Elvira - Mistress of the Dark (1990)

Name:Elvira - Mistress of the Dark
Number:248
Year:1990
Publisher:Accolade
Developer:Horrorsoft
Genre:Adventure/RPG/Survival Horror
Difficulty:5/5
Time:4 hours
Won:Yes (111W/79L)

It feels good to have finally beaten this game. A grand weight off my shoulders. It was exactly what I expected it to be...because I knew there wasn't going to be something incredibly impressive at the end, just that there would be a sense of yes, I have won one of the hardest adventure games ever made. Even if I did take advantage of maps and had to look a few things up.

If you don't read the playthrough parts, Elvira - Mistress of the Dark is a licensed adventure/RPG hybrid that just so happens to perfectly encompass most elements that make up a survival horror game. Who is Elvira? Elvira is a horror hostess, which if you haven't had one or haven't watched one, is someone who appears before horror films on local TV. I'm not sure how legitimate ones work, because the one I grew up with was Svengoolie, who was one of the later ones and who himself played things quite jokingly. Basically, they hype up the film before hand, appear before and after the commercial break to make jokes or state trivia.

Elvira, based on what I know, is one of the more comedic ones. Sort of what if a California bimbo hung around all the horrible monsters. The kind of bimbo who looks at a big nasty monster and goes "look at this jackass". This of course, was a winning combination, which is why eventually Elvira went from mocking movies to starring in one of her own. From this, came these games.

Try being the operative word.

This is a sequel to the first film, which is one of those things I've heard but have never quite been certain if it was true or not. The important thing is, Elvira is a witch, she's inherited a castle in some obscure English hamlet, and as she's renovating it, it turns out to be haunted. By the spirit of her dead ancestor and her army of evil guards. She puts an ad out in the paper, and in comes the player to try to help.

In this game, a guard sauntering out to challenge you is always a bad sign.

And likely dies at the hands of a guard in a gory manner I will neglect to show. There are pictures of it out there on other sites, if you want to see a pixel art depiction of a severed head. They don't skimp out, Lucio Fulci would be proud. It's one of those things that either really motivates you to not die or to die, depending on your fondness for gore. This is actually at complete odds with Elvira herself, who despite showing horror films, disliked the more violent end of the scale. I don't know what she considered the edge, but I'm sure seeing the part where a head was cut off is over it.

Few games give you quite as much a sense of "prepare to die", as this one does.

This act of violence sets the game's tone. This is no kiddy horror experience, you will die, you will die a lot, and the game wants you to die. It's mercies are mostly contained to not throwing you directly into a fight at the start of the game and the adventure side of things. In contrast to most adventure games from this era, there are very few situations where you lose because you used an item elsewhere or missed it earlier in the game. At least in the sense traditional adventure games are known for, you can still lose an item by forgetting where you dropped it or never picked it up. You can just always go back for it. This isn't to say they don't exist, it's just that most require very elaborate acts on the player's part.

Instead, you get screwed on combat. Combat is unrelenting and brutal. There are two attacks, corresponding to roughly half the screen. Click on one side to attack on that side. Which attack works seems to be random. When you defend you also get two defenses, also corresponding to half the screen. Successfully defend, you get an attack, the same is true for your enemy. Usually. You get a second after every failed attack to defend against the next, and most enemies don't have a good wind-up. You can figure out how to defend when a blade is halfway to your neck. Good for ambience, bad for survival.

This isn't to say that the system is bad, it just needs more windup. You need to be able to figure out how an enemy is going to attack before his knife is at your jugular. It's less difficult with earlier enemies, but later enemies can get quite fast, and the proper way to guard from attacks coming on the right has less method of leeway than you'd think. It's less halved and more 3/4ths for the left and 1/4th for the right, probably even less. You can always use the buttons on the side, but these feel like they're making the combat less interesting.

A few enemies switch the combat from the back and forth to having to time your attacks. These basically all happen in the crypt area, the head honcho there and the flying skulls all have to have timed attacks. If you don't know how it works...well, the flying skulls you might be able to figure it out, but the boss enemy doesn't even seem like someone you can take in a fight.

The graphic artist for this game clearly had a lot of fun.

You also get a variety of spells to deal with enemies as well as a crossbow. You use these before an encounter starts by clicking on the item and then using it. At least in theory. In practice, the number of attack spells you can get is heavily limited and you need them for certain enemies. The crossbow is also limited to those enemies and three special cases. For all the game hypes up its spells, it's very difficult to get the spells you need, since a lot of the ingredients are hard to find. Not helped by them being a part of the copy protection system and thus no walkthroughs I could find mentioned where they were.

Combat also has other little side bits. As you get wounded, you gradually lose strength and dexterity, which means you hurt them less and they get shots after you hit them instead of waiting until they can defend. Even if you heal yourself, if you've taken enough damage, you can be in a pain state which needs a particular spell with difficult to find ingredients to fix it. There's a reason that savescumming is suggested around this game.

Wakey, wakey, Sleeping Beauty.

The RPG part of this feels like a token aspect put in because it needed to be put in. Strength is your damage, while dexterity, at low levels, prevents you from following up a successful attack. Res is resilience, your defense, get the right spell and you can raise it. There's also a suit of armor, but that means you can barely hold anything else. You have a weight limit and the game doesn't tell you how much you can lift. Life is your health and experience is just the score, apparently. Skill is more esoteric, it depends on the weapon and raises as you attack with it, but I'm not quite sure how it changes combat.

Oddly enough, the adventure half is generally reasonable given the company. Horror Soft tends to have a bad reputation for this sort of thing, but in this game, anything not involving combat is reasonable. Even that tends to be easy to predict after a while. Just move items around and keep an eye on anything you think might be important. The game is not unwinnable in its adventure half, we just tend to forget this because the RPG half wants you dead.

