The Stack

I finally found the save room in maze 3, and close by, a single challenge room. On the other side of the challenge lies more maze. I have not yet found any more rooms. This maze is a lot bigger than I remember them being. And on top of that, the one challenge room I found? It’s another maze. A smaller one, with different rules and different presentation: multi-tiered, isometric, and with a sort of node that you disappear into at every bend or intersection. Key to solving it is realizing that pressing the primary action button while in a node switches you to a view of the inside of the node, where items and elevator platforms are hidden. That’s the kind of puzzle you find in the rooms. There’s always a bit of guesswork before you can start solving them for real.

Some other notable puzzles I’ve seen so far:

The very first puzzle you encounter on level 1 involves a spider-demon that sits in place and spawns spiders, which follow you erratically and attack you. It doesn’t take long to figure out that the action buttons make you step on spiders, or occasionally pick them up and eat them, but it’s a losing battle: the demon just spawns more to replace any that you kill, and you can’t do anything to stop it. Until, that is, you buy some bug spray from the shop. Then the two action buttons do two different things, one stomping and one spraying.

A sort of wizard’s laboratory, with a row of colored flasks, a bubbling cauldron, and four wizards playing poker — although before long, one of them gets irritated at another and turns him into a frog. Get close enough to the flasks, and you enter a special mode where you select stuff to throw into the cauldron. The correct combination is found elsewhere in the maze. Even once I had that, it took me a while to find the place I had to stand to take a drink out of the cauldron. Drinking the correct concoction temporarily turns you into a mouse, letting you escape through a hole in the wainscotting on the opposite side of the room — but only if you can evade the cat that’s been sleeping by the poker table until that moment.

A sleeping dragon on a treasure hoard, albeit apparently not the sort of treasure you collect in the maze. There’s one item in the hoard you need, but it’s on the other side of the gouts of flame the dragon is breathing out of its nose in its sleep. You can, however, reach a heap of large gemstones, and pick them up and throw them (with no ability to alter distance or direction). I suspected early on that the solution was to throw the gems to plug the dragon’s nostrils, but it still took me multiple visits to find the exact spot you have to stand on to get them in place. And even then, you have limited time before the gems burn up.

So there’s action elements in most puzzles, just as there’s a puzzle element in most of the game’s action scenes.

I’ve made it to the third maze. Despite a considerable time spent exploring, I have yet to find a single room — not even the save room, with the result that I have to restart from the save room in level 2 every time I run out of health. (In case I have not yet made it clear: This is not a friendly game.) Let’s look at the patterns established in the first two mazes and assume they hold through for the rest.

Each maze starts and ends with a fight against a monster on a bridge. Coupled with the fact that you can’t save between mazes, this means you wind up doing two bridge fights in a row. The maze-start monster and the maze-end monster are distinct, but there seems to be only one maze-start monster (a troll with a club) and one maze-end monster (a squat, grinning, vaguely lizardish demon with a flail), just palette-swapped and possibly with increasing health. The maze-start monster can’t actually defeat you, because the price of defeat is always being ejected from the room with slightly less health, and before you’ve entered the maze, there’s nothing to eject you to. All it can do is block your way indefinitely.

Every maze I’ve seen has the following rooms: the save room, where you can save the game; the shop, where you can exchange the gold you find scattered through the maze for items needed to solve puzzles; the exit with its aforementioned bridge fight; and seven challenges, for a total of ten rooms per maze, matching the Steam blurb’s claim of “five hellish levels of treacherous tunnels with more than 50 raucous rooms of gameplay”. Three of the challenges yield items you’ll need to exit the maze. The other four are just obstacles, blocking the path to sections of the maze. One of the obstacle rooms seems to always be a special arena fight that you need an item from the store to win. All challenges disappear after completion, turning into just more corridor.

There are occasional locked doors in the maze, not leading to rooms, just blocking the way until you collect a key lying in a dead end somewhere. One locked door shortly before the exit is special: the key is provided by a sort of toll taker who reaches a very long arm from a nearby barred window, demanding all the gold in the maze (less the price of all the items in the shop). In this way, the game motivates you to explore the maze thoroughly, as coins could be anywhere. Then it trolls you by including long, winding, trap-filled sections that don’t hold anything worthwhile at all.

Like many other maze-themed games, Litil Divil makes it basically essential to draw a map. Oh, it has an automap that fills in as you explore, but it only shows a meager 8×8 section of the maze at a time (in maps that can be in the neighborhood of 40 tiles on a side), and doesn’t communicate essential information like “How do I get back to that one puzzle room that I think I have the resources to solve now?” Back when I played this game for the first time, I drew crude schematics of the maze, just lines showing how things connected, bendy in places because they weren’t drawn to scale. That was okay in practical terms, and acceptable when I was just playing a game I had picked from a bargain bin. But when I’m looking at closing out a twenty-year pretend obligation? That feels momentous enough to warrant something tile-accurate, drawn on an actual grid.

