Game 232: Moonstone: A Hard Days Knight (1991)

    

Moonstone: A Hard Days Knight

Canada

Anderson Gae Studios (developer); Mindscape (publisher)

Released in 1991 for Amiga, 1992 for DOS

Date Started: 19 October 2016
Date Ended: 22 October 2016

Total Hours: 9

Difficulty: Moderate-Hard (3.5/5)

Final Rating: 32

Ranking at Time of Posting: 141/230 (57%)

Raking at Game #453: 304/453 (67%)

Moonstone took me a long time to get up and running, but once I did I had fun with it. It's an interesting fusion of light strategy, light action, and light RPG. A session can easily take 3-6 hours, and there's no saving. There won't be many more such "single session" RPGs on the list.

I ended up vacillating between the DOS and Amiga versions. I'm on an extended road trip, and I left my controller at home (which probably wouldn't have worked anyway), so I needed some way to emulate the joystick-only requirement on the keyboard. After a lot of effort setting up the diagonal controls, the Amiga turned out to be the only platform on which I could fully emulate the joystick. However, I had trouble with video and screen captures with WinUAE. For some reason, every time I try to take video, it just makes a 0KB .avi file but doesn't actually record anything. It also puts huge thick black borders around every static screen capture and saves them as bitmaps (yes, I know I can edit both, but that's a pain). Because so much in this game is rapid and difficult to capture with my usual Amiga screenshot method (Windows 10's clipping tool), I used DOSBox for some screen shots and all video. The drawback with the DOS version was that I couldn't figure out how to emulate diagonal controls on the joystick, so I didn't have my full set of combat actions.
    

How most of my early combats ended.

    
Action-oriented combat is the most important feature of Moonstone. It's relentless, hard, confusing, and increases in difficulty throughout the game. It's the type of mechanic that I absolutely suck at, and I had to spend about 90 minutes reloading a save state at the first combat I tried before I felt I finally had the controls...well, not "mastered," but at least "learned." I soon discovered that every enemy type requires a different approach to combat, so even the lessons of that long practice session didn't carry me through the entire game.
     

"Character creation" is really just selecting a color.

     
On the surface, combat seems easy. When you aren't holding down the "fire" button, the joystick moves you around the screen. When you are holding it down, it executes various attack and defense moves--one for each of the 8 points of the joystick. Sounds easy, but the problem is that the combat options associated with each direction aren't necessarily intuitive, and they also swap sides depending on which way the character is facing. So when you're facing right, upper-left throws daggers, straight up executes a powerful overhand attack, upper-right does an upward thrust, left does a backward thrust, right does a swing, lower-left is a block, straight down is a special block that counters enemies' special attacks, and lower-right is a lunge. Turn and face left, and the top and bottom options are the same but everything else reverses.
    

Battling some spear-wielding jackass.

    
Someone with better dexterity could figure it out, but I spent most of my practice sessions just bumbling around. It didn't get easier until I decided to just focus on movement and one or two attacks (primarily swings and overhead chops) that I could rely on. Enemies rarely stay far enough away to throw daggers and upward thrusts only work in a few places anyway.

Let's back up to the story. "The Druids sent their best knights to Stonehenge," the opening scenes of Moonstone tell us, "so they may be dubbed into the Quest for the MOONSTONE." I'm trying and failing to come up with a sentence of similar length that's even more guaranteed to send historians into fits of apoplexy. "When George Washington signed up to fight Nazis in the Boer War, he called upon every strategy he learned during the Crusades" might fit the bill. But it soon turns out that the "druids" and "Stonehenge" of Moonstone aren't meant to be in Britain. The terrain doesn't even come close to matching, and the closest cities are called "Highwood" and, oddly, "Waterdeep."
     

Visiting "Waterdeep," some distance from the Sword Coast.

    
Every thousand years, the manual tells us, the warriors of the realm have a special opportunity to win a "gift of ultimate power" from the gods. Fighting through "horrible demons of immense power and strength," the warrior must recover a Moonstone from the Valley of the Gods, then race to Stonehenge and present it to Danu, "the great Moon God."

