The Stack

I seem to have solved Rhem’s second major puzzle, and in so doing gained access to the first hint of what passes for a plot in this game. (By which I mean, an excuse to assign new player objectives: I’ve been offered help escaping Rhem in exchange for finding four parts of a discarded letter.)

More importantly, the same area seems to be the motherlode of cryptic hints. A machine labeled “SIMULATION” displays shapes, which change into other shapes at the press of a button. Another machine with a keypad dispenses sheets of paper with rows of pixellated runes, some labeled with numbers. Even a portrait of two young boys seems like it’s hiding a message, if only I knew how to begin interpreting the colors. Some of this is clearly connected to things I’ve seen before, although the nature of the connection is obscure. It’s all in one small room, not like the large explorable areas outside.

The thing is, I may well be laughing at this a day or two from now, after I discover the real cryptic hint motherlode. Every time I sit down to play this game, I make substantial progress in figuring things out, but still wind up with more mysteries than I started with.

I think I’ve gotten just up to where I stopped playing Rhem the first time. My last major accomplishment was setting everything up correctly in a control center for a system of pipes, allowing water to flow where I needed it in order to gain passage to the second major section of the game. Getting the right settings involves piecing together information from four other places, information partly in the form of unexplained symbols whose meaning and significance has to be derived from context.

For my money, this kind of inductive reasoning is the essence of the genre (both adventure games in general and Myst clones in particular). And it stands in contrast to the sort of reasoning needed in DROD and other rules-based puzzle games. In those, you pretty much have complete information about how all the elements work. The challenge is to figure out the consequences of what you know. It’s very mathematical. Rhem, on the other hand, is scientific: you start with incomplete information, and have to notice patterns in order to figure out how to complete it. Or perhaps a better metaphor would be reading uncommented source code: all the symbols were presumably meaningful to whoever made them. Heck, it’s not all that different from the ad-hoc notation I’ve been using to take notes while playing the game. There are certain fixtures repeated throughout the map, comprising seven buttons arranged around a screen; press the right buttons in the right order, and you get what I can only assume is a clue for a puzzle I haven’t encountered yet. When I encounter one, I note it on the map with a special glyph, a simplified representation of its shape. I could imagine someone else finding my map and being as puzzled by these symbols as I am by the symbols in the game.

When I said yesterday that I wanted something more thinky, what I was planning to do was pick up a copy of Myst V: End of Ages at one of the various retailers I pass on the way home from work. But it turns out that it’s no longer on store shelves (although, for some reason, Uru: The Path of the Shell is.) I have already made other arrangements to acquire it: as a completist, I definitely want to finish the Myst series sometime, even though the series seems to have peaked at Riven. But in the short term, I’ll have to make do with the next best thing: a blatant Myst imitation. Fortunately, I have several.

Rhem is one of the better ones, and in some respects utilizes the form better than any of the actual Myst games. Andrew Plotkin’s review does a good job of explaining this. I honestly don’t know if I’ll have anything significant to add to what he says. I will note, however, that while his review talks at some length about three CDs and overcoming the need to swap disks, the game was later re-released on a single CD, apparently the result of better video compression. This is the edition I’m playing.

My history with Rhem is typical of my experience of graphic adentures. I started it, got a good way into it, got stuck, got distracted, and set it aside to finish later. Well, this is not a game that you can just abandon for a week and remember enough of to keep playing. Some time later, after some system upgrades, I tried to play it again, but hit strange technical problems. The publisher’s tech support was unable to help me, as is usually the case with games more than a year or two old. Whatever the problem was, subsequent upgrades seem to have fixed it. (I love it when that happens.) I have of course forgotten most of the game, but I have a vague recollection of what I did before that makes it a little easier to figure out what to do.