The objective of the game is to collect six keys, so you're going to have to take out that bird, one way or another.

The interface is mostly good. Mostly. Click on an object and what actions you can do light up. The problem comes with your inventory. You don't get a pick-up and drop action, and you need to do both. Instead, you drag objects to the other inventory. Be it yours from the room or the room's to yours. You need to check the room's inventory if you ever left anything there that wasn't originally there. Like, say, putting down spell ingredients in the kitchen.

That said, I did fall prey to the trap that tends to happen in adventure games. How easy it would be to just look up the answer to a nagging question. The only case I felt the game was being truly annoying to pull off was with lighting a cannon. You have magical fire attacks, but as is often the case, you can't light something with magic fire. So you have to find a fire source. Not the hundreds of torches, no, you need to get a piece of coal. Only, the coal is an item you can't just pick up.

Time to reinvent fire.

One of the things I've learned about adventure games is that often developers will go the extra mile in executing their vision instead of doing good enough, even if that isn't something that's going to be readily apparent to a player. On the other hand, you can sometimes notice something might be useful if it seems useless. The player is given a satchel at the start which seemingly has no use. There's an oven in the kitchen that has a piece of coal in it, but if you take it, you get burned.

The answer is to put the satchel in the room, then drag the coal into the satchel. This still isn't enough to light the cannon, because you apparently can't drop the coal onto the cannon that way. Instead, you have to get a pair of tongs from the dungeon. Only, you have to put that into the satchel, then bury the bones of the torturer. If you don't, his ghost comes back to life and kills you. Because apparently he's so much tougher than the other ghosts. At this point, you take both out of your satchel and now you can light the cannon. Of all the times to not be a smoker.

I do feel like the puzzles are less clever than the ones in Personal Nightmare. A lot tend to recall obvious bits of horror trivia or just plain searching places until you find what you want. The ones that don't, well, none of them are on the level of the cannon, but they never really felt clever. Just sort of meh. In a weird sense, this is just about finding out how you can do these things without getting slaughtered by the hordes of roaming guards. And that, in essence, is why this game, despite the difficulty and failings, is fun to play.

Weapons:
For most of the time, you're juggling melee weapons whose only difference is their base damage. Spells and bolts are limited enough that you don't ever seem to use them outside of special situations, making their contribution feel underwhelming. There is a decent selection, at least. 3

Enemies:
For a good chunk of the game, you fight hordes of guards which come in all colors of the rainbow. They vary in strength, but the game uses the same basic guard for most encounters. The only real differing enemies that you can actually find only dwell in one location, one in which you don't want to spend much time in. 3

Non-Enemies:
I don't mind getting insulted for things under my control, but being the constant target of insults when I'm the only one clearing out the castle feels wrong. Though I guess getting yelled at by the hot goth chick is someone's fetish. 1

Levels:
Every area is effectively a circle. Technically it's a square, but you're moving around in a circle, going through rooms one by one. It sounds simple, but in a sense, it works with how confusing the game can get if you don't pay attention. That said, the garden maze is something I would never try to attempt without a map, it's simply insanity. 5

Player Agency:
Attacking isn't as smooth as it could be, but for the most part, everything is easy to get used to and easy to use. 7

Interactivity:
The interaction list could stand a simple pick-up and drop command, but for the most part, I don't have any general complaints about how the adventure half is set up. Specific puzzles vary, of course. 5

Atmosphere:
Elvira is one of the first games to really do horror right. The brightly colored screens serve to hide a horrific and oppressive gameworld. 8

Graphics:
Despite the horror atmosphere, the castles and forests in the game are wonderfully done. Every background is a joy to look at. Human characters, meanwhile, are done well, but in some cases have too little animation. 8

Story:
A token effort, despite the potential for there to be something given the game. We get a background in the manual that could have been anything, and the assumption that we've read it in the game. 1

Sound/Music:
Sound effects are sparse, but effective. Enemies could make a better sound than a high-pitched shriek. The music is properly moody, each area having its own fitting theme. 7

That's 48.

Elvira gets a bad rap for understandable reasons, but this tends to result in people overlooking the game's positives. In a sense, these work too well. A horror game so horrific people fear it. But behind that difficulty is a fun game whenever you defeat those seemingly insurmountable problems. Sometimes a game's true destination is what you get out of it.

I played through the Amiga version, but in the interest of not playing through the game again, I've briefly gone through the rest of the ports.

DOS

From a technical standpoint, this should be better. I'm not entirely sure of the technical details, but VGA is better than the Amiga graphics chip, especially for things based on actual images. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of actual sound, and the soundtrack is less a spooky adventure and more Skyroads. I should really play Skyroads again sometime soon. It's not a bad soundtrack, but it feels less fitting. There's also the option of MT-32 music, which I imagine improves the soundtrack immensely.

Atari ST

It's basically the Amiga version without music and an ad for the movie at the start.

PC-98

Somehow, not just an inferior DOS copy. The combat is a lot slower. Which changes the oppressive atmosphere of the game slightly and makes it a bit easier. The soundtrack is the same as DOS though.

Commodore 64

Basically, a novelty. I tried playing it, but either there's an emulation issue or the game forces you to use a joystick as a mouse cursor. Which is always fun, but here it presents new and exciting challenges! The sad thing is, I couldn't even get combat to work at all. It's cool that they managed to convert nice, shiny Amiga graphics to the C64 though.

Next time, Onesimus, a Christian game using the Jill of the Jungle engine.

Elvira: Won

One of the nicest sights in this game.

