Game 198: HeroQuest (1991)

Even the title screen can't decide if there's a space between the words. I'm going with the main title.

    

HeroQuest (with Return of the Witch Lord expansion)

221B Software Development (developer); Gremlin Graphics Software (publisher)
  

Released 1991 for Commodore 64, Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, ZX Spectrum and DOS; 1993 for Acorn; Return of the Witch Lord expansion released later in 1991 for Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Commodore 64; bundled package released 1992 for Amiga, Commodore 64, DOS, and ZX Spectrum

  
Date Started: 9 August 2015
Date Ended: 9 August 2015

Total Hours: 4

Reload Count: 0

Difficulty: Very Easy-Easy (1.5/5)
Final Rating: 19

Ranking at Time of Posting: 42/196 (21%)

  

To call HeroQuest "bad" would give it a status it doesn't deserve. It is inadequate. Unworthy of notice. MobyGames codes it as both a role-playing game and a strategy game, but it really is neither. There's no character development to qualify it as an RPG, and no actual strategy to qualify it as a strategy game. It is literally nothing more than a computer version of a board game.

The board game in question, bearing the same name, was published by Milton Bradley and Games Workshop in 1989. Thematically, it uses Games Workshop's "Warhammer" wargame setting, first published in 1983. (After HeroQuest II, we'll next see it in a CRPG in 1996's Warhammer: Shadow of the Horned Rat.) I've never played it, and attempts to get a copy for this review revealed that used copies sell for a minimum of $400 and go up to the thousands. I gather from online descriptions that it pit one player (the game master) against one to four other players. The game master won if everyone else lost. I can see the board game being fun--the suspense of the roll of the dice, the social interaction--but it makes a frivolous and boring computer game.

The board game, full of rooms, corridors, enemies, traps, and treasure.

HeroQuest begins with a well-illustrated series of semi-animated screens establishing the game's setting. The characters' teacher, Mentor, tells of his former apprentice, Morcar. Too eager for knowledge, Morcar ignored Mentor's cautions and read Mentor's secret spellbooks at night. Once he had amassed great power, he fled to the Northern Chaos Wastes and conjured ancient powers to overthrow the empire. Defeated once by a party led by Rogar the Barbarian, Morcar retreated, licked his wounds, gathered a new army, and is on the march again.

One of the nice introductory illustrations.

The game is organized into a series of independent missions: 13 in the original game, and 10 in the Return of the Witch Lord expansion. Although they progress in a logical order, you can actually skip about them in any order and even replay the same mission multiple times. Each mission looks more or less the same: a series of rooms and hallways in which you explore, search for treasure, and fight monsters. The winning condition might be to find a particular artifact, kill a particular monster, or find an NPC and lead him to safety. The first character to find the exit having satisfied the winning condition wins the scenario. The scenario ends when all characters are out.

The original game's scenarios.

Each scenario begins with a description of the mission and its winning conditions.

Like the board game, the computer game is set up to allow one-to-four players to control one-to-four characters: a barbarian, a dwarf, an elf, and a wizard. The four characters act completely independently--competitively, even. They can't team up to fight enemies, although I suppose they could coordinate entry into rooms with multiple enemies. They can't trade gold or equipment. And no matter how hard they work, only one of them gets the big prize for the level. For these reasons, I found it easiest in most sessions to just play a single character.

While in a mission, each character's round starts with a random roll (represented by a spinning coin) that determines how many moves the character will get for that round. He can use those points to move around the screen, open doors, and move to other screens. Once per round, he can execute a special action: attack an enemy, search for traps and secret doors, and search for treasure. Viewing and using inventory items and viewing the map are actions that take up no movement points and can be done as often as necessary. When you're done with your movement points and special actions, you hit "End Turn" to move on to the next character.

The typical start to a HeroQuest turn. The icons in the lower left indicate that I can end my turn, unlock a door, search the room for traps and secret doors, search the room for treasure, or access my inventory. A map is available on the right. To expend my 11 movement points, I can click the floor tiles or click the arrows on the right.

Searching for traps, secret doors, and treasure applies to the entire visible room or corridor and not just the active square. I generally found it useful to search every area for both. That meant I had to spend at least two full rounds in each area because you can only search once per round. If the room had an enemy, I had to spend at least three full rounds there.

Treasures to be found in the various rooms may include gold, potions (e.g., healing, strength, speed), holy water, and quest items. Potions don't stay with the character between missions, so it's best to use them in the active mission. Gold stays with you.

The result of a treasure search.

