Black Crypt (1992)

Name:Black Crypt
Number:259
Year:1992
Publisher:Electronic Arts
Developer:Raven Software
Genre:RPG
Difficulty:4/5
Time:9 hours 50 minutes
Won:No (115W/86L)

After finally getting around to Black Crypt after years of meaning to get around to it, I must admit, I have mixed feelings on it. Not just because the game crashed and I couldn't continue it, but because as a game this comes off as a bit of an oddball. There are a lot of things this game is trying to do, but some of these felt like they really counteracted one another.

This also applies to the game's development process itself, since given the 1992 release date, you'd expect that this for some reason just appealed to whoever was greenlighting games at EA back then. An Amiga dungeon crawler? In the US, that was on its way out then, even if the message wouldn't be fully received until this year. No, this was started in 1986 and the publishing deal was made sometime between the two points. This was just an unfortunate victim of bad timing and a strange unwillingness to not make a DOS port. Which made it the only game they made until X-Men: Legends to not be on DOS or Windows.

The premise is your usual Dungeon Master-clone idea. There's this evil bad guy, Estoroth Paingiver, who took four champions from the past to kill, and now he's about to take over the world again. You have four lousy amateurs, go survive in his dungeon where dozens have died in vain. Go through thirty levels of dungeon, while moving in a blob through a grid-based movement system. Go fight monsters in a circle, solve puzzles, eat meat that's been on the floor for god knows how long, and try not to get screwed over by spinning tiles. If you don't really know what that is, go play Dungeon Master, it's got a free port and everything.

Despite considerable room for improvement, this genre is ultimately just "is this still as fun as DM, despite being worse". The answer here is complicated, while that's true, whether this is playable really depends on your skill with Amiga emulation and having an idea of how to install a game to a hard drive rather than just using save states and hoping it doesn't kill itself. I didn't quit willingly, the game just stopped registering disk changes after the third area transition. If you can avoid that, it's worthwhile.

There's no control over party selection, you just choose the name and which portrait they get from a selection of people who look like they just got out of fantasyland jail. What matters is you get a fighter, a cleric, a "magic user"/magician and a druid, and attribute selection. This feels very Dungeons and Dragons derived at times, with classes which seem taken from the game, armor class and attributes mostly taken from the base six. Stats go up to twenty and you have no real knowledge of what they do beyond assumptions you get from previous games.

The fighter is more or less a straight copy of the class from DnD. At first the most useful character since he can actually fight, until your spellcasters can actually cast spells, at which point he acts as a meatshield while your druid brings down the forces of the four planes. (Ice, bees and chaos) He is useful when you need to fight in melee, of course, like when you've just cast fifteen attack spells at someone and they're still moving. Melee is just a lot less effective than the always hitting spells, since he'll be trailing far behind in damage and ability to hit.

The cleric is an oddity. In four character crawlers like this, it's tradition to have two melee fighters and two spell-casters in the back. The melee guys soak up the damage, the spell-casters do whatever, then use their bows. The cleric is also a straight copy of the DnD class, good defense, good variety of offensive and defensive spells, and a class aversion to hitting things with bladed weapons. Violence with a mace is okay though. For a while, this guy functions weirdly. He does less damage than the fighter, which should technically be augmented with spells, but outside of healing, he only has one effective attack spell for a while, which makes him the least useful character in the party until he gets his third spellbook.

The magic user, or wizard as I called them, is well...like a wizard in DnD. Not fully like, since the magic system here doesn't work like DnD and this has a strange selection of spells, but it's the same archetype. At first, somewhat useless. You can have him use throwing weapons or a bow, but ranged attacks from the people who will use a ranged attack are useless. He doesn't get an attack spell until the third level, and until then all he gets are a map spell and a defense spell. But when you get that second spellbook the wizard becomes the sort of universal problem solver, getting stat boosting abilities along with being able to remove glyphs and magic barriers.

The druid is the strangest class. It fits the usual druid DnD class, but the spells you would think to be lower level are sprinkled throughout later spellbooks, and what you get at the start are odd utility spells and the only starting attack spell. He also doesn't get another spellbook for a while, leaving him as the worst character you have, since it takes a while for that starting spell to get useful. It takes a while for him to get more attack spells, but boy howdy, does he start hitting hard when he does.

The magic system uses spellbooks and levels to indicate what spells you can use. Your wizard can cast Shield at the start of the game, but not Fireball despite both being in the starting magic spellbook. In contrast, by the time you get his final spellbook, Libram of Darkmagic, chances are both Deathstorm (9th level) and Detect Traps (2nd level) will be available to him. I have no technical issue with this, except that the progression is odd, in that a druid went a lot longer between spellbooks than a wizard or cleric. Otherwise it's simple memorization, click on a spell in the spellbook section, it pops up above, then you can cast it. Once memorized, you can memorize it again after a set period of time which is reduced if you cast said spell first. Meaning, you can have multiple casts of the same spell at once.

Control-wise, the game is more or less what you expect from a DM-clone. The arrows move, and you turn with delete and page down, which kind of works. Spells are in the upper right corner, each caster can have five at a time, including multiples of the same spell. Switch between them with the symbols. Left click on a character's portrait and he uses his primary function, usually sword against monster, right click activates a secondary function, which is a spell with some enchanted items. Never really used that in combat, just accidentally whenever I meant to open the inventory. The bars are health, the row of six dots are status effects and that gold dot is indicating who the leader is. This only effects things like what plaques you can read and if someone with magic sight can direct the party. If you have your druid lead, he isn't going to be in melee combat. If you click on the skull, a little menu will open up allowing you to save your game or sleep in-game.

Right click on the character name and you open the inventory screen. This is more complex than it really needs to be. There's the armor, weapons and spellbook, but the bottom part seems odd. These are your packs, bags which hold stuff in them. You can have up to five, though in practice I just kept two/three per character. The manual says encumbrance is a thing, but I've never found out. As the game goes on there are more of bags you have to put in these slots to search through. You can't attack on this screen, so do so safely.

The icon below the shield is the class icon, in case you forget. This is actually a clue for later, because you can pick up smaller icons and give them to any character and get a small stat boost. I didn't notice a difference, but I'm not complaining. The three bars on the right are health, sleep (because magic just happens) and food/drink. So many meters the game had to combine one. Clicking on that will give you the hard numbers of your stats along with any status effects you have.

But there's one thing you can't pick up from context, it's that you have multiple sets of clothing. Yes, rather than doing so in an elegant system where everything is on-screen at once, you instead get a confusing inventory system where it takes in-game hours before you realize you can equip belts and rings! And also shirts. Which implies that if you take them off, that you could fight demons and goblins dressed up like the Celtic warriors of legend. (And probably die too.)

