I’ve defeated the game; my previous posts are needed to understand this one.
For reasons I’ll get into, I believe some inspiration came from here. Source.
First of all: it was a short hop to defeating the vampire master (and both John Myers and Rob guessed the answer more or less). I was thinking in particular about how there’s no pause (RNG or otherwise) like there was for the regular vampire: you open the coffin, you’re dead. This suggested a “preparation puzzle” as opposed to some particular action that’s needed, and based on all the items of the game, the only one that seemed like it might beat an enemy “passively” was the Mirror of Neo-Madness. Hence:
It didn’t occur to me immediately — I would have thought of vampires as already insane — but at least I could see the logic. Searching in the coffin reveals “Galdimus”; even without looking I knew I had a sword, so I knew what to do next.
Well, somewhat. Even with the shield and the sword you can lose! It’s just RNG, but given my antics with the wandering vampire that could kill you between 0 and 99 turns I figured that might be the case.
In a game without a save game facility (like Seiko’s Adventure) having an RNG-dependent death at the very end of a game is automatically a bad move; here at least you can save. (I wasn’t thrilled about it, but it wasn’t catastrophic to either the gameplay or my mood.)
Once you actually kill the guard (see below)…
…you get some red dust, which then converts into a red orb (“a diameter of about two inches”) when you look at it.
Last time we had put a glass ball (“about two inches in diameter”) into a hole to get an item. This is just re-using the same hole. (Item re-use is always satisfying, even when it’s simple, and the size is a good indicator that the magic is being used in parallel.)
Now we can unlock Final Judgement and win, right?
The game says “Surprise!” and a “Grinning Skeleton” appears in the room description. After KILL SKELETON:
You move in to attack
with your sword ….
The skeleton chops down with his saber ….
…. you shatter its sword with a deflection from GALIDIMUS!
It shoots a fire ball at you ….
and kills you!
This is the part that I think might be derived from Tomb of Horrors. Amongst the traps of the game is a room with three chests: gold, silver, and wood. The wood one has a skeleton.
It’s not exactly the same; it uses scimitars rather than a saber, but it is resistant to bladed attack (like this game implied), and holy water is useful in both incarnations (as you’ll see in a moment). For this game’s version, you need a set of objects to fend off a series of attacks: saber, fireball, curse, and finally death gaze. It’s a little like the Babel Fish puzzle of Hitchhiker’s but with everything done in one shot. This has the downside it is easy to beat by accident, but the inventory limit means you probably dropped one of the important items before arriving here.
Holding the sword, shield, vial of holy water, and mirror: victory! In the chest is the Jewel of Derojhen, which now can be taken to King Brion.
This might be the most I’ve enjoyed myself on an experimentalism-based game where magic is at play. My main frustration with magic has been a fundamental lack of logic; you wave some items at an arbitrary point to cause an arbitrary action. Even though you couldn’t find out the sequence of the Final Judgement skeleton without dying to it (unless you get lucky) the response to a particular attack wasn’t unreasonable; I got cursed, thought about the items I had laying about, and immediately latched onto the holy vial as useful. (This is using the “fan fiction shortcut” to be fair, knowing that holy water and the undead don’t mix.) Similarly, the death gaze made me think of re-using the mirror for “bouncing” even though it already got used once for the madness quality. The effects of various colors was completely unclued, but not unclued in a way that required checking across the map (like The Hermit’s Secret requiring magic words at unexpected points). The experimentation was self-contained.
If I was playing this on a computer that had slow save/reload I might be a bit more annoyed about all the above.
This compares quite favorably to the Howarth games (I think Arrow of Death Part 2 was a little better due to clever geography design, and it’s on par with The Time Machine). Scott Adams still inches above with clever use of daemons which doesn’t happen here; there are no persistent effects (like rooms that change over time) to deal with or coordinate. However, given this is still only game number 2 from Leduc we may still see something like that in the future.