Faded familiarity does not, however, make the map easier to navigate. Talk about twisty passages — Rhem is made largely of catwalks and stairways that cross over and under each other a lot, ruining my sense of where I have and have not been already. The game provides a partial map at one point, and I’m relying on that a lot, when I can figure out where I am on it. Annotating the map with the locations of stairs helps a lot. I may wind up making a simpler map that only notes junctions, once I have a better handle on the layout. As much as the author has tried to ease navigation within the framework of a Macromedia Director adventure game, I really think this aspect of the game might be served better by a full 3D engine, where continuity of motion would make it easier to keep track of which peripheral objects are which. Or maybe not: it would slow down movement, now handled by swift mouse clicks. Besides, it’s not like the author had the time or the budget to develop such a thing. This is another of those indy efforts, sold at first exclusively through the author’s website, and I’m glad that he chose to devote his efforts towards a game rather than a new engine. But the point is, Rhem is conceived as a continuous three-dimensional object, and understanding how that object is put together is crucial to figuring out the game. I made comments to this effect about The Neverhood, but it’s even more true here.

Levels 6 through 9 of Serious Sam: The Second Encounter are set in ancient Babylon, which is presented as pretty much like Central America with minarets. (Which aren’t historically appropriate, but this really isn’t the kind of game where you complain about that sort of thing.) The gameplay is basically more of the same, including hunting up weapons afresh, as they were all lost at the end of level 5. The sniper rifle becomes available early this time round, and it’s a good thing: there’s one part involving a cluster of buildings in the middle of a vast expanse, and I’ve found that the easiest way to approach it is to go off into that expanse and pick off the monsters from a long, long way away.

I’m most of the way through level 6 right now, but will probably put off playing more until later. I do want to finish the game, but it’s a bad follow-up to DROD. Both games involve repeatedly dying and reverting to your last save, but when you fail in DROD, you rethink your approach, whereas in an action game like Serious Sam, usually all you can do is try the same thing again and hope you can dodge that missile this time. There is a tactical element to Serious Sam, but it’s not all that deep. Just now, I require something more thinky and less shooty.

I have completed DROD: The City Beneath, seen the final revelation at Lowest Point, and learned the secret handshake, and am currently in the process of hunting down the secrets I missed (which is easier after you’ve won, because the game then tells you how many secrets there are on each level). This will probably be my last post dedicated to this game, so let me end in what seems to have become my customary way, by iterating through a list of unrelated points that I didn’t get around to making full posts about.

First, I wasn’t kidding about that secret handshake. When you finish the game, it gives you a little ritual you can use to identify other people who have finished it. This is kind of fun: it gives a sense that I’ve passed an initiation trial and am now a member of an elite brotherhood. The last time I got this feeling from a game was when I finished the special Grandmaster ending to Wizardry IV, and sent off for the special certificate available only to Grandmasters.

Second, I think the demo is misleading. The demo consists of the first few sections of the full game, which has a large amount of introductory material and a proportionately small amount of puzzle-solving. Since there’s no hard division between cutscene and gameplay in this game — there is a division, but it’s rather soft and permeable — this has led some people to think that this is representative of the entire game. Well, there are occasional scripted scenes throughout the game, but the first section of the City is the only area dedicated mostly to wandering around, looking at stuff, and gathering information without solving puzzles.

Third, I know I’ve already devoted a post to the improvements that TCB makes to the DROD user interface, but there are two things I haven’t mentioned that really deserve a nod. One is the “battle key”, which is one of those little things that, once you’ve tried it, you can’t imagine doing without. It’s a key (numpad + by default, although you can reconfigure that) which, when pressed, does the opposite of your previous move. That is, if your last move was to swing left, it swings right; if it was to move north, it moves south. Pressing it repeatedly alternates between two opposites — for example, swinging left, right, left, right, etc. This is exactly the sort of action you need to clear out a large number of roaches that have accumulated while your attention was elsewhere. In previous versions of the engine, you had to twiddle two keys to do this, and it was easy to miss a beat and get killed. It’s a little thing, but good UI design is built out of little things.

My other favorite new feature is the ability to right-click on any tile to identify what’s on it. This is especially useful when hunting for secret rooms. Nearly all secrets are hidden by breakable walls that look almost like the walls around them. While it’s possible to spot these by scrutinizing the graphics, I find I’m often unsure in my assessment. Sometimes it’s easy to just walk over and give the wall a poke to test it, but sometimes the uncertain spot is only reachable by, say, clearing the room of tarstuff in order to make a gate open. It’s good to know in advance if it’ll be worth the effort.