I clown on it, but it isn't that bad. Just click on the torso icon in the upper right. It's what seems the logical course of action the second you pick up something. It's just unnecessarily large and complicated, but it isn't that complicated. I get the feeling it's there to account for the whole bow and arrow/dagger ranged attacks, you put those in a quiver or bag and they automatically pop out. It's just less elegant than it could be. I really only dislike the combination food/drink meter, because that one just feels needlessly obtuse. People know if they're thirsty or hungry. These aren't really that tricky to fill, since usually every section has a water fountain early on and you get enough food that by the time you get a food summoning spell you won't end up in trouble.

Combat is very typical of the sub-genre. Click on a spell to cast it, click on whatever items you have equipped to use them, and sooner or later someone will be dead. Trade blows or engage in the usual combat waltz. Where it differs, I feel is that spells reign supreme while physical attacks feel weak. As I've mentioned, spells always hit and most spells scale with levels, while physical attack damage is more esoteric. Throwing weapons might as well not exist since they never seem to actually hit.

While I did have fun with it, the added depth of having multiple attack spells at the ready trivialized most of the combat I got through. The problem is that the game really encourages this route, because in the second section you fight against enemies which steal the items out of your hands. Right next to enemies which can poison you, when you have a limited supply of cure poison items. There is no way to deal enough damage to one of the item thieves without spamming a few spells. After this, you get enough spellbooks that you'll never run out of attack spells.

The most definitive characteristic of the game in my mind is that sometimes scrolls will tell you information that is outright false. For instance, in the opening section, you have to fight a giant, two-headed ogre to go further down. One scroll tells you that to beat it, you need to get the Ogreblade. Another tells you that said sword drains the lifeforce of the holder. The game includes the option to figure out if a scroll is real or fake with a spell, but I felt it added so much to the game I never used it.

It's a very clever idea that makes the dungeon not just a series of stuff that makes everything better and tells you the truth. Too many games will just constantly tell the truth to the player about whatever it is they're about that adding in something that lies to you is a breath of fresh air. I wish the game did more with this. Have some of the plaques tell you lies, have items be traps of some sort. Why is a random piece of meat I found next to a corpse still edible? Why are all these potions of cure disease what they say instead of something like bestow diarrhea? This is a dungeon, act like it instead of making the whole thing one endless prize parade.

Now, I'm not saying this is something universally good, but outside of a few cases like this it doesn't come up. To the point that, in an odd way, a game that does this has it worse than a game that did in back in the day. If a game doesn't actively draw attention to the fact that it lied, then it's far more reasonable to assume that something wrong is happening on the game's end. Rather than necessarily saying we're all dumb sheep who trust what games tell us too much, game developers are just too stupid to pull it off. Which in turn, makes players look like dumb sheep for trusting what the game is telling them. It's a no-win situation.

Black Crypt is very mixed on difficulty. At first we get a situation where the game is building up to an encounter with a deadly monster who can only be killed with a certain weapon...which may kill you as well. Then a section where the only reasonable recourse was to spam spells at a monster so it wouldn't poison you or steal a weapon. Then for the rest of my experience it was more or less a smooth experience.

There's not really a lot this has over Dungeon Master. Most of the puzzles are odd. I liked having to consult the manual to find out what the answer to a question was, but the rest were not that memorable. The worst was one had seemingly no logical answer beyond brute force, and was designed in such a way that you couldn't quite figure it out through that either. Even map design wasn't much of a challenge, the game gives you a map spell which means you don't need to make one, you instead get one as you go along. Since by the time the usage runs out, you can cast another, there's no reason not to use it.

It's a shame because the game has a very nice mood to it starting out. Raven had a really good run in these early days making these dark, dying worlds and then just...not doing much of anything with them. All the mood disappears for what is basically Dungeon Master with nicer-looking graphics and a different spell system. Right down to the only ambient sounds being the footsteps of your enemies. This isn't necessarily bad, but knowing future games, it does paint Raven Software as only being capable of making nice, simpler imitations of other games. There are of course, gaps in my knowledge of their games, some of those non-FPS titles from the '90s, for instance, but it does feel like Raven is always following, never leading, in what they do.

Weapons:
A selection of weapons you can only figure out the damage of by trial and error, ranged weapons which never hit, attack spells which function more or less function the same except for damage, and various magical items which feel to valuable to ever use. 3

Enemies:
An interesting selection, where puzzle enemies still require standard combat, and a ton of enemies have one annoying thing about them which makes fighting them feel incredibly risky. 4

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
For what I got through, I always felt like I was going for some goal or another in the short-term in addition to my long-term goal. Most moment to moment stuff was just fluff, but in a fun way. 5

Player Agency:
No complaints for the most part, it's a Dungeon Master-clone and doesn't screw it up. The scroll system is mildly annoying, because it's difficult to use in combat, but that's also true of the inventory screen in general. That's why you don't do that stuff in combat. 6

Interactivity:
Nothing special, puzzles, the usual buttons and switches. 3

Atmosphere:
Starts off dark and moody, especially with the constant darkness, but soon enough just starts feeling more or less like your typical fantasy RPG. 5

Graphics:
Very nice-looking, even if it's once again the same wall texture for...thirty hours. At least this game shifts it up occasionally by...turning the walls blue or red. Enemies look properly sinister, but there isn't that much animation. 5

Story:
The backstory is referenced all the time during the game, but we're not getting much more depth that using various bits of it for puzzles. 1

Sound/Music:
There's one really nice intro tune which sets the mood, then just combat and ambient monster sound effects. They're nice, but since there's no sound when you've killed all the monsters, it can get quite silent for long stretches at a time. 3

That's 35, about what I expected. Good but below Dungeon Master.

You can sum this one up with one sentence. Do you know how to install Amiga games and like Dungeon Master? Though I feel like if you said yes, you've probably already played this one.

Most of the reviews are overwhelmingly positive, doing nothing but praising the game. So, I looked at whatever was actually critical. There was one, which...said mostly the same things I did before calling it incredibly difficult. Eh, I kind of get where they're coming from, since in one section you basically have no recourse but to savescum or be quick on the spell draw, but once you get past that it's quite smooth sailing.

The next Raven Software title will either be CyClones or Heretic, since I think both are '94. There's not going to be any particular order or anything. Just the whims I get whenever I finally reach that year.

Next week, I've unfortunately got a bit of stuff to do in the real world this week, restricting the time I have on this. Chances are I'll be doing a 1984 or 85 game which won't take too much of my time to cover.

Black Crypt: Lost

The other teleporter back at the hub leads to a red area. I guess yellow was too similar to the regular wall color. It's certainly...there. Not that I don't appreciate this sort of art direction, I love '70s Italian horror films, but this feels gratituous. We're not doing it for the cool factor, we're doing it because we can. This opening section has an openable door and a switch. The switch reveals a bit more hallway, with a plaque:

"A year of death
Counted in souls
One for each moon
Four is your goal."

So...find four keys? Four of something, I guess. What's behind the door?

