Elvira II - The Jaws of Cerberus (1991)

Name:Elvira II - The Jaws of Cerberus
Number:270
Year:1991
Publisher:Horrorsoft
Developer:Horrorsoft
Genre:Adventure/RPG
Systems:Atari ST/Commodore Amiga/Commodore 64/DOS
Country of Origin:United Kingdom
Difficulty:5/5
Time:10 hours 35 minutes
Won:Yes (119W/92L)

The follow-up to the infamous Elvira: Mistress of the Dark, another horror-themed adventure/RPG. Containing much of the same people who made the first one, this should be more of the same, and in such a unique style, that should be a good thing for me. Yet despite being such an easy thing to follow-up on in my mind, there's considerable difference between this and its predecessor. Oh, and the most common methods to play this game destroy the mood completely.

This is the era where such things are usually a hard question. The Amiga likely has better music, but the DOS version will work better in other ways even if it sounds like ass. Loading, your ability to control the speed, possibly even better support for modern gaming layouts. For Elvira I, this was a genuine question for which there was no good answer. Both had good soundtracks, and there weren't any noticeable issues in ScummVM. Whichever you felt like playing, you could easily enjoy.

Elvira II changes things. Normally, in ScummVM, it fixes issues you would realistically have with the Amiga version. Constant loading, no keybinds (because cool kids use a mouse!), the occasional glitch. It does the first two, possibly fixes the third, but it also adds in glitches of its own and screws around with the music to boot. After all, who plays the Amiga version of a game for the music? Even though I managed to get through most of it, I cannot recommend the way I played at all.

That said, this distinction exists because the DOS version has problems of its own. By default, the Adlib soundtrack sounds like some goofy haunted house game, which, despite a major loss in mood, this still isn't. It's not necessarily bad, but it feels goofy without using taking advantage of Roland MT-32 sound instead. Even then, there's a certain mismatch. The opening area sounds like The Incredible Machine, while the insect cave sounds like it was taken from Inca. The Amiga version, when played properly, is unquestionably better, but can you deal with a slight bit of loading every tile? Unquestionably, the music there is best, but if one must play Elvira II, some sacrifice to playability must be made.

As I went through the game, the backstory continues. There are three films being filmed and thus three areas to go through. An underground crypt that was taken from a fantasy RPG...I mean a zombie film. (There are like three zombies in there) A haunted house film that has shades of a Lucio Fulci flick, and is by consequence, the most interesting of the three. An insect cave for...I'm not sure what it is, but it's a cave maze four floors tall, is this supposed to be what it looks like pre or post demonic possession of the place? This question actually bugged me, because the house set seems reasonable, but everything else screamed the kind of production that kills movie studios. We'll call them "Elvira's Gate". Are all those giant worms I killed actual props we built? Sweet Jesus, we were going bankrupt before they started eating our cast and crew.

The game starts, after picking out one of four classes, out in front of the studio which is locked and you need to get inside the security office, which is also locked. You have keys, but they aren't the keys you need to enter...anything. They're your actual keys, presumably to your house and car. There for flavor, or if you feel like getting screwed after the game is over, useful as a spell component. What you have to do, after Elvira manages to jumpscare me in the one time I actually got scared this entire game, is find a rock hidden on one tile throughout the area outside the studio. Starting off with pixel hunting, what fun!
 

There are three movie studios for you to switch between at any time you wish. Kiss of the Spider, a giant insect monster updated for the '90s; House of Horror, a Fulci-esque haunted house film; It Came From Beyond the Grave, which is...uh...a skeleton movie. I'm not actually sure what it's supposed to be, because it sounds like a zombie film, but in actuality, I'm fighting skeletons and goblins like I wandered into a fantasy film. The studio is your oyster.

But that's a lie. In actuality, you have to do these things in a reasonably set order. Go into the insect picture first, and you get killed by giant worms. Go into the zombie picture...and you'll either get killed by a bat you have no idea how to deal with or by skeletons. Until you get to about level 5, you need to explore as many tiles and solve as many puzzles as you can to get that precious experience to survive those two studios.

As a reminder, in the original, you didn't have levels, you just gained experience and skill by fighting. Other stats pretty much only increased or decreased through set events. This is a traditional RPG with no real thought into the system. Stats increase through each level based on your class until you reach level 10. These stats are very important, and the manual kindly explains them:

• Weapon Skill, how well you can hit with a weapon...probably.
• Accuracy, actually, why is this different than weapon skill again?
• Will Power, a higher of these means you don't faint at the sight of a zombie. Never mind that this isn't your first rodeo and last time you took maggots from a freshly severed throat, seeing a smiling head on a platter is the real terror. Can be improved with a spell, important for all of the haunted house stage.
• Magic Resist, how resistant you are to magic attacks. There are two enemies which use magic attacks. Skeletons, which cast glue on you, and the wizard you need to avoid anyway. It does actually help, but you're also nearly done with the game by the time you need it.
• Strength, how much damage you do. Probably connected to how many items you can carry, but I never tested this.
• Constitution, how much health you have.
• Poison Resist, how well you can resist poison. I'm not actually sure how useful this is, considering that by the time this is high enough to matter the only poison attacks left are those from traps. I think it works, in that sometimes when I should have gotten poisoned I wasn't, but that could just be a hallucination.
• Intelligence, what the player character doesn't have, though in this case I'm copying from the manual. Affects mana and the number/power of spells.

Also, that HP icon on the bar? Total amount of health divided among your limbs, if you had full health. The body in the upper left is the one to watch. Get zero in an arm and you can't pick things up, get zero in a leg and you can't walk anymore. Get zero in the other two parts, and game over. Also, PP is power points, your mana. Mana regenerates, health does not, for that you need a spell.

