Game 191: Elvira II: The Jaws of Cerberus (1991)

The first Elvira was a better game than a game inspired by a schlock late-night character had the right to be. As I played, I kept catching myself having fun--only to be reminded that the game was, in some fundamental sense, about Elvira. I don't hate her or anything, but centering an RPG around her makes as much sense as basing one on Dave Letterman or the Church Lady from Saturday Night Live. Every time she entered the frame, it broke any sense of immersion the game had otherwise managed to build up.

By having pictures of Elvira literally everywhere, this game breaks the immersion quite frequently.

(For more background on Elvira and her inexplicable appearance in computer role-playing games, check out my coverage of Elvira: Mistress of the Dark, starting with the first of four posts.)

It's a bit worse in this game, because the protagonist is explicitly presented as Elvira's boyfriend. I've had to role-play evil characters before, but never a character that just has really bad taste. That's nothing against Cassandra Peterson, who is lovely, and everything against the character she created, who, while comical, strikes me as a bit gross. When I played Elvira, you made me watch her 1988 film, in which this weird, black-clad, ash-skinned, wig-wearing, cleavage-baring creature moves to Massachusetts. The movie gives her the most square, conventional love interest possible, and then just expects us to sit back and pretend that the pairing makes any sense. Now I have to pretend to be such a guy in a game.

Is this the CRPG Addict getting upset about boobies again? No. The issue is more that she's a butter...everything else.

No mention is made in the manual or opening screens about the events of the first game. Elvira is inexplicably back in Hollywood, running Black Widow Productions, producing films with titles like House of Horror and It Came from Beyond the Grave. Somehow, the demon dog Cerberus ends up on her set, kidnaps her, and plots to sacrifice her at midnight. The protagonist, her boyfriend, starts the game hanging outside the studio, waiting to pick her up for a date.

Your only character creation choice is whether you're a stuntman, private eye, computer programmer, or knife thrower, the choice of which affects your attributes (weapon skill, accuracy, willpower, magic resistance, strength, constitution, poison resistance, and intelligence) on a scale of 6 to 10. The stuntman is naturally quite high in weapon skill, strength, and willpower but low in accuracy, magic resistance, and intelligence. The computer programmer excels in magic resistance, poison resistance, and intelligence, but has low constitution, strength, and weapon skill. I went with the private eye, who has 8s and 9s in everything--no very strong strengths or weaknesses.

The game begins with a character creation process.

For some reason, the developers significantly increased the RPG credentials of the second title. Elvira's only method of character development was an incremental increase in weapon skill over the course of the game's many combats. Here, not only do we have more attributes and an actual character creation choice, but also a beating heart that helps diagnose fear and injury levels, actual experience levels, a system of tracking injury to individual body parts, and a choice of combat styles that tweak the mostly-action system.

The private eye's attributes are on display as he examines a cork board.

The PC begins with Elvira's spellbook, a small knife, a pendant that Elvira lost the other night, an empty wallet, a set of keys, a ballpoint pen, a used piece of chewing gum, a penknife, and a small silver crucifix. I don't know if he brought one along because he knew Elvira was in trouble, or just because he's fully aware of who he's dating.

The first puzzle of the game involves getting through the locked outer security gate. I spent a while trying to pick the lock with the penknife when Elvira exploded in another vision and suggested that I try using "the rock by the road." I returned to the road area, looked around, and finally found the "rock" she was referring to--a barely discernible set of pixels in the background. So that's how this game is going to be.

Do you see that rock?

Throwing the rock through the door glass, I was able to enter the security office. I grabbed a security jacket and hat from the wall and put them on. A bunch of notices on a corkboard didn't seem to offer anything useful.

The plot thickens.

A dead security guard fell out of a closet when I opened it, and a couple of pixels on his belt delivered me a "small security key." This unlocked a nearby panel, which prompted me to my first use of the game's copy protection system to find the right security code. The game came with a codewheel, and occasionally you have to line up various rings representing symbols, spells, and monsters to get numeric codes. Fortunately, there's this awesome online version.

Somewhere along the line there, I got enough experience to level up. Already Level 2!

A nearby computer monitor showed surveillance camera images of other parts of the studio. None of them seemed to be important.

Back outside, the security gate was now open. It led to a parking lot, where there was only one car--Elvira's. I opened the trunk and got a wrench and some pliers.

With nothing else to do, I opened the door and entered the studio. I immediately recognized a room I'd seen on one of the security monitors. I grabbed a fire extinguisher from the wall. A desk held nothing of importance that I could find. A pair of doors lead to restrooms with toilets; the game let me fiddle with the lid and gave me 4 points for flushing it for no reason that I could see. The bathrooms otherwise had nothing.

I'm trying to envision a scenario in which I'll need to come back with a coin.

A door led out of the entry room to three other doors, labeled 1, 2, and 3. I left them alone for now and took the other exit: an elevator, which offered stops at Levels 1 and 2 or the basement. I went down to the basement.

Might as well get the scary basement out of the way.

There, sitting crosslegged on the floor, was a strange-looking guy. But in my attempts to investigate the room, I accidentally walked forward into...I don't know...a boiler room? There, a giant hand came out of a doorway and killed me instantly. I hadn't been saving, so I need to start over.

Death comes with no warning.