The game supports up to 4 players. If playing alone, as I did, the other 3 players are computer-controlled. Each player explores the map in turn, trying to find 4 keys that will allow him to access the Valley of the Gods at the center of the map. There, if he defeats the Guardian, he'll be rewarded with a Moonstone. He takes the Moonstone back to Stonehenge to win the game.

A secondary goal during the player's exploration is to amass an inventory of magic items, experience, and gold, the latter of which he may use in the two towns to purchase equipment upgrades.
    

I and the other knights explore the map as a dragon swoops around menacingly.

    
Most of the exploration is done at a series of about 20 "lairs" that dot the map. Each has one or more monsters defending a chest, which may contain a combination of gold, magic items, and keys. As the knights acquire these items, the other knights might attack them hoping to acquire their spoils. Each knight starts with 5 lives and loses 1 life for each lost combat. Lives can be restored by paying healers in cities and by sacrificing magic items to Danu at Stonehenge. If you fall below 3 lives, you can get a couple more by returning to your "home village" (your starting location), but you can only do this three times.
    

After conquering one of the "lairs," I find one of the keys to the Valley of the Gods.

    
Playing with other human players would be an entirely different experience than playing with computer-controlled knights. The AI of the computer-controlled characters is pretty stupid. They basically just swarm the human player until you defeat them in enough combats that they lose their lives and die permanently, leaving little graves on the game map. They never return home to heal, nor visit towns to spend their money.

The role-playing elements of Moonstone are light but reasonably satisfying. You get 1 experience point for clearing a lair, 3 experience points for killing the dragon (below), and 3 for defeating the Guardian in the Valley of the Gods. Every time you amass 3 points, you can spend them on 1 point of strength (increases combat damage), endurance (increases movement per round), and constitution (increases hit points). Each of these attributes starts at 1 and might end the game at 3 or 4. Apparently, if you have 4 human players in the game, it only takes 1 experience point to increase an attribute, which again creates a very different game, with some players ending with minimal strength but a huge hit point reservoir and others favoring the opposite.
     

Raising my constitution with some of my experience. I've collected a few inventory items, including a claymore, a suit of chainmail, a healing potion, a Talisman of the Wyrm, and a key.

    
About half the ruins contain gold, which can be spent on healing and equipment upgrades, although the only one that you'd want to buy in a single-player game is "battle armor," since you can loot daggers from slain knights and you ultimately find a sword--the Sword of Sharpness--better than anything the shops sell. Other magic items include a Gem of Seeing, which lets you look in lairs and see what treasures they have, a Ring of Protection, and Talismans of the Wyrm, each of which halves the damage done to the character by the dragon.

There are a handful of delightfully devious items that, again, would only make sense in a game against other human players. Scrolls of Protection, for instance, allow you to avoid other players' attacks against you. A Scroll of Acquisition allows you to steal one item from any other player anywhere on the map. Scrolls of the Wyrm direct the dragon to attack another knight. Adding a twist, each of these items can be cursed. Thus, a player who accidentally reads a cursed Scroll of Protection will find that all the battle controls are backwards, and a cursed Scroll of the Wyrm naturally has the dragon attack the player who uses it.
  

In Waterdeep, you can supposedly donate your gold to Mythral the Mystic for a "chance" to increase your attributes. There's also a chance that visiting him will lower your attributes. I don't know what was going on with my game, but every time I visited Mythral, no matter how much I donated, my stats went down.
     

This cost me 100 gold pieces.

    
The game has a few other twists. After about half a dozen turns, a dragon appears and starts circling the map. If he passes over any knight, there's a chance he'll attack. In a game with other players, I'm not sure if I'd want the dragon attack or not. Chances of victory are low, but you do get 3 experience points and several magic items. The dragon breathes fire in combat, and it took me a long time to realize that the key to defeating him is to get under his head, so his fire goes over yours, and swipe at his neck from a close position.
      

     
There's also a mage's tower in the upper-right quadrant where the wizard Math might give you a magic item, or some gold, or an attribute increase, or might turn you into a toad for a few rounds.
    