Spells in this game are mostly like the ones from the last game. Find regents, then you can cast that spell. The difference is, this only prepares the spell, and you carry around the spellbook yourself, preparing and casting them without the aid of Elvira...since she's locked away in one of the studios. Three spells are castable without regents, one of which is a healing spell. I like the system, except that since you need to wait, it would have been nice if there was a rest function somewhere. If there's no way that someone can attack me, I should be able to rest, not have to pull out a novel or something while my mana gets restored. That's not an exaggeration, it takes a while.

Given that it's Elvira, you'd be right in thinking that it's easy to screw yourself by using regents the wrong way, but only in one case. In order to win the game, you need to cast the Resurrect spell on a dead priest, and among other things, you need a brain, and an item important to the deceased, in this case the walkthroughs said "Bible". Other religious items may work, but curiously, nobody mentions trying that bit. The brain and the Bible are used in other spells. The former Turn Undead and the latter Unholy Barrier, which works against the undead. You cannot cast this spell without first using at least one brain to cast Turn Undead, and if you were unwise, you may have used Unholy Barrier in an encounter that it didn't actually help in.

Normally, I don't like spoiling things like that in these reviews, but let's be honest, if you weren't playing cautiously, you'd lose. Technically, I lost, but I'm not going to let a little thing like "the game arbitrarily decided I did not pick one option of dialog in a crappy system" stop me from counting it. It's not that the game is difficult and requires you to be careful to not end up in an unwinnable state, it's that the difficulty sucks and the unwinnable states are like playing Russian Roulette.

Let's talk about that dialog system. It's bad and adds absolutely nothing to the game. Elvira I didn't need a dialog system. The only talking that happened was when the captain of the guard threw you in prison and Elvira saved you. And you didn't talk back, because you were either getting thrown around or getting your marching orders. Here, there's a four option dialog, which stinks for three reasons:

1. It adds nothing, there is no real choice. You talk to four people, one of which is a magical Indian type who is employed as a janitor, because of course he is. He tells you about the Cerberus of the title. There is no reason for this to be a conversation, just tell me what's going on with him.
2. It adds in completely pointless dead-ending. What kind of moron, in a situation in which his girlfriend, her financial assets, and likely his future, makes fun of someone? "Elvira's going to get sacrificed to a demon, but me make firewater joke!" Elvira isn't joking when she refers to the player character as an idiot.
3. It doesn't work very well. Now, this could be ScummVM, but the text box wouldn't advance if I didn't click on it, and if I clicked on it, it might automatically select an option if I'm not careful. Like, say, asking an Indian where the firewater is.

The other two characters don't add anything either. Two of them require you to dress a certain way using photos, then guessing the right dialog choice, then the third, the priest, who you have to resurrect so you can properly cast a Bind Demon spell, requires you to exhaust the options with the Indian. Exhaust the right options, in case your guy decides to ask him how many beads it is for a bride or some crap. This doesn't even take anything away, this is just annoying.

The Indian explains to you what the overarching goal of the game is. Summon Cerberus, then get rid of him using three Indian artifacts he'll enchant for you if he gets his peace pipe. Each artifact is in one of the studios, with the peace pipe being in the haunted house set. Later, there are two books in the library which explain the details of the Bind Demon and Resurrect spells, which explain how you need to resurrect the priest in the graveyard movie in order to win. Of course, the Indian could have explained that, but as I said, the game discourages talking to characters and once I got the gist I used my metaknowledge of how these games go to fill in the gaps. My mistake.

There are basically two halves to the game where the other aspects of them only incidentally matter. The adventure half, which consists of the lobby, the second floor, basement and haunted house set; The RPG half, which consists of the insect picture and the graveyard picture. In the adventure part, the RPG aspect is really only important for like two parts, and in the RPG part, most of the adventure aspect could just be thought of as a DM who wants to see you make a new character.

Let's take this scene from the second floor. I want to know what's in here, so I click on things. The game gives me a vague object name, not very informative. After I'm done, it seems like there's nothing really interesting. Why is that? Well, it's because that just adds that item to the room inventory. Now you switch from your inventory to the room inventory, then you can examine it. Sometimes, you get other actions. Often, this too, tells you nothing if you didn't pay attention to your spellbook, which has a list of regents. Does this match the description of one, or could it if it was thrown in a freezer? Maybe it's something you know you can use somewhere else, so you pick it up. Rather than a normal take command, you drag the object to the icon of your inventory. Because a take command is so lame.
 

Perhaps it's because of this that most of the puzzles feel less like clever but difficult riddles and more like using whatever options you have available to you until something works. The past two games used horror tropes to good effect. For instance, in Personal Nightmare, you used a mirror to direct light into a vampire's face during the day hours. This made sense because everyone knows that vampires are affected by light in some manner, and if they are not, it is an important plot point. Here, in order to kill a vampire, you use a tuning fork to destroy a glass window in order for light to hit the vampire. On an in-door studio. At night.

Most puzzles are okay, but a lot of their implementations are strange. You'll need to use this spell or item to get an object, when there are very valid other options, and the game just ignores them. In two cases you can use the Telekinesis spell to get an item...then in other cases it won't work or will just be treated like picking up an item otherwise. Some items which are protected by traps which hurt your hand can be stopped by gauntlets, others cannot. You have to figure out which will actually work and which the developers just didn't think of. Or possibly the usual adventure game problem, not giving the proper feedback for wrong answers. And instant death events in a RPG are just lame. 

That leaves the RPG half. Eventually, by wandering around the game and solving puzzles, you can get enough experience to fight something and not die right away. You might even survive. At first, it's tricky, because you have just enough skill to be able to fight the first kinds of insects...until you face off against a mosquito. Did I mention that there's poison in this game and said poison can only be cured with a spell for which there are only three regents for? Sources of poison are unlimited, of course, and the regents are behind the creatures poisoning you.