Now that I've done what I remember, I need to get started on what I don't. Around the main courtyard area are towers, most guarded by guards on both the ground floor and the top floor. These guys are here for the easy experience, more experience means my skill goes up, and skill going up is good. Down on the towers leads to the catacombs, which I need to deal with somehow later, for now, I can only deal with upstairs.

This is mostly just a way to remind me of what I needed to do. There's a cannon up here which has a convenient fuse and is pointed at one of the towers. The tower in question holds a knight who is invulnerable in melee combat. Somehow I know this just walking towards him...which got me thinking, maybe I could use a spell or a crossbow bolt. Because invulnerable in melee is one of those exact wording things games like to use, and I'm right, because a crossbow bolt knocks him off the battlement and into the moat surrounding the castle. I file this away as something that will be useful in the future. Clear out the easy enemies and hard ones will appear in their place.

The layout of this room in relation to what's outside is weird. This only makes sense if it's an L-shaped room with the entrance being off to the right, which it isn't.

At the front entrance of the castle, where I came in, there are two rooms. One which has a bunch of nice stuff you can examine but otherwise has nothing, and one containing the captain of the guard. He's tough, possibly the toughest regular enemy. He's fast too, just a general tough cookie. Which is why using a few spells on him is the best policy. The room has a few pieces of paper which reveal quite mundane things. But if I take one of the notes off the noteboard you can get a key, primus. Still nothing that opens any doors I've seen.

There's a wolf no one will confuse for being friendly.

The next part is to deal with the werewolf, a guy hiding out in the stable and turns into a werewolf when I get close. In order to take him out, I need a silver tipped crossbow bolt. That's what the silver crucifix was for, not dealing with the vampire. Turns out I already had everything I needed to kill him. There's a forge on the same side of the castle. Just drop the crucifix and a bolt into a crucible, put that crucible on the fire, then return to the werewolf and just use the bolt. For my efforts I get some horsehair and if I check one of the walls, the secondus key. That's four out of six. Surprisingly far all things considered.

I've been carrying the bones the entire time, since I'm not really sure what the point is.

I decide to do one little cheat, find out where the key to the herb garden was. It was my bad for not exploring the garden shed more, it turns out they were in the seed packets in the tin there. Sometimes a bit of knowledge can be a bad thing. Anyway, after taking out two of the lizard people, I can now clear out the herb garden of everything useful. After taking the herbal honey spell I prepared earlier.
 

If you see this bit, alas, its already too late for you.

Now it's time to deal with the part of the game that gave me the most trouble, the garden maze. Here you need a ton of spells to deal with the pesky little goblins that pop up here. See, you can't fight them in melee combat, they explode. Since it's Elvira, this is a problem. That means using the crossbow, of which I have a limited amount, and spells. As I go to start mixing spells, I realize I'm lacking in many essential components to make any offensive spells. I'm lacking nightshade, belladonna and surprisingly enough, bird eggs. These aren't in the kitchen, the herb garden or anywhere else I've looked. This is what I mean when I say even the walkthroughs are no help.

In retrospect, I made a mistake in going after the captain of the guard, that lightning spell would have been a help in this maze. It's entirely luck if I can reach the end of the maze successfully. You can't fight goblins, if you try, they explode and set you on fire. Or steal stuff. Which in this game is worse than slowly dying. The one attack spell I had ahead of time is useless against the goblins, so basically I have to hope I have enough firepower to reach the end of the maze where the goblin nest is. You need to hit that twice with a bolt or a spell. But inside, is all the rest of the lovely spell components and Elvira's Ring.

Considering how this sort of thing goes elsewhere, putting the object in the convenient hole seems too logical in retrospect.

 I decide to try out the chapel, since this is the only place where a jeweled object fits in. There's an altar covered in fancy objects, a cup, a cross and two candlesticks. There's a slot in the cross that just so happens to correspond roughly to the size of the ring. I put it in and the altar explodes in a flash of light, revealing a set of stairs down.

Continuing Horrorsoft's fondness of putting corpses in walls.

Inside is a room with a crown and a mural showing a king getting knighted by an angel. There's Latin writing I don't understand. Take the crown out of the room, and the room collapses. Remember that Bible verse I had from upstairs? Turns out that's the answer. I looked that up because I assumed the game expected me to translate the Latin and I'm kind of tired of dealing with that. This reveals that there's a skeleton inside the mural, which I can put the crown on to get the Crusader's Sword. Which is presumably more powerful than the one I'm using, but still decreases my skill for the moment. I find it somewhat amusing that they couldn't code the sword's skill to count for two weapons.

Unfortunately, I lack a number of easy foes to clean out. I still have the battlements, of course, but I don't know how many trips I have up there. The catacombs have a monster I'm not sure how to deal with, which leaves the dungeons and the upstairs part of the castle. Going around the dungeons results in significantly less enemies than I was hoping and the upstairs castle has suddenly cranked itself up to max strength.

Yes, this is a guy I want to fight.

So I decide to do the catacombs. You enter here through one of the southern towers. This is a scary and dark place full of creatures which are not easily killed. Including an ogre monster which I assumed was invulnerable to physical damage, but it turns out you just need to use a certain weapon and then click it in certain places. This comes off less as a matter of cleverness and more as a matter of luck. Until this section no enemies have required anything more than just getting the correct attack.

The reason why this becomes a thing here is that you have to deal with flying skulls here. I'm not sure the proper method of dealing with them, but what I'm doing is clicking where they are and eventually they die. Eventually the flying skulls get used as a weapon by fishmen. Which is still weird, but mostly works by the usual rules.