One of the few special locations in the game.

     
But back to combat. The computer-controlled knights are pretty pathetic, so for a single player, the biggest challenge is figuring out how to defeat the other monsters in the game. Each has a different approach to regular attacks and special attacks. As a general strategy, darting north or south on the combat map, then executing an attack just in time for your opponent to walk into it, then darting away, works against almost everyone but takes a lot of patience.

Most lairs generally have more than one enemy. Towards the end, you might face upwards of a dozen. About mid-way through the game, they start attacking you 2 or 3 at a time, too. I don't know if the increased difficulty and numbers are based on how many lairs you've already cleared or on increases in your attributes, but either way the endgame combats are much, much harder.

The manual lists 5 monster types--troggs, ratmen, mudmen, baloks, and trolls--but I swear I faced more than that, and I can't quite reconcile any of the creatures on the screen with the descriptions in the manual. "Mudmen" are the most obvious--they're tall bastards who swing tree branches at you and have a much greater reach than you do, making it hard to hit them first.
     

Is this a trogg, a balok, or a troll? No idea.

     
But there are some undead-looking things that I can't match with any of the descriptions. As you kill one, a new one immediately comes erupting from the ground and kills you in one hit if you don't dart out of the way.
     

Does this look like anything in that list of foes?

    
In the upper-left quadrant, there are some boar-like creatures that gallop back and forth across the combat screen. You have to make a quick attack the moment you see them at the edge of the screen, or they'll bowl you over before your strike finishes executing. Then there are these spearmen, who might make my "most annoying enemies" list in a more consequential game. Their reach is far longer than yours, but they dart too quickly to catch them with daggers. If you face one on either side, they can catch you in a neverending succession of rapid thrusts, and you have no choice but to watch and die.
     

Two spear dudes skewer me.

    
One highlight of combat, particularly for the 1991 player, is the "gore" setting, which ensures that every character death is accompanied by copious on-screen blood loss, dismemberment, and decapitation. Knights in combat always execute a decapitating coup de grâce on their defeated challengers. Almost every review or summary of the game mentions this aspect, but honestly it's pretty tame compared to what we're accustomed to in 2016.
     

My character is beheaded by another knight.

    
A few other notes:

• The game mentions wandering "Black Knights" that you have to watch for, but I never encountered any, or didn't know what they were when I did.

• This is the first game I can remember to offer hints on loading screens.

    

     

• There's a gambling game in cities, but I lost every time I played.

     

It's well-animated, anyway.

    

• Each knight can visit each "lair" only once, after which it disappears from the map. Sometimes, you fight an exhausting battle at a lair only to find that another knight has already been there and claimed the treasure.

• The game features nice animation in the opening and closing screens. But if you can perceive a difference between the Amiga and DOS versions of these screens, I think you're making it up.

• DOSBox either had problems emulating the sound, or the sound for the DOS version was just awful. But I didn't really experience the Amiga sound because I was mostly playing the game during a time when I had people around me and I was supposed to be working, so I had the sound off.

• Technically, I guess there are multiple "Moonstones" that you can obtain in the Valley of the Gods, and you need to wait until yours corresponds with the right phase of the moon (shown between turns) before you enter Stonehenge to win the game. In a multi-player game, this would give other players a chance to defeat your character while you wait. In a single-player game, everything else on the map is probably dead by then, so you just end up passing a few turns until the moon aligns.

   

If I have the "new moon" Moonstone, I have a lot of waiting to do.

   
It took me about 5 false starts to finally win the game, even against the pathetic computer AI. Once I had the four keys, I went to the Valley of the Gods, where the Guardian--a whirling genie-like creature, was probably the easiest enemy in the game. (At that point, I had been used to fighting 3 creatures at once and 15 creatures total.)

    

It killed me here, but only because I stopped to take a screenshot.

     

After defeating the Guardian, I returned to Stonehenge with the Moonstone and got the endgame. "You have completed the quest," the end titles informed me, before taking me to the "ceremony of the Moonstone." In said ceremony, my warrior stood triumphant on a platform in the middle of Stonehenge while scantily-clad girls danced around him.