This creates an annoying roadblock for a while. There's a certain point in the adventure half where you can't really get any more experience without first getting stuff from the other sections, and that's the point at which you can either fight against skeletons which are stronger than you, or mosquitoes you can't hit and poison you every time they hit. You have to hope you get lucky, there's simply no other path forward that I could see.

Once you actually get into the RPG part, it's a rather uneventful one-person Dungeon Master kind of experience. Explore a massive dungeon that was designed by people whose last such dungeons were scenic square dungeon and random path hedge maze. This did not inspire me beforehand, and now that I've finished this, I wish they did something else. It's not bad...it's not good...it's just there to fill the time. Is that really what you want people to say about your game?

There are bosses, of course. The fantasy/crypt one has a wizard you can bypass by wearing the right outfit, but the insect one is interesting. A giant spider. Tick him off with a magic spell and I hope you brought a bunch of fireballs because he's not going to be happy. There's a puzzle method to dealing with him, but that's lame, I'd rather just fight him, even if all I'm doing is pelting him with fireballs.

The only purpose these dungeons really serve is to tie together the various rooms and places that actually have something important going on. Rooms with mushrooms and jewels in the insect cave, various objects in the fantasy dungeon. The fantasy dungeon is the more complex one, and more than that, basically just trial and error. Carefully advance every tile, clicking on wires or tiles to cut/avoid them. Find niches or rooms, save, then determine what the trap is. Then determine if the trap is worth dealing with, is the item worth it, and is the trap manageable? There's no limit on saves, but an adventure game shouldn't be encouraging save-scumming, every action should not be a potential landmine.

What's actually good here? Well, it's Amiga game, so it would be embarrassing if the music and graphics weren't nice to look at. Despite the aforementioned issues, the soundtrack is nice, even if it doesn't quite fit what the game is going for. The intro is nice, but it doesn't sound like it's introducing a horror game, it sounds like a pirate intro...which at some point it probably was. The big issue is that what I've heard is a destruction of the original experience, which turns even the more overtly Amiga in style tracks into less interesting versions.

Visually, there are some 4000 advertised rooms, and a lot of those aren't special. Most of these are in two of the dungeons. Ironically, these are better looking than most dungeon crawlers, simply because they aren't two sets of stone blocks and static sprites. There's variation in the number of tiles you find, at least three tiles worth. It's not great, but you know, it's hard to make nice-looking dungeons. On a technical level, the rest of it is amazing, but the haunted house set looks like a relatively normal house and the lobby feels like an ordinary lobby. They're well-drawn, but I don't feel like I'm playing a horror game half the time.

Animation is where a lot of these things shine, and while there isn't that much, most enemies didn't feel static. Idle animations or just constant animation in general helped them. It was a shame that most enemies weren't that interesting. Sure, the insect cave was nice, usually we just get giant spiders and worms, but ants and mosquitoes are rare, but that's arguably the part of the game you'll spend the least time in. The crypt was mostly just your usual set of fantasy enemies, outside of a ghost which was more of a hazard. It doesn't feel that special.

This is ultimately the problem with the game. Elvira I was special. You click on the wrong hallway, a guy saunters out and you're in a fight for your life. Do poorly and you see your severed head. There was an aura of menace to the experience. Any wrong move could result in you dying, with each death being more gruesome than the last. In contrast, this is a sedate experience. There are no shocking deaths, no gruesome discoveries, just cuts across your face to indicate a worm with a giant mouth killed you.

And this is downhill from every decision in the game. A worm blocking my path here is not tense, I'm just not strong enough to deal with it. It's just an enemy in a game. Not so with Elvira I, in which enemies in certain areas could only be beaten by certain items, and looked like they were going to enjoy what they would do to you. You didn't back up either, you turned around and ran. Because if you didn't, you would get killed. Resources were tight, and it was a genuine question if you could survive.

Jaws of Cerberus just feels like a bland experience. It isn't scary, it isn't interesting as an adventure game, and it isn't interesting as a dungeon crawler. 

Weapons:
Regular weapons are basically indistinguishable from a practical perspective, though obviously some have effects and do more damage. Just point and click. Spells are awkward to use in combat, requiring you to switch to a different menu, but cool to see when you can afford to use them. 2

Enemies:
Why am I playing a horror game and fighting against random skeletons and goblins? Hey, at least the insect cave is nice. 3

Non-Enemies:
None, really.

Levels:
I like the interconnectivity of the place, but nothing really stands out as an interesting location or cool level setup. It's just tiles and places to go. 3

Player Agency:
By default, you have to do everything with the mouse, but ScummVM adds in keyboard movement. It's a smooth experience with that. The inventory is a pain to deal with. Not having an actual pick-up command is a crime against game design and having three different inventory screens you need to switch between to either pick up items or use spells is annoying. 4

Interactivity:
For an adventure game developer, things sure feel very static. Examining things are a pain and everything happens automatically, whether you want it to or not, unless it's an object in your inventory. 2

Atmosphere:
For a horror game, I wasn't exactly having a horror experience. I've seen straight RPGs which had scarier stuff going on with them. 3

Graphics:
Unquestionably good-looking, excellent use of color, well-done sprites and animation, but everything is just too bright. 5

Story:
Generic save the princess (of sorts) story, modified for the 21st century, brought down by an obnoxious dialog system. 1

Sound/Music:
An interesting selection of jaunty tunes and effective sound effects. 7

That's 30, or 12 points less than the original. 