The giant is holding a stone with runes on it, and guarding a tomb which has a key in it. Lots of graves in here, including one room with two empty coffins. Only problem is, one of them leads to under the well and floods the room. The other is where I guess you're supposed to put those bones I've been lugging around since I cleaned out the dungeon. What this does is unexplained. Also unexplained, a random vial of dragon's blood in the entrance to a random set of coffins. I have no idea how you'd figure this out without a map explaining where everything is.

There's a spell to read the runes, which just tells me there's a secret passage in the catacombs. Useful, but unless that's the tomb that fills up with water, I'm probably going to stumble upon that sooner or later. I mix up the last of the spells I think I'll need, turns out that I used up all my nightshade and I'm not going to be getting anymore, so no super powerful attack spells for me. I do realize that I should make a light spell so that Elvira can go through the area behind the dumbwaiter to the left of the kitchen.

An entire jungle of stuff that doesn't matter.

One key left, which is outside, in the moat. The key I got from the tomb is not one of the six numbered ones, it's one that opens an actual door. Or rather gate to the outside. The moat is accessed from the well, which is where there's some moss, after I've given up on using the rest of the spells. The moat is a risky area, because you get very little warning before you die from lack of air and the whole area is wide and vast. There's probably spell components here, but good luck finding them. Instead, I just need to grab a key off the knight I shot earlier. Finally, the set is complete. Now what?

It's kind of disappointing that this is what most of the game has been building toward, instead of the final fight, but it makes sense that the evil witch lady would be easier to reach.

This allows me reach the chest, and after using the six keys in order, I get a dagger and a Scroll of Spiritual Mastery. Now to find where the villain of the game is, which is in the Catacombs. Thank god I have a map. Random women pop up to throw fireballs in my face as I explore now, because I've been having too good a time lately and the game needs to remind me I'm its bitch.

Considering what kind of license this game is, it's surprising that something like this isn't an entendre.

From the entrance I take, to reach Esmalda, you have to go right then left. It's a random hole in the ground, which is always nice. Examine, the put the stone in. Finally, the confrontation, and it's somewhat underwhelming. There's a hole in the center there which obviously requires...something. I took a leap of faith and guessed that it was the Crusader's Sword I needed to use, and it was. From there, it all falls into place. Use the Scroll, and she's further stunned, and the dagger finishes her off.

I get the feeling that these guys lacked the talent to write dialog, which is a mistake for what this game should be doing.

There's no grand ending, just text saying that Elvira is calling our name, and then an image of Elvira giving us a come hither look. No points for sex jokes, that's basically what's happening in-universe. I wonder if they knew that was going to happen when they signed off on this game?

This Session: 2 hours 30 minutes

Final Time: 4 hours

Elvira: Introduction

Welcome to friendly castle Killbragant, which may or may not have a moat depending on where you are.

This is not a playthrough of honor. This is a game I have tried to win for over 10 years at this point. I'm going to play through this entire game in a state of frustration, trying to figure out things that have eluded me in this time. At the end, despite this difficulty, I'm going to recommend it, because despite being very hard, it's fun and interesting.

Elvira - Mistress of the Dark is a weird game. Not necessarily in regards to the world and design of it, though that is true too. A sequel/adaptation of a movie that takes an incredibly graphic horror tone to a character intended to be incredibly campy? It's very strange. What's always intrigued me about it is it playing like an early survival horror game, and you being in a constant fight to survive is not something that only applies if you know what you're doing, this is a constant slide downward you need to fight against. Which is why it's taken me so long to get around to trying to win at it.

Probably not.

The game puts me down in front of the entrance to the castle the game takes place in. There's not a lot to do here, except I can examine the sign there to find out I should enter the office. You can avoid the office, but the end result is the same anyway. I meet a pleasant looking gentleman, who proceeds to tell me that I'm doomed, which is probably accurate, and then has you thrown in the dungeon.

Hey, it's not my fault that the English banned my assault musket and butter knife!

I'm freed by Elvira, who then proceeds to berate me for getting captured by a guard who is undoubtedly stronger and more capable of fighting me right now. She then tells me what I have to do, find a chest which contains some stuff I can use to destroy Emelda, which in the manual is explained. Inside is The Scroll of Spiritual Mastery, and I need to find six keys to open it. Otherwise Emelda will come back from the dead and probably do something terrible. Before I'm sent off, I'm given a dagger, a healing spell and an attack spell.

The game proper starts in the courtyard. There's about eight guard towers, a couple of other exterior rooms, a path to the garden area, a door to the dungeon and a door to upstairs. Enemies pop out whenever you reach certain sections, here it's guard towers, exterior rooms. You get the opportunity to attack first, which is basically you using a spell or your crossbow, neither of which I have right now. You can run, by turning around and then, well, running. But if you turn after the guy behind you starts chasing after you, you enter combat anyway. Chasing after you, in this case, is him stabbing you in the back. Which they'll do once and then sort of politely wait for you to do something.

Few games give you such concentrated "I'm going to kill you" energy like Elvira does.

Combat is straight-forward. Click on the left or right side of the screen to defend or attack on that side. You defend based on which side the guy is attacking. Attacking is more luck of the draw, really. I'm not sure there is a method to being able to do it perfectly, you just hit whenever the game decides you hit. I think the skill stat is tied into this, but despite the simplicity of it, the combat system here has some depth to it.

In contrast to a lot of other games, Elvira is gory. Very, very gory. Dying results in you getting to see very graphic results of what happened to you. In most cases, this involves seeing your slashed throat. Since these are modified photos of real people, it feels a lot worse than the more campy gore of what games would have over the next couple of decades. This, oddly, is in sharp contrast to what Elvira tends to promote herself as. More campy, goofy Halloween fun rather than some dude getting mutilated. Even if she tends to show those films anyway.