     

      

Then a portal opened up in the heavens...

    

    

...and my knight was sucked up into the night sky to become a constellation. I'm not sure how much of a "reward" that is. But the game deserves credit for a series of victory screens more interesting and complex than the typical RPG that takes dozens of hours.

    

I suspect this would actually kind of suck.

        

As I said, I had fun with the game once I got the hang of combat. The process of exploring the ruins and finding items is satisfying and relatively quick, and character improvements from both equipment and attributes is immediately noticeable in combat. (Without the extra enemies towards the end, the game would be far too easy.) Let's see how it does on a GIMLET:

    

• 2 points for a fairly minimal game world.

• 3 points for character creation and development. Creation is nothing special--you just select a name and a color--but as above, development is swift and satisfying.

• 2 points for a couple of NPCs who help you out, but there's no interaction.

    

This guy just barely qualifies as an NPC.

     

• 3 points for foes that act differently depending on type, forcing you to adapt. Alas, no role-playing encounters, but it's not that sort of game.

• 3 points for an action-oriented combat that nonetheless makes you think and plan.

    

A "mudman" waits for me to recover.

     

• 3 points for a decent set of equipment.

     

Purchasing items in town.

      

• 4 points for an economy that never loses value (you always need to heal, if nothing else)

• 2 points for a main quest.

     

The game's final screen.

   

• 4 points for graphics, sound, and interface. The graphics are fun, and what I heard of the sound in the Amiga version was serviceable, but I have no patience for joystick-only interfaces.

• 6 points for gameplay. The game is meant to be replayed, and offers a slightly different game depending on what knight you choose (each knight has a different starting area). It's brisk and fun, and offers a satisfying challenge in its difficulty.

That gives us a final score of 32, which isn't too bad, particularly given that it's not really a classic RPG. Morever, it's the first British game to break the "weirdness" barrier that I talked about in my entry on Heavy on the Magick--although we have to note that the Brits still don't show any signs of understanding classic RPG conventions. [Ed. And as we learned in the comments, the game isn't British but rather Canadian.]

    

At least the tagline is accurate.

    

I had a feeling that our friends at the perpetually annoying Amiga Power would love this one. After all, it has virtually no RPG elements and spends nearly its entire wad on graphics and sound. So I was surprised to see reviewer Neil West rating it only a 73/100, basically saying that its not quite enough of an action game and not quite enough of an RPG. Overall, Moonstone was pretty controversial among reviewers, with ratings from a low of 48 (Power Play) to a high of 100 (Top Secret). American magazines tended to overlook this one.
    

An interview on a fan site credits Todd Prescott with the game's concept. He indicates he was inspired by "a combination of D&D and the board games Talisman and The Dark Tower." He approached a colleague, Rob Anderson, and Anderson handled most of the programming. For combat, the pair was heavily influenced by the action game Barbarian (1987). Prescott indicates that the game never had a U.S. release because Toys R Us thought it was too violent. The limited release unfortunately sank plans for a Moonstone 2. This was Prescott's only game; Anderson went on to a longer career at Mindscape, Electronic Arts, and Sega (among others), and currently lists himself as an independent video game developer. None are RPGs, so we won't be encountering him again.

Moonstone seems to have a lot of retro-fan love these days, and I understand why. It's not going to be part of my soul or anything, but it was a fun way to kill a couple of days in a hotel room. Let's see if the same can be said of another Mindscape title, Knightmare.

****

Alas, Fer & Flamme continues to give me trouble. A kind commenter sent along the French manual, which allowed me to advance through character creation. The problem is, when I get to the end of the creation process, the game insists on saving the party to disk. I insert a blank disk, give the party a name, and hit the "$" key as prompted, and then get this:

    

     

Unless there's an obvious workaround I'm missing, this game might not be playable after all.

Game 265: The Kingdom of Krell (1987)

Developer Steven Screech might want to re-think his little personal logo.

