particularly notable that I find Quest for the Unicorn at least as enjoyable as most of the commercial RPGs I've played since finishing Quest for Glory II last August. If the game world had been less bland, and the dungeons, towns, and NPCs less interchangeable, Unicorn would be a strong contender for a "top five" game of 1990.

Author Mike Riley has been a good friend throughout this process, just as he was with The Land, commenting frequently, warning me about doing things that I did anyway, and sending me several helpful e-mails (including a response to my request to dig up the DOS version in the first place). In a recent comment, he announced intentions to compile a 25th anniversary edition of Quest for the Unicorn and to re-do the game's official page. I hope these postings raise the interest in the game a bit, and I hope Mike comes back to comment when it's available.

If you visit that page now, you'll find download links to a couple of different versions, all published well after the version I played, with fairly different mechanics. The only version Mike has updated in the last few years has been the "HC" (hardcore) version, which implements permadeath and an ASCII interface. I played the Windows version for a little while, and I would consider it different enough to be a different game on my list.

A town shot from the "HC" version for WIndows. I've just talked to an NPC.

         
I'm glad I played Quest for the Unicorn, but we should perhaps use this occasion to talk about a rules change when it comes to independent games, particularly since we're about to see an explosion of them in the 1990s. This is on my mind because I recently downloaded Dungeon, another independent title from 1990, that's not so much as a game as a programming exercise. I'm not saying its bad--it plays like an all-text Wizardry--but it doesn't really offer anything new, and I wouldn't have even known about it if a reader hadn't found it on an obscure DOS archive site and e-mailed me. I rejected it on a technicality--it doesn't have an "inventory" except for potions--but it won't always be that easy.

Naturally, I don't want to reject all games that never received a commercial release. That would remove most roguelikes, Quest for the Unicorn, and a host of 2000s games that better exemplify the type of single-player RPG I like. On the other hand, I don't want to commit to every entry in the Seven-Day Roguelike Challenge, either. Can you think of any good way to end the sentence, "If a game never received a commercial release, it doesn't appear on my playlist unless..." other than "I feel like it?"

While we're talking about that, it's time for a return to Tunnels & Trolls: Crusaders of Khazan!

 

Quest for the Unicorn: Lore Tour

Finally, someone has something to say about unicorns!

A few hours into Quest for the Unicorn, I realized two things. First, I had no idea where to go or what to do. Second, hunger comes upon you so quickly that it discourages random outdoor exploration. You burn all your food in minutes.

Needing some direction, I decided to travel around to the major cities via the "travel agent" and collect as much lore as possible. (There's a travel agent in each city; I'm not sure if the transportation is supposed to be magical or if I'm paying for passage in a carriage or something.) To fund this journey, I first had to spend a lot of time exploring the dungeons, picking up loot, and lugging it back to town for resale every time my pack got full. Fortunately, I didn't have any trouble finding dungeons. Every city seems to have one nearby, and there are around 60 total in the game.

Exploring a dungeon. I'm in the upper-right. To my left is a scroll (either lore or spell), an orc-like monster, and a cleric NPC. I don't know why NPCs can walk around unmolested by monsters.

Both The Land and Quest for the Unicorn have pretty good economies. It takes a long time to earn money, especially at low dungeon levels, and there are lots of wonderful things to spend it on--mounts, ships, skill level increases, lore searches, and magic items among them. I didn't really get to experience this in The Land because I used the broken "Die Square" gambling game to make hundreds of thousands of gold pieces in less than 10 minutes. But this game, lacking such an exploit, forces you to collect items for resale to get rich.

It'll be a long time before I can spend money on training.

The one major economic imbalance is that the cost of item identification is far greater than the item value. For instance, I currently have a "periapt" around my neck that costs 2,500 to identify but sells for only 784. Thus, I find myself selling lots of magical stuff (primarily weapons) without ever finding out what it is.

Selling my pack items. This spear is clearly magical, but it will cost more than it's worth to tell me exactly how magical.