A few other notes:

• The game uses the same pseudo-3D as the first one. You can't really turn and look in all directions except from a few screens. When you do turn, you don't necessarily occupy a fixed location; the game might move you slightly closer or further away from important objects.

• It's really easy to accidentally move forward when you just intend to click on something on the screen.

• As in the first game, you can pick up a bunch of things in Elvira II that probably have no value to carry around.

I'm not sure if I need two fire extinguishers plus a portrait of Elvira.

• While the graphics are okay, I can't tell you anything about the sound, because I spent this playing session in the middle of an airport lounge with no headphones. Hopefully, I'll be able to talk about that next time.

• The game offers some of the first real interactivity with the environment that we've seen in an RPG, though perhaps not in games of other genres. You can flush toilets, turn faucets on and off, and operate the hand dryer in the bathrooms, for instance.

Water flows from the sink as I press the tap.

When I wrapped up my coverage of the first Elvira, I noted:

While they crafted an interesting and relatively enjoyable game, the developers missed opportunities to truly make it an Elvira game by incorporating more elements from the types of shlock horror films associated with the character. The puzzles and enemies are mostly generic fantasy and horror tropes, and with the exception of Vampira, they don't seem to draw any obvious inspiration from B films.

This wasn't exactly a complaint, since I'm a fan of neither Elvira nor schlock horror films, just an observation that the character was oddly displaced into something that felt like a generic adventure castle. This game seems to have learned from the past by filling the screens with references to the character and the films that she glorifies. Because of this, it promises to be a better "Elvira" game, though not necessarily (from my point of view) a better game.

I had hoped to get to at least one dialogue and combat in this first outing, but I guess they'll have to wait for future posts, as will a discussion of the spell system. I don't mind an adventure game--I haven't played one in a while--but Elvira II is definitely feeling more like an adventure game than an RPG so far.

*****

You're probably wondering how Elvira got elevated to the next spot all of a sudden. Here's the rundown:

• I have Antares sort-of working in the Amiga Forever application, but it keeps taking me to a black screen during loads and not loading the content. Typical experience trying to play an Amiga game. No, don't bother writing with suggestions--nothing any of you say ever makes any sense, and it's always filled with phrases like "easy" and "just..." and "all you have to do is...," all of which make me want to redirect the time I spend blogging to ruining your lives. I'll either figure it out for myself or I won't.

• Dragon Slayer---can't find a PC-88 version. Anyone have one? I was hoping to avoid having to learn an MSX or FM-7 emulator.

• Quest for Tanda: Only a couple of sites even attest to this game's existence, and if it wasn't for some screen shots on MobyGames, I'd frankly doubt that it was a real game. I can't find it available for download anywhere. It went to "not playable" status until I learn more.

Elvira II: Won!* (with Final Rating)

I don't like the sound of that last bit.

Elvira II: The Jaws of Cerberus
Horror Soft (developer); Accolade (publisher)
Released 1991 for DOS; 1992 for Amiga, Commodore 64, and Atari ST
Date Started: 20 June 2015
Date Ended: 04 July 2015

Total Hours: 21

Reload Count: 44 (mostly from trying alternate solutions to puzzles, not death)

Difficulty: Moderate-Hard (3.5/5)
Final Rating: 34

Ranking as of Game #349: 238/349 (68%)

If nothing else, Elvira II helped me clarify why I'm a CRPG addict and not an adventure game addict. Although I value puzzles in RPGs--the occasional riddle, mystery, inventory puzzle, or navigation puzzle--I don't like games that are all puzzles. I don't always want to have a puzzle on the board, waiting to be solved. Rather, I want my puzzles to be punctuations after moderately-long periods of dungeon crawling and tactical combat. This probably explains why I'm not a huge fan of Dungeon Master-style games, where unsolved puzzles tend to rack up pretty fast.

As I wrapped up last time, I was preparing to navigate out of 6 levels of catacombs so I could grab some items of makeup and then navigate back through 6 levels of catacombs and fool the evil sorcerer into thinking I was his apprentice. As I had done with the mad scientist's assistant, I studied the picture that looked like a wizard's apprentice and dressed up in the appropriate garb, hat, and facial hair.

This was fun the first time.

        
Fortunately, it occurred to me to take all the makeup items back with me, in case I'd made a mistake, because I did. I forgot the fake nose. If I hadn't brought everything, I would have had to trek up and back again, and that probably would have killed my interest in finishing the game. (Later, though, when it became clear that I missed some fish bones needed for a "buoyancy" spell, I did have to trek down four levels again.) As it was, they were pretty annoying. Frequent traps pop up in your path, so you can't get into a rhythm where you're constantly moving forward, because this happens:

     
Instead, you have to pause after every step to make sure there isn't a trap ahead, and if there is, you have to click on it and "avoid" it.

      

Anyway, fooling the wizard just made him go away, allowing me to proceed into the small chamber beyond, where I found Elvira!

          
Or, at least, I thought so. The visage of Elvira turned into an acid-spitting demon. Once I dealt with it, I recovered the Indian's war lance.

It turned out that each of the three major areas--the "stages"--culminated in an encounter with "Elvira," followed by the recovery of one of the Indian's magic items. The first two times you find Elvira, she turns out to be a fake and you have to battle the creature that's taken her visage. The third time, it's the real Elvira, and after that until the end of the game, she appears in your inventory(!).

