You are Adam Trent, a trouble shooter for the Federation of Space. You have descended to an alien planet where you will make a horrifying discovery, which will impel you to take on a desperate and dangerous quest.
From the cover of Softside June 1982. Escape from the Dungeon of the Gods is an RPG. The magazine cover art is better than the Arrow One art.
Six more to go in 1982 for the Softside Adventure of the Month! (Previously: Dateline Titanic, Witches’ Brew.)
This is probably yet another Peter Kirsch jam — it has the same coding style and feel — but there is no name in the source this time to check. Witches’ only had Peter’s name mentioned in the TRS-80 version so its lack in the Apple and Atari version doesn’t indicate anything either way.
I warned you.
While I previously could predict exactly how his games could go (linear set of scenes, trying to be cinematic) the last two games have thrown a wrench in his patterns (big ingredient hunt, and a non-linear passenger-rescue game). This one (again, assuming it is him) is more of a “romp” structurally, in that you pass through the same areas of an alien planet multiple times revealing new things as you go.
I went with the Atari port this time on a coin flip.
Despite a lot of words being dedicated to an intro, there isn’t much conveyed: we’re Adam Trent, landing on a planet, let’s go explore. There’s something extra going on but you’ll see later.
You start — armed only with a LASER — in a fairly small area with a jungle, beach, and a city being blocked by two aliens. The aliens are not described, but based on actions our hero is about to undertake, they probably look more or less like humans, except maybe for spots on their arms or something. Sort of the Star Trek look. (To be fair, there’s a canon explanation in the Star Trek universe where one older civilization seeded everywhere else, which is why everyone is humanoid.)
In the jungle there’s a GOOBA…
…and a crashed shuttle with an alien. You can search the alien and find a uniform. The uniform fits you and you can wear it, and then the aliens at the city will let you by.
Once in the city things open up quite a bit. I’ll mention now as it becomes important later there’s a broken teleporter with a missing spot for a CYLINDER.
There are lots of “NICE” aliens wandering about and while you can’t converse with them, you can shoot them with your laser.
One of my first encounters was an alien who was not NICE, although I am unclear from the minimalistic BASIC presentation exactly why we know this, or why the police don’t care if we shoot the not-nice alien with the laser. The upshot is we can get some SUNGLASSES that let us see a CONTROL ROD in one of the rooms that otherwise just looks like it is filled with light.
Shooting aliens is ok as long as they look mean.
The most interesting location (from a history-of-games angle) is the library, which has a FROTTI, a LIBRARIAN, and an ENCYCLOPEDIA.
The big gimmick here is that there are “alien words” that need translating, and the encyclopedia can help. You type the letter of the alphabet to get the right encyclopedia volume and then hand it back if you want a new one. (The alien language uses all regular English lettering. It’s less confusing than Followers Adventure which included random odd characters in its alien language.)
The FROTTI you can look up by requesting volume F. After you’ve read the volume, the object’s name changes from a FROTTI to a POWERFUL MAGNET.
The powerful magnet, when taken back to the beach from the start, can be used to find a random alien coin. The coin can then be handed to a beggar back in town to get a translator missing a battery.
You can LOOK POCKET in the uniform to find a battery (no, there was no indication of this, and I looked it up). With the translator active it can make certain puzzles easier (for example, you can understand the librarian is yelling at you to return the encyclopedia volume if you try to walk off with it), but it honestly is completely optional.
You can also look up the GOOBA in the encyclopedia (the critter in the jungle) as well as a XIPPI, a bird you can find in a “hen house”.
There’s potatoes elsewhere (although again, they’re not called that, you need to look them up). The potato can go to the XIPPI who gives you an egg, which then can go to the BABY GOOBA to get a TEENAGED GOOBA.
The process can be repeated for an ADULT GOOBA, which can then be ridden.
This lands you in a new small area with an alien that keeps filching your stuff (and putting it in a nearby warehouse so you can pick it up again, it just serves as an annoyance), a teleporter, a locked door, and a “dying professor”.
Up to this point I had been exploring pretty randomly, so it was very odd to suddenly get a motivated quest. It also isn’t totally clear from this screen but the professor (and his daughter) are human; that will be important later.
The key you get lets you ride an “air car” back to the main town. In order to get to the missing daughter you need to get by a “SNARLING ALIEN DOG”.
There’s no marker this would be where the daughter is.
In order to get by the dog, you need to find a “TRUTH MIRROR” that’s just lying around elsewhere in town and figure out how to activate it.
You can look at volume B (only after seeing this message) to find a torn page:
Elsewhere there’s the other half which says “UPRIGHT”. You can then do a little cryptography to get H— UPRIGHT, which turns into the command HOLD UPRIGHT.
Then you can go to the far north of town to a DESERT, which has the occasional mirage. You can find a CYLINDER and a FREEZE GUN amongst the mirages, but if you turn the truth mirror they “become real” and you can pick them up. (The cylinder can go back to the teleporter, but it will say it needs time to charge up.)
With the freeze gun in hand you can go try to freeze the snarling dog.
However, you can’t just walk on by — you have to pick up the dog and walk over to a BOTTOMLESS PIT where you toss the dog down. Why sneaking by is more likely to defrost the dog then the whole picking-up-and-yeeting process I don’t know.
Past the dog you find the daughter who gives you a DOOR KEY, and then who you can lead back to the professor (using the now-working teleporter)…
…and get a serious, serious, plot dump, which recontextualizes the entire game. It turns out this is a Planet of the Apes situation where Adam unknowingly landed back on Earth, not an alien planet, and almost all the humans are now dead via an invasion of aliens. Given the vast number of aliens we’ve encountered have been NICE ALIENS this is a puzzling turn of events.
Anyway, the computer: it is nearby past a locked door where you use a DOOR KEY. The code the professor hands then lets you kill nearly everyone on the planet.
This is not where I expected the plot to be going. I think the author had something lore-heavy in mind but even if you find the professor early you don’t get any context about how the aliens are all deserving of destruction somehow (by that point you’ll have likely seen about 30 “NICE” aliens). You can see how people at this time were struggling to fit in plot beats at the same time as the gameplay; something like G.F.S Sorceress worked by framing the major plot events at the beginning and the end, but this one just had the plot at the end.
As a moment-to-moment experience this game was still genuinely fun, especially with the language shenanigans; I realize they’re not even remotely “realistic” but I assumed we were in pulp sci-fi mode anyway, like going to Mars and finding aliens. Structurally you have to loop through the same places multiple times and find new things, yet the game didn’t feel “constrained” in geography and I still had a grand sense of exploration.
Coming up: Level 9, the highest level reachable when only using single digits.
Renga in Blue 