Reviewers at the time loved this. Why? Well, for as much as we love the Amiga in retrospect, we must also admit that a game could be the developers wiping their bottom with five pound notes and people would love it as long as the graphics and sound were nice. They were, no matter if they could have been more than just two nice things to look at. Shiny things are nice, but in the end, it's what's inside that matters.

As an aside, I've cut the game Combat Lynx, as it was just too much of a mess to actually play, leaving only three titles left in 1984. What game I play next is up in the air, I may return to Star Cruiser or I may head for something else.

Elvira II - Won-ish

It's finally time to deal with the third stage, It Came From Beyond the Grave, the stage which has confounded me the most out of all the stages so far. Now I finally possess the ability to actually fight the scores of skeletons deep inside. I wonder what goodies I'll find. Surely it isn't going to be just like the Kiss of the Spider stage and have scores of like four monsters, right?

When I said that Kiss of the Spider was more like a level from a blobber, a Dungeon Master-clone, that was kind of not true. It mostly behaved like one, but most levels from Dungeon Master and the ilk aren't just about killing monsters. Even the bad ones. This? This is just monster slaying with a few traps here and there. Like a key which is set on top of a trap which is...technically poison gas, but there's no sign that it isn't just a poisoned dart. Except because of the way it hits, you might not notice it until you're already dead. You can actually dodge this using the Breath Underwater spell, which is a bit I'm grateful I noticed whenever I needed to find something of bigger importance in a walkthrough.

Then there's this guy. He doesn't exist until you open a chest containing a single potion. He hits like a truck. To which I have to ask myself, is it important that I get this red potion? I mean, it's probably a healing potion, but if I need to use the healing potion right after getting it, should I? I guess the experience is good...but...man, this game is surprisingly philosophical at times.

So, I decide to prep some spells for this long trip. Considering that this is it as far as the game goes, that's probably for the best. I'll just get some Detect Trap, Fireballs, Herbal Healing and Detect Magick spells. I'm sorry, did I say Detect Magick? I meant I have nothing that qualifies as quartz. Hopefully that spell wasn't too important.

I also bring some test tubes to make the cure wounds spell. "Fun" fact, in order to take the holy water you have to drag it to the test tubes in your inventory. No other item does this...that I know of. With that, I have enough to go through a ways. Except as I notice after clearing out the chest the second time, I still had the tomahawk. Well, at least running back gives me an excuse to regenerate my PP. Yeah, yeah, funny pun, still doesn't change that I'm doing a bunch of busywork.

That's basically this dungeon. Kill monsters you're really only killing to get that last bit of XP for level 10. Find a door to a closed room, save, enter, check what the gimmick is, then determine if the juice is worth the squeeze. For instance, a room west of the entrance has an olive green potion inside a locked chest. The chest has a poison spike trap. You can't avoid it, but presumably there's some way to mitigate total failure of whatever part it hits. The potion itself does nothing at a glance, and I don't feel like checking further. Use these rooms to save and restore PP, since random enemies won't enter here. Probably. This feels like a dungeon designed by a DM playing against players used to hardcore dungeons, except in this case the last dungeons they designed was basically wandering around and dealing with one trap. 

A particularly tedious aspect of this dungeon is that there's only one real way down to the second floor and thus to further floors down. Combined with enemies seeming to ignore my protection spell, and being able to cast their own glue spell against me means that there's a whole lot of more waiting going on here. And then I realize that the path I thought lead to the rest of level 2 actually leads nowhere and the path I was taking actually does. Despite the fact that it leads into an instant death trap.

At this point, I realize exactly what I need to do, I need a use of the luck spell every time I head down that path, which means every time I need to enter this stage beyond floor 2. I've found one ingredient that allows me to make a luck spell, which may allow me to have extra castings. That's still a limited amount of times I can go down that floor and explore. Basically, I need to either anticipate what spells I'll need ahead of time or...look up a walkthrough.

At this point, the game is encouraging it, so why frustrate myself further?

Firstly, I need to dress up as a wizard. If I don't, things will end badly later. Don't worry, it'll make sense when I reach the end. Then, I should grab the floppy from upstairs (which I thought I already did) and use it for a Brainboost spell. I can apparently only use the floppy, even though the ingredient required is "anything that stores information", of which I have a great deal. Don't argue with the computer DM, just figure out what it wants. I also discover that copper isn't a precious metal, so I can't complain when the copper pans can't be turned into a Magical Armor spell.

Otherwise, I've prepared myself every kind of defensive spell I could, courtesy of finding out I can just raid the monster's standing corpse for spare parts. Like a metal band, his scalp and brain. Which I'm not supposed to turn into another Turn Undead spell. (There is such a thing as being too prepared) But I've got Protection, Courage, Luck, Revive, every spell I can use on a weapon besides Enchant Weapon, and every regular attack spell. Let's see these guys take me on now!

Damn it, the Luck spell isn't working as advertised. Turns out of the two levers in front of one door, I'm only supposed to pull one of them. Well...this still means less trial and error going on here. Still a lot of waiting, since skeletons have that glue spell and I need to wait for mana to regenerate...until I find a dagger that the walkthroughs point out as important. This is what I'm supposed to use Bless and Frozen Weapon on, the the point that walkthroughs suggest dumping useless crap in the freezer to get the regents for it. I missed the regents for Bless, unfortunately, but that's not important.

Each time I hit an enemy I get more mana. Problem solved. The rest of this should be a cakewalk. Yeah, that was stupid of me. On floor 4 things change. Now there are rats, who are so small you might not notice them, and ghosts. Ghosts constantly pop up, and if you don't cast courage, hurt you before disappearing. That makes it so there's a hard time limit on how long I can spend on this level. Unfortunately, this one makes it difficult, because there's only one way further down guaranteed (there are random, skeletons popping up out of the ground ones) and that's in an area different than the fish bones you need for a spell.