The caverns of Stage 1 were as large as the catacombs, but only four levels. They were crawling with giant mosquitoes, ants, grubs, and other vermin, but I clearly was supposed to have visited this area first, because I was way overpowered for them. Most of them died in a single blow with combat set to "berserk" mode. Occasionally, they poisoned me, but red mushrooms in the area were capable of creating the "antidote" spell.

The encounters in the dungeon were punctuated by rooms full of crystals and mushrooms that I could use to make helpful combat and healing spells. I ended up using hardly any of them because I had already conquered the place where I would have needed them most--the catacombs in Stage 3.

At the apex of the level was a giant spider and spider web. The spider was unkillable, I think, but I was able to evade him by trapping him behind an elevator door. In his web, I found a version of Elvira that turned into a hideous wasp-woman and the Indian's magic tomahawk.

Okay, enough of that.

Clearing the area meant finding a key to the elevator, and I had to look up a spoiler for that one. It wasn't obvious to me that a couple of pixels on an image of a dead man wrapped in a spider's web held a necessary item, or that I would need to use the "Telekinesis" spell to obtain it rather than simply cutting it out of the web. There are quite a lot of puzzles in the game that are like this.

Do you see anything obvious to try to take?

During my explorations of Stage 1, I maxed in level (10) and experience (9999). Even though I took multiple passes through the catacombs, I still think it was a bit too easy to hit the cap well before the end of the game.

Fighting a giant worm. Note all the crystals and mushrooms in my inventory.

With Stages 1 and 3 clear, I had to return to the haunted house at Stage 2 and figure out what I hadn't finished there. It turned out I had to bring Frankenstein's monster to life by casting "Summon Storm" on the house's roof and letting it strike a copper rod I inserted in a barely-visible slot. Again, I was relying on a walkthrough at this point.

The storm brought the monster to life, but what ensued was the most annoying puzzle of the game. Basically, you have to do two things with the monster: remove his headband, scalp, and brain, and get him away from the door that he's blocking when you first find him. This means that you have to animate him long enough to get him to walk a few steps from the door, but then stop him (by pulling out his brain wires) before he has a chance to kill you. The timing is hard to get right, and if you don't realize there's a door behind him in the first place, it's easy to put yourself in a "walking dead" scenario by taking his brain before he's moved away from the door.

Disassembling the monster.

Behind the door was, in my case, the real Elvira, along with the Indian's magic bag.

I don't suppose I could just leave her here?

I took all of the magic items to the Indian and he, one by one, in a series of identical animations, infused them with magic power.

You'd think a man of such ability could find a better job than janitor.

I now had all the items I needed for the summoning and binding ritual to kill Cerberus, described at length in one of the library's books, but I needed a holy man to draw the pentagram, and that meant resurrecting the dead cleric. Fortunately, now that I was at Level 10, I could mix the "resurrect" spell. I'm sure the ingredients were among the library's many tomes, but I just tried various mixtures of likely-sounding items (brain, heart, spleen, holy book, holy water, etc.,) until I got it right.

Trying various items to mix the "Resurrect" spell. Note Elvira sitting there in my inventory (second from the left). Could I have used her to mix a spell?

With the cleric revived (no word on how a clearly-Catholic priest felt about being resurrected via arcane arts), he took my chalice full of blood (I honestly can't remember where I got it) and went off to the parking lot to draw a pentagram. At this point, relying on the instructions in the book and a little help from the walkthrough, I completed the ritual necessary to kill Cerberus: light a series of 10 candles around the pentagram, use the magic bag to summon the beast, cast "Bind Demon" at him, throw the Indian's spear at his head, and hack his heart with the tomahawk. It took me a few tries to get it right because he kept killing me while I was trying to find necessary items in my inventory.

You'd think he could just do #2, but he just says "I don't perform that mumbo jumbo sort of religion."

The endgame animations were pretty good, and it's worth watching the video below of the entire sequence. Note the constant music. I played the game with sounds turned off on my computer; how long would you have been able to last with music like this playing incessantly?

Like the first game, this one ends with Elvira beckoning you to your ribald reward.

I'm not sure I like the look of that dagger.

I hope that the folks at The Adventure Gamer get to this one eventually, because I'm curious what they'd say about it from an adventure game perspective. I thought that some of the puzzles were rather obscure and illogical, and that there was too much screwing around trying to make sure you had the right inventory items in each situation. Add to this a number of "walking dead" situations (avoided in my case by breaking my rules and looking at spoilers), and I'm not sure it performs well as an adventure game.

On the other side, the role-playing aspects were under-developed. You do get notably stronger with each level-up, but the dungeons are long and boring and the combats bereft of anything you might call "tactics," so for me the role-playing elements were somewhat unwelcome. They mostly just padded the time.

It might score higher in a GIMLET than the first one just because it has more elements, but I can't honestly say I enjoyed it more. Let's see.

• 6 points for the game world. This is one category that's notably better than its predecessor. It makes good use of horror movie tropes and characters by having the sets literally come to life. Elvira felt more like a standard fantasy game in Elvira's clothes; this one felt closer to a horror RPG.