    

The Kingdom of Krell

United Kingdom

Anco (developer and publisher)

Released in 1987 for ZX Spectrum

Date Started: 8 October 2017
Date Ended: 14 October 2017

Total Hours: 26

Difficulty: Moderate-Hard (3.5/5)

Final Rating: 16

Ranking at Time of Posting: 36/265 (14%)

British ZX Spectrum games occupy a weird little sub-genre that I'll have to fully analyze after I reach the last one in 1989. This is my eighth, after The Ring of Darkness (1982), Lone Wolf: Flight from the Dark (1984), Out of the Shadows (1984), City of Death (1985), Heavy on the Magick (1986), and The Wizard of Tallyron (1986). Five others--The Valley (1982), The Citadel of Chaos (1984), The Forest of Doom (1984), The Master of Magic (1985), and Seas of Blood (1985)--I played on Commodore 64 ports but were originally written for the Spectrum.

The Ring of Darkness is the odd-one-out, being mostly plagiarized from Ultima. The rest are highly original, lacking clear progenitors in their styles and conventions, not only avoiding American RPG tropes but almost consciously shunning them. More unexpected, however, is how oddly foreign they feel, coming from an English-speaking nation that manages to churn out perfectly comprehensible (from an American perspective) books, films, and television shows. In some ways, they're as bizarre as French RPGs.

As the popularity of the ZX Spectrum wanes in the late 1980s and the Amiga begins to dominate British RPG development, we see the same stark originality (with both good and bad consequences) in games like Galdregon's Domain (1989), Lords of Chaos (1990), Heimdall (1991), and Moonstone: A Hard Days Knight (1991), but the sense of the bizarre fades, which makes me wonder how much of it is due to the platform. With its extremely limited keyboard, stunted default memory, and cassettes as the primary distribution media, the platform was never going to support games with the same speed, complexity, and ease of play as U.S. players were getting on, say, the Commodore 64.

The Kingdom of Krell is the first ZX Spectrum RPG to require the 128 model (issued in 1985). With all this extra memory, the developer could have offered a more complex engine, more tactical combat, or better graphics, but instead what he did was to make the physical game world ridiculously large. The box boasts "more than 2,500 locations." I only mapped a little over 1,900, but either figure is far too large when the number of those locations with an item, NPC, or other plot-driven need to be there is around 60.

The backstory is amusing in its lack of epic ambition. The game is set in a "remote part of Britain" in the "misty past." The custom of these people is that when a young man reaches his 18th birthday, he has to spend a month in the wilderness alone before he's welcomed back to the tribe as a man. The tribe throws a party for the protagonist; he gets drunk; and he awakens the next day "alone in the vast wilderness."
    

Part of the vast wilderness.

     
Character creation is nothing more than a name, from which the game procedurally generates your six attributes: strength, wisdom, intelligence, dexterity, constitution, and charisma. This is the first game that I know of in which attributes are derived from the chosen name; Captive (1990) would later use the same method. Anyway, I lost patience trying different names and ended up adventuring with a sub-par character; I would recommend anyone else playing the game hold out for at least 15s in strength, dexterity, and intelligence and 10s in everything else, lest their reload counts hit the astronomically high levels that mine did.

As the game begins, you're on a "barren grassy plain" with a sling at your feet. The image shows a bridge, which is one of the game's oddities. As you turn different directions, the screen changes to show the terrain in the next square, not the one you're currently in.
         

Sure looks like notable features to me.

      
That bridge is probably the most complex graphic that you get in the game. Among the c. 2,000 "locations" in the game are about 12 different terrain types, including "barren, grassy plains," "dense, dark forests," and "long, dark tunnels." The author wastes precious descriptive text space saying things like "well, here you are" and "I don't know what else to tell you," with at least one misspelling on every screen. I didn't find a single "unique" location in the game.
      

A decent percentage of the game's many vaunted locations.

