We’re back to Softside here (previously: Arrow One) with another Peter Kirsch game.
Something that might not be obvious at this point is that essentially, by this time, Peter Kirsch was one of the most experienced adventure creators in the world, similar in quantity to Scott Adams. He (probably) wrote at least 9 of the games we’ve looked at so far, and he’s edited the other Softside games from outside contributors. The need to output adventures monthly kept the momentum going, even though it also meant the games sometime seem a bit rushed.
While this condition wouldn’t cause every creator to branch out this way, for Kirsch this gave him opportunity to experiment. Magical Journey from early 1980 was his only “gather the treasures” game; by Kidnapped later in the year he had an escape divided into a series of a “mini-adventures” based on the floor you were at. In his Adventures of the Month he’s tried sequences of movie-like scenes (Around the World in 80 Days), turning “saving passengers” into a collectathon (Titanic), collecting ingredients for a potion book (Witches’ Brew) and exploring an alien planet with a language-translation mechanic (Arrow One).
Structurally, Robin Hood shares similarities with an RPG. There are a series of heroic tasks you can accomplish (not always in a specific order), and you can meanwhile rob the rich and build up your “gold” supply. Once you have four tasks done a person will appear allowing you to get task #5 and win the game.
There are, as usual, Atari, Apple II and TRS-80 versions. Due to a bug mentioned by Dave Dobson in the Atari version I steered to Apple. (See here; you need Adventure Pack #2.) The TRS-80 version isn’t up for download; Ira Goldklang has a copy, and has it marked as Peter Kirsch, so I assume his credits show up there just like with Witches’ Brew.
You start fairly lost in Sherwood — despite the map not being much of a maze, I had trouble for while because I couldn’t do any object-dropping. You start with a bow, sword, and 3 arrows, but the game doesn’t let you drop any of those for the purposes of mapping (“LITTER THOU NOT / KEEP THY WEAPONS”).
The “hoofsteps” from that starting room are a random mechanic that runs the entire game. While in Sherwood Forest (the area in the map above, plus a western portion) merchants will constantly pass through the forest. You can climb up a tree, then go down to surprise them.
It took me a long time to get the right parser syntax. I tried, for instance, ROB MERCHANT to no effect.
Specifying what you are robbing turns out to be important; you can steal a horse (only once, although it is unclear why later attempts fail) and you can — and this is very hard to find, and I only found it from the walkthrough long into my game — STEAL CLOTHES. This will give you merchant clothes, and you can swap back and forth between your classic green and your DISGUISE. (Note you need to be wearing the green to steal from merchants, otherwise they just laugh at you.)
This sets up one of the early tasks you want to do, but you need to gather all your merry men first.
Here’s the western side of Sherwood.
It has one of the side-tasks you can do, in order to be classic Robin Hood.
Through the forest you can find Will Scarlet who will just straight up join you (and you can pick up the pole next to him). Everyone else takes a little more work. Little John is waiting on a log for your to do a quarterstaff duel with the aforementioned pole (he wins)…
…Allan Dale needs a harp (which you can find under a “boulder” in the forest, although pushing it requires having found some merry men to help push)…
…and Friar Tuck wants food. This was the hardest one for me to figure out. There is the occasional random sound of GEESE; you’re supposed to SHOOT GEESE with your bow (this uses up an arrow) and you don’t have to cook it.
Once you have all the Merry Men, they start complaining about not having a horse. One can be stolen, as mentioned earlier, but no other merchant falls for the same trick. Fortunately, the remainder of the horses just happen to suddenly appear in Sherwood so you need to wander until you find them.
With everyone on a horse (including you) you can take off for Nottingham (be sure to have on the disguise!)
Along the way there is a store that sells new swords (25 gold) new bows (5 gold) and new arrows (1 gold). You’re going to need 3 arrows for the contest (something you will find out only partway through, oops) and you’ll also need 10 gold to enter the contest so I hope you robbed at least one of the merchants!
(Spoiler: later in the game you’re going to need another arrow or two and another sword. So you need at the very least 27 gold total from the merchants. Each merchant has between 0 and 3 gold, and it took me over an hour of grinding to get to what I needed. It didn’t help partway through I had the disguise on instead of the green suit and I couldn’t figure out why my robbing attempts were failing.)
The game will ask what name you want to enter under. I tried ROBOT and apparently that was too close to ROBIN and I got immediately arrested, which was hilarious.
What isn’t hilarious is that the contest is purely based on random luck, and you have to get through to win the game.
On the fifth time I made it through. I’m not sure what the probability is, but that was long enough to wonder if I was supposed to solve a puzzle to “bend the odds” before starting. (You are not. It really is just random.)
After winning, you get a golden arrow, but you also get caught.
The Merry Men will fortunately do a last moment rescue.
Back in the forest (where you’re probably going to need to grind merchants for the next part, make sure to dedicate some time) there’s supposedly some sort of note about rescuing Maid Marian (that Dave Dobson mentions) but I never found one. I instead, being stuck, wandered back into Nottingham to seem if anything changed, and in the castle I found a guard at the foot of a stair which previously wasn’t there.
Trying to attack with a bow causes the bow to break. Trying to attack with a sword also causes the sword to break, but fortunately you get a last moment assist.
However, you’ll need to get both sword and bow back. Fortunately, I used the magic of “save states” to rewind and avoid the bow breaking, but I still had a new sword to buy (25 gold). The sword is needed to kill a second guard at the top of the stairs.
I just want to emphasize how the structure means this is not like one of Kirsch’s cinematic structures. In all likelihood, you likely need to break after defeating the guard to go grind some gold before defeating the second one. So it isn’t like this is a continuous dramatic action. (In practice this is less strong than the cinematic scenes; in theory I see how this is a nice way of making the action feel not-so railroaded.)
Before nabbing Marian, after killing the first guard, the Sheriff of Nottingham will sometimes appear. This is truly the oddest (and frankly, immersion-breaking) aspect of the game, because there’s no confrontation or chase message; the game is waiting for you to do away with the Sheriff. The sword doesn’t work, you need to use the bow.
With the not-well-described victory, your next step is simply to wander around until for some reason the Rightful King of England shows up.
We robbed every merchant in the country, and spent most of our money on a new sword for us and only a little bit on the poor.
I definitely recommend Dobson’s take on the game as he hit the Atari bug I alluded to without first realizing it was a bug, and he narrates the action “straight” like it was meant to happen.
… there aren’t many clues as to what we’re supposed to do — we just have to find things to try and hope some of them count toward victory.
A more complex game might have been able to let you run things as a “Robin Hood simulator” without any concern at all about a specific narrative sequence, and in fact kind of happened already with the classic game Defender of the Crown. Could it also be done while maintaining the adventure-game-ness? The closest I can think of is the Sierra On-Line game Conquests of the Longbow which has, at least, a very versatile score system.
Kirsch found here a way to combine the “cinematic” and “freeform” style play; the unfortunate side effect was having severe grinding and a weirdly undramatic rescue and battle against the Sheriff. I still felt like the game “worked” in an immersive sense but only because it was strictly speaking fan fiction.
Renga in Blue 