Oh, niches with skulls in them. This feels like a trap. There were a ton of skull enemies last time. And it turns out to be correct. Pick one up, and a fireball spell is cast on your party. Use the skull you get and a skull enemy pops up. Maybe, I'm not sure. Hang on, we've just seen a plaque with a riddle on it. Maybe there's a connection? The fourth skull? No. The fourth on the left. Now what?

I sort of end up brute-forcing this puzzle. There's one right in front of the door, one at the end and then another one somewhere inside. Looking back, I can see two of them are clearly indicated, but I'm not sure how the last or the odd one out connects up. The last skull causes a click and a switch pops up which opens the passageway further. This has another plaque with months on it. February, April, July, October. This one I get, and might explain the last one, except that it wasn't the exact last skull. I guess I just dump the skulls then?

So I go to take the skulls based on what months they would correspond to. This doesn't work. Okay, maybe it's in the opposite direction. No, that's not it either. This is getting to be annoying. I bruteforce it and that does nothing. Okay, what am I missing? I take a peak at the guidebook and apparently these things were opened in a sequence. Looking at both plaques, I'm not sure how the sequence is being hinted at, since it goes third, seventh, twelveth, then sixth.

There's probably going to be a bit about puzzle design when I reach the final entry, but it can't be the months, since there's nothing to connect them to those skulls. I can kind of see a year corresponding to three, since the number of days starts with a three. The number of moons could also mean twelve, since that's sort of what a month grew out of. Souls I could see being connected to the death gems you find on the ground beforehand, but that's because I paid zero attention to them. Very gamey idea, in a bad way. There's no reasonable way to figure this out, I'm just grasping at straws after the fact. And I don't mean this in a sense that I usually do this, because usually the problem is that this puzzle could have been given hints much better. This ain't that, this is impossible for me to parse. There are no easily noticeable visual differences, though I think there are some if you can see one next to another one.

Moving on, there's some more of all three enemies that have been in this section, and another death gem next to a piece of meat and a potion of cure disease. Two locked doors and one I can open. This leads to a hallway which damages you for no explained reason. Presumably, it's due to the heat, but the game neglects to mention this. There's another water fountain, but more importantly, a key and a robe of the forest, which does some good on my druid.

The door this opens leads to a wall. I kind of figured this by checking the map, but I tried it anyway since it seemed like it might be a trap. The other door has a different lock, so this is correct. I wish it was, because instead it's a sort of walk-through wall maze. Sort of because, well, there's not really much maziness to it, but it feels like one. There's even a plaque mentioning that the druid hero of the great war died here. I find what might be his stuff, which includes a leather armor +2 I had no reason to care about, and fortunately, another key. The door this opens leads to a fountain and the first proper dark area of the game. That means I can finally take advantage of that light spell! How well does it work?

Now, I'm not going to use words like, awful, terrible, or even unforgiveable. What I am going to say is that is that this screenshot of me fighting something in the dark was very soon after I entered the darkness. This can't have been more than twenty seconds if I'm being generous. This is shorter than most grindcore songs, unless they're literal joke ones. This is a large area to go through, even if there's not much in it. Beyond a few floating skulls, there's a coffer with a scroll next to it. That tells me that the archdruid, Oak Raven is buried in a white oak coffin. Am I going to have to rob his grave? Sigh...

The end of it appears to be a small room in the center of a large outside hallway. Only, it isn't, it just has some minor stuff, I missed another room. I do get twenty seconds, but it is annoying to rush this way. The second room, on the side, is where the actual loot is, a shiny new helmet and the key. This level is starting to feel long in the tooth, and it seems the developers agree with me, because the last part is just answering the questions about the archdruid I just mentioned. But you know, not as two words, as one word. Sigh...

Among many other other defense items, including vaguely named magical helmets Mage Bane and Helm of the Triton, I find the Wisdom of the Druids, a spellbook for the druid. This has Pestilence, Chant of Doom, attack spells, Cure Wounds, healing, and Cure Poison, self-explanatory. Good to have, even if poison hasn't come up in ages. There's also the key down, allowing me to reach the next section.

...At which point the game won't let me continue. As I've sort of glossed over, you need to do a disk switch between major sections. I've done it about half a dozen times before, but there are three sections so far, the times in the past were to get water. This time the game just says the disk is write-protected (which it isn't) and fades to black afterwards. Nothing. At first I thought I might be able to fix this by just saving, but this prompts the same kind of error. Neither reloading a save from the start of this section or redownloading the game files seems to work, so this, alas, is where I'm ending the game.

This Session: 1 hour

Final Time: 9 hours 50 minutes

Black Crypt: Le Soleil, La Lune

The rest of the fourth floor was relatively simple for the most part. Nothing really new popped up, just more of the semi-invisible worm enemies. I got another character level. Curiously, my party doesn't all do it at once despite never having died, but it doesn't really work quite logically. Fighter and cleric both do it at the same time, but it then goes wizardess, then druid. I mean, I guess that makes sense, neither is using their weapons anymore, no point when they never seem to hit, but shouldn't my cleric be ahead of my fighter, since he fights and casts spells?

At this point, I end up stuck a bit. There's a magic wall I can't cast dispel on, so I assume I'm just missing something. Based on past evidence, I need to find some hidden button. Once again, I succumb to weakness and look it up the map. Nothing. The walkthrough? There are two scrolls of dispel I dropped because I don't need that when two of my spellcasters can do that. A lot of the more generic magic items which seem to serve no purpose I've just been ignoring. I don't need health potions I'm not going to use.

Inside is more armor, a remove glyph scroll I have a funny feeling I know where it goes, a key and another magic user spellbook. Reminder, my Druid still only has his first spellbook. All he has is a measly attack spell I'm not sure is doing the 2-8 points of damage per caster's level it alleges, a dispel magic spell which apparently isn't that helpful, a read runes spell which is actually useless, and a protection spell I keep neglecting to use. Second he gets another spellbook he'll actually be useful. Probably.

Anyway, this Wizard Word spellbook is a mixed bag. Create Wall, create a illusionary wall for some purpose, Ethereal Shield a better protection spell which affects the entire party, Refresh, "remember all spells below 4th level", which I can't use yet, but sounds insanely useful when I do and Lighting Field, damage spell. Wait, Lighting or Lightning? Oh, well, we'll find out when we use it.

The scroll of remove glyph works on the skulls from earlier. Though since it only has one use, I have an awful feeling I might be accidentally screwing myself over. There's nothing that special here, just some armor my frontline fighters can't really use and a few odds and ends. That's okay, I knew this could be a possibility. The key, meanwhile, opens a door near the start of this section and it's straight down three more floors to the next section. Which prompts another disk swap.

The very first thing I see on this floor is this plaque. Oh, good, does this mean the game is going to go after me for using spells? Wait, can plaques lie to me? Since the game is introducing the possibility, that's a valid theory. I can reload if it kills me for casting fireball.