• 3 points for character creation and development. Definitely better than the first. You get noticeably stronger as the game progresses and you gain experience and level up. I like that you get experience for a variety of actions and puzzle-solving, not just combat. But there are no meaningful character choices throughout the game; even the initial selection of "profession" is staggeringly unimportant.

• 5 points for NPC interaction. Between Elvira, the Indian, Frankenstein, and the sorcerer, there are a handful of NPCs with dialogue options, some of them even involving a small amount of role-playing (e.g., whether to insult the Indian by asking for "fire water").

Elvira's interpolations were usually unwelcome.

• 5 points for encounters and foes. A variety of monsters undone by a lack of true strengths and weaknesses, plus puzzles that tended on the too-tough side. Balancing this were some occasional puzzles different than anything I've seen in a CRPG or adventure game. I like the use of spells as puzzle-solving tools.

• 4 points for magic and combat. The combat system is arguably worse than the first game, but either way it's just a click-fest. I did like aspects of the magic system, such as being able to create "Fireballs" from a combustible material. This would be a fun dynamic in an open-world game where items replenish. Here, because there were so many "walking dead" scenarios, I was reluctant to fully exploit the magic system. I could have gone the entire game without running out of "Herbal Healing," for instance, but there was only a single item available to cast "Telekinesis." Good thing I didn't waste it.

Killing a giant mosquito, like everything else, is just rapid clicking.

• 3 points for equipment--a handful of weapons and armor. The game gives you no clues as to the damage or protective value of the items you wield and wear.

• 0 points for no economy.

• 2 points for the main quest, which offers only one outcome and no player choices.

Tossing a spear at Cerberus to win the game.

• 3 points for graphics, sound, and interface. The graphics are lovely, but the relentless music is unbearable and makes it impossible to enjoy the other sound effects. And I can't excuse the all-mouse interface. If a game is going to feature long series of mazes, I want to be able to move through them with the arrow keys.

A well-rendered giant spider chomps me to pieces.

• 3 points for gameplay. I like the non-linearity during the central acts, but I'd say it's just a little too hard and quite a bit too long.

That gives us a final rating of 34, a little higher than Elvira but not enough to cross into "recommended" territory. Elvira II is definitely a better RPG than Elvira, but being a "better RPG" doesn't count for much if you're still not a good RPG.

I've run out of ways to make fun of Dragon giving everything 5 out of 5 stars, but they did it again here. You'd think a magazine focused on role-playing would recognize that Elvira II had some definite weaknesses in this area, but instead they offered a review that could have doubled as an advertisement: "From the opening screens, you'll be on the edge of your seat trying to rescue the beloved Elvira. This is a 'must' purchase."

Scorpia offered a more sober look in the March 1992 Computer Gaming World. Her primary problems are the "walking dead" scenarios: she was unable to complete the game because she'd used a crucifix needed to ward off a vampire in a spell; even if she could have gotten past this, she also used the matches needed to light the candles on a "Fireball" spell (which I also did; thankfully, I had VK to warn me). She also mentions the Frankenstein one. The entire second half of her review, in fact, is taken up with complaints about this specific issue, and I can see why. I was also happy to see that she complained about the music. On the other hand, she goes on for a while about a lack of save slots, which baffles me a bit. The game allows 48 different save slots in an era where the default is usually one. I only used 6 slots, but I grant you I tend to be overly conservative about this.

I'll tell you this: I wish there were more horror-themed RPGs. To that end, I'm going to be happy to give the Horror Soft/Accolade team another chance with Waxworks, coming up in 1992. Judging by the screen shots, it uses the same engine as Elvira II, but perhaps it improves elements of the gameplay. Either way, the setting looks pretty cool.

That will, alas, be Horror Soft's last game. The company renamed itself Adventure Soft in 1992 and produced the Simon the Sorcerer series but never tried again with an RPG. Of the three primary developers on Elvira II--Alan Bridgman, Michael Woodroffe, and Simon Woodroffe--only Simon Woodroffe seems to be active today, with some 2010s credits on action games produced by Sega. Michael Woodroffe last shows up as managing director of Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth (2005), and Alan Bridgman last contributed to Simon the Sorcerer 3D (2002).

My acquaintance with the Mistress of the Dark was brief, but I can't say that breaks me up. It's time to finally get serious about Antares.

****

Further reading: My series of posts on Elvira: Mistress of The Dark from early 2014. YouTube user Lemm has a 3 hour and 20 minute LP that takes the game from beginning to end, and as a bonus you can check out Javier Juan Castro Sanchez's compilation of all of the game's death scenes.

Elvira: Won! (with Final Rating)

Elvira: Mistress of the Dark

United States

Horror Soft (developer); Accolade (publisher)

Released 1990 for Amiga, DOS; 1991 for Atari ST, Commodore 64; 1992 for PC-98

Date Started: 6 January 2014
Date Ended: 11 January 2014

Total Hours: 9
Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)
Final Rating: 29
Ranking at Time of Posting: 65/131 (50%)

At it's core, Elvira is an adventure game, not an RPG, and like many adventure games of the 1980s and early 1990s, it has the virtue of brevity. It took me about six hours to fully explore it and figure out the puzzles, and another two and a half hours to win it with a fresh character. I've found that this divide between learning and execution holds for a lot of adventure games and adventure/RPG hybrids. When I replayed all the games in the Zork series in the mid-1990s, they each took about a week of banging my head against the wall trying to figure out the puzzles, followed by about three paragraphs of text to actually beat the games from start to finish. A player who already knows the territory and puzzles could get through B.A.T. or Hero's Quest in 90 minutes each. When I played "The Case of the Sultan's Pearls" scenario for SwordThrust, it took me about two hours to fully explore the castle, only to find that the winning series of commands, when starting fresh, is:

>N. N. ATTACK BUTLER. LOOK BUTLER. GET SULTAN'S PEARL.