My goals this early on are all based around the spells. This is one of the most important aspects of the game. At this moment, Elvira is in the kitchen, and once I get her the spellbook, she can whip up more spells for me. There are a few that are necessary, but the ones that will sustain me throughout the game are healing and pain removal spells. See, if I get hit enough times, it doesn't matter that I'm healed up, the pain still causes my stats to plummet. I also need salt, the spell that identifies spell components, and those spell components.

This last bit is quite tricky, because the game's copy protection is the spell system. Which is not unreasonable, except that because of this, walkthrough makers seem to skip over the whole, where can you find the components, part of the game. Also, the official cluebook has something obscuring text, so you can't find the components with the versions online.

You can pick up the plates...because you can.

The first part is easy, go inside the castle. The library is to the left of the entrance. I just need to grab the book. This is oddly, the only action not built into the interface. You get all the usual adventure actions, but picking things up is exclusively click and drag. Elvira is in the kitchen further down the hall, along with a larder stuffed with food, some of which are spell ingredients, which at the moment, the most important is honey.

I also take the opportunity to enter the armory, after fighting off the guard. There are weapons in here, as well as a suit of armor. I just stick to a sword, dropping the dagger I started with, and pick up a crossbow. Now I just need to find some bolts. Unfortunately, I don't remember where they were. So, for now I'm going to enter the garden area.

If you somehow haven't been killed until now, this is the point you'll realize this isn't quite a fun, fantasy adventure.

The garden area is where most of the spell ingredients are. Unfortunately, most are hidden behind a locked door at the moment. So I go all the way to the far side of the area, past the falconry area and the hedge maze, to the garden shed. Where an old man has had a door fall on him, his throat slit, and maggots crawling on his corpse. Which is as charming as it sounds. There's also a sledgehammer and a crucifix in here, which might be useful later. There's other stuff, but it's all food I don't think I can use.

Shouldn't she be looking towards the camera more?

I'm not really sure what I can do next, so I decide that what I'll do next is clear out the upper floor of the castle. First, I need to get a stake from the living room, because there's a vampire just snoozing in one of the upstairs rooms. Not sure what the logic is, because if you go near her, despite being, you know, day, she'll get up and bite you...assuming you don't have the crucifix. Which I'm glad I got, because I forgot I needed the sledgehammer to drive in the stake. It's odd how often vampire media forget that you need a lot of force to drive a stake through someone's chest. Guess this was before people forgot that.

After returning with a sledgehammer and staking the "vampira", I get the dust she turned into. The rest of the place is mostly killing lizard people and then grabbing random crossbow bolts inside the rooms. Yeah, lizard people, as in lizard men wearing robes and swinging various weapons. The exception to the rooms is the central room, which is a bathroom, which only contains Laudanum, a kind of opium, and a locked door for which I have no key. I also get a Bible page for some important reason.

Four bolts turns you from a rank amateur to a master. (the fourth hit the forest)

Now that I have the bolts, I can return to the garden, getting past two respawned guards. Here, there's a target which I can fire a few crossbow bolts at and suddenly I'm an expert marksman. Just use the crossbow and you hit someone with a bolt. In general, this is useful, but there are specific enemies you can only take out using this thing. The first, and nearby, is a weird hawk and falconer combo. Hit the hawk with a bolt and the falconer disappears. You get a feather and a key labeled tertius.

As I return to Elvira to drop off the stuff I don't need, I hear a scream and see that she's left the kitchen because of a lard bucket. That means I can't return there under penalty of death without the salt. Where is the salt? In the basement, where more creatures and spooky things are.

If you make a joke about him, that'll probably be the last joke you ever make.

There's not just salt down here, there are skeletal guards. These differ from regular guards in that you can't tell how wounded they are from how they look. There's also bugs, centipedes, spiders, beetles and earwigs. And of course, spider webs, all of which are useful spell components. You basically just explore every room, clicking on the same hotspots to try to find the same things. At about halfway through the area there's a sort of boss skeletal guard, who wears pink, and takes quite a bit of swordfighting to take down. I've also noticed that the tougher enemies swing their sword faster, which is screwing me over on occasion.

The area he's guarding contains the salt and a few other things. There are tongs on the table, which if you grab, kill you. The spirit of the torturer around here comes back and burns your eyes out. I've always assumed that it's just another one of those things that kills you, but seeing as I have a satchel that seems to be just flavor. Maybe it's one of those puzzles where the game plays against your assumptions? The satchel and the seemingly unobtainable tongs. Surprisingly, it works.

There's an iron ring on the ground which, when you attempt to take it, opens up an old grave, which has skeleton bones and the quartus key. Then it's just a finishing ring around the dungeon until I get out. I was surprised that I managed to pick up what was seemingly all the cobwebs, because they're not in the rooms like the others, they're out in the halls.

You're welcome. I'm so glad I decided to help you.

Now that I have the salt, I return to the kitchen, slowly wait for the right time to toss the salt at the cook, and everything's back to normal. Elvira thanks me, and I unload all the bugs I've been carrying, and now this place is a bizarre mess of bugs, poisons and other assorted odds and ends.

Unfortunately, this has all been the easy part. This is all I really remember solving. There are minor puzzles I've solved everywhere, but what those are escape my mind at the moment. The bigger problem, of course, is that enemies respawn, and as they do they get tougher and faster. I've already taken out three guarding the path to the garden and there's at least two trips there left for me. What that eventually means is something I'm afraid of.