Oh, look, it's my new most-hated enemy. Kidding, mostly. Even if the game can get frustrating, this is some top notch enemy design. I spam spells at it until it dies with a few melee attacks. My fighter and cleric are starting to become less useful in a fight and more like meat shields. Oh, well. There's another glyph blocking my path after this, but fortunately this is done in by a spell. There's also a plaque warning me that there's something dangerous in the dark.

Further up is another plaque, one which I have to switch to my cleric to read. A druid needs me to complete his task, presumably, not my druid. "For sun and moon", which by examining the nearby...door/wall relief, I believe refers to two items to do something here. I probably would have figured this out on my own, but the explicit statement does make it all easier. Two teleports lead the way onward.

My first choice is the nearer of the two, which leads to the blue walls. Shades of the level with the first boss in Shadowcaster, but either way, very cool. You start off in a circle with three paths blocked off by pillars along with a door which has a gold lock. To advance, you have to step on a tile with an invisible pressure plate, which opens one. There's another pressure plate, visible this time, which hurts my party, then spawns a bunch of flying skulls. They cast spells, but in a fight they aren't worth much individually. Of course, in a bunch, that's a bit more troublesome.

This is a whole set of strange pressure plate traps that lead around a switch. The first one spawned a horde, while the second one spawns one, but forces your items one space away. This opens a door which leads to a key, and more importantly, the Manual of the Planes, the second druid spellbook. We get Light, self-explanatory, Swarm, attack spell, Dismiss, "sends enemy to another plane", probably works against planar enemies, to use DnD terminology, and Disrupt. I can't use the latter two yet, since they're 8th and 9th level respectively. In-between all this is a pit and a stairway down leading to a small area.

The door opens, revealing another door with a gold lock. Okay, I get the point here. And I start back on the area I was, only to realize I can't go anywhere else. Okay, I'm missing something, I know it. But what? Examining a block which disappeared when I returned reveals a button which opens another pathway.

In here is another plaque, this one reads "HCTIWS", which is not misspelled and when I looked at the screen upside down it showed me nothing. On the left side is a coffer, a storage item I don't need, on the right is a regular bow, which I don't need. I leave, do a few other things, and then it occurs to me, hey, does that mean SWITCH? The nearest switch is back in the last area. Nothing, and then the answer comes to me, switch where the items are.

Another fight with a horde of floating skulls, I once again run out of spells and fight them in melee, not very fun. This area has a pillar blocking a passage and three stairways down. There's another death gem and a scroll. This one tells me that there's another passcode wall, this one asking about how long the Black War lasted. The scroll says 10 hours, but checking the manual, it says 40. Gotta love that, making the copy protection require you to pay attention to the manual, and I'm saying that even though I didn't really read the backstory part.

Oddly, two of the stairs down lead to dead ends and the other one just has a skull guarding a magic robe, which I give to my wizardess. Knowing this game at this point, okay, where's the button I missed? Pixel hunting in blue screens is an experience, let me tell you, and does take away the cool factor. But I find the button, which removes the pillar and leads to a fourth stairway down...which actually just leads back up. Huh.

This area has four more stairways down and this slime monster. As per usual, I spam magic attacks, and try not to get hit. It doesn't seem to be anything special, but I prefer not to play with fire. It's the only one in this section, so what it does will have to wait for later. One of the other stairways leads to another corridor which should lead back to the area I was just in, but is blocked by a pillar. The actual meat here is that there's another "HCTIWS" puzzle, which reveals a chest with the second key.

The third pillar is removed by another newly revealed button, this has two paths. One is locked off by a plaque asking the question about the Black War, but the other is guarded by a glyph. This leads to a strange puzzle with two different plaques, here and today. I figure there's something else I need to find, so I start to double back, only to find there's no way out except a teleporter which wasn't there before.

This leads to another room, which throws a trap at me, with two more plaques. Tomorrow and gone. I'd like to solve the puzzle, Pat. "Here today, gone tomorrow." Well, what that means is beyond me for now, because there's nothing that can interact with this, and the way forward just leads to another snaking pillar, this one giving the solution to the Black War question. It's still requiring you to look stuff up in the manual, but the manual gives the answer, so I don't understand the purpose.

The path behind the puzzle plaque leads to a locked door and one I can open. The one I can open has another one of the nasty-looking fellows on-top, but no way to enter. Until I check the map and notice one of the walls is strangely colored. It's a one-way wall, kind of, and on the other side I have to fight this thing without magic. That's not a mistake or anything, there's a note from Estoroth telling me that I'm too reliant on magic. He's not wrong or anything, but this was the first time I've had to actually use the combat waltz since the ogre.

He's guarding another a key and another druid spellbook, Force of the Elements. This has Shadow Shield, party protection spell, Ice Strike, heavy but non-scaling attack spell, Blast of Cold, scaling attack spell, Quake, heavier but non-scaling attack spell. Kind of limited selection, no fire or air spells? I guess the magic user spellbooks cover that, but it is strange. The rest of this area is just a few more token enemies and better items, along with the final key.

This leads to yet another of the red ceiling crawlers. This one seems tougher than the others, a more or less full shot of spells doesn't kill him and I'm not in a position to actually fight him. Considering that a lot of the higher level spells have something like a 10-80 damage difference, it could just be bad luck. He dies quickly when I came back.

This is it for this section, the moon key is here, along with some nice, shiny plate armor for my fighter. Returning to the relief/door, and a wall is removed, revealing a Frost Razor. This, alas, I think shall be my stopping off point for this particular entry, Easter weekend and all that.

This Session: 2 hours 30 minutes

Total Time: 8 hours 50 minutes

Black Crypt: Going Around in Circles

What I eventually ended up doing to deal with the goblin thief and poison crawler issue was to just wait and give myself plenty of attack spells to blast them to bits. Once again, there's a bit of DNA that Shadowcaster got, waiting before advancing further. Only this was much more abstract. Taking out one, going back to a safe spot and doing something else while it runs off to the side until a spell regenerates, repeat until I'm prepped for the next one. In something like a couple hours of total time spent, I got this far.

There are, of course, multiple options to this. I got fooled into thinking I couldn't sneak past the invisible enemies by just dropping my weapons and there's a spellbook with cure poison in it there. There's a trick I'm not quite getting yet. It could be that I've hit on the safest and also most boring way to get through this. Yes, for the crawlers, I can use arrows and knives to fill out the damage, but that isn't going to help me against the goblins. Even compared to those obnoxious guys in Dungeon Master, these guys are a pain to fight.

So beyond the usual objectives, I found a plaque on the wall which told me that I needed to find the water of four fountains in order to continue. It's possible that the game is going to be cruel and force me to get water from two fountains earlier on, then two down here, but I'm hoping these are just puzzle items rather than waterskins I need to sacrifice.

