The Stack

The player’s mission in Wizardry I is to slay the wizard Werdna and obtain the amulet he stole from the mad overlord Trebor¹The names Werdna and Trebor are the reversed first names of Andrew Greenberg and Robert Woodhead, the game’s authors. Greenberg and Woodhead’s initials also form the basis of the layout of dungeon levels 8 and 9., but the game only announces this after a major battle on dungeon level 4 (out of 10). Before that point, you’re just dungeon-delving for its own sake. It’s a little like how Final Fantasy 1 only starts its main plot after the first dungeon, and in both cases it’s probably based on how tabletop D&D tends to go: only after the first few sessions does anyone think of turning it into a campaign.

But here in Wizardry, the mission start comes unusually far into the thing. In fact, in a sense, it’s right at the end. Here’s the thing: Dungeon levels 5 through 8 are useless for the actual mission, except to the extent that you can use them to grind levels and loot. There are no stairs down from level 8. The only way to reach the last two levels and Werdna (other than by teleportation magic) is via the elevator on level 4, which you can only access if you have the blue ribbon you’re awarded at the same time you’re told of the mission. So there’s no obstacle to going straight down from the mission assignment to the endgame, if you’re arrogant enough to think you’re up to it.

I’ve always found the whole situation a little confusing. The upper parts of the dungeon, at least, are the titular “proving ground” that Trebor uses to find heroes worth sending after Werdna. But to prove yourself worthy, you have to ignore a number of signs telling you that certain areas are off-limits and break into a section marked “Testing Grounds control center” and “Authorized personnel only”, where alarms go off, summoning monsters. A mention of “the remains of crystal balls and other magical artifacts all now broken” makes the place seem abandoned and overrun, but it’s still functional enough to dispense elevator keys on Trebor’s behalf. Just what’s going on here? We’re told that that Werdna is hiding in the depths of the maze, but the maze is apparently right underneath Trebor’s castle and features an elevator leading straight to Werdna’s lair. We’re probably supposed to chalk a lot of this up to the mad overlord’s madness.

One other thing about the battle of the control center: It yields significant loot, including a Ring of Death, a cursed item that drains the hit points of its wearer at an alarming rate. That might not sound good, but you have to bear in mind that it also costs a fortune to uncurse it — so much that you should probably give up on the character who put it on and roll up a new one. OK, that also doesn’t sound good. The good part is that the cost to remove a cursed object is proportional to what you can sell it for if you identify it without triggering the curse. There’s a certain risk in identifying cursed objects — the character doing the identifying can accidentally become cursed while identifying it — but successfully identifying and selling a Ring of Death is basically the point in the game where you stop worrying about money and start lamenting that there’s so little to spend it on.

This time around, I’m really noticing just how weird the entire dungeon is, viewed as anything other than an abstraction. This is a place that just doesn’t make sense. And I’m not even just talking about the physically unrealistic aspects, like wraparound. I mean that it doesn’t make sense that anyone would build it this way, even bearing in mind that it’s a labyrinth created by a wizard.

I think of my recent experiences with Litil Divil. That was a completely artificial labyrinth, with tunnels meandering this way and that for no reason other than to be circuitous, punctuated with rooms containing challenges of various sorts. There’s a senselessness to that, but it’s a top-down senselessness, a senselessness of purpose. The details of the maze and its rooms make perfect sense as an execution of a strange and pointless intention. The dungeon in Wizardry I has rooms too, and hallways leading to rooms, and corridors with rows of doors leading to rooms on either side. What’s in these rooms? In most cases, absolutely nothing. They’re not rooms that serve a purpose. It’s as if the whole thing was built by an alien intelligence that knows that human buildings have rooms in them, but doesn’t understand why.

Alternately, I guess you could decide that the minimalism of the graphics is just hiding implied details. But that just leaves you in the position of trying to imagine details that make sense of rings of tiny rooms or cycles of one-way doors. Level 5 is particularly chaotic. I recall the short-lived Leslie Nielsen comedy series Police Squad! had a recurring gag involving a door that one character goes through while another just goes around the wall of the set it’s in. There’s a door like that near the beginning of level 5, and even worse, it’s a one-way door.

I think that when I played this game for the first time, I wasn’t really taking it seriously as a place. It was as fake as a carnival funhouse, and similarly intended solely for entertainment. You get that in a lot of older games, like how the endgame in Colossal Cave takes you through the warehouse that stocks the caves.