Coming up: some unfinished business, followed by Japan and then Ireland. This will be the first time Ireland has featured on this blog.
(Continued from my previous post.)
There are two different philosophies when it comes to deathtraps involving multiple choices (buttons, doors, etc.) from around this time.
Philosophy Type One (let’s call it “Signalism”) is that deathtraps should have a clue, and this might involve solving a puzzle (often given in the form of a cryptic message). If you read the clue wrong you get punished by death.
The other (Philosophy Type Two, let’s call it “Experimentalism”) is that deathtraps don’t need a signal and the player is welcome to just experiment. In the puzzle shown above, designed from a Signalism standpoint, you go left, then keep going right repeatedly; in an Experimentalism game, there might be no sign, and you’re just supposed to test left-right directions and restore a save if you die.
The issue with the two philosophies co-existing at this time is that you might see a puzzle that you solve by Experimentalism (“brute force”, essentially) except the intent was Signalism (some clue you might not find until after solving the puzzle!) If you assume Signalism, you might get a game that clearly intends for you to just experiment (like the three buttons on The Missing People) and you waste play-time searching around for a clue when none exists. It helps to know what kind of game you’re playing (or if it’s the sort that mixes the two because the author never thought that hard about that design; it might even be intentional mixing like a four-digit code where you can only find the first three digits and you’re supposed to guess at the last digit).
And really, it’s only a few buttons (or directions). Is it worth spending all that time thinking about it? Some of the Signalism games introduce random aspects to force engagement with clues (the Cambridge mainframe games like Hezarin especially) but there is some level from the player’s perspective where the two are almost indistinguishable. Certainly I’ve never thought of myself as “cheating” when I apply brute force just because of how many games that really is the intended route.
Returning to Epic Hero 2…
…last time I was stuck trying to enact a ritual, as waving the wand (which seemed to be step 3 on a list) just had spirits laugh at me (“your poor attempt tp complete the ritual”).
It’s faded a bit. You can read :
“Draw pentagr…Chali…Fill with Blo…Frog…Wand wav
Lit Candl…Smo..Incen” The rest is unreadable.
John Myers guessed in the comments correctly: this isn’t in order, or at least left-to-right followed by top-to-bottom order. After drawing the pentagram and filling a chalice with frog blood, you can light the candle and smoke the incense, and then wave the wand. Waving the wand is just meant to be the last step. Matt W. speculated that
I guess the clue is that it says “Lit candle” so the candle must be lit already? Though I can’t make the chalice part come out grammatically. “Draw pentagram, Chalice Fill with Blood from From. Clean the Wand then wave it over a Lit Candle and Smoking Incense.” But “Fill” is not really in the right tense or place with respect to “Chalice.”
although I’m not sure there’s really supposed to be a “logic” here. I can accept a mangled magic book might be somewhat loose with the order of events and the intent is just to think it worthwhile to try (Experimentalism rather than Signalism, but without the deathtrap.)
To light the candle and the incense you need to have fire in the first place; the stick from the tree will do it, as long as you go over to the oven first and LIGHT STICK. With those two acts done, waving the wand will cause a zap effect and most of the ritual items to disappear.
The wand, stick, monocle, book, chalk, and knife stick around. At least the monocle gets used again.
You can GO PENTAGRAM to warp to the other side, and there’s a pool where GO POOL will easily send you back again. (This has an amusing side effect I’ll talk about later.)
Leduc shows up in person again, this time plugging Epic Hero 3. Sadly, you can’t stab him with the knife.
This is followed by a straightforward maze (drop items to map it out), although my finessing with map directions makes it look cleaner than it really is.
The last room of the tunnel maze contains a long pole (that seems straight out of Dungeons and Dragons) and a shovel. This is followed by a room with colored coloured discs.
You are in a room filled with coloured discs.
Objects you can see are: Red Disc ■ Green Disc ■ Blue Disc ■ Orange Disc ■ Black Disc
Possible exits: EAST ■ WEST ■ SOUTH
I immediately tried fiddling with the discs and they are oddly inconsistent in their parser responses.