This Session: 1 hour 30 minutes

Welcome House 2 (1996)

Name:Welcome House 2 - Keaton and His Uncle
Number:247
Year:1996
Publisher:Gust
Developer:Gust
Genre:"Survival Horror"/Adventure
Difficulty:3/5
Time:2 hours 30 minutes
Won:Yes (110W/79L)

There's a certain measure of apprehension when you see a video game sequel released the same year as the original game. By default, it means that unless you carved up a bigger game into smaller chunks, you've spent less than a year on this game. This isn't really a problem during the '80s, because you generally just focused on a gameplay loop, or even during the early '90s. Id did their best work in around four years. But by the time 3D models started getting good enough to resemble something?

Welcome House, in case you forgot/missed it, is a Japanese-exclusive PSX game centered around a man called Keaton visiting his uncle's mansion. These days, it reads as a strange parody of survival horror games. There's no real enemies or threat of violence, but it plays like the genre, looks like the genre, and feels like the genre.

There's going to be a lot of this, often just as "telegraphed".

This time around, Keaton's been living with his Uncle Parkinson for a while, but uh-oh, it's the Fourth of July and his prankster Uncle has set a whole bunch of explosives off in his room. Turns out, he's set the entire house up with similar exploding presents. So much so, that he's rigged phones to explode. You better get used to this, because everything in this game explodes.
 

There's going to be a lot of this.

Which sounds like an exaggeration, but the game is practically non-stop explosions. The game really ramps up the physical comedy, to the point that it centers around it. Were it not a comedy game, the mansion would be a deathtrap. Bombs, phones turned into bombs, pits, mechanical traps and even bear traps. Parkinson probably got himself on a few lists with the purchases he made for the events of this game.

Control-wise, the game is unaltered from the first game. Tank controls, circle opens your item menu, square functions as your general action button. Once to use something in front of you, hold down and move forward to run. Start pauses, opening a map, press it again and you get the save menu. In general start functions as an accept button and cross as a cancel button. Which caused me a bit of confusion at first. 

Unlike in more serious games, a sign labeled danger is an indication that you should use it.

Much like the original game, this is advertised a polygon cartoon. In this case, it feels more like a description of gameplay than the general style of the game. You only interact with the game just to engage the game's jokes in the sequence the developer wanted. Everything else is an illusion, you get things like descriptions of objects and rooms, but they don't ever tell you something beyond what you can see in front of you. It's one long joyride.

But the game does have a problem. While it does flow well for the most part, once you stop for whatever reason, it becomes apparent that the game is basically just a series of events that happen, and your contribution is just advancing the plot. Actions that advance the gameplay are either a matter of gameplay, using an exploding phone, obvious, key and door, or random luck, walk through a doorway in a certain way.

One of the descriptions you get when first entering a room.

A good example of this is a room on the second floor with four big cabinets. You can enter here beforehand, only to find nothing inside. What you actually do is wait until later, when Napoleon the Dog flees in here after you get stabbed by him in military regalia. This makes no sense in context either, you just randomly turn away while chasing him around the room. Once you get him inside, whenever you open a cabinet, he appears in the opposite row. How do you solve this? You go to another room, sit on a random chair, which puts a "kick me" sign on Keaton's butt.

Which is not helped by the game following this up by making you give this axe to a lady of the pool, as in, a water elemental that appears in Parkinson's pool, who then gives you the choice of three axes, only one of which advances. I'm also reasonably sure that in order to get this axe exchange, you need to actually go down, talk to the guy repairing the diving board, go up to the second floor where a set of stairs upwards are, which somehow causes the board to be repaired, then return. Not exactly a series of puzzles which tends towards anything but random actions, but at least I understand the logic to axe lady of the lake and axe against chain of same color.  

Keaton gets his revenge against a statue.

Unlike the last game, there is no long awkward backtracking sequence once you seem to reach the end of the game. Instead, it's put all across the game. In a certain sense, the game suffers for this. It's obvious what the really big things you need to go back for are, but all across the game you get little ones which make you go back and forth across most of the mansion. For a game that isn't that long, it's odd that there's such blatant padding in it.

There's voice acting this time around, which is nothing special. They're doing the job you expect them to do and doing it well, but the job isn't special. Nobody rises above the level of the archetype they're expected to do. Because of what the game is, this wasn't ever not going to be the case.

Admittedly, out of context it just looks like a guy laughing at a dead dog, which is a different kind of weird.

The ending of the game is quite spectacular. In order to stop Napoleon from pranking you, you need to bait him with a bottle of booze. Which is in the spirit of what this game is imitating, but damn, it's pretty ballsy to do something like that. That seems like a risky move, even in the '90s. Then, after finding all the objects you need to open Parkinson's secret bedroom/viewing room, you get treated to one, spectacular final explosion. No wonder there wasn't a Welcome House 3, there was no house anymore. Onto the rating.

Weapons:
None.

Enemies:
None.

Non-Enemies:
With the exception of Allegro, most of the characters are one-note and only state and offer simple things, only ever being more than scenery when the rare puzzle comes up involving them. 1

Levels:
Not having a last-minute point in the game where you have to go all across the mansion again and seeing the bizarre changes the game has made over the course of the game does wonders to improve the quality of the place. 4

Player Agency:
Same as last time. I feel like the game could have used a sidestep function, it really, really could have used that. 3

Interactivity:
In addition to the usual look/use actions, you get a lot of choices. Sure, these choices are often for things you have to do, but you get the option. 3

Atmosphere:
While I didn't much care for playing the game, I must admit, the cartoon violence and what awful prank Keaton would fall victim to more than made up for it. 6

Graphics:
It's cartoony, but charming. Keaton gets a wide variation of animations for the various calamities that befall him, albeit he's pretty much the only character with more animations than the usual you'd give a character who walks and talks. That said, it is very obvious that whenever something calls for an object to lose part of itself, the model completely changes. 5

Story:
It's the Fourth of July and let's just have the most explosive one ever, and boy howdy, does it ever deliver. 4

Sound/Music:
Low quality but fitting sound effects and a smooth jazz soundtrack. Unlike last time, when the tracks played in different rooms somewhat randomly, you get some degree of control, since there are radios in numerous rooms you can change the song on. Which doesn't apply to the licensed songs you can find around. These still only work on the jukebox, all one of them that I found. 5

That's 31.