My craving for making maps on a grid unsatisfied, I turn back to the game that taught it to me in the first place. I left off Wizardry III in the middle more than a decade ago on this blog; I think it’s time I got back to it. But first, it’s been so long now since I played the first two Wizardries that I feel like I should start over from the very beginning. So last night I created a new party of adventurers to explore the Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord. Just like when I started over Wizardry III, I still have some old characters around — I’m not using the same machine as 12 years ago, but I still have the files — but I intend to only use them for emergencies like dragging characters’ carcasses out of the dungeon for attempted resurrection after a TPK. (Recall that resurrection is not guaranteed to work in this game.)

My writeup of Wizardry III describes generating lots of level 1 characters and getting most of them killed immediately, a cycle that repeats until I finally, painstakingly get someone to survive to level 2, which provides the leverage I needed to get more characters over that hump. Strikingly, that didn’t happen at all in my replay of Wizardry I. I just took some simple precautions, like pooling my party’s gold to buy the front-line fighters decent armor, and heading for the exit before I ran out of healing spells, and that was sufficient to get my entire party up to level 2 without any deaths at all. By the end of the evening, they were level 10-ish with only one replacement. I remember the game being a lot harder than this. Of course, when I first played it, I had no idea what I was doing, and this time around, I’m very familiar with both CRPGS in general and Wizardry in particular. The opening hallways and chambers of level 1 are engraved in my memory, and instantly recognizable — moreso than the rest of the dungeon, because this is the part you see at the start of every delve.

But to be honest, the main reason I’ve been able to advance so quickly is the Murphy’s Ghost. Hidden away in a secret area of level 1 where you won’t find it easily, it may have been initially intended as a kind of trap. You enter a room and get some text describing an altar, and a prompt asking if you want to search it. Say yes, and a Murphy’s Ghost appears — or sometimes two; I think the name must not mean “the ghost of Murphy” but rather, something like “a species of ghost identified by Murphy”, like “Thomson’s Gazelle” or “Pallas’s Cat”. At any rate, the Murphy’s Ghost is a great deal tougher than other monsters you encounter on level 1, but once you’re advanced enough to beat it, it offers an unparalleled reward-to-risk ratio. And since you can just enter the altar room and summon it again as many times as you like, it’s the ideal grinding spot. And grind I did.

All this ease inevitably led to overconfidence and a TPK on level 4 when I prematurely took on the game’s first real boss encounter. I’ve more or less recovered from that, but my party has been almost entirely Ship-of-Theseused, with only one of the initial roster remaining. The Murphy’s Ghost helps a lot with that, too: it doesn’t have any ranged attacks, so if you’re training up a fragile new level-1 character, you can just park them in the back row and let them earn XP by watching the big guys slaughter ghosts for a while.

After the trampoline room, I decided to keep moving forward rather than make the long trek back to the save room. There was a substantial chunk of maze on the other side, but also a great many healing items to make continued exploration feasible.

The sole challenge remaining turned out to not be the usual end-of-level bridge fight, but one last arena fight, and I found it to be the most satisfying combat scene in the whole game. It pits Mutt with a halberd against a tall fire-breathing demon with a flaming sword, and beating him is all about figuring out a combo: a thrust to the gut makes him bend double, at which point his head is low enough for you to smack it, and then follow up with a jump to evade his fire breath just before he straightens up. I suppose it’s a fairly pedestrian boss fight puzzle, really, but in this game, where the combat is generally just monotonous thrust-and-dodge stuff, it stands out.

It’s worth noting that the final maze doesn’t have a toll-taker. The final passages have loads of gold, but there’s no in-game reason to take the time to collect it, not even a high score list. Not knowing this, I of course collected it all.

The whole thing ends not with a credits roll, but with an outro animation that simply loops until you press a button. It’s an unusual choice, even for that brief period when games had cinematic endings but showing credits wasn’t yet normal, which it surely was by 1993 anyway. Recall that Mutt’s ostensible goal through this whole thing has been a pizza. The ending includes some pizza imagery, but Mutt isn’t shown actually obtaining the pizza, probably to help enable a sequel about Mutt’s adventures on the surface world. I think by now we all understand that hooks of this sort aren’t really necessary. You can provide a satisfying conclusion where the protagonist achieves all their goals, and then trivially make up new ones later without being beholden to what you left unresolved.