Combat is the least interesting part of the game. You essentially just choose the enemy that you want to attack and watch as the computer rolls the hit dice and shows you the outcome: you miss the enemy, you hit the enemy but don't kill him, or you kill the enemy. (Combat takes place on a separate screen that just shows you and the enemy.) There are no tactics, except maybe to quaff a potion or two before a difficult battle.

I attack a skeleton. This screen is only up for a split second; the enemy just disappears in a puff of smoke if you defeat him.

Oh, I suppose the way you use movement counts as a "tactic." Enemies never leave their rooms, but they will inevitably attack you if you end a round in their room. You want to avoid that. So one tactic is to make sure you have enough movement points to exit the room after making your attack, in case the enemy survives. Overall, though, the combat system barely qualifies the game as an RPG under my rules.

The result of an enemy attacking me.

Elves and wizards get spells, and before each mission they have to choose which "book" to take with them: air, earth, fire, and water. There are three spells per book, including attack, defense, buffing, and navigation. I experimented with them a little, but as we're going to see, I found the game so easy that spells were an unnecessary addition.

Casting a spell on an enemy.

In between missions, characters can spend accumulated gold on a small selection of weapons and armor. The selection is small enough that it's possible to completely outfit a character after only a couple of missions.

A small selection of items in the shop. The bottom-right has a "tool chest" for disarming traps.

The first mission is "The Maze," presented as kind of a final training mission from Mentor. All you have to do to win is find the way out; the first character who does so gets an extra 100 gold pieces. You can linger longer, of course, and try to find additional treasures. There are a few orcs in the maze, but nothing serious.

The victory condition is simply to leave.

I played this level with all four characters and learned its quirks. Although the characters start with no weapons or armor, I didn't find the enemies remotely dangerous. I did determine that it was annoying to constantly switch among multiple characters, so once everyone was out, I kept playing the barbarian for the rest of the scenarios.

I moved on to the second scenario, "The Rescue of Sir Ragnar," which requires you to find Ragnar the Barbarian within the dungeon and lead him to safety. Ragnar becomes a playable character once you find him, but of limited utility since he can't do anything but move. The quest ends when you bring Ragnar to the exit. It took me maybe 20 minutes.

 

At this point, I had enough gold to buy all the weapons and armor that I wanted, so I started to wonder what all the other missions were about. In some of them, you can apparently find special artifact items that stay with the character and boost his abilities, but the game had been so easy so far that I decided to jump ahead.

Quest 11, "Bastion of Chaos," asked me to go into a dungeon and kill as many enemies as possible. I received a bounty of 10-30 gold pieces for each foe I killed. I stayed there for a little while, but I didn't really need the gold.

The goal of Quest 13, "Quest for the Spirit Blade," was to find...wait for it...the Spirit Blade, an artifact weapon capable of defeating the Witch Lord. (He's not mentioned in the background, but he's the big bad of the game and I guess an ally of Morcar.) It was just a matter of fighting past some undead, finding the right room, and searching for the blade.
        

    
The final quest of the original game, "Return to Barak Tor," has you confronting the Witch Lord with the Spirit Blade. I found him in a room full of skeletons. I buffed myself with a strength potion and then used holy water to kill his skeleton allies. The Witch Lord himself then died in a single combat round.

Oh, hey, guys!

Better get ready.

 

Say goodbye to the minions.

Attacking the witch lord. For whatever reason, you choose the enemy you want to attack from the map.

 

One-on-one combat.

        
Nothing special happened at this point, so when I returned to the menu, I looked at the expansion quests and skipped right to the last one: "The Court of the Witch Lord." Here's the setup:
     

     
The mission starts literally in the Witch Lord's throne room, with the character standing one space away.
    

 

I immediately entered combat and killed him in one blow.
    

Well, that was somewhat anticlimactic.

    
When I made my way to the exit, I got an "epilogue" screen indicating that the Witch Lord had been defeated. Further text indicated that someone named "Skulmar" escaped and remains a threat and Ragnar turned out to be a traitor and was executed--I assume these plot twists were elaborated in the missions that I skipped.
    

     
Can we call that a "win?" I mean, I skipped 17 of the 23 missions, but I did defeat the big bad, and I got the endgame screen.
    

It is pretty pathetic that you can jump right to the endgame like that, but that's what happens when characters don't get any experience or other character development between levels. The initial character is just as capable of defeating the Witch Lord as a character who's gone through 20 scenarios. If the developers had wanted to require the full set of quests building up to the endgame, they should have made the enemies a lot tougher and offered more items for sale in the shop. When you can buy everything after 3 missions, and there's no other character development, what are you playing an extra 20 scenarios for?
    