What will you do now? TOUCH RED DISC
That is not quite possible .. right now!!
What will you do now? TOUCH GREEN DISC
That is not quite possible .. right now!!
What will you do now? TOUCH BLUE DISC
That is not quite possible .. right now!!
What will you do now? TOUCH ORANGE DISC
I am not quite sure what you mean
What will you do now? TOUCH BLACK DISC
I am not quite sure what you mean
Why do the red / green / blue have the “right now” message but the orange and black discs do not? Additionally, while three of the discs say “You find nothing special” when examining them, one gives an item (a “four pronged hook”)…
What will you do now? LOOK BLUE DISC
There is a puff of smoke and ….
You find something!
…and the black disc states “There is something DIMENSIONALLY funny about it!” This is supposed to be a hint you can GO BLACK and enter the disc to a new room.
The vampire will eventually “suck all the blood from your body”. “Eventually” is a vague span because it seems to be dictated by RNG, and I’ve had the vampire kill me immediately upon entering the room. Usually you get a chance to do things or even run away, and the vampire will follow. This includes through the pool and you can visit King Brion with vampire in tow (no reaction) or go outside (either it’s night-time or this is the type of vampire that doesn’t care about the sun). The vampire will prevent you from going into the hole and we don’t have the right item yet to defeat it, so I’ll come back here later.
Going back to the disc room (red, green, and orange remain unused), heading south leads to a room with a soft floor. The shovel from earlier comes in handy, sort of.
The old manuscript and rope are already there; the “mirror of neo-madness” appears from digging. Looking at the mirror kills you. I tried to use it on the vampire with no luck (although to be fair, I wouldn’t have expected it to work). I suspect the mirror may simply be a deathtrap for amusement (for the author, if not ours). Regarding the manuscript, as long as you’ve got the monocle, it tells you to say Mekleh and then beware.
The vampire lair is the Crypt of the Helkem (so just Mekleh backwards) so that’s logically where the word works, but the game just says
Okay
with no apparent effect. What this does is unlock the coffin, where the “master of the vampires” hypnotizes you and sucks out your blood if you open it, so I think this might also be just a deathtrap gag.
The master of the vampires rises up,
hypnotises you and sucks all your blood!
Heading back to the disc room, there’s one more straightforward exit to the west, that leads to a “Tiny Alcove”, with a rod sticking out of the wall.
Trying to pull the rod kills you (Experimentalism, there is absolutely no indicator).
You can instead either PUSH or TOUCH the rod and it will reveal some stairs (“A panel in the wall slides open.”). These stairs go to a “Hall of the Cunning”, and another dose of Experimentalism.
You are in the first ‘Hall of the Cunning’.
Objects you can see are: Green stone ■ Blue stone ■ Red stone ■ Lighted archway
Possible exits: UP
UP returns to the alcove; the goal here is to make the lighted archway save for passage; it will kill you if you try to enter right away. (“A spell completely inverts your body!”) Two out of the three stones kill you right away as well. I managed to safely TOUCH BLUE and TOUCH GREEN and went for TOUCH RED and died again.
Kerzappp !!!!!!!!
You are DEAD!!
This EPIC is over.
The right sequence is BLUE, GREEN, BLUE (again!), RED, and there really is no clue to this at all. (Having to touch the same color twice really makes it seem like a Signalism puzzle and I even combed over previous rooms to see if I had missed something. No luck. It really does seem to want you to test at random.)
What will you do now? TOUCH RED
There is a puff of smoke and ….
Look what happened!
The archway is now safe to enter, resulting in a second hall of cunning.
Sometimes you’ll get the message
Something in the pit snickers ….
although it seems to be at random. The glass ball has “a diameter of about two inches” and the shield has no description. GO PIT, predictably, kills you.
Silly!
The rim of the pit forms teeth and swallows you whole!