At any rate, now that I’ve been through this game with fresh eyes, I can definitely say that I wouldn’t recommend it to new players. For me personally, the experience was enhanced by the fact that I was coming back to something I gave up on nearly thirty years ago, with the intent of seeing it through to completion this time. That is a powerful experience, mixing triumph, relief, and nostalgia, but it’s an experience that is mine alone. Litil Divil is, however, a game that’s interesting just because of its unusual structure, sundry minigames embedded in a maze. It occupies an otherwise-unpopulated point on a continuum that I hadn’t thought about as a continuum before, with puzzles-in-a-context games like Professor Layton and Puzzle Agent at one extreme and real-time dungeon crawls at the other. Could a game like that work today? I’m not sure. You’d have to make the maze more interesting, I think, but then you’re moving it around on the continuum and might lose what makes it different.

I’ve finally reached the trampoline room.

I haven’t gotten through it yet, but it really does seem likely to be the last challenge in the whole game, apart from the customary unvarying end-of-level fight. By numbers, it should be. But also, the architecture leading up to it seems suitably climactic. The meandering tunnels narrow to a focused point, and the final approach is a straightaway coupled with a serpentine path filled with gold — not a maze to get lost in, but one to get rich in. If you can spare the time, anyway — this is far enough from the save room that just getting there leaves you low on health.

The interior of the room is just as I remember. We stand on the ribcage of a huge skeletal demon. The room’s only other feature is a small round trampoline. If you walk into the trampoline, you just kind of trip and fall over and flip the trampoline in the air briefly. If you press one of the action buttons just before walking into the trampoline, the exact same thing happens. But I remember seeking help back in the day, and being told that this was basically the right approach, that it’s tricky to pull off but you should be able to jump onto the trampoline with the right timing. But once I was able to play with it again, I quickly convinced myself that this is malarkey. There had to be some secret, something I wasn’t doing. But what?

I’m not too proud to seek help again. Alarmingly, when I searched for “litil divil trampoline”, two of my own blog posts were in the first page of results, a good sign of a game too obscure for me to hope for much help. But there was, at least, a two-post thread on the GOG forums that seemed to give an answer: you have to start in a specific place, down along the spine as far as you can go, and hold down the primary action button (the Z key) to break into a run. Now, I’m fairly sure that I had tried each of these two things individually, not just to no success but to no apparent effect at all. Does Z only make you run if you’re in the right place, and aimed in the right direction? That seems like bad puzzle design to me. There have been other puzzles with location-specific actions, and sometimes they’ve been excessively difficult because the area where the action can be performed is smaller than it should be, but this one seems particularly egregious.

I’m reminded a little of an experience I had in Final Doom, a level pack for Doom II. This has a bit in an early level where you’re on a ledge above a lava moat, and the only way to get past the lava is to run off the ledge by holding down the shift key. When I played this, I didn’t know that running was an option — perhaps I had forgotten about it, or perhaps I had simply managed to get through the entirety of Doom and Doom II without ever knowing you could run. I mean, as far as I’m aware, there had never before been a place where running is absolutely necessary, the way it was here. At any rate, I was stuck, and wound up looking for hints. The hints I found simply said to run off the ledge to clear the lava. Not knowing what this really meant, I just tried walking off the ledge and into the lava repeatedly, wondering what I was doing wrong.

Perhaps the first trampoline hint I got back in the day had a similar problem: perhaps it said to run, but didn’t specify how. If so, that’s worse here than in Final Doom. At least there, the controls were documented. The hint’s assumption that players already know how to run was basically reasonable, and I have only myself to blame for my own stupidity.

I found the save room in maze 5! It turns out to not far from the entrance. I think my first attempt at mapping the level covered every branch of the early part of the maze except the one leading to the save room. Ah well. At least I have it now, and being able to bank my progress in clearing challenges has accelerated things. Still no sign of the trampoline room, my white whale from olden days, though. And I’ve been through enough challenges that, if the patterns of the earlier levels still hold, I only have two remaining, one of which will be a combat arena. Maybe the trampoline room will turn out to be the very last one.