The primary floor is such that each little section of the map I take feels like immense progress even if I'm barely moving. So much so that I start to get trouble when I go away from the door I've been using as a stopper, the crawlers don't go through it, so I can safely use it for kiting. At which point I find I've cleaned the area out and can now go hunting for stuff. Beyond some food, there's a scroll of cure poison, a key and a switch.

The switch opens a path to this. Neither dispel magic or remove glyph does anything, so I decide that it's best to just return later and instead focus on the key. There are a lot of doors this key could go in. A lot of doors. Fortunately I've already cleared the area out, so it's just a matter of hoping there isn't anything else around. This leads to a hallway with a button behind a barrier. The button reveals a switch which opens a hallway with a pit downward. No points for guessing what I'm supposed to do.

At the bottom is a small hallway with a teleport to exactly where I was. There are no hidden buttons or switches, just the teleport. The pathway back is blocked off. I look around the upper hallway, a loud thumping sound happens when I stop just before the pit, but happens again if I step off that area. The actual answer, which I had to look up, is that there's a hidden button which closes the pits. Definitely wasn't hard to find even after being told. This leads to a portal, a key and another scroll of cure poison. I'm actually doing pretty well now.

This key, despite how several locks all have the same design, only opens one door, a room with a niche and a water fountain. The niche contains another helmet, some bracers of agility and a waterskin. Which is not so obviously the item I need in that little area where water from four fountains needs to go. At which point I don't know what to do until I realize that one switch now seems to open another area, which allows me to go further.

This leads to a rather strange pressure plate puzzle. At first I assume it's a sequence I need to press to get out through a door, but when I do that I only reach an area with a switch. A bit further experimentation allows me to go back to the area I was just in...which has a pillar blocking the way out. So it's more than that. I mess around for a while, then look up a walkthrough. Naturally, this doesn't do it like I'm starting from a ruined playthrough, but from scratch. I reload an earlier save, which thankfully isn't too far back, and end up doing it exactly as written in the walkthrough. It still doesn't work.

So I check the guidebook to confirm what's going on. It isn't 100% accurate, sometimes they'll spawn a ceiling crawler, but it does tell me that the pressure plates down here don't have anything to do with what's going on upstairs. I check that walkthrough again and think that it means I've got to do it fast...but it actually just neglects to mention that there's an invisible pressure plate in one part of this area which then allows me to get out. Here I am thinking the game is cruel in an unwinnable sense and instead finding out the game is cruel because it's hiding things in obtuse ways! I even reloaded to try to do it fast and right.

This spawns another switch, in the same area as the last bunch. Even if they're disappearing afterwards, it's still cluttered. This opens up another area with more crawlers and...oh, it's dark. I got slaughtered the first time because the light spell hasn't been helpful the entire time, and now it is. It gets worse, because the spell only works within the dark and for some reason it's only three tiles here which are dark, so walk out and it deactivates. This isn't going to be annoying later when it's actually important.

Behind the darkness is another puzzle. There's a barrier, so I cast dispel magic on it. Doesn't work, neither does remove glyph. (I have no idea what's special about the second spell, but it's going to do something eventually) There are buttons on either side, neither of which do anything obvious. The pillar blocking the path out permanently moves afterwards, but I'm not sure that's related. Nothing else is fixed, so I end up looking up a walkthrough again. Oh, one of the buttons removed an anti-magic field. I didn't realize that was something you could use to defend against dispel magic. Doesn't work that way in other RPGs.

This gets me another key which opens up another fountain. There's a nice shiny new mace and a waterskin, but no more keys or anything. I go back to the area with the four doors and place the second waterskin. Nothing new pops up. I'm perplexed until I realize the mace's name is Sightgiver. Thinking this is something I can use against the invisible enemies, I go back up only to find myself once again troubled by invisible enemies. Sigh...

The answer is that another lever popped up. This is getting to be obnoxious level design, it's just a long path that loops in on itself a dozen times when it could have been just a bit more open. This leads to an area with five barriers, behind three of which are enemies. I dispel one, take the enemy behind it...only to find out when I turn around that all the barriers were dispelled at once. Nice. There's another key and a switch, allowing me to advance further. Among my loot is a +1 longsword (Is that better than my previous weapons?), potions of cure disease and at the next fountain, a +1 bow.

The next area is easy to find, because the switch is near the level entrance. A winding path for once, leading to a small fork with switch with a plaque on one side, a button activating a teleporter on the other. Telling me that when I activate the switch that I should move quickly to go inside it. This leads to an area with the final key. A wall drops down when I get close, but when I'm one tile away, it disappears. There are niches in the wall. It takes me longer than I would have liked to figure this out, but I'm used to strange solutions, put items in the niches, the final one of which will retract the wall. Finally, the fourth water skin. Also, a potion of cure poison and invincibility.

This takes me to a room I was previously in, which now has two blue gems in a niche. The Eyes of True Sight. Aha, this must allow me to advance against the invisible enemies. Only, I can't equip them. So what can I do? It must solve a puzzle, that strange door on that floor! That works, and I then can go into a room in which I have to find the true path. AKA, guess or risk damage or teleportation. Oh, well.

Now I have the Mask of True Sight and the spellbook Cult of Magic. Which is for my wizardess. Reminder, I'm still waiting on a second for my druid, and she gets two additional spellbooks. The spellbook has, Haste, "Battle at a quicker pace", which I guess means decreased recovery time, Mind Strike, damage, Death, a lot of damage, but not until we're level 8, and dispel illusion, destroys false scrolls. Which I'm not using. Well, let's go take out some of those previously invisible enemies!

Oh...they're still invisible. Why? Because my wizardess, who I gave the mask to by happenstance but it turns out she's the only one who can use it, is supposed to be the leader right now. Why that's the only way it works, I don't know, but at least she isn't about to get slaughtered by an enemy because of it.

I liked them better when they were invisible. These guys are annoying, it's hard to hit them and it's hard for them to hit me. When they do though, they hits like a truck. Still, they're less troublesome to fight than the thieves and crawlers simply because they don't cause any nasty status effects. They also run away if they get too injured, which I foresee causing some trouble.

This is where I'm going to stop for now. This is going slowly, which I admit is annoying. This session in particular felt like one constant stream of being stopped by something I wasn't expecting. I just don't understand dungeon crawling as much as I'd like, so I assume I'm just not as good at this as I should be. Either this week or next week, I'll interrupt this for a look at Spear of Destiny, but otherwise we're probably going to ever so slowly see this one until the end.

This Session: 3 hours

Total Time: 6 hours 20 minutes

Black Crypt: What Genre Was I Playing Again?

So some interesting things happened with food and rest when I started this entry. After a certain amount of water, it started saying my characters were full. Which is kind of obnoxious in more simulationist RPGs, but here it's bizarre. I'm guessing it's here to force you to not just drink water alone, but it seems to remain in place for a considerable length of time.