I feel like I was very harsh on a few aspects last time. Despite taking longer than I should have on it, it was enjoyable as an experience, at least. One of those odd games where it could be said that a let's play is the better experience than actually playing it. Since you won't get the joys of wandering around a big mansion wondering what you have to interact with in order to advance.

Next time, another spooky game, albeit, one that's also not quite the usual fare. It's Elvira - The Adventure Game, an adventure/RPG hybrid which is one of the first games to lean into horror more seriously. 

Jill of the Jungle (1992)

There's no real title screen, just screens like this for each episode.

Name:Jill of the Jungle
Number:246
Year:1992
Publisher:Epic MegaGames
Developer:Epic MegaGames
Genre:Side-Scroller Shooter
Difficulty:3/5
Time:3 hours 30 minutes
Won:Yes (109W/78L)

In retrospect, it's kind of strange that Epic as a company would go from a simple flip-screen game that runs in text mode to a smooth-scrolling VGA side-scroller. It feels like there's a step missing, lessons not learned from the world of CGA or EGA games. Something which does show straight off, as the title screen isn't better looking than Apogee's EGA titles.

Jill insists upon herself, apparently.

The story is, Jill is a mysterious figure in the jungle. She is beautiful and brave and all adjectives you would apply to a heroine of a game. We get no backstory, like how she appeared in this world, how she can turn into animals, or what she's doing in general. Just a rhetorical question, 'who says a lady can't slay a few monsters'? Which in 1992 feels a bit pretentious to put in as your sole rationale for making a female protagonist.

Jill has an overmap, much like Commander Keen and certain other Apogee games. It's pure side view, so you're basically just walking between stages. It's a bit non-linear, but I feel like it should have been just a series of levels. You automatically enter anything you walk into, and there are the usual keys and doors. Later episodes shift this. Episode two has a more traditional series of levels, and the third has a standard top-down overmap.

The controls are you basic fare for the era. Shift jumps, alt shoots and the arrows move. There's seemingly no rebinding them. In comparison to a lot of the competition, Jill moves closer to the hero of a cinematic platformer. There's no climbing or anything, but there's a noticeable delay to most actions. Jumping is where this is most pronounced, with a very realistic build-up to jumping and landing. I dig it.

That said there is some issue with this, and it's that the game often forces you to time jumps fairly well. Jill has health, and health pickups are plentiful, but it would be nice to play a game where I don't have to worry about nigh certain injury. You also get no control over your height, but at least you can turn mid-air. At least there are infinite lives.

There are vines and chains that Jill can climb up, or if you press left or right, jump off a certain distance of. It's generally smooth, but like a lot of other things, the game plays around with this. Elevators and destructible blocks, which function like most others of the era. Step off the elevator, it drops down to the floor it originated on.

Behold, a destructible block maze.

Where this kind of falls apart is in the shooting. Rather than a gun, Jill gets various boomerang-like weapons. Unfortunately, she can only shoot standing up, and there's no easy way to handle enemies who aren't at head height. You just have to hope the game gives you a weapon that doesn't go in a straight line. Because even if you crouch after throwing one of those, it's still heading back straight towards you. Sometimes they even get stuck inside walls, and because you can't fire the weapon again until it comes back, you're screwed.

There are two weapons Jill uses. A dagger, which goes in a straight line until it goes a bit off-screen. This is useless against a lot of enemies, and you have to manufacture situations for it to hit them. Then there's the shuriken, which has a downward arc, bounces, and sometimes doesn't return to Jill, but it returns to her inventory anyway. Despite weapons with downward arcs being the stereotype of a terrible side-scroller weapon, this bucks the trend.

Jill, this isn't what they mean by Phoenix Force!

Jill can transform into various forms based on symbols you can find around. These are usually fairly obvious. The first is the flaming bird that's a constant enemy in the game. This can fly and shoot. Though if you shoot you also fly. Everytime you fire or press the fly button, you get a small burst of upward momentum. It's a bit tricky to get used to, and it's easy to get caught by climbing too fast, but it is possible.

Then there's the fish form. This only works in water, and thankfully you can't jump out of the water. (In her base form, if Jill lands in a body of water, she dies) Jump still moves you up, but not at a quick enough rate to be of any use. Instead you just hold up. Considering that from a player perspective, flying and swimming should be only slightly different, why the massive change?

The third form is a frog form, which doesn't have an attack and just constantly hops. Like Keen's pogostick form, just without the option to turn it on or off. I'm really not sure what the purpose of this is, since outside of one section where it can enter water, it just sort of shows up.

A game set in a jungle without a crocodile is a rare game indeed.

As to Jill's enemies, well, queen of the jungle she isn't. Every animal in the forest seems to want to kill her, and also demons from heck and lizardmen. Most of this can be boiled down to a few real types, the ones on the ground, the ones that shoot back. But there are certainly some unique enemies, not always for good reasons.

Each level is more or less self-contained. Even the hub world, outside of a few keys. This means that weapons, jump power-ups and transformations are all unique to that level. As a result, some levels are centered around regular side-scrolling action, while others are all about finding a clever way around enemies.

Surprised nobody in these games ever tries to harness the energy of a perpetually bouncing ball.