The game makes some attempt at thwarting this: one spot in maze 2 pulls the old Infinite Hallway trick, periodically teleporting you backward inconspicuously until you get suspicious and turn around to see if you’ve actually gotten anywhere. But for the most part, the only thing getting in the way of accurate maps is the mere fact that it’s hard to tell how long a long, featureless corridor is. Your movement isn’t bound to the grid, so the only good way to tell when you’ve advanced to the next tile is to look at the automap — and you can’t even tell then, if the map view looks the same centered on the next tile as on the current one.

The game also discourages simply taking the time to draw more than rudimentary maps, by having Mutt’s health bar steadily drain all the time when you’re in the corridors. It should be understood that health is purely a corridor thing; it’s not reflected in the challenge rooms at all, not even the combat challenges, which effectively have their own per-room health. Challenges do affect health, though: completing one restores a large measure of it, and leaving a room without completing it takes some away. To minimize loss, you should always go to a challenge you can win by the most direct route available, avoiding any traps along the way, and win it in one try. In practice, it makes more sense to visit the maze’s save room whenever you beat a room that you don’t want to repeat. But directness is important regardless. You know what helps with that? Maps.

The overall effect is that I always leave the save room with specific intent. Either I’m exploring, and expect to die in the halls, or I’m trying to do something specific and concrete, like beating a room or looping over a known sequence of hallways to collect the treasure, and then make it back to the save room alive.

This blog has seen a request that I finish up Deus Ex next. I want you to know that I’m not ignoring it, but I have reasons to want to put it off for a little bit. In the meantime, let’s pull out something from the depths of the Stack.

Litil Divil is a 1993 game by Gremlin Graphics, a studio otherwise unfamiliar to me, but which apparently had the resources to advertise this game noticeably in the videogame magazines of the day. It’s a game of cartoony pixel art and cartoony sensibilities. You play as a lesser devil called Mutt, possibly because of his enormous bulldog-like jowls, as he traverses the Labyrinth of Chaos to reach the overworld and retrieve a pizza. Please understand that most of this information, including the protagonist’s name, comes out of the manual rather than the game itself. The game has no intro other than Mutt dancing on the title screen. (Apparently some later ports add an animated FMV intro cutscene, which you can see on the game’s Steam page.)

You could call it a “variety game”. The labyrinth proper is a series of largish grid mazes with occasional underpasses to make it harder to navigate. Some tunnels have doors to unlock or traps to dodge, but the real challenges come in the rooms scattered through the maze. Each room is a mini-game, which could be a puzzle, or a side-view fighting game, or an isometric platformer, or a shell game, or whatever else the designers came up with. All such challenges come without instructions; figuring out what you’re supposed to be doing, and what the controls do in that room, is just part of the challenge. Some challenges require inventory items obtained in other rooms, and this too is something you have to figure out on your own, usually by failing the challenge a few times.

Back in the mid-90s, this game was in rotation as something I’d pull out and try to finish from time to time, and I played it enough for a snippet of the background music — FM-synthesized, almost offensively jolly and lightly discordant — to get stuck in my head occasionally even to this day. (It’s always a little weird to hear music played aloud that you’ve only heard in your head for a long time. It never completely matches what you remember.) If I recall correctly, I got as far as the third maze, which could be the last one for all I know. There, I got severely stuck on a challenge involving a trampoline and could progress no further. I’m given to understand that it’s basically a timing thing, but I couldn’t seem to get the right timing no matter how many times I tried. The game’s low framerate definitely hurts timing-based puzzles.

I’m told that the MS-DOS version of this game is inferior to the Amiga CD32 version, but the MS-DOS version is what I have (and is what’s available through Steam and GOG). The CD32 has one feature that would make a significant difference to gameplay: the ability to rotate the camera 180° in the maze. In the version I’m playing, you can only change the camera facing at bends or intersections in the tunnel, which means that if you want to turn around, you have to go as far as the first such point and do a K-turn. Until then, you’re stuck doing the Crash Bandicoot thing, walking towards the camera with diminished visibility for any traps you’re approaching. This is an annoyance, but possibly a deliberate one, as annoyance is something of a theme. Mutt reacts with exasperation toward the player whenever he falls in a pit, and the manual cover features the tag line “And you thought you had a bad day!”