Finally, let me talk about the story a little. Beethro starts the game in search of two things: his nephew Halph, and answers. He finds Halph about halfway through the game, for all the good it does him. Answers are less forthcoming: despite the fact that the Rooted Empire’s explicit goal is knowledge, no one actually knows anything. Knowledge is valued as a treasure to be stored away in the stacks, where it sits and decays unregarded. Citizens are vat-grown for specific jobs, and, with the exception of a few rebellious individuals who help Beethro on his way, show little curiosity about anything beyond the tasks assigned them from higher up — or rather, lower down, as the seat of the Empire is at Lowest Point. Meanwhile, it becomes clearer and clearer as the story goes on that the entire system of the Empire is insane, not controlled by anything intelligent, held together only by paranoia and a willingness to not question it. As the Journey to Rooted Hold theme song put it, “Outside the walls, there wait our foes… Let each not speak that which he knows”.

In one respect, this makes Beethro’s quest futile: if the Empire is simply irrational, there can be no explanation of why it does what it does. There may be comprehensible motives for individual factions, such as the Archivists (who want complete knowledge) and the Patrons (I have no idea what they’re doing, much less why, but they seem to be opposed to the Archivists). But for the Empire as a whole, there is no reason why. So we’ll have to be satisfied with understanding how. How it all got to be this way. How it was before. The end of the game provides a very big clue (which I won’t spoil, except to note that it reminded me of something in one of the Ultima games), but we’ll have to wait for the next game to get the full story. And that’ll be several years from now. According to the end credits, the authors are going to take a break from DROD and do some other game next.

To look at him, Beethro is a lunk with a sword. But his is a world where battles are puzzles. He’s plain-spoken, even anti-intellectual at times, with no patience for the snobbery of the Empire. But when all is said and done, he’s the only person in the Empire with any inkling of what’s really going on. Which makes him a better seeker of knowledge than any of them.

So, this game is taking over my life.

Seriously, I’m going through the sterotypical alcoholic’s denial thing. I come home, I fire up DROD for a quick session. Then the session goes longer than I intended, but instead of stopping, I decide to just finish up the room I’m on. Once I finish it, I decide to have a look at the next room. And step by step it goes, until the next morning when I come to work late with no good excuse. It’s kind of alarming. Maybe there’s something to this “game addiction” concept after all. (People often call games “addictive” as a term of praise, but Everquest showed us years ago that addictive does not imply fun.)

I suppose I don’t have it too bad. For one thing, this isn’t something debilitating like heroin we’re talking about here, this is mental exercise of the sort that supposedly delays the onset of dementia in old age. Also, I did take a nine-day break from DROD in the middle, and didn’t really crave it during that time. So the “I can stop any time I want” argument has some weight. And, since the game is finite, and there’s not much point in solving puzzles twice, I will in fact have to stop playing at some point.

I think that’s going to happen soon. The last level I completed was called “Upper Lowest”, and the one I’m on now is called “Lowest Proper”, which really sounds like the end. Mind you, given the game’s sense of humor, there could easily be a level called “Below Lowest” or “Even Lowester” or something. But Lowest Proper has a major adversarial NPC running through all the rooms, out of reach, trying to control things to block my progress — which is a lot like the final level in King Dugan’s Dungeon. This is pretty definitely the climax, and anything that comes afterward will be denouement.

Which means all I have left to do now is solve the hardest, most time-consuming rooms in the entire game. And then hunt down all the secret rooms I missed and solve them in order to open the Master Wall and gain access to the bonus material. Which, for all I know, may have more puzzles in it. And then try out some of the downloadable fan-created holds…

One of the first things that an experienced DROD player learns upon downloading the demo of The City Beneath is that there are sections of the game where Beethro has to sheathe his sword. It’s natural to assume that this is plot-driven, an excuse to keep the player from going on a slaughter rampage in the City itself. To a certain extent this is true, although the designers have other ways of keeping important NPCs out of sword’s reach when they have to. But the game also sends the player into some puzzles unarmed.