Resting, on the other hand, is very fast to heal your wounds but not quite as fast to heal your stamina. The game gives zero sign of how long you have left and I sense that if you're in an area that isn't cleared this is an incredibly bad idea. It seems like it's going to take a very long time to restore the meter by any real margin.

Enough of me stalling, it's time to go down a floor. And we're pretty much straight next to that two-headed ogre, because once you head down the stairs there are two doors leading to a large area with pillars. It's not there right away, but I know it's there. I know it. The game even gives subtle clues that something's wrong, a death gem, leather leggings and a pack.

Death gems, as the manual explains, are basically the corpses of your dead characters that you lug around until you can resurrect them. Outside of scrolls, only the cleric can do anything with them. I have a life scroll, which can resurrect a character three times, but it's not supposed to work with the death gems you can just find. Which I confirm after trying it. Probably too difficult to code in a friendly NPC.

The pack has a scroll saying that he died to the double-headed ogre and how he wished he had the Ogreblade. Gotta love that this guy, knowing of his impending doom, just started scribbling on this scroll. I double check upstairs again, but no, I'm pretty much stuck up there, there must be something down here I can interact with. So I carefully look around.

This doesn't really work out, because once I get close enough he can apparently see me in the darkness. I can hear his thudding footsteps, so I run behind the door...which he destroys. I was kind of expecting him to open it, but no, just tear it away. Against my guys he isn't doing too much damage, but none of my attacks are doing anything, so I reload. If only the game had signposted that I need something to fight this thing.

Since the solution to this is either that I missed a switch somewhere on floor 1 or there's something behind the two-headed ogre, I continue to run around the guy on my second try. In one corner of the big open space is a switch next to a pair of chain leggings. This teleports you to an area next to the arena with two one-way walls into it and a path elsewhere.

This hidden area is a maze, complete with a few spinners. I was wrong, despite the obvious screen movement and noise, I got tripped up by them a few times. Not very nice. Unfortunately this area doesn't seem to have much of anything I can actually use. Just a switch which doesn't seem to activate anything and a chest with a few potions in it. Useful for the future, but for now I just have to find out what this switch opened.

After a bit more exploration, I find a newly opened passageway which leads to a plaque on the wall, and another wall which opens. The plaque says "patience is a virtue", which doesn't quite seem right when the wall opens right away. A couple more eyes, starting to get dangerously low on both food supplies and health, and then...another resurrection scroll and a throwing dagger. It does bring my wizardess's supply up to a full bag of spares. The very end of this section has a belt...which is a...belt. It then loops back into the maze.

I wander around some, before trying for the hidden area again, only to find out there are multiple areas hidden behind the walls that disappear. The second doesn't have much, just an eye and some food, but the third. It's here that I get my hands on some fancy new gear, +1 throwing daggers for my wizardess, and a rune which looks like the fighter's symbol. Taking a chance, I used it on my fighter and he got an addition point of strength. Then a key. I think I can find where this goes.

There's actually a teleporter nearby, which I didn't realize was supposed to be a teleporter design, which leads back to a door on the first floor. This, finally, leads to the little area where the Ogreblade is, along with the Necromancer's Guide. A spellbook for the magic user which adds a strength spell, +2 to strength, remove glyph, which removes a glyph in front of us, dispel and freeze, another attack spell. Note, none of these have anything to do with the words necro or mancy.

The fight with the ogre goes better than I expected. Which is to say that my fighter doesn't take any damage and protects the nice and fragile druid behind him. My cleric gets murdered, can't hurt him any, and soon enough the same happens to my wizardess. But the ogre goes down. Fortunately, scrolls of life have three uses of raise dead, perfect for this situation. That gives a resurrected character very low health. I decide this is a good time to start exploring, after giving back the dead characters their stuff and making them memorize their spells again...only for them to quickly die again.

I reload my save and realize, hey, this is a Dungeon Master clone, why am I not doing a combat waltz? This time around I get in a dozen shots without him ever landing one, and this time my guys once again get another level. Man, by the time I get some of these spellbooks, I'm going to be able to use all the spells. The ogre drops another key, this is his sole contribution, and I'm not sure where it goes. Also, the ogreblade isn't hurting me yet, so I'll hold onto it for a while. 

The moment after I wrote that, I find the door. Which I could swear I didn't see before, but it was under threat of a dangerous foe. There's also another area with a door, which I'm guessing was destroyed. There's only a teleport scroll there. The locked door has an eye which deals a surprising amount of damage, but otherwise isn't special. Really hoping there's going to be another regular enemy at some point. Plenty of stuff, better armor, magic bracers, magic crown, and oh, a rune wall. I click on it randomly.

Oh, shoot, was one of those things cursed? Wait...is this copy protection? It's one of the spells. It is, and it's blocking the path down. I still take the opportunity to fill my party's rest meter, which surprisingly doesn't remove full status. I forgot that I just found another spellbook, Prayers of Orlin.

There are two spells I can't use yet, healing 2, self-explanatory, and God's Fury, high level damage spell. The two I can use is Chant of Orlin, a scaling attack spell, 2-8 +2 per level past 3, not sure if that's going to be the most useful spell, and create food. Which creates food. I'm a perpetual motion machine now, baby!

Floor 3, at least what I can access, has a lot of information and a lot of doors I can't enter. One needs a key, another is a strange gold design, but two others are just closed without a switch. There are lots of notes warning me about the unseen, which based on a slight flicker of the sprite when they attack, are giant centipedes. One note says they only attack if you have weapons, another says to come back with a mask of true sight, and either way, I see no point in aggravating them. Floor 4 is right there. Oh, and there's a ring of location that I gave my cleric. 

Floor 4 starts with a noise and as I approach the passage, I try to get a sideways view. Then this thing steals my druid's bow. I'm glad it wasn't an important weapon. I go through my currently prepared attack spells and it goes down after most of them. No damage, but that could be because my fighter is now an iron wall of defense. By the time something can hurt him, everyone is screwed.

Around the corner is what appears to be another teleporter and a niche with more stuff. A Hopeblade, which I give to my fighter. The Ogreblade hasn't drained his health, but better safe than sorry. The worrying part is the continued noise and a potion of cure poison. There's another enemy, this one hangs out on ceilings but doesn't seem too tough. Another one of those neat little hangers that Raven loves so much.

There's another scroll here. This tells me that in the nest of thieves, the skull glyph is an illusion. Okay, I feel like this is a bit early to tell me that when I have no idea what I'm supposed to be worried about. And then I realize what the problem is in both respects. The hanging enemies poison you, but worse, as if there's something worse than poison with only one cure, is that the nasty-looking goblins can leave before you kill them. My massive assault on the first one was sheer luck, if it goes away that's just it, that weapon's gone until I find out where they leave them. Those hangers ain't going to be kind to me.