There are very few straight RPGs that you could finish in such a speed run. Even if you had all the maps for Pool of Radiance or Dungeon Master in front of you, you still have to invest the time to fight the combats and build the characters.

I won the game with only 60/100 "experience points." I think the others would have come from mixing the other spells offered in the game. As I indicated last time, only a handful of spells are actually necessary to win. The others are optional and help with combat, but until you reach the endgame and know what reagents you need for puzzles, you're afraid to waste them on spells that aren't necessary.

I ended my last narrative having found all of the six keys needed to open Emelda's chest. The difficulty was finding the chest. For a while, I was stumped. I had solved every puzzle that I knew about and had visited every location that I could find. Then I remembered the cannon at the top of one of the turrets.

Lighting the cannon was the only puzzle in the game that I felt was unintuitive, and even it wasn't that bad. I first had to find a pair of tongs in the castle basement. The only problem was that every time I tried to take them, the ghost of the torturer would kill me.

The solution I came to, mostly by accident, was to put the tongs into my canvas sack. From an anonymous comment thread on my last post, I gather this was an unintentional workaround. What I really needed to do was to take the bones of the torturer (I originally thought they were from one of his victims) to the catacombs and lay them to rest in an empty coffin, then return and get the tongs. I did lay the bones to rest eventually, but I didn't tie the two things together.

Anyway, with the tongs in inventory, you can use them to remove a piece of coal from the stove in Elvira's kitchen. You take the hot coal to the cannon and use it to light the fuse. In another fun animation, the cannon blasts a piece out of another turret.

Two feet to the left and I would have blown up the chest. Then where would we be?

 
For reasons I don't really understand, destroying half the turret allows you to go up into it. It was blocked before. There lies Emelda's chest. You use the six keys and retrieve from it a Scroll of Spiritual Mastery and a ceremonial dagger.

 
After this, there was another interval in which I didn't know where to go to find Emelda. Eventually, I thought to use the "Alphabet Soup" spell on a rune stone I'd discovered in the catacombs, and it suggested there was a secret room within the catacombs. I returned and explored a bit more, and finally noticed a hole on the floor of one of the corridors. The hole was just big enough for the rune stone. When I inserted it, the floor broke apart, revealing a passage big enough to climb down.

Confronting Emelda in her throne room.

 
Emelda was in the room below, and she started draining my life force the moment I entered. Defeating her was a three-part process of inserting the Crusader's Sword into the stone in front of her, using the Scroll of Spiritual Mastery (which stripped away her glamour and revealed her undead nature), and stabbing her with the ceremonial dagger. The first part stumped me for a while, and it took several reloads for met to get it all right.

Some things apparently run in the family.

After my victory, the screen changed to a shot of Elvira beckoning me, and the endgame text vaguely suggested some kind of ribald reward:

Elvira beckons to her hero to follow her so that she can show you how grateful she really is for saving her from the evil powers of Emelda. Follow your mistress and collect your just reward.

It would be true-to-character if the next scene showed Elvira giving me a check for $50 and then demanding that I leave her castle. But the game isn't that witty. Instead, the credits roll and the player has the option to start again.

Overall, I feel like Elvira was a bit superfluous to the proceedings, and for a while I wondered if the game wasn't originally constructed without her. It wouldn't have taken much effort to add her to the framing story and the few in-game places in which she appears. The back story doesn't even jive with the film, really: in the movie, she inherits a mansion, not a castle; it's in Massachusetts, not England; and at the end of the film, it's destroyed. However, it's clear that Adventure Soft had obtained the rights to use the Elvira character at least a year earlier (I'll talk about this at the end), so this seems unlikely.

Regardless, while they crafted an interesting and relatively enjoyable game, the developers missed opportunities to truly make it an Elvira game by incorporating more elements from the types of shlock horror films associated with the character. The puzzles and enemies are mostly generic fantasy and horror tropes, and with the exception of Vampira, they don't seem to draw any obvious inspiration from B films. If I wanted to make a real Elvira-inspired game, I'd modify the plot a bit. The castle is haunted, but in such a way that it creates its horrors based on things it finds in the subjects' own minds. When it delves Elvira's mind, it finds decades of awful horror movies and populates the castle with Blacula, The Blob, intelligent rats from Willard, and perhaps a Killer Tomato or two. I guess that might have run into some copyright problems, but the point is the game doesn't quite have the campy humor or irreverent sensibility that you'd associate with Elvira, and most of the enemies and puzzles are played straight.

If they had made a game like this, I'd probably be complaining that I didn't like it because I don't like goofy, campy humor. Nonetheless, I think it would have been more true to the character. As it was, it felt like a decent horror game in which Elvira--a character I don't particularly like but also don't particularly mind--played a tangential part.