"For fun!" would be the obvious answer, if the scenarios were any fun. But with the same things to do in every dungeon and every room, no combat tactics, no plot to uncover or puzzles to solve, the scenarios are just tedious. In the board game, at least you have the anticipation of rolling the dice yourself. Here, the game does it and the combat is over before you can even register the results.
      

Under my rules, a role-playing game has to have at least three core elements. The first is combat in which accuracy and damage are at least partially based on character attributes, and not just player reflexes or the type of weapon wielded. This game just barely qualifies by offering characters of varying strength and the ability to influence underlying attributes with potions. The second is an inventory of items that the players can equip, unequip, and drop; again, with its paltry selection, this game just squeaks by. The third element is character development, and in that area HeroQuest fails. But on Page 4 of the manual, the game itself claims that "Hero Quest is a fantasy role playing game," so I'll rate it as such:

• 2 points for the game world, with a back story full of common tropes. It doesn't even really have an effect on the game. The back story really should have been about the Witch Lord.

• 1 point for character creation and development. That one point is for the ability to name the characters and to choose which of the four you want to play in each scenario.

      

On this screen, you determine what characters are going to participate in the next mission.

        

• 1 point for NPC interaction, since you have to rescue an NPC in some scenarios.

• 1 point for encounters and foes. The enemies in the game are boring and derivative and don't even escalate in difficulty.

      

Entering a corridor full of orcs.

         

• 2 points for magic and combat, earned solely for having the systems in place. The spells are somewhat creative, and I like that they include navigation spells (e.g., "Pass through Rock") as well as combat spells.

• 2 points for a very small selection of equipment, both found and purchased.

        

Checking my inventory during a scenario.

        

• 2 points for an economy that soon loses its purpose.

• 3 points for a variety of quests as well as an endgame quest, but there are no options or alternate endings.

• 2 points for graphics, sound, and interface, all going to graphics. I had an emulator issue that produced a constant drone, but I watched some online videos of the game and confirmed there are no sound effects, at least in the DOS version. I disliked the all-mouse interface. (There's an illusory option to choose "keyboard" during setup, but this just means that you have to use the keys to move the cursor like a mouse. The commands and movement aren't actually mapped to any keys.)

The graphics are good enough to fool you into thinking it's a better game. Doesn't this room look cool? Trust me, nothing happens here.

• 3 points for gameplay. It gets 2 for being non-linear in the approach to its missions and 1 point for some slight replayability with different classes. But it's far, far too easy, and even in the short amount of time I played it, it seemed too long.

I had to deliberately screw around for over 10 minutes to make this happen.

The final score is 19. Throughout the past year, we've learned that gamebooks don't work well when translated literally to the computer. Now we learn that the same is true of board games.

Of course, I did miss out on one element: playing the game with other people. Maybe some of you played HeroQuest in groups and can testify as to how well it worked as a social game. Personally, I can't see the fun in four people huddling around the beige monitor and keyboard of some 486 PC, but maybe I'm just too introverted.

 

I can't find any evidence that Computer Gaming World reviewed it, but MobyGames's review round-up shows a wide range of scores in contemporary reviews, from 93/100 in Commodore Format to 52/100 in Power Play. The median is in the 60s, consistent with a relatively poor rating. A modern reviewer, Boston Low, titled his assessment "Great board game, inadequate RPG."

Another modern review on Rock, Paper, Shotgun echoes my negativity. The reviewer, Alec Meer, went into the game with rose-colored memories of the board game and was disappointed with the computer version. "It lacks the sociable enmity of a flesh and blood player assuming the mantle of the murderous dungeon master," he notes. His review is worth reading for other comparisons between the board and computer experience, and I particularly like one of his closing sentences:

I’m unfairly applying modern standards I know, but I don’t think this has aged badly so much as it would always have been too rudimentary and passionless, stopping at an awkward halfway house between directly emulating the boardgame and being a lightweight turn-based RPG for a lone player.

        

221B developed half a dozen games in 1991 and 1992, all action games except for HeroQuest and its expansion. The U.K.-based Gremlin Graphics Software (Gremlin Interactive from 1994 to 1999) has a much larger portfolio, but HeroQuest and its sequel are also its only forays into RPG territory (that I can find, at least). When a developer and a publisher have no experience with RPGs, that's usually a bit of a bad sign.