You are DEAD!!
This EPIC is over.
The key is to combine the hook randomly found from the disc with the rope, although I had unfortunate results the first time.
What will you do now? TIE ROPE
To what. (I.E. TO TREE)
What will you do now? TO HOOK
Okay
What will you do now? THROW HOOK
The rope and hook are thrown over the pit ….
…. and disappears!
I was thinking maybe I was hooking the ring somehow, but I think the ring is supposed to be positioned on the ground next to the pit. So you can TIE ROPE / TO RING in addition to tying it to the hook, and then throw the rope successfully.
What will you do now? THROW HOOK
The rope and hook are thrown over the pit ….
…. and catches onto something across the pit!
What will you do now? GO ROPE
Okay
You lost your balance and fell in the pit!
The rim of the pit forms teeth and swallows you whole!
You are DEAD!!
Except: now you need the pole that was back at the end of the maze (with the shovel).
The hole is described as being about two inches in diameter; you can INSERT BALL and a vial will appear. The vial is glowing. This seems to be the end of the line as far as the rooms of cunning go (it’s safe to go back as long as you keep the pole), but the vial is fortunately the thing we need to take down the vampire.
Going down from here is a crypt.
You are in the ‘Crypt of Static Enchantment’.
Objects you can see are:
Completely still Guard of the Eternal Keeper ■ Lever ■ Passageway
Possible exits: UP
Pulling the lever will activate the Keeper. If you’re holding the shield, it will (sometimes) defend you.
What will you do now? PULL LEVER
Okay
The guard moves in and attacks you with his sword ….
You stop his blow with your shield!
Sometimes (at random, I think) it will get through your defense and kill you, so you can’t stand here forever. I’ve tried KILL KEEPER and the game says I don’t have a weapon (even while I have a knife) so I’m not sure what to do here. There is one last room, going down the passage, but it hasn’t helped me either.
The name Final Judgment suggests this is the final room to me, and I suspect the Keeper has the key and I just need to defeat it, and to defeat it I just need a weapon, so… I’m close? My guess is I missed something, maybe an extra manipulation with the colored discs, maybe something to do with the creature in the pit.
Unfortunately I’m not ending at a point conducive to audience-solving this time, but I’ll still take suggestions if anyone has an idea. I’m still not interested in plunging into machine code yet; even with all the Experimentalism this game has generally been fair.
This continues my series on Marc Leduc starting with Epic Hero 1. At least, unlike the previous game, this game is traditionally hero-like.
Before going into the gameplay: I’ve managed to unearth an autobiographical statement! It comes from the first issue of Chewing Gum (the publication for the Colour Genie group that Leduc ran); the entire issue was written by Leduc himself.
Via Everygamegoing.
He was not British at all but Canadian. He moved in 1979 and to work at a telecommunications company (before founding his own); his wife was from Nottingham and by 1983 they had three kids. (Or he met his wife before moving, it’s unclear.)
He gave lectures on machine programming and was “an avid reader of science fiction and fantasy novels.” He also described how his wife Anji sometimes joked about starting a “Colour Genie Widow Users’ Group” and he intentionally made sure the computer stayed turned off over the weekend.
I don’t have a copy of what the packaging looked like, but Molimerx was fairly consistent during this era, so a sampling:
From both the Centre for Computing History and the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History. The bottom two are Scott Adams games, the hand-written “Golden Baton” is based on a Brian Howarth game.
There might be yet more buried out there, but for now, let’s play–
This time we are a warrior tasked by King Brion to find a jewel that will “nullify” the evil spells of the wizard Sharloebon. The Jewel of Derojhen is hidden within the wizard’s castle itself.
The structure here is fairly novel; rather than starting outside the forest of the Evil Magic Person, we’re in the grounds of King Brion’s castle, and we need to collect ingredients in order to get to the bad-side. I’m reminded (very slightly!) of Temple of Bast, which had some elaborate puzzles at “your house” that needed to be solved before crossing dimensions.