Now, there is an option I can do, two actually, fakeout weapons and just not having one out, but I'd prefer to try the overwhelming force technique again. And, you know what? That's not working out for me. I either got very lucky with the first one, or there's some heavy randomization with enemy stats. I think I'll need to just wait out a full selection of attack spells and hope for the best.

Meanwhile, the hangers are poisonous. I got in another fight with one, I won, but if they poison you, it's over. Poison doesn't wear off on its own, you need to cure it. There's only one cure so far, and that's not even enough for one fight. I repeat, that's not even enough for one fight. One of my two guys needs to completely avoid getting hit, which as much as I liked it, still applies to my fighter, he just isn't going to die in a fight unless he gets really worn out or gets poisoned.

Since I'm done here either way, I look up in the guide when I'm going to get the spellbook with a cure poison spell. I couldn't find it, but I saw the maps of this floor. It's very complex and I'm not looking forward to it. I had to look up one on Lemon Amiga, which says it's floor 10. This last part was clearly the training wheel section, because the difficulty has jumped up. I may have to go back up if water is truly its own thing and not tied into food.

My completed map of floor 2.

There are a few other things I've noticed this session. While reading the guides, I found out that the false scroll bit is applying to the text scrolls, not the spell scrolls. I actually think this is neat, that some scrolls are full of false information, that's probably what the life-stealing bit was. I like this, I'm not going to use the spell to reveal if its true or not. The other is that I don't seem to need the read rune spell to read the walls. Not sure what it's actually for.

This Session: 2 hours 20 minutes

Total Time: 3 hour 20 minutes

Black Crypt: Introduction

Going back to Raven Software's debut after years of having covered one of their later games feels like a fitting statement on the game in general. If you've ever played it, it was generally something you did after playing their other games. 1992 was arguably the Amiga's final commercial hurrah, but in America, that feels like it already passed and DOS had already begun its inescapable domination. Why such a strange choice to develop a game on?

Well, when you read about the development of this game and find out that instead of being into action games like you'd expect, they wanted to make Dungeons and Dragons modules and then decided to make a computer RPG like Dungeon Master. As in, Dungeon Master just came out and they changed their plans. From first steps to out the door, it took five years, three before EA agreed to publish it. A far cry from what they would do at any other time.

Reading the manual, it's very clear that this is DnD-derived. Our antagonist is a cleric, Estoroth Paingiver, who was cast out from the country of Astera. Twenty years ago he brought forth an army of foul demons and "other undead creatures", until four men from the Four Guilds of Astera defeated him. Now he's back and you control four champions who shall take him on! Not sure why demons seem to be related to demons, but the idea of a cleric leading demons and undead is very DnD. The Four Guilds, incidentally, are fighters, clerics, magic users and druids. An odd selection, if I do say so. I am probably going to refer to the magic users as wizards, since I've already forgotten it once and magic user is a lame class name.

Now there is some backstory, but I suspect it's just mood. Basically just hyping up Estoroth as a magical protege whose lust for knowledge let him to the dark arts. If I thought this game's story was going to matter, I might care more. But there is some...interesting bits hidden here. It describes four lieutenants, a sea beast, a medusa, a "possessor demon" and a ram demon. (That last one is probably a normal-looking demon) That said, a sea beast? I feel like that sort of creature is an oddly prominent theme in Raven Software games.

There's no intro, just a credits and then the title. The Raffel brothers, along with Gokey, Johnson and Schilder would be the core of Raven Software for most of the '90s, though the two programmers would eventually leave. The soundtrack is starting off very well, Schilder is handling the Amiga very well. I am feeling very hyped up right now.

So, our actual objective is to head into the Tomb of the Four Heroes, where the last four guys fought and presumably died against Estoroth. For some reason there are words, items and symbols on the right. Not sure if this is something I'm supposed to be writing down or not. It sort of conforms to the four classes, except that a fighter has a shield and a wizard has a sword...unless that's a wand. You can tell this is their first game from the pixel art.

There's a configuration menu, mostly just to select your keybindings. Which is rare for Amiga games, now that I think of it. But first I have to make my party, and uh...gotta say, looking at the portraits, I'm wondering if Mr. Paingiver is actually the hero here, because it's looking like I'm about to play as a rag-tag team of villains. Also, the symbols don't quite correspond to how they appeared on that last screen, which makes more sense. The shield belongs to the druid and the sword belongs to the fighter. 

Before I get into the characters themselves, I'd like to talk about the portraits. Each class has nine of them and as you can see in this helpful bit pasted together image, there's some reuse between the classes. Some are explicitly reused and others are very, very similar. It's very possible to have "Angry mustache man" and his three brothers, along with "The chain coif twins" and "The green elf twins". (But not the last two in the same party)

That said, there are some semi-consistent ideas spawning throughout the portraits. The undead or otherwise evil-looking dudes, facial expression aside. The token woman character, and then there's the anime-esque dude. Not sure if that one's intentional or just coincidental. I'm more interested in the echoes of future Might and Magic games by the random minotaur and vampire portrait.

As to the characters themselves, we get three magic characters and one attack character. Technically, all get spells, but the only fighter spell is "show coordinates". Assuming that this is going to be like Dungeon Master, fighting in the front, magic in the back, I've made the cleric a second front-line fighter. Since you get twenty five points and no attribute can go over twenty, this isn't as hard as it sounds. The primary stat can easily be maxed out, the question is, what else do you do? I'm guessing that magic runs off DnD rules, wisdom for divine spellcasters, Cleric and Druid, intelligent for arcane, wizard/magic user. Bears out with the starting stats, anyway.

After some time figuring out how to save to disk and waiting for said saving for disk, I make it to the game world. No real explanation of anything beyond what was in the manual. No music either, lame. Here's my four guys, they're in the Black Crypt! (Or something) From upper left, fighter, cleric, magician and druid. Decided to go all in on the "maybe they're bad guys, maybe they ain't" theme I got from the portraits.

The interface here is mostly explainable by what you interact with. Very smooth too, to the point that its smoothness is far better than a game at this point should have. As in, this is so smooth that I fear the game may sacrifice something else for it. Neat little animations and scrolling text when you click on an item. Or rather hold one. There's a niche in front of the starting point with a wooden shield and a backpack.

Right-clicking on the status box with the AC (Armor Class) on it and you get the inventory. The backpack is a subtle sign that there are inventory items. Basically, items that allow you to carry other items. Something that usually only happens in really simulationist games. Why I get multiple item pouches on a character here I do not know. I do know that it feels odd here. Certainly, it's typical for DM-clones to have food meters, which I can already see is here, but this amount of inventory feels at odds with what seems like a more simple game. Just give everyone the same number of slots. 