The inventory system in this engine is reasonably good. You get a lot more equipped slots than the typical RPG, including four belt slots and four rings. I don't really like the way the pack works, though. Every time you want to eat (in dungeons or towns), read a scroll, or quaff a potion, you first have to get the item into the "up in air" slot, which means using the (t)ake from pack command and scrolling through the items one by one until you find the one that you want. I wish Mike had implemented some contextual filtering here, so that when you choose (r)ead, only readable items appear, and when you choose (e)at, only food and drink appear. Especially when your pack is loaded after a dungeon exploration, it's annoying to scroll through a bunch of pikes, spears, swords, shields, and armor to find the iron rations I want to eat.

Chester's inventory slots. I'm not sure what a Cloak of Elvenkind does in this game, but it seems like a good thing to have.

From NPCs in the dungeons and in towns, I've been able to expand my party to include a pixie, an acolyte, and a "prestidigitator." You get NPCs to join you by simply hitting "J" when standing next to them, though they don't always agree. I also bought a horse in one of the cities (only one city, I think, sells mounts), and he shows up as a party member. Party members have their own levels and hit points, and they earn experience from successful kills in combat. They control themselves when you fight.

My party member roster.

And the party in action, against a couple of orcs.

Based on Mike Riley's comments, I edited the configuration to increase the maximum dungeon level to 5. Since dungeons get harder as you go down, by having them only go to 2 levels, I was ensuring I'd always get easy combats and thus not progress very quickly. While I was editing the file, I also set the flag to go into "full combat mode" for all encounters. This forces the game to bring up the tactical combat screen even if I'm only facing a single enemy (by default, you fight single enemies on the main screen and parties on the full screen). This has a couple of advantages. First, it lets my party members participate in the battle. Second, it means that I'm not the only one taking hit point damage when we fight. Third, it allows me to hang back and fire ranged weapons while my party members swarm the foes. Finally, you can stand and wait on the combat screen after all enemies are dead, recharging hit points without passing time in the real world.

As I said, in between combats and dungeon visits, I visited the eight major cities of the land, in turn, via the travel agent, (t)alking to everyone I could find to amass lore entries. The first seven cities had mostly geographic and historical information ("Lake Quenar is located inside the Ring Ridges"; "Solat was once the capital of the Old Realm but is now only ruins"), but I hit the jackpot with the eighth city, called Nichorville. (Perhaps for this reason, it was the most expensive to travel to.) Almost every dialogue resulted in a piece of quest-specific lore, differentiated from the others by text color.

One of three pages of lore.

When I was done with my "lore tour," I knew that the game world is an island continent called Halkanar. Its capital city is Malduk, and the land consists of a number of provinces and regions, including the Northern Realm, Radon Valley (named after a wizard of the same name), the Great Desert, the Kobold Mountains, Marduk Vale, and the Enchanted Lands.

The unicorns disappeared a long time ago from the Valley of the Unicorns. They were apparently captured by someone named Eshter and taken through "the Gateway." I don't know where the Gateway is, but I know that three items are needed to enter it: a Talisman to find it, an "Aurafax" to activate it, and the Amulet of Yathun to enter it.

The Talisman was last in the possession of someone named Elanther. I don't know who he was except that he was "the builder of the Talning rod" and his followers built a series of temples. In a place called Elanther's Forge, he was defeated by someone. Elanther's Forge is in the Ring Ridges, which are in the Enchanted Lands, east of the Radon River. Since Radon River flows past the starting city of Radon, I have a basic idea how to start searching for this.

The Aurafax was last in the possession of Caldnar, a deceased mighty wizard last seen in the Northern Realm. His tomb reportedly holds a "mystical light weapon."

The Amulet of Yathun was last seen in Larkon, once a major city until it was destroyed "during the Caldnar Droughts." (During that event, or sometime before or after, will-o-wisps drove the people away from the city.) The ruins of Larkon are at the head of the Anjar River, north of the Enchanted Lands.

Lore also talks about:

• A great sword that existed in the Old Realm. It might be the same mystical sword that was "once lost in Areth Knoll," a valley in the Coastal Mountains, which are located west of the Great Desert. I assume, therefore, this is on the west side of the game world, but I otherwise don't know where to go.