I'll check out HeroQuest II: Legacy of Sorasil in 1992, but unless it offers more in the way of character development, I'll probably reject it as an RPG.

So that's the game that snaked the trademark and forced Sierra to re-name Hero's Quest to Quest for Glory. I guess they had to accomplish legally what they couldn't accomplish in gameplay quality.

Back to Antares! Or maybe not! Antares definitely requires a particular mood, and I've been having so much luck with these one-offs that I might move on to Return of the Ring to keep the momentum going.

Game 288: Legend (1992)

       

Legend

United Kingdom

Mindscape (developer and publisher)

Released 1992 for Amiga, Atari ST, and DOS

Published in the United States as The Four Crystals of Trazere

Date Started: 7 April 2018

 
If there's one major thing that you can credit British RPGs of the late 1980s and early 1990s, it's their experimentation with different perspectives. While most U.S. games remained stubbornly divided between iconographic, top-down, and first-person perspectives, British games (at least, those not based on Dungeon Master)  played with side-view and what we might call "studio" perspectives: those where the screen seems to be framing a scene from a play (Moonstone, Galdregon's Domain, Heavy on the Magick). More important, the U.K. was ahead of the curve on axonometric perspectives, which would eventually comprise a solid chunk of all RPGs. In the U.S., only a small percentage of games so far have used this perspective, perhaps most famously in Faery Tale Adventure (1986) and Ultima VI (1990) and its two spin-offs, and in these cases the perspectives are barely offset from top-down. Axonometric examples from the U.K. include Lords of Chaos (1990), Heimdall (1991), and HeroQuest (1991).
       

A group of four characters explores a dungeon from an axonometric angle.

          
(What I'm calling "axonometric" is usually given as "isometric," but every time I use it we have to have a long discussion about whether it's technically isometric, which means the X, Y, and Z axes have been equally shortened to achieve a 3-D effect, or just axonometric, which can involve any number of perspective angles. In the case of Legend, if it's not actually isometric, it's damned close.)

HeroQuest and Legend both seem ultimately inspired by the action-adventure Cadaver (1990), which featured the same perspective, the same-shaped game area, the same sorts of controls and indicators in the periphery. When I reviewed HeroQuest, I remember remarking that the graphics were quite good, but the limited gameplay didn't give you anything to do with the interesting items you see, and the combat was just laughable. In Legend, both elements are improved, though they still have a long way to go. 
           

Cadaver (1990) seems to be the source of the interface for both HeroQuest (1991) and Legend.

          
Legend was written by Anthony Taglione and is set in the same universe as Taglione's previous Bloodwych (1989). It was marketed in the U.S. as The Four Crystals of Trazere, which is how my list had it until I started playing and found more available copies and documentation under its original name. Graphics are by Peter Owen-James, who also did Bloodwych and Anthony Crowther's Captive (1990). He seems to specialize in gaunt, hollow-cheeked protagonists who look more desperate than heroic.

The brief setup is that some ancient evil is reaching into the world of Trazere and turning its residents into vicious monsters. Four characters--a berserker, a runemaster, a troubadour, and an assassin--assemble to investigate and put a stop to it.
          

The brief backstory is covered in about half a dozen screens.

         
In character creation, you have to go with these four classes. You can choose a name and sex and broadly adjust ability scores by assigning various elemental icons to the character. For instance, "Earth" boosts strength, constitution, and armor class and reduces intelligence, speed, and dexterity while "Air" does the opposite. I went with an all-female party. Each character comes with a starting selection of weapons and armor and a little gold.
         

Creating a new berserker.

        
Gameplay begins on an overland map from which you can direct the party to various towns and castles and such. Other parties and armies roam the map at the same time, their sigils indicating their power levels, and the manual suggests you can fight them in something called "banner encounters," but I didn't try that in the first session. The manual hinted that the dungeon of Treihadwyl (similar to the "Treidwyl" of Bloodwych) was intended as a starting dungeon, and that was the closest city, so I went there.
          

This reminds me of the overland maps in Moonstone (1991) or Dragon Lord (1990).

        
The city has a "menu town" on top of the dungeon, with options to visit the blacksmith, tavern, artificer, and adventurer's guild. There's not much to do at these locations when you first begin, so I immediately headed for the dungeon.
        

Not much to do here until I earn more money.