We start in a garden and there’s a frog that jumps away if we try to pick it up.
The frog leaps ….
…. and slips through your fingers!
The frog hops over to the other side of the royal garden.
You are in the east end of the royal gardens.
Objects you can see are: Breathtaking Pond ■ Green Frog ■ Stick of wet blue chalk ■ Tree
Possible exits: WEST
The “wet” blue chalk is just a straightforward item, and the tree has a branch you can grab and turn into a stick. If you try to grab the frog again it will jump back to the west side of the pond (where the game started). We’ll deal with the frog later.
For now, let’s head over and get our briefing, going to the northwest corner of the map at the “sitting room” where King Brion awaits.
To the east is a “Royal Kitchen” with kitchen drawers (containing a knife), an oven, and a monocle. I’ll give away right now that if you try to use the chalk it will break (because of the “wet” part); I came up with HEAT CHALK as a way to use the oven to dry it out.
This is the same “ambiguous control” issue we just saw in Seiko’s Adventure. Rather than specifying a set of micro-actions (open, put chalk inside, close, turn a knob) you just specify the whole result in one go. It can be tough to come up with a verb in this case, although I got lucky because the screenshot above represents my first try.
South from the sitting room is a “Chapel of St. Barendon” where you can PRAY and cause a candle to appear, followed by a holy chalice and some incense.
Pray a fourth time and “Lightning strikes you for being so greedy!” There’s not really a way to know what the limit is until you find it, so it’s essentially an intentional death that’s part of the meta-narrative.
Stepping south again is the last room of the start area, a “wizard’s laboratory” containing a “book” and a “dusty wand”. If you don’t have the monocle you can’t read the book (the text is too small). With the monocle it still is broken up:
It’s faded a bit. You can read :
“Draw pentagr…Chali…Fill with Blo…Frog…Wand wav
Lit Candl…Smo..Incen” The rest is unreadable.
This suggests a ritual:
1.) Draw a pentagram
2.) Fill a chalice with blood (from a frog?)
3.) Wave a wand
4.) Light a candle
5.) Smoke some incense
With the chalk dried out, we at least have step one.
I was still lacking the frog part, so I went ahead and did my verb list…
…and noting I was trying to play nice with the frog, and we’re after blood, I just decided to use one of the killing verbs instead.
What will you do now? ATTACK FROG
Tell me how to do it. (I.E. WITH ROCK)
What will you do now? WITH KNIFE
That was a cold-blooded thing to do!
But it had to be done!
(Other verb observations: CLEAN and WASH are good to remember. If I hadn’t already used PRAY at the altar I would have tried it now.)
I went back to the wizard’s laboratory and tried to do the ritual. After some fussing about I did DRAW PENTAGRAM, GET BLOOD (FILL doesn’t work), WAVE WAND–
Except the game said I couldn’t do that yet. I realized it was a “dusty wand”, so the CLEAN I just saw off the verb list might be useful. Let’s try again!
Curious. Looking back at the book again it didn’t seem like I left anything out (“Draw pentagr…Chali…Fill with Blo…Frog…Wand wav”) but there is a gap between the blood and the frog part, and even though we used the blood of the frog, maybe it there’s an extra frog step?
1.) Draw a pentagram
2.) Fill a chalice with blood from a frog?
2 1/2.) Do thing with frog
3.) Wave a wand
4.) Light a candle
5.) Smoke some incense
I tried to place the frog (and various other acts) but no luck. I also tried wand actions other than just waving and still no luck.
I figured now would be a good time to turn to you, the readers. Any thoughts on what I’m missing? I would say “please only people who are playing along, no help from people who looked at a walkthrough” except there is no walkthrough. (No help from people who have looked at the machine code yet, though!) I’m having fun with this (I’ve always liked “ritual” style puzzles in games) so I’d rather solve it as normally as possible before breaking things open.
Renga in Blue 