For once, the challenges I’ve been encountering have been ones I recognize — “Hey, it’s the plant room!” I say to myself, or “Oh, wow, the mechanical bull challenge. I haven’t thought about that in ages.” That mechanical bull gave me some difficulty, though — just because I recognize the problem doesn’t mean I remember the solution. Basically, it bucks and spins and you’re expected to react with the up and down buttons. A sort of bar graph made of in-game horseshoes heats up, shoe by shoe, as you fail, but cools down if you do things right. There have been other reaction mini-games like this — in particular, the arena room in level 4 is themed as a tennis match, where you’re served four types of balls and have to lunge in the correct direction with the arrow keys to hit them back. The thing that makes the mechanical bull so much harder is the lack of feedback: your button presses have no effect on Mutt’s actions, and that makes it difficult to tell if you’re doing things right. Even if you know what button to press, are you supposed to hold it down, or tap it with the right timing, or what? Eventually I realized that it wasn’t penalizing me for incorrect button presses, just for the absence of the right ones — and if Mutt isn’t playing any animations, there’s no dead time where my presses don’t register. So I could pass the challenge by just jiggling both the up and down buttons all the time, regardless of what happens.

I’ve finally made it to the fifth maze! Only temporarily, though. As usual, I didn’t find the save room on my first visit, so the next time I play, I’m going to be retracing some ground on level 4. Fortunately, that path isn’t so bad. There are two challenges remaining on it, both far enough past the save room to make it not worth going back, but they’re both things I’ve cracked. One is a pure puzzle, with Mutt and a sort of minotaur-like bruiser taking turns stepping around on a life-sized chessboard where certain marked squares have effects on the opponent’s position. I haven’t worked out the meanings of the marks, but the board doesn’t change, and neither does the opponent’s movement algorithm, so once you’ve found a sequence that works, you can just key it in without risk.

The other is a moving platforms scene, a relative of the lava crossing I mentioned before. I’ve come to dread these things. They tend to be the hardest challenges in the game, owing not just to the difficulty of the execution but the random elements that can wreck you at the last minute. In other words, they’re the sort of thing that I try to win once, then head back to the save room so I don’t have to do it again. But this one is much closer to the level exit than to the save room, making that a harder call. Gladly, though, it turned out to be quite manageable, once I had observed it enough. The room has three rows of platforms, two rows moving right separated by a sparser left-moving row, which you have to cross to reach a couple of buttons at the room’s extremes, then cross back to reach the door they opened. Riding the platforms across the room at random are two guys with green robes and distance weapons, ready to knock you into the abyss when you’re on the same row. The key to the whole thing is noticing that the two guys have different weapons: one has a spear, the other a bow and arrow. When the spear guy throws it at you, he doesn’t get it back until he’s carried all the way off the screen. So the the first thing you need to do is jump onto his row and then off again, to make him waste his spear. The bow and arrow, meanwhile, takes three hits to knock you off, provided you don’t panic and try to dodge onto a platform that’s out of reach. So you can afford to simply let him hit you a couple of times while waiting for your stop.

This is a pretty satisfying puzzle, in large part because the tactics that make it easier are so easily articulated. If you asked me how to defeat the earlier lava sequence, or the even earlier bubble room that I haven’t mentioned before now, I wouldn’t know what to tell you. It would be a lot of “Wait until the time is right. You’ll know it after you’ve seen it happen six or seven times.”

A colleague noticed that I was playing Litil Divil — he doesn’t read this blog, but we use Discord, and my Discord account is linked to my Steam account, so he could see what I was playing that way. He remembered finding the game tremendously impressive in its day, and asked how well it holds up. I sadly had to inform him that it does not hold up well. But it’s an interesting question, because the obvious way for a 30-year-old game to age badly is in its graphics, and I really don’t feel like that’s the case here. Indie games have made pixel art fashionable again, and this game still has pretty good pixel art — I suspect a modernized version would mainly just give Mutt more frames of animation.

But the gameplay feels positively antiquated! And I struggle to articulate exactly why. It’s big on the design philosophy of “If you liked doing it once, you’ll like doing it over and over”, but that’s never really gone away — mostly the difference is that modern games more effectively make players actually want to perform repeated actions, by exploiting the mechanisms of addiction that have been called “gamification”. Litil Divil, despite being a game, isn’t particularly gamified. In some ways it’s anti-gamified. When you fail in a mini-game, you can’t just give it another try. You have to navigate to it in the maze again first. This discourages continued play.