Floor 5 adds in goblins. Not like the ones from the first one, more like traditional fantasy goblins. Only, when I kill them, I get to see the life drain from their eyes. That's not the kind of creepy I was looking for in this game...Otherwise, it's nothing new. Sadly, I no longer get experience for exploring new tiles, and I have a lot of experience but I'm still stuck at level 10. It's either the Bind Demon or Resurrect spell I need to be level 10 for, which is important for the end game.
 

Floor 6 is mostly more of the same until you reach the end, where this wizard is. He can be fought or talked to if I'm wearing the Wizard costume and dressed up as in one of the photographs from the script editor. Well, for most people he can be fought. I tried, since what kind of FPS guy would I be for not trying, but that crashed the game. Just tell him I had a bad case of food poisoning and he goes off, allowing me to "guard" what he's guarding. 

This is Elvira. No, I'm sorry, a doppelganger. You can tell because she has the crazy eyes instead of distaste for my existence and she's happy to see me. I've been playing this game long enough to know this lady isn't happy and I have to kill her. Somehow. If I try to cast spells before talking to her, she yells at me...if I don't she just pops up in my inventory and I can't "drop" her. Well, hopefully when I make it out I can kill her before she kills me. There's also the war lance nearby, meaning soon everything will be a-okay.

On my way back up, I find that one of the skeletons has made a hole near where the area I climbed down from the first floor into the second floor. Meaning, if I had gone back at the time, it would have been a mostly straight shot down to the third floor. Great, great, great. I brace myself for the inevitable attack by the doppelganger as I get closer and closer to the surface. An evil force spins me around. 

It's the Angel of Death. The first time I die. The second time...the game crashes because apparently the Nova spell crashes ScummVM or someone didn't rip the game properly and there's no sound. There's a fifty/fifty chance, really. The third time, I cast Unholy Barrier and let rip with the spells I can use...and I run out of spell points and watch as he slowly hacks away until I die. Finally, I get lucky (not the spell) the fourth time and my spells actually hit...or I used them right. This pushes me over into level 10. Finally, now when's the doppelganger going to try me?

Not when I go into the basement with the four magic items and have the Indian do what he needs to do to bless them. He doesn't comment about anything. At all. Even if it's the doppelganger I expected something. Going upstairs to Elvira's room, nothing. Seriously? Going outside in a deliberate attempt to cause the doppelganger to act up? Well...

Not exactly a doppelganger causing me trouble here. We'll get back to this in a moment. Since I have the fish bones now, I can get the rope. We'll see how the doppelganger can handle going underwater...and it works. With the rope, and the binding scroll I have from earlier, I can make a Bind Demon spell. Now I need to resurrect the priest in the church. To do that, I need to take the Scalp, Brain and Heart from the mad scientist's laboratory, plus Eggs (for the shell as illustrated in the book describing the spell) and something important to the deceased. In this case, a Bible.
 

He's back, at which point I have to get him to set down a pentagram on the studio entrance so I can then lay down the black candles I took. Only...the conversation doesn't allow me to get to that point. He just tells me to talk to the janitor, who I've already done everything I need to do with. Apparently I missed one point of dialog that would have allowed me to get the priest to do what I need to win the game. A point made more difficult by how saying the wrong thing causes the janitor to never talk to you again. I love dialog systems which make the game worse.

At this point, what I should do is head to the car park, summon the demon before he summons himself, bind him, then throw the war lance, and hit him in the heart with the axe. Elvira then gives the player a come hither look, guess that is the real deal, and we get a text crawl in which she discusses casting Hercules Goes to Hell, and wonders what I'm willing to do to get the part.

Anyway, that's my Halloween gaming session ruined. Fortunately for me, I can still watch a Lucio Fulci film to turn things around. Hope you had yourselves a happy Halloween and see you next week for the summary...probably.

This Session: 3 hours

Final Time: 10 hours 35 minutes

Elvira II - Technical Ecstasy

This has been a strange week. Firstly, by accident, I found out that ScummVM isn't properly playing the music in the Amiga version. It's a slight difference, but it does make a difference in the end quality when you're playing the game for hours. Remember, there's about half an hour of music here. This game isn't as creepy as the first one, but losing a bit of what's left does hurt the game. I'm not sure why this is an issue, since I was under the impression that the soundtrack used some form of MOD music.

The second is that the version of ScummVM I was using introduced a bug, namely, that sometimes you can stop regenerating mana. This resulted in me loosing a bit of progress. I was going to switch to an Amiga emulator, but I didn't want to restart the game completely when I'm basically a third of the way through at this point. And it does have the minor problem of the game having to constantly load from the drive. That's on an emulator specifically designed to run this.

As to why I didn't switch to the DOS version, the Adlib soundtrack sounds terrible and while I could use the Roland MT-32, that would reset my progress and I've already done enough of that. I'll repeat this in the review at the end, do not play the Amiga version, play the DOS one and set up the MT-32 soundtrack. 

For about the first hour and a half of this session, I made slow progress through the Kiss of the Spider stage, basically saving whenever I managed to take out a mosquito. It was cheap, but considering that my only other option was to try to weather out a monster I had no counter to...well, I wasn't playing fair anymore. I was exploiting any advantage I could get.

This resulted in me learning two combat tactics. Something ScummVM made a lot easier, though it's still possible in the Amiga/DOS versions is that you can back up before a monster attacks you. In Kiss of the Spider and the crypt stage, this means as long as you have space behind you, fighting is easy. Well, against regular enemies, mosquitoes can't be run away from. This is why you switch to berserk mode in combat settings, because for the most part, the enemies on these stages have attack speeds set in stone. Meaning, the increased attack frequency of you and your enemy only changes your attack frequency. It completely changes the combat in Kiss of the Spider from annoying to actually tolerable.