     
You interface with the game not with a keyboard, which would make sense given that the game was developed for a PC, but with a joystick. You cycle through the various icons and use the button to execute an action or move to a sub-menu. This is true even of movement. Main actions include move, sleep, fight, cast a spell, take or drop an object, speak, handle various disk operations, and "other," the latter including eat and check the time. To move, you have to activate the "shoe" icon then the appropriate directional arrow. If you're not already facing a particular direction, your first move turns you in that direction and then your second and subsequent moves actually walk you in that direction.
  

A typical Krell location. A zombie is waiting as I arrive. The scene shows more icy wastes to my north. "Crevasses" is misspelled.

      
Krell is such a deadly place, I can't believe how irresponsible I was to get drunk and pass out here. You can't even sleep in a hut without getting interrupted by a monster 50% of the time. Foes are D&D standard--giant rats, hobgoblins, ogres, skeletons, trolls, orcs, and the like--and there's around a one-in-four chance that one will be waiting for you in every new square. If you managed to kill it, there's a decent chance another monster will be waiting just behind, sometimes two or three more.
     

I only encountered one dragon in the game. He wasn't significantly harder than the other monsters.

      
The game doesn't throw easy monsters at you early and harder ones late. You're just as likely to face a "cyclopse" in the opening area as a giant rat. There are some contextual encounters; the graveyard area produces almost exclusively undead, for instance, and the only dragon I encountered was deep in a cavern. For the most part, they don't have any special strengths or weaknesses except that some have more hit points than others.
 
For combat, you select your sword icon and then decide whether to aim it at the enemy's head, torso, or legs. I managed to hit the enemy's head maybe twice in my 15-hour game. Torso is almost always the best bet. After your attack, the enemy gets a swing at you. There is a variety of messages indicating damage--"sliced through your flesh," "took a chunk out of you," mercilessly rips into you"--but basically you just take either 1 or 2 hit points damage for each attack (if the enemy doesn't miss).
           

Exchanging blows with a dwarf.

     
A character might start with 10 hit points at maximum constitution, so as you can imagine, he doesn't last long in long battles. Fortunately, most enemies die within a couple of hits. Moreover, you can eat the corpse (or "carcus," as the game has it) of any slain enemy to regain one hit point. Unfortunately, you don't get any intrinsic attributes for doing so.
      

A skeleton appears right after I killed something else.

     
Your character gets experience from kills but doesn't gain anything from that experience. Despite promises made on the box, neither attributes nor hit points change as he levels up. Only his "rating" changes, which starts at "dung dweller" and progresses through at least 12 levels, including "scavenger," "dog-wrestler," "useful," and "dangerous." I spent so long at Level 10--"Schwarzenegger"--that I thought it was the highest level, but after a while the rating changed to "Psycho," as if it's my fault that monsters spawn practically every square, and finally to, nonsensically "Well Ard." Does that mean something in British?
       

My character at the 20th hour.

     
What does improve with leveling is access to spells. You start with only one: "Detect Magic," which as far as I can tell has no use anywhere in the game. But you soon acquire "Burning Hands," "Detect Evil" (also no use), and "Magic Missile," and both of the offensive spells in that list outperformed combat attacks for my character for the rest of the game. The last spell you acquire, "Disintegrate," reliably one-shots every single enemy, so there's no more reloading once you have it. I spent the entire second half of my playing time with that spell and didn't even bother to carry a weapon from the moment I acquired it.
       

Blasting an enemy with a "Magic Missile."

      
The list of spells includes "Cure Illness" and "Remove Curse," neither of which I experienced in the game. "Teleport" returns you to the starting area, which is handy because there's a one-way path that locks you out of the area. "Magic Mouth" warns you if an enemy approaches while you're sleeping.
      

The full list of spells at the end of the game.

   
There is absolutely no meter for spells. You can cast as many as you want as frequently as you want.

You don't have to fight every enemy that appears. You can try to just brush past them, which I did a lot of after I was already "well ard." Success seems to depend heavily on the enemy type. Sentient NPCs like dwarves and halflings almost always let you go; monsters like cyclopes and ogres catch you about half the time. Giant rats absolutely never let you pass. When it doesn't work, the enemy gets a free attack at you, so it's a bit of a risk.
      

Trust me, this absolutely is not going to work out for you.