         
I am mortified at how long it took me to get out of the first room. To start, I had trouble interpreting the elements in the periphery of the actual gameplay area, in the center of the screen. The central area, surrounded by a black void, is the area where the gameplay actually takes place. The items in the corners are controls and indicators. In the northwest, we have buttons that bring up the automap (the dragon) and character inventory. In the northeast are the directional indicator and a chicken that unkindly flaps its wings when the party is fleeing. The southeast shows available actions (based on equipped items) for the active character.
        

The characters arrive in the first room.

        
Finally, the southwest is where you can select your active character from among the four. The stacks of skulls next to them depict their health levels.

I realized from the manual that you select the characters in the southwest, but I didn't realize they were the same characters milling about the center of the screen. I thought they were starting outside the room and would have to open the first door to enter it. In other words, I didn't realize they were controls instead of the actual people. I spent a good 10 minutes trying to figure out how to open that door before I realized that by selecting them, I was simply choosing which figure in the center of the screen was active.

The core of gameplay in Legend is exploring these dungeon rooms and finding the keys, or solving the puzzles, necessary to open doors and access further rooms. The placement of keys imposes a certain linearity on room exploration, but the two dungeon levels in Treihadwyl weren't all that big anyway. The game tells you explicitly what type of key is needed to unlock each door, and you simply have to search items until you find them. Just about any piece of furniture--chests, clocks, desks, tables, weapon racks--can hold treasures, including items. There's no difficulty in opening and looting them--no hidden items, no locks, no traps.
        

My assassin finds a key in a clock.

       
The harder part is the occasional puzzles. They have something of a Dungeon Master quality, with which of course Taglione was intimately familiar. Most of the usable objects are levers or buttons, but they often have non-obvious effects, sometimes in other rooms. Some examples below.
     

This was a tough one. The lever in the middle changed what the lever on the left did--either cause the pillar in the northwest to rotate or belch fire. I had to hit both of the runes with fire to lower the spikes in the northeast, which allowed me to push buttons on those pillars, which did something in a different room, I think.

I had to find a key to open this door to pull the lever behind it to do something in another room that would then allow me to enter this room from the west side.

The troubadour prepares to push a lever that will teleport the runemaster to the inaccessible western area. There, she'll be able to loot the large chest, then pull the lever to return. The plaque in front of the assassin said "send a friend" as a hint.

          
Aside from my confusion on the interface, one of the reasons that I couldn't get out of the first room was that it took me a while to understand the puzzle. Each of the two northern corners had a rune, and I finally had to break down and read the manual thoroughly to realize that the runes correspond to the game's magic system. (Between the puzzles and use of runes, there is some similarity here to 1990's DarkSpyre.) The sigel rune (looks like an "s") is associated with damage and the nȳd rune (looks like an "x") is associated with healing. The game wanted me to cast the appropriate spells on these rune tiles to open the east and west doors.

Thus, I had to explore the spell system right away. It's interesting. You create spells as pairs of runes, the first specifying the "direction" and the second specifying the "effect." Directions include forward (the tile in front of the character), surround (the 8 tiles surrounding the character), missile (wherever the caster aims), and "continuous" which applies to a subset of spells. Effects are damage, healing, paralysis, antimagic, dispelling, charming, speed, teleport, regeneration, resurrection, death, and "make weapon," the last a kind of odd-one out.
         

Mixing spells in the spell interface. This reminds me a bit of Dragon Lord (1990).

      
Both directions and effects require reagents, of which the runemaster begins with a large stock. The game is explicit about what reagents are required for what spells. You select the direction and appropriate reagent, then the path and the appropriate reagent, then mix them together. Once you've done this once, the spell appears on a recipe list and you can mix new ones with just the click of a button.
           

Now that I've mixed a couple of spells, I can just go to this screen to mix them again.

          
My understanding is that it's possible to mix extremely complex spells by combining multiple effect runes--for instance, a targeted spell that dispels the enemy's magic protection and then paralyzes him. But the runemaster only starts with the runes necessary for healing and damage, so that will have to wait until later.

Once I figured out how to mix targeted spells for healing and damage, I was able to cast them at the runes in the corners and open the doors.
       

The door opens after I blast the rune with a healing spell.

       
The next major issue is combat, of course. Any room you enter for the first time might contain a swarm of foes, but they can also respawn randomly in rooms you've already visited. I have no idea what the enemies are; the game identifies them nowhere in the interface. By appearance so far, they've included things like goblins, kobolds, orcs, wizards, and beholders. But there's no way to get their names or a sense of how powerful they are.

