Necromancer

Name:Necromancer
Number:99
Year:1982
Publisher:Synapse Software
Developer:Bill Williams
Genre:Top-Down
Difficulty:5/5
Time:50 minutes

An evil necromancer has brought darkness to the land, with his foul magicks and legions of sprites and spiders. Only you can stop him from completing his domination of the realm of light. So promises the back of the box for Necromancer, an unusual shooter that not only promises action, but growing...trees?

This was developer Bill Williams second game, after a game called Salmon Run, which looks like a lot of games from around that time. If you know of him, you've probably heard of him because he finished Alley Cat. There are three stages of gameplay, one growing trees, one having the trees kill your enemies and one in which he take out the evil necromancer himself.

The game starts with a creepy tune. It isn't bad for the era, considering its competition could be charitably called a jingle. It doesn't quite fit the game that follows. The game begins and madness reigns. Things run across the screen and trying to move just causes a cursor to move. Pressing the fire button creates a tree. The object is in fact to kill enemies by moving the cursor over them, which is only the objective by way of trying not to get killed and to save the trees you're trying to grow. The majority of the enemies try to steal those trees.

You can't see it too well, but there's a forcefield of a six-point star around the player

While I got past this screen pretty readily, that's because its basically impossible to die on this screen. The only real threat are the spiders, which either hurt you or hurt the trees. You have these things with sacks, I guess the sprites, that seem to steal everything they touch. If they touch a growing tree, they set its progress back. The final element to this screen are the hopping things, which drop seeds, which you need to create a tree.

Note the green thing on the left, that's what drops seeds

Creating trees is more difficult than it sounds, because not only is this game frantic, it controls badly. This isn't a keyboard joystick issue, because I plugged in my bootleg N64 controller and it handled worse. That's the closest I have to a proper old-school controller and if that's handling things badly, I don't think its going to be much better even with period controls. The cursor/crosshair moves as quickly as everything else, and as a result its very hard to properly aim the thing vertically. You're just hoping to make enough trees to properly deal with the next level.

Nothing I do can say will explain anything here

Stage two is where things get really confusing. You're supposed to take the trees you grew and allow them to eat the eggs of the spiders, otherwise they'll hatch and kill you. Except that's not really what the objective is. No, what you're supposed to do is get a symbol that spawns ladders down, go down, and repeat about 10 times. The issue with this is in the controls. Moving still just moves a cursor/attack, but holding down the joystick button moves your character. Which is awkward to say the least, especially since there's the same issues from stage 1. Now if you position yourself wrong, you can acidentally take control of a tree when you're trying to do something else.

Stage two is where things get really confusing. You're supposed to take the trees you grew and allow them to eat the eggs of the spiders, otherwise they'll hatch and kill you. Except that's not really what the objective is. No, what you're supposed to do is get a symbol that spawns ladders down, go down, and repeat about 10 times. The issue with this is in the controls. Moving still just moves a cursor/attack, but holding down the joystick button moves your character. Which is awkward to say the least, especially since there's the same issues from stage 1. Now if you position yourself wrong, you can accidentally take control of a tree when you're trying to do something else.

About all you'll see on this level

Stage three is madness and I was not able to do much here. There are tombstones here, I can get one once, but attacking further tombstones doesn't seem to work. I can take out the wizard, but he comes back, and the hordes of enemies quickly kill me. It doesn't seem to me this section is possible to complete without abusing save states or spending thousands of hours mastering the game.

Ultimately, this game is just too weird and too frenzied to be anything more than that. Its chaos is too unfocused to ever really be fun. Its clear there are many things going on in the game that are more complex than they seem, but actually figuring out those systems isn't worth the effort. Its the sort of thing that would be ripe for a remake, perhaps Cinemaware-style.

Weapons:
A sort of weird wisp that doesn't really feel like much of anything. 0/10

Enemies:
Things that seem to just randomly wander around until they decide to kill you. 1/10

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
Its interesting for 1982, but ultimately, while they change up the gameplay, they're too different. By the time you've reach the latter ones you don't really know what it is you're supposed to do before you get killed. 2/10

Player Agency:
Its interesting in theory, but in practice its very heavily limited by its decision to use the joystick with its 1 button. Having to hold the button down in later levels to move is just maddening. 2/10

Interactivity:
None.

Atmosphere:
The title music does a very good job of setting a tone, but the thing is, I don't think this followed up on that. What follows feels as random as any other title I've touched upon from the era. 3/10

Graphics:
It gets the job done. More impressive in motion than in pictures. 1/10

Story:
None, really.

Sound/Music:
Outside of the title theme, generic sounds for the era. 2/10

That's 11 points. So far above average for 1982, but I find myself hard-pressed to say its good for the period.

Mr. Williams has several more titles over the years, although I'm not sure how many are ones I'll be covering. If you don't know who that is, I suggest reading up about him elsewhere, as he lived an interesting life. Seems a shame to knock on such a title so hard, but there's not much else I feel about it.