• A "strange machine" that can be found under Lone Peak. It might be the same machine that's called the "picture machine," which only works at the bottoms of dungeons.

• A "Triad of Might" consisting of a Crown of Might (last seen in the ruins of Solat, located northeast of New Solat, a visitable town), a Sceptre, and an Orb of Might (rumored to be in the Black Hole). You need all three pieces for their power to work.

There are a number of open questions, including the location of Caldnar's Tomb and the location of the Orb of Might, but these assembled facts gave me a little to go on, and I decided to head east from the Radon River and see if I could find the Enchanted Lands. So far, I've been stymied by a wall of uncrossable mountains, making me suspect that perhaps one does not simply walk into the Enchanted Lands. A pegasus, the lowest level of flying party member, costs 125,000 gold, so either I have to find a way around the mountains or start saving up for this mount. (The most expensive, a platinum dragon, costs 750,000 and sounds awesome.)

The automap fills in as I try to make my way east.

        
Lots of miscellaneous comments:

• You find a lot of scrolls in dungeons. Some of them have lore similar to what you'd get in the towns; some are spell scrolls; some have gibberish. I assume the latter ones are lore scrolls but I didn't make a "Language" skill check.

• One more level and my paladin starts getting spells.

• I still haven't "proven my worth" to the Cavalier's Guild. I don't know what they want from me.

• Five of the eight cities use the same map. This is great because the cities are quite large, and it's hard enough to memorize the store locations on a single map, let alone eight separate ones.

• There's a snake-like creature in the dungeons that has a special attack that puts me to sleep. I don't know how many turns it lasts, but it lasts long enough for the creature to kill me every time.

A snake slowly kills me while I doze.

• I have no idea why you'd pay for healing in a town. Hit points recover at a rate of one every couple of steps, and if you're already in a town, it's an easy matter to just regenerate by walking around.

• When you're outside, the (e)at command selects food from your backpack automatically. When inside, it forces you to select the ration or drink from the backpack. I wish it just automatically selected your meal every time.

• There's really good in-game documentation of icons--another reference to the game's roguelike heritage.

I like the engine and mechanics of Quest for the Unicorn, and I admire what Mike tried to do with such a large, open world to explore. Like a lot of early games (and shareware titles in particular), a lack of variance in the dungeons and an overall lack of content undermine the size and ambition of the game, but it's still reasonably fun. I do wish Mike still had the manual and backstory.

It seems likely that there will be a lot of grinding coming up, so I'll probably get started on Space: 1889 while I try to complete this game.

Time so far: 6 hours
Reload count: 18 

****

Coming up, I've already started to play Space: 1889, and  you should see a post about it on Tuesday. Looking past that, does anyone want to try to convince me that Circuit's Edge is actually an RPG? It has RPG-like attributes, yes, but it doesn't seem to have any character development (aside from inventory-based development), and the entire feeling of the game is more akin to an adventure game. 

Game 174: Quest for the Unicorn (1990)

      

Quest for the Unicorn

United States

Mike Riley (author); distributed as shareware

Released 1990 for DOS and at some point between 1990 and 2010 for Linux and Unix; DOS version last updated in mid-1990s. "Hardcore" version released for Windows and Linux/Unix in 2010, last updated 2014
Date Started: 26 February 2015

  
Occasionally, I review some past blog entry--usually when someone comments on it--and I have trouble remembering playing the game or even writing the entry. But I suspect that I'll always remember late June, 2013. I was doing some work in Trinidad, staying in a Hyatt right on the waterfront in Port of Spain. Every evening that week, I retired to a patio bar, watched the sunset over the Caribbean, drank a few gimlets, and played an obscure 1980s shareware game called The Land on my laptop. Sometimes, it's not a bad life that I lead.

The Land was based on Stephen Donaldson's The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, a series that I've tried to read twice but haven't been able to enjoy. The game had a number of bugs, one of which made it impossible to win after I'd invested about a dozen hours in it. In frustration with both the mechanics and the setting, I prematurely wrote a final rating and gave up on the first game I hadn't won since Bloodwych a year earlier.