You might wonder how this is possible, given that the goal in every level is to kill all the monsters. Well, that’s the goal in every level, but not necessarily in each room. The goal in a room can be simply to get across it in order to reach another room. And there are places in The City Beneath where this is difficult, most notably a series of rooms in the City proper where crowds of workers bustle between a series of workstations, getting in Beethro’s way. Really, though, the entire series has had parts where the sword was irrelevant, including the infamous maze level in King Dugan’s Dungeon.

Also, killing things doesn’t necessarily involve your sword. There aren’t any monsters stupid enough to simply walk off cliffs, but there are hot tiles, bombs with fuses, mimics and other armed NPCs. The unarmed delver’s most interesting option for killing things is the Fegundo, a phoenix-like bird found in certain rooms. One you take control over it (by stepping on a special tile), the fegundo will fly in whatever direction you face every turn. When it hits an obstacle, it explodes, only to rise again five turns later. Suprisingly, the most interesting part of that is the “whatever direction you face” clause. When you’re armed, you can only turn as fast as you can swing your sword, which is to say, 45 degrees per turn. But when you’re unarmed, you can instantly turn to face any direction by walking that way. (Even if there’s an obstacle that prevents you from moving, you’ll turn to face it.) So in fegundo areas, the sword isn’t just irrelevant, it’s a liability. If only Beethro could sheathe it voluntarily! But that would ruin some good puzzles, and that concern, as always, trumps common sense.

By now, I seem to have pretty much left the City behind. The story has taken me to the forgotten spaces below the city, home to the Stone Giants.

Stone giants are what would be called “Large” in Dungeons & Dragons. That is, they have a 2×2 footprint. Although they look more threatening this way, the larger size doesn’t make them more more powerful or even let them move faster. Quite the reverse: it limits their mobility. There are puzzles to be made from this weakness, by forcing the player to either take advantage of it (ducking into narrow tunnels to escape them), or overcome it (herding them through difficult passages). When hurt, stone giants break apart into four one-tile stone golems (a familiar monster from JtRH), leading me to suspect that they’re made of the same kind of rock as seen in Asteroids. Golems collapse into impassible rock when slain. Since obstacles of this sort are the giants’ greatest weakness, it’s like the giants carry within themselves the seeds of their own downfall. (Much like the Rooted Empire itself, it seems. There’s some kind of parable about hubris and data storage going on back in the story. More about that later, probably.)

The reason I’m taking the time to write about the giants in particular is that this is the first new creature shape in The City Beneath. The original DROD had three shapes. You had your standard one-tile creatures, such as roaches, goblins, wraithwings, and evil eyes. You had tar, which formed amorphous multi-tile blobs, at least two tiles thick in all places. And you had serpents: one tile wide, arbitrarily long, moving in right-angle wiggles like in the classic Worm. Journey to Rooted Hold introduced several new monsters, including new kinds of serpent and tarstuff, but added only one more shape: standard-plus-weapon, a shape used for armed guards and the Slayer. In a sense, even that wasn’t really a new shape, because that’s Beethro’s shape.

Well, The City Beneath gave us another new serpent and another new tarstuff, but only at this rather late stage of the game do we start seeing giants. I wonder why? Perhaps the designers felt that the stone giants had limited potential for reuse. Or maybe not; if you’re introducing a new element on nearly every level, something has to come in near the end.

I don’t think I’ve adequately described the experience of solving a DROD room. There are essentially two modes of thought involved, which we may as well call “strategic” and “tactical”. The difference is that tactical thought involves using the “undo” feature repeatedly, whereas strategic thought involves “restart room”. Some rooms emphasize one, some emphasize the other. I recently encountered a room in the Pirate Hideout level that seems good for illustrating both modes and the interplay between them. The solution to this room is given away in some detail below.