      
As for equipment, there's some. Among the game's 1,500+ squares, I found around 40 items: a sling, two swords, two bolas, two spears, two axes, a dagger, two suits of armor, four scrolls, six potions, a shield, a crown, four bags of gold, two precious gems, a torch, and about eight quest items. They seem to be in the same places for every game.
       

My inventory early in the game.

      
There are a lot of mysteries among the inventory items, some of which I'll cover below. Five of the six potions improved attributes--the only other source of character development in the game. None of the weapons markedly outperformed the others. I'm not sure what the torch does, since you can enter caves and tunnels without it. The bags of gold are treated like inventory items, not an actual pool of gold pieces, and as far as I can tell there's no place to spend them. There is no command to equip the shield. As I'll cover below, none of the quest items did anything for me at all.
      

This potion increased my constitution.

     
NPCs are a big part of the game, but I didn't understand their importance until late. At first, I tried to talk with generic sentient creatures like dwarves and halflings but just got rude replies. The "Tongues" spell lets you get rude replies from even non-sentient creatures like cobras and skeletons. When you choose to speak, you can be friendly, neutral, or rude, but I never noticed a difference in the replies I got except once when a friendly overture elicited "GO AWAY" and a rude overture prompted "GO AWAY AND DON'T COME BACK." My comparatively low charisma might have had something to do with it.
      

Krell must have borrowed Sword & Sorcery's random insult generator.

     
Later, I realized that there are a few named NPCs in the world. Almost all of them say the same thing: "DAMIENNE STOLE THE SCROLLS." That's it. No other explanation or assistance. Because of that, I didn't bother noting their locations as I mapped. This would later come back to haunt me.
      

An NPC waits in a temple.

      
So what of any kind of quest? At first, I hoped that the main quest was just to wait out your 30 days and see what kind of score you'd achieved. The clock ticks forward even if you're just standing still, so I tried jacking the CPU speed to maximum and standing in one place for 30 days. Unfortunately, nothing happened, not even when I returned to the starting square.
       

At least the game uses a 24-hour clock.

      
For no reason that I can possibly justify except that I've recorded a loss on two consecutive games, I spent over 20 hours mapping the entire thing, one lethargic square at a time. The sections of the game basically correspond with a map in the manual, from forests to the southwest to ice wastes in the northeast.
    

The map of the land in the game manual.

And my Excel map.

    
I ran into several problems while mapping. As you can see from the map above, the terrain is blocked off into several sections with single-square passages or bridges between them. It's very easy, when you've hit 20 consecutive "barren grassy plains" in a row offering exits only to the north, west, and east, to miss the one that suddenly had a southern exit. This means that there were entire areas, including most of the tunnels at the bottom-right, that I didn't discover until late in the game.

Second, a few NPCs become important later in the game even if all they say is "DAMIENNE STOLE THE SCROLLS" when you first encounter them. I should have been noting their locations. Most of them are in huts or other buildings, and I did go back and re-investigate those, but a few are just standing in the wilderness, and who knows how many of them I overlooked.

Missing NPCs is compounded by another problem: if there are enemies in the same square, the enemy portraits appear on top of the NPCs. You have to kill them before the NPC shows up. I could have just brushed past any number of NPC squares while trying to avoid enemies.

A few NPCs do offer quests. For instance, a man named Graxx stands at the mouth of the cave to the northwest. He says he has a "magical shape" and wants me to collect the four sacred scrolls, presumably the ones that Damienne stole. In the southeast, "Davilla" wants me to kill "Habgoog," who she says is evil. "Megog" asks me to kill "Questilla," who has cursed him with stone skin. Some of these NPCs drop rings after you talk to them; picking them up makes them disappear but adds permanently to one of our attributes.

Some of the NPCs are clearly lying. Once I killed Questilla and returned to Megog, he called me a "foolish man" and said that I'd managed to kill the "chief do-gooder of Krell" and attacked me. I also have suspicions about Davilla, who seems to be using sex to get what she wants and asked me to kill another NPC named "Caldrix" after I was done with Habgoog.
    