The book icon, which was greyed out on my fighter, shows what spells my guys get. Or rather which ones they can use from the starting spellbooks they have. Since everyone is level 1, that means the most basic of basic spells. Click on a spell to memorize it, which means you can then use it. Two get a simple protection spell, the requisite healing spell for my cleric, a light spell. The two odder choices are "Chaos", an attack spell from the druid, the only one at the start, and the wizardess gets "Wizard Sight", which maps out the dungeon. Finally, taking the clunky mapping process out of a game genre which revolves around mapping!

I guess I need to travel around a bit first, but one square ahead isn't...terrible I guess. It's more that you'll have to go into every nook and cranny in order to figure out what is what. More terrible is the loading screen when you press F5 to open or close the map.

There's also a read rune spell, which reads this stuff. Glad I did, because a rhyme about my likely death is definitely helpful. You only get one use of a spell per memorization, and some length of time must pass before you can use it again. But if you let enough time pass, you can actually memorize a spell multiple times. Which undoubtedly will be useful when I pick up a spell that isn't just "light attack" or "little bit of healing".

Speaking of which, monsters are already roaming on this floor. I'd complain, but eh, it wasn't very troublesome. Left-clicking on a character's portrait causes them to attack. If they're able to. This is very much Dungeon Master rules, guys in the front attack, guys in the back cast spells and shoot arrows. In this case, because I wasn't about to waste a spell on my first enemy, my druid did nothing. My wizardess didn't do much either, but at least the throwing dagger she has was an attack. The damage screen for your characters is a tad overdramatic, since it shows a skeleton. Gave me the wrong impression the first time I noticed it.

The stairs further down are also in plain sight, right next to another set of runes I need to cast a spell to read. This time with a rhyme about needing a magic blade to pierce a twin's skin. Guessing that means that whatever it is my fighter is using won't work. Good to know.

The starting area is a small side section, with an unlocked door and the stairs down. There's another alcove with stuff, including a dagger pouch for my wizardess. The path out without the door is to a small, ring area with little niches and another of these eye enemies. There's another passage leading to another unlocked door. The ring is where I concentrated my effort on first, there's another niche with an eye blocked off by a pillar and a little fire trap preventing a complete ring around. Careful search reveals a switch.

Pulling the switch causes a wall to disappear, possibly more than one. Another eye pops up, but this one isn't the pushover his brothers are. Instead, he just slaughters us. Twice, the first time I thought I just got accidentally shanked, but no, he's properly tough. Guess my efforts are better spent elsewhere.

So, I find a few more items on the ground, a key, no idea, a "life scroll", which might be for resurrecting dead characters, and an old scroll which warns me that the "Ogreblade" is cursed and drains the wielder's lifeforce. If so, I like that one of these style of games is actually warning me of an item's effectiveness.

The path off the side of the circle is where I go next. It has this thing that is so obviously a trap I decide to step on it for giggles...it's a pressure plate. A really, really, stupid-looking pressure plate. This opens a nearby door which has leather armor and a waterskin. Food is a concern, but I think this waterskin is just counting as food. Another normal eye.

As I continue through the south of the floor, I notice two standard dungeon crawler hazards and how the map feature actually acknowledges them. The first are the spinners, the things that spin you around on the spot you're at. Very noticeable, but more importantly, the map actually shows them. The other is that some walls will disappear to allow you to go on a one-way path. It's kind of annoying because what state the wall current is in, existing or not, is what you see on the map. The only way to know if that's a bogus wall is to go through it the right way.

I also level up. This doesn't change much in obvious ways, except give me more spells. My cleric gets a poison cloud spell along with reveal truth. That one exposes if a scroll is a fake. My wizardess gets compass...because I needed that with wizard sight. My druid gets dispel magic, which the manual implies is only useful for trap squares. Guess there's not going to be any negative effects I need to cancel, then.

That level up was behind a passage I can't go back, and the only way forward is down. Oh, well, I'll just find a way back. My cleric dies on the landing, and I hear strange noises. Could be the landing, could be something else, I don't know where I am.

Ah, I've gotten myself another game over. Good thing I saved before the spinner section.

Going back to the other door, there's another door behind it, which doesn't have the usual chain to open. Taking this as a clue, I use the key I've been dragging around to open it, success. This is a wide open area and I have no idea how many enemies are here. The first eye I spot feels like it almost cost me my team, but I manage to take it out. Unfortunately, I have to go after some of the knives my wizardess threw.

As I find it, I spot this strange rainbow barrier. Before I get a chance to examine it, I'm accosted by another eye. I feel through the door I can actually open and cost. Gotta let my guys rest somehow. There is a rest function on the menu, but I wager on just waiting around to be able to healing spells again. Curiously, it's at this point that I realize I have no mana meters. At first I assume it's a water meter, but after I found one later, I realized that it had to be something else. The manual sort of alludes to it, but it's a stamina meter, or rather, rest meter.

Speaking of the inventory screen, there are various options, to simulate multiple sets of equipment. Your armor, clothing, then accessories. Just press the torso to the upper right to switch between them. Since I've only seen about four pieces of armor, two of which are shields, this seems to be overcompensating.

When I no longer feel in danger of dying, I go back to the rainbow barrier. The eye has gone in front of the closed door. He's another regular one, which thankfully brings my characters back up to level 2. Now I can dispel that force field. I continue back in, finding a water fountain, which prompts my realization about how the blue meter can't be a water meter either. Lots of items, including a bow, which I give to my druid. The manual implies that some weapons can only be used by some characters, but the druid hasn't hit that problem yet.

The room doesn't take much more effort to clear out, since individual eyes usually aren't troublesome. There's another barrier blocking the way out and a switch nearby. Thinking this might be a puzzle, I pull it and cause another barrier to pop up. Huh, guess I need to wait to get another use of dispel. Or because that forcefield was guarding a scroll of dispel, use that?

That leaves the ring area and the switches that spawn the super eyes. Now that I have a decent attack spell, I try it again. It works, not entirely sure if it's because I overestimated them or because the poison cloud was the edge I needed to handle the fight. Since all this does is expose a few more switches, one of which reveals another door I can't open, the other seems to do nothing, I decide to see if the cluebook included with the manual includes monster statistics. (Shadowcaster's did, in case you forgot.)

Which accidentally reveals that this is more like Shadowcaster than Dungeon Master, nearly thirty levels, and judging by the map of level 1, 25x25 in scope. No signs of monster statistics, but I did find out I missed an area which has the Ogreblade and a spellbook. Well, I can take another look around and see if I just missed that.

Turns out I missed something more, a whole area in the center of the ring. Another eye spawns when I make my way in, as in, it comes up from somewhere behind me. Interesting. There's a helmet here along with a "glyph" scroll, whatever that is. This is pretty much all I can do for the moment, so I'll end it here.

Final observations for this session include, I am mildly annoyed by the movement controls. It's arrows + delete and page down. It's just enough that I don't feel compelled to try to change them but not good enough that I actually like it.

This Session: 1 hour