Basiclly, what we have here is a simple, wide-corridored maze sprinked with Roach Queens. The Roach Queens are held immobile in little chambers lined with one-way force arrows. The roaches spawned by the queens can get out of the chambers, but you can’t get in to kill the queens until you open a way in. All of the chambers have gates that are color-coded red, which means that they’ll only open after you’ve collapsed all of the trap doors in the room. The trap doors (which show as pink floor tiles in the screenshot above) are scattered throughout the maze. In addition, there’s a Brain in a small area that you can only exit through a green gate, which will open when all of the monsters are dead; this means that you have to kill the brain last. Understanding this gives you a series of strategic goals: go through every part of the maze stepping on trap doors, then go through it again killing roach queens, then kill the brain. This much, you could plausibly figure out just by looking at the level layout (although in practice there are always details that escape my attention until their importance is forced on me during play).

So far, so easy. The difficulty comes in when you actually have to navigate the maze, with roaches coming at you from all directions, guided by the brain. Remember, your sword only points in one direction at a time, and you can only swing it in a 1/8 arc per turn. So surviving involves tactics such as taking advantage of the walls for cover, going after small groups of roaches first in order to have fewer directions to watch, and maneuvering to kill one roach every turn whenever possible, lest they grow too numerous and choke the hallways.

In fact, it soon becomes clear that the queens in this room are generating roaches faster than you can kill them, and that to survive long, you need an extra edge. This is provided by speed potions. Introduced earlier in this level, speed potions are the level’s theme and the key to all of its rooms. They act pretty much like the speed potions in Nethack, allowing you to move at double speed until you leave the room. There are two in this room, but neither is easy to reach without getting killed. So, tactical concerns introduce a new strategic goal: get one of the speed potions before doing anything else. Once you’ve got the potion, you have to discover new tactics that take advantage of it. You still have to kill the roaches as efficiently as you can to avoid being overwhelmed, and a lot of the habits of defensive swordsmanship are no longer necessary. Given the right timing, you can defend a three-tile-wide hallway without retreating, or charge into a pair of roaches side by side, rather than spending a turn blocking one with your sword to separate them.

Now, it took me a while to notice this, but one of the two speed potions in the room, the one harder to reach, is not optional. You have to walk over it in order to reach one of the trap doors, and walking over a potion automatically applies it. I had naturally been going for the easier-to-reach potion first up to this point. What happens when you drink two speed potions? This was the first room to contain two, so I didn’t know. It turns out that they cancel out, reducing you to your original speed. This is disastrous. My first thought was that if I saved that trapdoor for last, I could immediately start killing queens, reducing the roach influx to something I could manage without the extra speed. This failed: you can kill at most one queen before getting killed. So I tried another approach: restarting from scratch and going for the hard-to-reach potion first. This took some tricky footwork, and I wasn’t really convinced that it was possible, but I did finally manage it, and was fairly confident that I had cracked the puzzle.

Once you start killing the queens, it’s all mopping up. The tactical concerns become gradually easier as roaches are produced in smaller numbers. After giving the screen a final look-over to make sure that I haven’t missed anything, I plunged my sword into the brain, and Beethro gave a hearty chuckle, a signal that the room was solved.

One thing puzzled me about Super Mario Land a bit at first: its length. The Gameboy was designed as ideally a platform for casual play, something to occupy your attention while you waited for the school bus. Its killer app was, after all, Tetris. But at half an hour or more per play session, SML doesn’t really fit that model. On the other hand, with a half hour or so of play in the entire game (and no save feature!), it doesn’t fit the model of a “core” game either. What sort of experience were they aiming for, anyway?

When it came to me, the answer was obvious. A half-hour of maximum total gameplay in a single session fits comfortably within the expected parameters of a coin-op arcade game. In 1989, coin-op was still the dominant form, and it would have been taken for granted that console titles are imitations of coin-op games, even when they weren’t direct adaptations. This also makes sense of the “Continue” mechanic, which simulates inserting another quarter.

Today’s designers of games on the level and scale of Super Mario Land are writing them in Flash and releasing them for free on the web. I suspect that today’s core games are influencing these works in ways that will eventually seem as odd as the coin-op influence in early console games, but only time will give us the perspective to know how.