Betrayal!

    
The bigger problem is that the NPCs don't always acknowledge what you've done. After I collected the four scrolls, Graxx had nothing to say, not even when I dumped them in his square. NPCs never seem to acknowledge items, not when I returned the Crown of Hod to Hod or the Eye of Graxx to Graxx. There's no "use" or "give" command for items, just pick up and drop, but still it's hard not to feel like I'm missing something.
      

Graxx refuses to acknowledge the scrolls he asked me to bring him.

     
Meanwhile, Davilla acknowledged when I killed Habgoog but not Caldrix, so that quest is stuck in limbo.
       

But I killed Caldrix!

      
There are a lot of other mysteries. In an ancient sacred temple in the southwest, an Oracle. It sits on the ground like an object that you can pick up, although the game tells you it's too heavy. You can't speak to it or do anything useful with it. I never did find the Damienne who had stolen the scrolls. The most I ever got on something that sounded like a main quest was someone named Guntor, who said that I would need the "Staff of the Gods" to destroy "Vulcor," two things I'd otherwise never heard of.
     

Why is this here?

     
My lack of progress might also be related to a final issue: At the top of the map in the northeast, there's a square that says you can go north, but the game freezes every time I enter this area and go north. I'm not sure if this is an "exit" square for after you solve the quests or if it's a bug. If the latter, it would explain why the game manual counts 600 more squares than I do, and why I can't seem to find so many vital things.

Thus, after spending an absurd amount of time mapping such a limited game, I must unfortunately call a halt and declare it unwinnable unless someone comes forward with more information or the "hint sheet" that the manual promises.
      

In an odd innovation, the "B"-side of the cassette has a track of "ambient noises" to listen to while playing. It consists of chirping crickets, howling wind, animal noises, monstrous groans and snorts, the odd clanging of a church bell, distant thunder, screams, and the occasional hint offered by the developer in a Satanic voice. "Ancient Krellian proverbs say, 'Never let your heart rule your head,'" goes one. Another warns about bad potions. I listened to the whole half hour to see if it offered anything to assist with my predicament, but no luck. It's certainly an interesting approach to providing atmosphere to a game.
    

Something about that dragon behind the rock seems familiar.

     
Based on what I experienced, it earns a 16 on the GIMLET, with 1s and 2s for everything except "economy" (0) and "quests" (3); I'm going out on a limb with the latter and assuming that at least one of the encounters is an alternate or side-quest.

I was glad to find a compatible opinion in the only review I could find, from the May 1987 Sinclair User. "My God, is it tedious," Graham Taylor writes, after offering a little praise for the graphics. He's not just talking about the repetitive banality of the areas but also the loading time of those areas; I was running the game at 4x normal speed, so I didn't experience that particular issue. He also thought the icon system was needlessly cumbersome. One aspect I didn't cover above, which I guess was fairly innovative at the time, was the use of RAM for quick-saving and quick-loading the game. This and the large game world were responsible for the title's 128k requirement.

The Kingdom of Krell was written by Steve Screech, who became relatively famous in subsequent years for his soccer games. His portfolio, up to the present day, is almost all sports titles. Neither he nor Anco ever developed or published another RPG, which makes one wonder why they were particularly motivated to create this one.

"The Kingdom of Krell," as a bit of trivia, appears in the 1971 sci-fi novel A Time of Changes by Robert Silverberg. It is also the name of an audio systems manufacturer in Connecticut and a vampire in the Warhammer universe.

It looks like I only have one more ZX Spectrum game, in 1989. I'll miss the emulator--Spectaculator is fantastically easy to use--if not the platform.

****

There's a TI-99 game called Legends coming up, but I can't get it to run. I think I'm doing something wrong with the emulator (Classic99), but I don't know what. I've got the Extended Basic cartridge activated, and from what I understand, it's supposed to just pick things up automatically, but it doesn't. If I try to load it manually, it comes up with "Legends Loading, Please Wait" and then crashes with an "I/O ERROR 07 IN 10." If anyone has successfully gotten this game running, I would appreciate help with the configuration.