In my GIMLET, I give it:

• 3 points for the game world. I give it credit for its horror theme and its tightly-constructed castle architecture, and a little for the back story involving Elvira's ancestor.

• 1 point for character creation and development. It mostly fails in this vital RPG category. There's no character creation, and the only development is with the incremental increases in weapon skill.

• 2 points for NPC interaction. Elvira herself is really the only NPC; other characters are encounters to be defeated. She's...there. I guess I cracked a smile at a couple of her lines.

• 6 points for encounters and foes. In adventure/RPG hybrids, I tend to use this category to evaluate the quality of the puzzles, which serve as "encounters" in such games. I liked the puzzles in Elvira. They were difficult, but difficult for minutes rather than hours, and generally fair. The enemies were fun to look at but not very different when it came to combat.

I could only defeat this guy with the Crusader Sword.

• 3 points for magic and combat. Combat is fast-paced but utterly non-tactical. As I outlined last time, the spell system was intriguing but mostly optional. I give it some credit for the variety of spells and the game dynamic associated with finding their reagents, but I wish the game had done more with the spell system.

• 2 points for equipment. There's a lot of stuff to carry, but most of it is for solving puzzles, and I already gave the game credit for that. The small selection of weapons and armor is another blow to its RPG aspirations.

• 0 points for no economy.

• 2 points for the main quest, which offers only one outcome and no player choices.

• 5 points for graphics, sound, and interface. I quite liked the graphics. The sound in the DOS version was sparse, mostly limited to combat attacks. I give it a little credit for the music even though I don't really care about game music. Mostly, I was surprised at how well I took to the interface. As you know, I'm normally not a fan of a mouse-only interface, but it worked surprisingly well here, even if there were times I wished I could just go forward and turn with the arrow keys.

• 5 points for gameplay. It was nonlinear in the order that you can tackle the puzzles. I thought it was pitched at just the right level of difficulty and lasted just about the right amount of time.

That gives a final rating of 29, which sounds like I didn't like it very much, and I didn't--as an RPG. It's a decent adventure game, the presence of Elvira notwithstanding, but it lacks the combat, economy, and equipment that would have made it a true hybrid.

I guess Horror Soft knew what its selling points were.

Alas, not everyone felt this way. As I discussed in my first post on the game, Computer Gaming World famously gave it "Role-Playing Game of the Year" in November 1991 after considering J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, Wizardry: Bane of the Cosmic Forge, Worlds of Ultima: The Savage Empire, and Eye of the Beholder. I haven't played any of these games besides Bane, but to call that one alone an inferior RPG to Elvira is just absurd. Meanwhile, the same issue put Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire in the "adventure" category and had it lose to King's Quest V; I wonder what would have happened if they'd switched Quest for Glory and Elvira and put them in their appropriate categories.

Those of you who are excited about Elvira, never fear, you'll get to hear all about her continuing adventures in Elvira II: The Jaws of Cerberus (1991). From its description, it sounds like it incorporates more RPG elements, including a choice of starting classes and more combat tactics. 1991 also saw a side-scrolling platformer called Elvira: The Arcade Game in which the player actually controls Elvira and kills enemies. I note that this is the same year that produced The Simpsons arcade game, which had Bart and Marge wielding a skateboard and vacuum cleaner as weapons, and a Hudson Hawk title in which the protagonist beans enemies with baseballs. Clearly, this is an era in which audiences looked at their comedy figures and said, "these characters are funny and all, but what I'd really like to see is them killing people."

Elvira was developed by the U.K. company Adventure Soft under its Horror Soft label, and the interface for Elvira is a clear update of the label's first adventure game, Personal Nightmare (1989):

Personal Nightmare has the same commands and approach to inventory, but it doesn't have the combat system or attributes.

Interestingly, the box cover for Personal Nightmare (also known as . . . A Personal Nightmare) prominently features Elvira. Clearly, Adventure Soft obtained the rights not just to make a video game based on Elvira, but to use her likeness for its Horror Soft series. In addition to Elvira II, we'll see Horror Soft again with Waxworks (1992). Three of Elvira's developers--Alan Bridgman, Michael Woodroffe, and Simon Woodroffe--worked on all of these horror titles, as well as the Simon the Sorcerer series from Adventure Soft.

Next we'll be returning to the 1980s with a review of Dungeons of Daggorath. I've removed Angband from the "upcoming" list because it's going to take me longer than I thought to offer my posts on Moria first. Sorry for those who were looking forward to it; we'll get there eventually.

Game 333: Waxworks (1992)

The box CamelCases the second "W" but the title screen doesn't. There's a similar issue with whether the company is called HorrorSoft or Horror Soft.

           
Waxworks

United Kingdom

HorrorSoft (developer); Accolade (publisher)

Released in 1992 for Amiga and DOS

Date Started: 11 June 2019
         

Waxworks is the fourth major title from HorrorSoft, after . . . A Personal Nightmare (1989), Elvira: Mistress of the Dark (1990), and Elvira II: The Jaws of Cerberus (1991). (It is also the last; the company would re-brand itself AdventureSoft in 1993 and from then on publish essentially nothing but Simon the Sorcerer entries. That annoys me a little bit. I mean, "AdventureSoft" is too generic a name to be taken up by a company that just publishes one series. They should have called themselves "SimonSoft" and left "AdventureSoft" for a developer with a more diverse catalog.) I think I could make a case for the game not really being an RPG, but part of me is curious to see how the developer does without Elvira as the game's centerpiece. I never really cared for the character, which I'm sure dragged down my enjoyment of the two previous titles.
          