Then the author, Mike Riley, came along like a deus ex machina. He fixed the bug that prevented me from winning, gave me a personalized copy, and offered a number of comments on my posts. His last-minute editing allowed me to offer a "won!" posting the next day. More important, he took notes based on my postings, went back to the source code, and produced a new version in September 2013. You can download it from the RogueBasin page. In short, he was a gentleman developer.

A screenshot from The Land. This game looks similar and uses almost identical mechanics.

   
Mike came through again with Quest for the Unicorn. The official site only allows downloading of the Linux/Unix version, which has been continually updated through around 2010, and a "hardcore" version for roguelike fans, replacing the graphic interface with ASCII characters, that Mike started offering in 2010. [Ed. The site has since been updated to offer DOS and Windows versions.] I didn't want to play the "HC" version, which was really a 2010 game, and I didn't want to mess around with a Linux emulator. Fortunately, Mike still had the last DOS version and was kind enough to e-mail it to me. I'm playing version 2.0, technically from 1995, though most of the files still bear a 1990 date stamp. I'm reasonably confident that I'm getting a 1990 experience.

Quest for the Unicorn is Mike's second RPG. It uses the same engine as The Land but in a more generic, Dungeons & Dragons-influenced way. In some ways, this is too bad; the Covenant-inspired classes like "Loresraat" and "Bloodguard" were fun to learn and role-play even if I didn't understand the source material very well; Quest for the Unicorn's standard selection of races (human, elf, half-elf, dwarf, hobbit), classes (fighter, paladin, ranger, cleric, druid, mage, monk), and attributes (the standard D&D six) are less interesting. On the other hand, I feel on firmer ground with Unicorn and won't have to spend so much time looking up terms on half-completed wikis.

Character creation in Unicorn is actually reasonably similar to Moria: you select name, sex, race, class, and attributes (everything starts at 10; you adjust based on a pool of 20 points), and the game tells you where you stand in a variety of abilities like melee attack, missile attack, searching, disarming, and magic. There are also a variety of specific skills (e.g., scouting, edged weapons, lore, healing, boats) that can be increased through training and leveling.

My first character, a paladin.

          
In look and feel, the game is a cross between something like Ultima and a roguelike, with a third-person, iconographic interface, a tile-based world that's slowly revealed as you explore, and a variety of one-letter keyboard commands for things like (i)nventory, (g)et an item, and (l)ight a torch. Like The Land, it's not quite a "roguelike," as it has graphics and no permadeath, but it does show its roguelike influences.

I don't know much of what the plot is about. The manual has been "lost to the ages," according to Mike, but the basic theme is that "all the unicorns have disappeared from the land and it is up to you to find out what happened to them." He also offered that of the game's 60+ dungeons, only about 5 are actually necessary to the main quest. The plot was modeled on a D&D campaign that Mike created in the 1980s.

The opening area. The city of Radon is to the south and a dungeon entrance is to the north. The forest outside the dungeon offers good hunting opportunities.

The character starts outside the city of Radon with absolutely no inventory, 250 gold, and no food, and he gets hungry almost immediately, so the first order of business is to enter the city and find someone selling food. After that, you can start to explore and talk to the denizens. If Radon is any indication of the rest of the game, the indoor areas are huge, just as they were in The Land--nearly 100 x 100 tiles.

A bit of the opening town. Note the shopkeepers in the upper-left corners of each building, and the partly-filled automap in the lower-right.

The city contains a large array of shops, including those selling weapons, armor, rations, magical jewelry, scrolls, magic items, and potions. There's a temple, several inns, a library, and a university where you can pay for training in the game's various skills. Magic items and training are extremely expensive, so it's clear that gold will never run out of value.

I'm a long way from being able to afford any of this cool stuff.

There's a "travel agency" that sells passage to 8 cities and sells ships for $10,000. A "cavalier's guild" tells me that I haven't proven myself worthy yet.