Most levels aren't very noteworthy. They're fun, but simple and easy to get through. Perhaps too easy at times. Level design is often very simple, A to B, with the occasional sidetrip which has point items. Maybe sometimes it's diagonally instead of sideways or vertical, but you go in one, straight-forward line of some sort.

That said, there were some outliers. Some good, and some bad. Like most games, there's this mistake of thinking a maze is automatically a good choice of difficulty. Because of the way Jill lands, this makes those mazes very tedious. Worse still, the most annoying one involves getting your weapon to destroy the right destructible blocks or having to make several precise jumps. Good thing Jill doesn't take fall damage.

One of the two levels the lizardmen, the evil enemies of the game, appear in.

Then there are the less straight-forward levels. These revolve around more puzzling layouts or just going through a level without a weapon. Despite the unusual movement and my distaste for the latter, I found these interesting. Jill has such an easy time with violence, since everything dies the second you hit it, that non-violence forces some cleverness on the player's part.

Like I mentioned at the start, the game's weird in the audio-visual department. It seems like they have little experience working against the limitations of earlier eras and instead made it straight to an effectively limitless palette and audio design. It's not bad-looking, it's just that the use of colors show that there's little thought about it. Look at all the pretty colors rather than thinking about what colors should be used.

Then there's the audio design. It's very impactful, distinct and matches actions well, but it's also distracting. Sounds are a bit loud and there's no volume adjustment in-game. They also sometimes don't quite fit, made worse by how every episode changes a lot of them around. Sometimes a sound will be reasonable, then in the next episode it'll change to something that is not.

This makes the game feel less like a DOS game and more like an Amiga game. Which in retrospect makes the game feel a bit out of date for 1992. Clearly, it didn't hurt Epic, but the second more obviously VGA games appeared on the scene, Jill feels more out of place. I still like the way the game is set-up, but I must admit that it has some problems.

"...the game series I would outlast. By three decades if you count that mobile game!"

One thing that rubbed me the wrong way was that instead of having a story, the game introduces various text boxes making fun of other video game heroes, which strikes me as overly presumptuous at the time. Now, considering that all of the characters being mocked had sequels at the time and Jill only ever had one unofficial sequel, well, I'm not terribly amused. Reminds me that impotent indie developer sniping isn't just limited to the 21st century.

At least, this is the story until the third episode. In the third episode, Jill now has to save a prince to prevent lizard men from destroying the forest to build condos. None of the shareware games so far have had an amazing story or anything, but it's odd just slapping in some half-hearted real story at the final part of the game.

It would have been nice if there was more variation than just huts.

In general the third episode changes a lot of things about the game. Suddenly, there's an overworld. Level design shifts from the mostly straight-forward levels of the first two episodes to something non-linear. It's an odd choice, considering that usually the shareware episode is the best. If it weren't for how the staff remains the same between the three episodes, I'd say someone new in this episode was better. Guess they just wrote all their levels in same order you play them.

There is some unpleasantness to this cleverness. Sometimes the game will allow Jill to jump down a bit of water which before, would kill her. And oh, the game loves dumping hundreds of spikes on the player. They kill Jill outright rather than hurting her, which is just great. It's about the only part I actually disliked in the final episode.

In most games centered around rescuing a princess, we don't find that part out 2/3rds of the way through!

Eventually, you get an epic two-part level where you free the prince. The game throws a text box at you if you try to exit without doing so, which is amusing, but otherwise the level is a bit disappointing. The final part is a straight-forward key hunt, and the ending is a joke that feels like it was added at the last minute to make some sort of point that failed to land. Onto the rating.

Weapons:
Despite some annoyances, the weapons have some clever unique behaviors going on which makes each feel different from the others and useful in their own way. Even if some can't hit some enemies. 4

Enemies:
For the most part, just enemies which go back and forth. The few which are actively hostile tend to be among the more annoying ones. At least they don't present an unbeatable challenge. 3

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
Rarely bad, usually forgettable, never outright unpleasant. The third episode is by far the best, and shows that the people behind this were clearly improving. 5

Player Agency:
Jill is a bit of an odd duck. She leans towards the realistic side, but doesn't quite force herself towards a full cinematic platformer style. At times it feels like she's an imitation of a cinematic platformer hero. That said, I liked it, and generally the game didn't make you work around the flaws it had. 6

Interactivity:
The usual switches and destructible blocks. 1

Atmosphere:
The whole package is weird. It feels like it came out of the void with barely any influences on it or influences that at times seem impossible. All in a package that seems to exist with the barest interest towards what it's trying to do. It's a strange fever dream, an aspect that gets overlooked because for many, Jill was a seminal game. 5

Graphics:
Nice-looking, but generally overly soft. While I like the animation, it sometimes seems both choppy and smooth, and I can't place my finger on why. 6

Story:
Basically nothing. 0

Sound/Music:
Nice, well designed sounds except for one flaw. Too bombastic. The music is nice, but loops are just a bit too short and are likewise, sometimes too bombastic. 6

That's 36, about comparable for most titles we've seen in the shareware era. Basically middle of the pack.

The thing that strikes me the most about this game is how odd it is. We've gone directly from a top-down shooter which was a very simple template using text mode to a complex VGA game which has a lot going on. Maybe it doesn't always succeed at what it tries to do, but Epic is starting to feel like a company that goes for something absolutely crazy, even if it can't always hit that target.

Halloween is about to pop up, so it's time for something spooky and slightly out of the usual. Well, one of those things, anyway, in Welcome House 2.

Owing to unforeseen circumstances, I'll be missing my usual entry on the 5th, but I'll be back with Welcome House 2 on the 12th.