Like the Elvira games, Waxworks is fundamentally an adventure game that does offer RPG-style character development, combat, and inventory. The interface is slightly redesigned from Elvira II. (The engine is called AGOS, a graphical version of an open-source engine designed for MUDs called AberMUD.) The system of health to individual body parts has been dropped, as has the useless beating heart. The compass is moved from the lower-right to the left, and character stats are on the bottom rather than between the two main windows. A control panel of icons in the upper-left lets you check inventory, manipulate objects, ready weapon, and attack.

        

I bought the GOG version and was confused for a while until I looked it up and discovered that the game came with two manuals, one of which GOG doesn't offer. The second, The Curse of the Twins, explains the backstory in 13 pages of text by Richard Moran, who also wrote the manual to Star Control II.

         

The backstory casts the unnamed protagonist as a twin whose brother Alex disappeared when they were teenagers. They had been exploring an old mine. The siblings lived in the seaside town of Vista Forge, where their rich, eccentric Uncle Boris built a wax museum in his creepy mansion. Now an adult, the main character has returned to Vista Forge to attend Boris's funeral. All kinds of mysterious signs, portents, and disasters accompany the trip, including the collapse of Boris's grave, and disappearance of his coffin when a sinkhole opens beneath the cemetery. During the chaos of this event, the protagonist thinks he briefly sees Alex in the mine tunnels that run under the cemetery.
         

The hallways of Uncle Boris's waxworks.

         

The protagonist remembers a tale that Uncle Boris once told, about a family ancestor who caught a witch named Ixona stealing one of his chickens. In retaliation, he chopped off her hand, for which Ixona cursed the family: "In every generation in which your family bears twins, one shall belong to Beelzebub." The curse nearly immediately came true, when one twin son of the family became Vlad IV of Walachia, or Vlad the Impaler, who lived up to his name by tracking down and impaling the witch. Generations later, other twins in the family included Torquemada, the Marquis de Sade, and a female witch burned at the stake in Salem. [Having lived in Salem, I am obliged to point out with indignation that no accused witches were burned in Salem; they were all hung, except for one who was crushed under rocks. Also, they were all innocent.] It was these very individuals that Uncle Boris chose to populate his waxworks. Determined to lift the curse, Boris also funded a dig at Vlad's castle in Walachia and recovered a crystal ball from the impaled corpse of Ixona. 

The character enters the tunnels and returns to the location where Alex disappeared, finding evidence that someone has been living in the tunnels, eating bats and fish. The next day, at the reading of the will, the character inherits Boris's estate. A letter left by Boris indicates that Boris knew Alex was still alive, and possessed by evil, and that the character can save him by using the waxworks to travel back in time and undo the curse.
         

Uncle Boris's creepy, disembodied head speaks to me from beyond the grave.

        

The game begins at the door to the mansion, with Boris's butler inviting the character in. The butler gives the protagonist (whom I guess I'll describe in the first person from now on) a crystal ball in which I see Boris's face. He tells me that I must use the waxworks exhibits to enter the worlds of the previous twins and kill them, "destroying the power that feeds the curse." I then find myself in front of an Egyptian exhibit. The Egyptian siblings technically predate the curse, but one of them was evil, which gave Ixona the idea in the first place.
         

Death is only the beginning.

       

I move throughout the mansion. Given the backstory, I expect to find exhibits depicting the Spanish Inquisition, the Salem Witch Trials, Dracula, and perhaps even the persecution and assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as performed by the inmates of the asylum of Charenton under the direction of the Marquis de Sade. But I guess those were just examples. What I see instead are:

        

• A mine being overrun by a mutant plant

           

Did that happen in this town? If so, the authorities sure hushed it up.

         

• Jack the Ripper approaching one of his victims with a knife

         

You're not even stabbed yet, woman! Don't swoon--run!

         

• A bunch of zombies lumbering through a graveyard

              

I'm not sure this event was "historical."

            

There are other closed curtains throughout the museum. I'm not sure if they'll later be opened and reveal other exhibits.

I wonder if I'm supposed to take these on in a particular order, but the game has me covered there. It turns out I can talk to Boris by clicking on the crystal ball. He tells me that no, it doesn't matter what order I choose--all of the scenes need to be "cleansed." I realize later that talking to him has cost me "psy" points, so I'd better save it for when I'm really stuck.

          

 . . . except that I'll be Level 1 for the first one and like Level 20 when I go to the last one.

          

I decide to go in chronological order, although I'm not entirely sure where the graveyard fits into it. My best guess is that the order is Egypt - Graveyard - Jack the Ripper - Mine. Thus, I head back to the Egyptian exhibit and choose "Enter."

A couple of flashes of light later, and I'm in a pyramid. A nearby room shows someone labeled "pyramid designer" stabbed in the back, his body hunched over a table. A piece of papyrus underneath the corpse has an image of Anubis and a set of nine hieroglyphics.
           

Some kind of puzzle already.