Kiss of the Spider is a blobber level, if said blobber thought that the appeal was wandering around a dungeon occasionally picking up items you can use for spells. Admittedly, this is the first floor, but I felt less than enthused about making my own map for this game, so I just used someone else's. Not really to find anything, just to look around. For instance, on the north side of the map, there's another cave with a gem and a mushroom, much like the one near the start, which basically serves to double up my use of herbal healing and whatever the gem's for.

On the opposite corner of this is a room containing a red mushroom and swarms of ants and ant larva. The idea being that you kill a bunch of them, then take the red mushroom when there's a lull...but sometimes the larva spawning from the left don't allow you to attack them for no reason. It's also not guaranteed that taking the mushroom will allow you to actually take it. Something funny about this, and at this point I'm starting to suspect ScummVM might be the issue. The red mushroom is a regent for the Antidote spell...which at this point is basically an emergency "I am not screwed" item.

The last room in this part of the map is a little cavern with a lake. I can cast Breath Underwater with any edible item, including the gum I've been carrying around the entire time. In the lake is a water insect I can take out. My reward? At the bottom is a rope. Then I could get out of the water...if I wasn't too weighed down. To get out with my stuff, I'd need a Buoyancy spell, which requires the calcified remains of a marine creature. I check a walkthrough, and that's in the catacombs. Good thing I only need the rope for the Bind Demon spell. I'll get back to that.

At this point most of this level is just fodder for me and some regents for spells. I assume. Oddly, and I suspect this is another issue with ScummVM, sometimes items just don't go into my inventory. As in, they disappear into the ether. Since the crystals are just quartz, judging by the manual's spell ingredient list, those just cast Detect Magic, and really, how many times am I going to need that spell?

Floor 2 is more of the same, except now the ants are wandering around. On one occasion I couldn't hit it, but otherwise they're just there. The library in the horror house implied that all this is just realistic FX. Funnily enough, from what I know of film production, having as many realistic fake insects as we have right now is less a sign that we're some technical geniuses and more a sign we're about to lose a crapload of money. You know, before demons from hell possessed them and started killing all our production staff. Now we need to convince the police that neither me nor Elvira are responsible for killing everyone. 

I'm level 7 now, which means I can finally cut through the last of the haunted house set. That's right, we're finally playing Doctor Frankenstein. There's a barometer in the house which serves as the regent for the Summon Storm spell. Cast it on the roof next to the attached copper rod, and there's power inside the lab. Go down, crank the right lever up, then throw the switch. Elvira congratulates me, before telling me that it's Herman Munster's evil cousin. Uh...technically? At this point, now I can cut the wires attached to his head. Don't think about how that works once the power's actually gone into him.

At this point, it's not obvious how to proceed, because the game assumes you'll realize that there was a door behind him. Inside is Elvira. Psyche, it's actually a doppelganger that bursts into flames and leaves behind the magic bag. Elvira tells me to hurry up and save her, while I then go down to the basement to try to give the bag to the Indian. No dice. Well, back to the Kiss of the Spider.

Since most regular enemies are either a few shots and done or ones I can walk past sometimes, I'm just going to mention notable rooms. (Ants sometimes don't acknowledge you, I don't know why) First, east side, just past a spider's web, is a giant scorpion. If it hits, poison, but once again the tried and true tactic of hammering the attack button works. He's guarding a scroll of binding, something I need for the Summon Demon spell.

Outside of a big cavern, this is about it for this floor, but there is good news. I'm level 8 now. This means I can now cast, Absorb Magick, which actually makes me immune to magic attacks; Freezing Blade, which gives me extra damage; Illusion, copy the looks of the next thing I meet; Trueflight, which makes my attacks hit the best area of the enemy to damage. The first looks to be the most useful, but knowing how useful Courage actually was, maybe not.

Floor 3 is more of the same. Now there's not really any regularly placed enemies outside of dedicated rooms and the worms that pop out of the ground. Just mosquitoes that randomly pop up and ants which are sometimes hostile. I find this giant ant room, which I hope is the queen thus less random enemies. This one doesn't break like the others, as I'm not prevented from attacking. Unfortunately, I end up not getting the poison mushroom thanks to that glitch. Good thing I'm not really concerned about that anymore...

Outside of the usual fights and caves, there's this section where you have to go down then go up in order to reach the rest of the level. It feels unnecessary and just confused me. Remember, I'm already checking a map someone else made. There's also a point, just before the transition to the fourth floor, where you have to cut one of two strands of web to get across a chasm. I picked right and it was right, but left sends you straight down to a spiky pit.

Floor 4 actually has regular enemies again, but that's not important. We have the boss, the big spider. I've kept calling it an alien picture because, well, outside of those giant mosquitoes, this could just be an ordinary alien planet. It still could be, but it has a giant spider now. He'll stay over there unless you attack him with a spell, then out he comes. The important thing is that guy on the right. He has something in his pocket and that looks important, but it's just out of reach. Clearly, a job for telekinesis. So, where's the magnet?

Answer, I've had it all along. Or rather, I've had access to it all along. It's the cassette player in the typing pool, which I probably didn't even mention. I think this is something to do with the mechanism of the cassettes, but I haven't listened to a cassette in like fifteen years and even then that was because I had a cassette of Rage - Perfect Man and no CD copy. Anyway, I guess I should make some fireballs to take out the spider to. There's a fifty/fifty shot that he's a fight or a puzzle.

The webbed up corpse is the director, which the game helpfully tells me once I have his wallet. Inside is an unusual key, which, if it's appearance this late in the area is a clue, is a hint that it's the elevator key. Unfortunately, the trip has cost me a bit of mana. Between the telekinesis spell and the ice bolts to bring down the webs, I'm down to sixteen PP, which is just enough for two fireballs. 