Combat is a chaotic free-for-all that does a decent job anticipating the Infinity Engine. You have to click on each character and activate their weapons to prompt them to engage the enemies. Enemies puff away as they die, but a lot of them seem to have some kind of teleport ability which looks the same. You can't select a specific enemy or otherwise do much to guide the character in combat. Sometimes they seem to go for the closest enemy; other times, they take the most roundabout route to the farthest enemy and insist on attacking from his least-accessible side. Of course, they get hung up on obstacles easily, and certain rooms are designed to make it almost impossible for more than one character to engage the enemy at a time.
         

A few seconds of combat. This is only a little faster than in the actual game.

         
A good solution in the latter case is to flee to a previous room where there's more space to spread out--enemies always follow--but you run a couple of risks. Characters are supposed to stop fleeing when you hit the "rally" button (or ENTER) but sometimes they don't, and you may end up in a worse room than where you started. Moreover, every time you transition screens, there's a chance that enemies will respawn, which means you might find yourself fighting both the original foes plus respawning ones from one or two rooms.

Often, enemies fixate on the first character they see, and if it happens to be one of the weaker ones (i.e., the runemaster or assassin), they can pound away his hit points mercilessly in a few seconds. But it's extremely hard--impossible, really--to coerce your characters into any kind of formation. Success at combat boils down to luck and, unfortunately, a lot of reloads.
       

The party battles some beholders and other monsters in a fairly limited-movement area.

       
You have just a few tactics. Each character has a special ability. The berserker can go into "berserker rage" and do some extra damage. The assassin can "hide in shadows" and theoretically backstab enemies, but good luck actually navigating him around in the chaos of combat. The troubadour can play a song. He only starts with "March of the Bold Ones," a weak regeneration spell that doesn't help much in combat but ensures that you can fully heal after combat before moving on.

Chief among the tactics, theoretically, is the runemaster's ability to cast spells. In the chaos of combat, with everyone moving every which way in real-time, it's almost impossible to successfully target either a healing or damage spell, but you can pause combat at any time and take your time studying the landscape. Without the pause option, I would have given up the game in its early hours, because it takes me at least a few seconds to identify who my party members are. If they're differentiated by color, I can't tell it except for the assassin. I have to study the figures carefully to look at their clothes or weapons, which is hard when they're in the middle of combat and running around the map.
         

This happened too often.

      
You can't activate new actions, switch characters, or do anything else while paused, but you can click on the screen to target a previously-initiated action. Again, it feels a lot like an early version of Infinity Engine combat, except that the Infinity Engine has more tactics and allows you to do a lot more while paused. Those extra options make quite a bit of difference. On the other hand, I'm new to this game, and it's possible that combats will feel more tactical as I acquire more items and powers. I've found area-effect items and scrolls, but I don't see how you keep your own party out of the area of effect. The game would be so much easier if you could just direct one character from room to room, but everyone has to go at once.

There's a huge imbalance in combat power, and thus earned experience. The berserker is killing machine who is rarely in danger of death, does about 10 times the damage of the weaker characters, and earns more experience than the rest of the party combined. This, of course, may change as I get more proficient with spells. I could also deliberately keep her out of combat by not clicking on his weapon, but for the first dungeon, at least, I really need her.

Thus, I blundered and reloaded through the two dungeon levels beneath the city. There were fairly regular equipment upgrades in the chests; this post is getting long so I'll talk more about equipment next time. I returned to the city once to see if I could level up, but only the berserker could.
          

Intelligence doesn't really do much for the berserker.

        
The first level had 15 rooms, and I've found 13 so far on Level 2. But there are corridor screens in between "rooms," and while not as complex, they often have their own items and combats. The total number of screens per level is around 30-35.
           

An automap helps.

         
Unfortunately, I'm stuck on Level 2. There's a room where I have to shut off a series of obstacles along a narrow path. Another room has a series of buttons behind locked doors, and I need four ornate keys to open the doors and push the buttons. I've found two. The fourth is, I'm sure, is beyond the door in the screenshot below.
            

The characters wait for inspiration to strike.

             
The floor runes are clearly the key to this puzzle. But you can't cast spells across the void, so I can't hit the five on the detached platform. I can only hit the one in the far southwest corner, but all that does is to cause a fireball to come belching out of one of the northern pillars. Nothing in the other rooms seems to affect anything here. I am thus stuck and will try to find a hint online if no one has any for me here.

The game certainly isn't the same old thing. I'll give it that. And I kind of look forward to seeing what happens outside with the "banner encounters." But I don't know if I'll be able to come to an accord with this combat system, and I thus hope there aren't too many of these dungeons to explore.

Time so far: 4 hours