         

The room is full of baskets, jugs, pitchers, and other objects, and it turns out that, just as in Elvira II, you can pick up just about everything. Unlike Elvira II, there's no spell system here that's going to make use of all these items, so there's probably no point in loading up my inventory. I do it anyway, mostly because I want to see if the 16 items the window holds are all I get, or whether it scrolls. It turns out that it scrolls. At this point, I realize that I can't figure out how to drop things. Clicking and dragging them back to the environment doesn't help. The manual says that "Drop" is supposed to be an object action when I click on an object, but it never appears. I hope there's no limit to my inventory, then. I walk out of the room with a scarab beetle brooch (found in a chest), a dagger, a lamp, a bowl, a beaker, a stylus and ink block, two pieces of papyrus, three baskets, six jugs, a jar of oil, and a mat.
         

The scene in the first room. Most of this stuff will end up in my inventory.

      

Returning to the hallways, I start wondering if I'm going to have to map. I decide to try following the right corridor first, and if I get lost or confused, then I'll map.
       

I turn a corner and meet a pyramid guard with a sword. Combat hasn't really changed since Elvira II, either. You hit the sword icon to activate your readied weapon, then click in the screen itself to indicate what part of the enemy you want to target. The guard defeats me three times in a row.
          

And here's where we learn that Horror Soft did not skimp on its customary gruesome death screens.

          
Finally, on the fourth time, I manage to kill him--with no hit points lost. That suggests that luck is going to play a big role in combat. From this one battle, my level increases to 2. I also get the guard's sword.
         

                 

As I walk, I realize I'm getting 1 experience point for every square I've never stepped in before. I soon go to Level 3. This is accompanied by an increase in maximum hit points.

        

Continuing down the hall, I meet another guard, who also slays me two times in a row. I finally kill him on my third try. I hit him about five times for every time he hits me, and I do hundreds of points of damage to him. These guys are tanks. I begin to wonder if I was really supposed to level up in one of the easier scenarios first.
         
At this moment, let's pause to note that the graphics are quite nice. Many are animated, which isn't coming through in these static shots. But the only sound effects I've experienced in the game are the swishes and thuds of weapons connecting in combat. There's music, but it's loud and relentless and I turned it off.
         

This guy was a little easier. He looks easier.

      

After picking up some piles of sand, I meet a new enemy: a priest with a dagger. He dies a lot easier than the guards. At the end of a corridor, at a statue, I find a tuning fork in a pot. But it isn't long before yet another guard kills me. I reload, kill him, step a few paces past him, and find a little pond. There, a crocodile kills me while I'm trying to fill a jug with water. Man, this game is rough.
           

         

Reloading, I walk a few paces past the crocodile, then meet an Egyptian guy with a spear:
           

            

The problem is that hit points don't seem to regenerate automatically as you move. It occurs to me that Uncle Boris might be able to help. I contact him and, sure enough, using the bits of papyrus and pen that I picked up, he creates three healing scrolls. Each one seems to heal 10 hit points. They don't really help: the spear guy destroys me in two stabs.

I start paying attention to the statistics, and when I finally kill the bastard, I'm convinced the game is just making things up. When you strike someone, the box in the lower-left corner tells how many hit points of damage you've done. There were times that I hit the guy for over 200 points in multiple blows and he didn't die. When I did finally kill him, it was after maybe 80 points of damage.

I come to a treasure room! Too bad that's not why I'm here. Five pots, a weight, two cat statues, a golden calf statue, and a tile all join my overflowing inventory.
            

In a real RPG, there would be lots of cool stuff in a room like this.

         

I soon come up against a thick glass panel. Nothing will smash it. This sounds like a job for the tuning fork! After 15 minutes of rummaging through my stuff, I find it--somehow I accidentally put it into a basket. I use it and the glass shatters and collapses.

A few paces on, two blades come out of the ceiling and kill me.
        

        

Okay, it turns out that the blades are the result of a trap, indicated by the presence of a very thin piece of string stretching across the corridor. I'll have to watch for those in the future.

I finally make it to a set of stairs upward, where I'm confronted by a puzzle: a pentagram with the number 0 at each point, plus four numbers (1, 3, 4, 6, 7) at each intersection of lines. Clicking on any of the 0s causes them to cycle through numbers 1 through 9, but it also starts an hourglass timer at the bottom. If I run out of time, as I did the first attempt (before I realized the hourglass was even running):
             

The mechanism by which this happened is unclear to me.

         

My guess is that it's like a magic square: each line has to add up to the same number, with no number being used more than once, including the ones in the middle. That means I have to make do with 2, 5, 8, 9, and 0 at the points of the pentagram. It doesn't take me long, though, to realize that isn't going to work. The best I can do with no repeating numbers is make the totals come out to 16, 17, 18, 19, and 20.

So I focus on just getting them to add up to the same thing period. I spend some time messing with it in Excel and I finally come up with the answer, but I'm unsatisfied with my method. I know there's a way to do it algebraically, and I just couldn't figure it out. Solving math puzzles via trial-and-error never seems right. Anyway, I go up to Level 6.
             

Caught it just as the door was opening.

        

A few steps down the corridor and:
              

How did I end up barefoot, exactly?

         
I think I'll leave it there. So far, it seems like a brisk game, but much like Elvira II, the RPG elements are unsatisfying. The deaths are kind of funny, but I wouldn't be laughing if I prized myself on low reload count.

Time so far: 3 hours