A big part of the game involves the accumulation of lore from various NPCs, much as you do in Ultima or The Land. As in Mike's previous game, the game itself keeps track of what you've learned so you don't have to write anything down. The library lets you pay to seek out specific lore. Mike indicates that the lore is the key to knowing which dungeons are necessary to the game.

A bit of lore from an NPC.

And my accumulated lore from all interactions so far.

In the northwest of the city is a big castle, and I assumed I'd find some NPC inside who would give me a first quest, but there was no one special. So after I mapped the entire city and bought some leather armor, a shield, and a dagger, I decided to head out into the wilds and start making more money.

The game's approach to inventory assigns specific slots for each item, plus a large pack.

For a while, I couldn't break the pattern of constantly starving to death. You get hungry fast in this game--every three or four steps--so you have to have a mega supply of food to navigate the wilds. (I assume that when I get a mount, food consumption will be reduced.) I couldn't find enough random encounters to make enough money to keep up with my appetite. Eventually, I realized that if I stood in the forest and kept (h)unting, I'd replenish rations in a faster pace than I was eating them, and find some random combats, too.

Combat in the game is the same as The Land. Outdoors, you're taken to a larger area map in which you fight the foe on a tactical terrain. In dungeons, you don't get the larger map unless you face a group of enemies or you have a party yourself. At this stage of the game, combat is basically just ramming into the enemy until one of you is dead; later, it will become slightly more complex with ranged weapons, magic items, and spells.

Fighting a giant spider in an outdoor combat screen.

There's a dungeon near the first city, and I've been trying to explore it, but I can't stay alive longer than a few fights. I started grinding on the surface, but I've been noticing that the "maximum experience" available from all enemies on the first level of the dungeon (which it tells you every time you enter) keeps going up as my levels do, suggesting that the dungeons scale to the character level. If that's the case, the only real point in grinding is for gold.

The dungeon resets every time I enter. Sometimes, I find myself surrounded by enemies, like this.

In the first few hours of gameplay, I managed to get up to Level 5. I had a lot of deaths and reloads in the first three levels, but I'm starting to stabilize a bit. By next time, I should be able to tell you more about the game's content.

A few other notes for now:

• (S)earching a wall in a city always produces a secret door right next to where you search unless there's already a door in an adjacent square. This makes it easy to move through the city methodically, but it's a bit weird.

Maybe my character is building doors in all these walls?

• The game is heavily customizable. When you run the setup program, you can set not only the graphics adapter and sound but also whether you always go to the special combat screen, whether the game remembers dungeon levels while you're still in the dungeon, and the maximum level of all dungeons. The default to the latter is 10, but I changed it to 2 to make things move a bit more briskly.

• The gambling game called "die square" was broken in The Land; it offered such favorable odds that you could make hundreds of thousands of gold pieces in a half hour. This game removes "die square" and offers only "dragon dice," a slot-machine-style game that features much less favorable odds.

A losing proposition.

• As you level up in the game, your skills increase randomly. (I think so, at least; I suppose it's possible that it's partly based on what skills you've used, but that seems awfully advanced.) This was one of my least favorite parts of The Land, too; I would prefer to be able to manually set my skill development.

• NPCs appear in dungeons and offer the same lore if you (t)alk to them as in towns. Monsters don't seem to attack them. The character can walk on top of NPCs but monsters can't, which means NPCs can serve as useful shields if you're trying to get away from monsters. This is particularly helpful given the fact that monsters can move and attack in the same action, so if you have one right next to you and you're trying to flee, you get attacked with every step.

An NPC helpfully blocks an ant as I make my way back to the stairs.

• The game offers the ability to (J)immy a door shut, but monsters seem capable of opening them anyway.

The character finishes giving himself a false sense of security.

I don't know how much I'm going to enjoy alternating between two games with very similar gameplay (Moria and Quest for the Unicorn), so you may see me add a third game to the mix unless I can win one of these two within a few days. It's nice to be playing a game that no one has talked about online before.

        

(Yes, this is a new thing that you'll see from now on):

Time so far: 3 hours

Reload count: 11