I think I need more than two fireballs. I prepared four, and I'm not sure that's enough. He's not that hard to hit, but he's hitting back and I'm willing to be he's poisoned me. Naturally, the first time I die. The second time, once I've gotten my magic juice charged back up...the game glitches out when I start spamming fireballs at the damn thing. The third time though? That works like a charm. I even have spells left over somehow? Do they multiple when I'm not looking?

Despite not looking like it, this does reveal this area's fake Elvira. What, you thought she was real this time? Ha! This one is on the web and turns into a giant wasp when you click on her. Now, normally, I'd just slaughter the thing and presumably get the next piece of magic, but this thing won't let me hit it with my sword. Which means, more waiting around for mana to regenerate. And I thought that Shadowcaster had a brutal waiting time back when I first played it.

I clear out some of the rest of the area, since it wasn't like there was anything else going on in this section by this point. Beyond the mushrooms, I'm really struggling to see what I'm actually going to need at this point. How many uses of Detect Magic am I actually going to need? Heck, considering that the number of uses isn't tied into how many regents I find, that means that I'm well beyond what I'll need.

The wasp dies to about three fireballs, and then Elvira shows up to berate me for not knowing that it isn't her. Anyway, the wasp leaves behind a tomahawk, likely the one I'll need to actually win the game. From here, I just have to go down and then find the elevator on the third floor. Oh, and discover that the wasp actually poisoned me. Huzzah. I also have to manually go down all the levels because the key to the elevator is stuck in the fourth floor lock and I forgot to take it. Since my original trip up to the fourth floor was one way and once you reach the wasp it's all downhill...

That's it for this session. The map I'm using describes all the rooms as just containing crystals and mushrooms, which I don't need more of, so I'll only come back here to get the rope. The Tomahawk can be used as a weapon and the Indian janitor doesn't acknowledge it at all. I'm level 9, but that only gets me Bind Demon and Cure Wounds...which I will need, considering that the final stage is the big one. Will it be the best...? Probably not, but you never know.

This Session: 4 hours

Total Time: 7 hours 35 minutes

Elvira II - If Only I Had a Brain

Last time, I killed a vampire by causing daylight to appear at night via using a tuning fork to break glass.. In retrospect, that didn't actually make any sense and I'm starting this session off with a deep sense of fear. Not of the game itself, though it has its moments, but because I'm afraid I'm not going to understand any of the logic.

I return to the alien movie set and try to fight the worm monsters. I actually can kill them now, but it costs me a lot of health. The new, fun part of the game is that you can take damage in your limbs. Head and torso does what you expect, but if you get a damaged arm, you do worse in combat, both and you can't do anything with your hands. One leg, and your ability to move only occasionally pops up. Both and you're dead in the water. In this situation, I ended up getting taken out by a giant mosquito.

Combat is worse than the original. Say what you will about it, but there was a system to it, it worked as long as you could match the reflexes of the enemies. Here, click and maybe you hit. Wait until the icon pops back up and do it again. There's seemingly no defense. I checked a few guides to see if they have anything different to say and none of them mention anything about combat. It's terrible.  

Since the bug picture isn't going well, what about the witch? That goes better, especially once I start using the no regent spells Healing Hands and Ice Bolt. It takes a while, but I take her out. Her head explodes, and now I can pick up her eye and...eat it. Or use it in a spell. Since the spell in question is Fear, which I suspect is of limited utility here or of absolute plot importance. One or the other. Either way, I'm underleveled for it.

The costume room, after I turn on the light, has costumes. Six of them. Well, that's useless I think, until I realize that this means that these must be in some way be useful. Not just in the "do this when you have the experience to get more experience to get enough levels to handle the evil boss" way, in the "hey, remember that this is an adventure game" way. Though checking, one of the costumes comes with a fencing sword, that of Sir Walter Raleigh. It works, and I actually clear out a few of the hostiles in the alien picture, but I get poisoned by a mosquito. Gonna have to find the ingredients for an antidote. 

In the meantime, it occurs to me that I can probably solve that frozen boiler. "Flammable objects" are the regent for the fireball spell, which paper counts as. I just need to wait until I get enough juice to cast it. I really hope I'm not on a timer here. After the requisite amount of waiting, I cast a fireball and now the room is back to normal. What I get for my troubles? A copper rod. Which, if it doesn't actually do anything in a puzzle, only works for the magical armour spell. Which I can't cast yet, because it's seventh level.

So, the antidote spell needs a natural poison. Which I presume means I need belladonna or aconite or something. None of the plants around are this. There's no poison, technically. I wouldn't drink the contents of a fire extinguisher. Okay, well, maybe, thinking back to that fish tank full of piranhas, I can use telekinesis to get the key out...except I need a magnet for that, and I haven't seen one. Considering I'm probably going to need the poison for the antidote, that poisoning the meat idea is looking less and less likely.

Now, what about the zombie picture? So far I have no idea what to do there. There's a door I can't open, a dead priest, and holy water I can't grab. Well, I try to just grab it, and the game tells me I need a vial. I don't know why, but fine. Maybe I can use the resurrection spell on the dead priest, but for now that train of thought is not helpful. I decide to look up if there's anything I can do here, and it turns out I missed that you can move the pulpit to go below. And to think Elvira hinted at this with her "sermons were very moving" speech. She gives another one about brains and brawn, which is a subtle hint for what's about to happen.