I’ve been thinking of this game as having a coin-op arcade sensibility, but that’s not quite right. For one thing, unlike arcade games, it does have save points — it just makes them uncomfortably sparse. But also, by the time it came out, it was normal for coin-op games to let players insert another quarter to avoid losing progress. I guess the thing that stands out here is that it really is structured like a modern game, just without modern conveniences. I compared it to Dark Souls before. Dark Souls and Litil Divil really have a lot of their structure in common: you spend your time exploring a network of twisty passages with sparse save points, occasionally confronting special challenges (boss fights in the case of Dark Souls) that either block the path or grant special items useful elsewhere. But in Dark Souls, when you beat a boss, the game saves your progress. If you die, you get sent back to the last save point, but you’re not expected to fight the boss again. Litil Divil hasn’t caught up on that particular design innovation, and that’s a big part of what makes it frustrating.

Let’s have a UI post, because the load menu is the very worst part of this game. Take a look at it! Oh, sure, it doesn’t look that bad out of context, but you have to remember one thing: This game does not support a mouse. Input is strictly through the arrow keys and two action buttons, approximately equivalent to a NES controller. NES games often have pretty good menus, based around moving focus around with the D-pad. Now look at that screenshot again and ask yourself: Where is the focus?

The menu here indicates focus by a red border around the selected element, which blinks on and off, staying in each state for about a second. A second is a long time in UI-land, and it’s an especially long time for important visual feedback to be invisible. On top of that, whenever the focus moves, it starts over from the beginning of its cycle — which would be great, if that were the part where it’s visible, but it’s not. The whole thing is set up to make you either wait for a second after each keypress, or operate blind. Neither is ideal, but it might not be so bad if the whole thing weren’t also set up to make you need to move the focus multiple times in succession: it starts in the “cancel” button at the bottom, but usually the very first thing you want to press is the up/down arrows on the right, which control which level you’re dealing with, and you have to go through multiple save slot buttons to get there, even if they’re empty and disabled. I usually find myself keying in multiple presses to move to the button I want, then waiting to confirm that I’m on the right one before pressing it.

The leftmost button is for starting the level over rather than loading into its save room. That seems like it should be useful: if you haven’t found the save room on level 4 yet, you could use it to start from the beginning of level 4 instead of the save room on level 3. But in fact it’s disabled on levels where you don’t have a save yet.

I keep mentioning the traps in the maze, but I haven’t really described them. Let’s do that now.

Traps are, at root, things that hurt you a little bit if you’re in the wrong place, and play an animation of both the trap triggering and Mutt reacting to it. The most basic trap is the spike trap: a row of little holes in the floor, stretching a little less than half the width of the corridor, easy to walk around or jump over provided you notice it in time. Noticing it is less trivial than it sounds: you can only see a rather short distance ahead, and Mutt himself blocks a significant portion of your view. When exploring new areas, or areas with known traps, I inch forward a bit at a time to avoid blundering into things.

There are barred windows, from which emerge hands that punch you in the ear if you walk too close. Bow-and-arrow traps that fire if you’re too far away. Open pits, which can appear left, right, or center of the corridor, don’t merely damage you but also impede your progress: after Mutt falls into a pit, he climbs out on the near side. There are grotesque faces that appear in pairs, one on either side: one of them will emit a gout of flame when passed, forcing you to hug the opposite wall, but as far as I can tell, it’s impossible to predict which. You just have to suffer the effects once, then remember which side is the bad one, or mark it on your map, or just resign yourself to taking damage every time you pass that way. These things are then combined, in recurring patterns, like two windows on either side of the corridor and a pit in the middle. The obvious answer is to jump over the pit — but then the game introduces a monstrous hand that reaches out of some pits and grabs you when you’re overhead. (The game is fond of hands reaching out from holes in general, really.) The designers are blatantly trolling the players here. As with the faces, you have an opportunity to memorize which things are and aren’t safe. Jumping diagonally seems to help sometimes. There exist fields of massed inconveniently-placed pits where it’s basically required.

One thing that’s not quite a trap in the same sense: Every once in a long while, there will be an X chalked on the floor. Stand on it and press the action button, and it might fully heal you. This is essential for extended exploration, as there’s no other source of unlimited healing — there are bits of food to be found, but they can only be consumed once. But sometimes, instead of healing, a piano falls on you. This perfectly encapsulates the game’s attitude.