The place directly below the pulpit is weird. There are two hag-like creatures chained up against a wall, with it all just hanging out. I can kill them...which I do. This doesn't seem like the kind of game that pretends to care about killing prisoners, if anything, killing might be best. Then a long trip down a rock cavern, and dirt catacombs deep beneath the earth. There's a trapped alcove with a key in it, but the trap doesn't kill me. The hostile down here, instead of fighting zombies or anything, are just skeletons with axes. Lame. What's not so lame is that they hit like a truck and it takes my all to take out just one. I don't have a chance against these things yet.

I carefully continue in the alien picture, taking out what enemies I can, then retreating back out so I don't get ambushed. I make it all the way to the end of one hallway, which leads to a cave. This has worms pop up out of the ground. They're tougher than the wandering worms, but there's only three of them and they don't surprise you. Inside this is a mushroom, which is not poisonous, and a crystal. Unfortunately, I need to manipulate it so I can get past the area without getting poison damage from the mosquito. Or something, since it just brings a limb down to zero health, and if I heal it, takes it down again.

Since I can't, I decide I'll head back here later. I decide to go up to the second floor and look for more objects I need to cast spells, then bring them down to the area between the studios. I start with Elvira's room, since it's messy, and I find out I can look inside the make-up case. Oh, look, there's stuff in there. The silver four-leaf clover's for a luck spell, or possibly Magical Armour, but the other seems to be an actual item, a curling iron I can use. Which generates heat. Speaking of which, don't I have a room in the mansion I was supposed to open from the inside?

First I check it with a fireball. That works, and in comes one of the developers whose palette has been changed to corpse color. I wonder which of the developers is the face of my protagonist? The guy who ended up assigned to be the role of hero and Elvira's boyfriend. A few applications of ice darts and a few whacks with my sword and he goes down. Outside of here leads to a hallway with a door to the kitchen and to downstairs.

The kitchen has surprisingly little obvious stuff, no real foodstuffs beyond flour and a few mysterious items, just a lot of pots and pans. Copper, which means they should be useful, but mostly I'll have to go over it a bit to figure out what's what. There's the little sliding small door I used which "teleported" me to the cooler, but it's one-way. There's a door which leads to the hallway with the killer zombie, and he's still there and kills me.

The basement, meanwhile, has three rooms. The one straight from the stairs is a cell with nothing in it except a message written in blood on the wall. Maybe message, I can't read it. Then we have a laboratory with a mad scientist who kicks me out whenever I try to talk to him or do anything, the third involves a little Frankenstein's monster on a table. I kind of already know what I need to do here, since this bit is pretty commonly spoiled. I have to bring him to life, but I have to be careful not to cut his wires ahead of time, lest I end up in an unwinnable state. That said, I'm also in an unwinnable state right now because I have no way of dealing with the zombie.

So I decide to try my luck with the ghost of the guy in one of the upstairs bedrooms again, and despite the magic seeming to not work, a few stabs with the fencing sword do. Huh. Anyway, the scripts themselves are useless scrap paper, but he also has photos. Of every character who belongs in one of the costumes in the costume room. Including the guy in the white coat, who I suspect is the lab assistant.

There's also a button under the bed which opens a secret passage to an altar room, which might be important later. For now, I decide not to hang around here, there are vampires hanging around on the ceiling and I don't want to wake them up. Right, well, that's enough actually solving things, now it's time to look up a walkthrough to see where that darn brain is. It's in the mad scientist's lab. No, couldn't do that first, I just had to know where the brain was.

So I get the costume and go to make-up to do my face up like the lab assistant. The first time around I don't use the teeth, since they aren't showing up the same time as the mustache, but that's important. Unfortunately, every time I click on something, he asks what I want. Every time he does, I need to ask if he needs any help, or he'll kick me out. I can, if I bring the note from the book with, have him whip up some poison, but then he kicks me out. If he kicks me out, the door is locked.

Disgusted with how little information the walkthroughs give me, I check a longplay. The stuff I need isn't in that room, it's in the one with the monster. Finally, I've found a brain. And all the parts that fill up our insides. I test the spell on the zombie, and he's gone. I go through and back through the area, and he doesn't show back up. Huzzah! Now, to poison those fishes and grab the key. This doesn't seem to cause any change there, but I can grab the key unimpeded.

The use of this key was not obvious to me, so I checked to see if there was something I missed. There was, turns out one of the paintings I checked behind is hiding a safe, it's just that you need to click the wall after removing the painting. There was no sign that there even was anything. Inside is an Indian peace pipe, which the Indian in the basement doesn't actually want. It's probably important, so I'm going to leave it in the lobby.

I'm level 5, which means I can cast resist fire and check out the burning room. Which has nothing in it. Another trap, unless whatever meager experience I would get here was supposed to be important. Since I seem to get more from casting spells, that doesn't seem to be the case. I'm starting to suspect that this game isn't timed, which is a rare mercy.

While reading the books in the library again, I've figured out how to change pages. See, you have to click on the book icon above the words in order to get more words. This is obnoxious and annoying, and took me until I opened up the spellbook to find it. That said, this reveals a lot more, like how to cast the resurrection spell I'll need for the priest, how to summon and unsummon a demon and a few more interesting things.

Of relevancy right now, is that it reveals the method of reanimating the dead like Frankenstein, which, if you've seen your horror films, is to use a lot of electricity to charge the corpse. This is what the seemingly irrelevant tasks of getting the copper rod and reaching the roof were for. Use the rod as a charging point on the roof. It would be nice if the game told me there was a hole on the roof for this stuff, but hey, that would be telling the player.

There's no storm around, so there's no lightning. I do have a spell to summon a storm, which is seventh level. It's going to be a while on that, which means I have to start going through the crypts or the insects. First though, I'm going to need to recharge and prep some spells for that, a lot of busy work. So see you in a week on that.

This Session: 1 hour 45 minutes

Total Time: 3 hours 35 minutes