Zal.:.

5/26/2019

The game starts with an Ultima IV-like scene except that unlike Ultima IV, nothing happens in the view window.

The Kingdom of Syree

United States

Everlasting Software (developer and publisher)

Released in 1992 for DOS

Date Started: 20 May 2019

The moment I fire up a game and see that it's an Ultima clone, I subject it to the "(Z)tats Test." This involves hitting the "Z" key on the keyboard. If doing so produces a screen with the character statistics, I know I'm not dealing with some half-assed "inspired by the look and feel" title like Questron. Any game that passes the "(Z)tats Test" is a proper goddamned clone. There's going to be a wizard with a freaking gem. There's going to be boats with cannons. There's going to be mantras.

The Kingdom of Syree is about as much of an Ultima clone as you can get. It not only passes the "(Z)tats Test" but the "(K)limb Test" besides. It's so much of a clone that "T" stands for "Transact" rather than the more obvious "Talk." It has a main menu command titled "Return to the View" even though the view doesn't actually show anything happening. We're dealing with a developer who took a desire to be unoriginal, doubled down on it, and then doubled down again.

A bunch of clerics chant a mantra around a fire. I think I've seen this before.

As for that developer, I spent a long time following a trail of breadcrumbs and eventually concluded that it is one Thomas Himinez, currently a writer, actor, and script editor for The Doctor Who Audio Dramas, an audio spinoff of the long-running television series. He would have been 25 when The Kingdom of Syree was published. There is no primary author credit in the game except for the company (Everlasting Software), but it is said to be based on three books called The Lost King of Syree, The Sword of Syree, and A Queen for Syree by "Lord Steven." A simple Google search shows that these books never existed in published form, although the first one is quoted on, of all things, a legal discussion forum for landlords. The poster on the forum is named "Lighthope," which is also the name of an NPC in The Kingdom of Syree. Meanwhile, the only publications I can find by "Lord Steven" are a series of books called Tigers' Quest, which were turned into audio plays and films, directed by Thomas Himinez of "Everlasting Films," who according to one magazine goes by the AKA "Lighthope." Q.E.D., as they say. Sorry for the digression, but the authorial mystery was more interesting than the game.

The Kingdom of Syree takes place a few decades after the nation of Syree, in the Land of Sheol, threw off a tyrannical ruler named Rancit in favor of a good king named Telbor. Telbor has ruled for 30 years in wisdom and peace, but now the beat of war drums pulses over the hillsides, and monsters have been appearing across the land. This leads to my favorite paragraph in the backstory:

The court wise men soon discovered that the evil was not the work of some warmonger seeking to overthrow the kingdom, but rather the work of a powerful, malevolent wizard. The approaching storm marked his growing power. Secretly, this wizard worked his evil magic, growing in power every day. What his intentions were were obvious: the conquest of Syree.

Got that? It's not a warmonger seeking to overthrow the kingdom; it's a wizard seeking to conquer Syree! The distinction is clear. Anyway, no knights have gone off in pursuit of the wizard, although many heroes have embarked on quests to find him. These heroes have not all failed to return, although none of them have ever come back.

Not only do I start off with just a dagger and cloth armor, the dagger isn't even christened.

Character creation consists only of a name. The character is assigned 20 points each in strength, agility, and stamina, and starts the game with 100 food, 100 gold, 100 hit points, a dagger, and cloth armor. He starts next to the town of Ludden, which is apparently his home town, given the number of NPCs who say "welcome home" when he talks to them. There's also a large house with his name written on it, which I admit is something I've never seen in Ultima or any other Ultima clone.

This is rather cool, if also a little ostentatious.

NPC interaction is a mix between the one-liners of Ultima II and III and the keyword-based dialogue of Ultima IV. When you find yourself talking to the latter type of NPC, he of course responds to NAME and JOB, and then you can usually pick up the rest of the keywords from those responses.

Shops in town sell weapons, armor, food, ale, and a night's rest. Food is crazy expensive--like 15 gold pieces per ration, although rations admittedly deplete slowly.

It will be a long time before I can afford that plate mail.

The NPC discussions in Ludden centered around the attribute of agility. One NPC warned me that adventurers with low agility won't survive long; another said that the guards are very agile people and I should ask them about it. It ultimately transpired that a cleric named Shalea was searching for a mantra, and if I could give it to him, he would give me a spell to raise my agility. I found some other clerics chanting the word--AHRHEM--and fed it to Shalea, who gave me a one-use spell word that raised my agility to 60.

That was a big boost.

Lacking anything else to do in my home town, I began exploring the continent. Like any good Ultima clone, Syree is a twisting landscape of peninsulas, islands, mountain ranges, and forests, with vision often obscured by terrain. Combat is relatively rare, and with the types of monsters you're used to from Ultima, including skeletons, thieves, and evil clerics. Combat regresses to the original Ultima: you just hit (A)ttack and specify a direction. Presumably, once I learn how to cast spells, I'll be able to do that, too.

Fighting a thief just north of a dungeon entrance.

There's no inflation of experience here. A thief is worth 1 point, a cleric 2, a skeleton 3, and so forth. There doesn't appear to be any fixed leveling. Instead, your experience points are continually added to your maximum hit points, although using a formula that I haven't yet figured out. (Since the game began, I've earned 53 experience but only 21 additional max hit points, if that helps.) Hit points restore slowly as you move around, or you can pay healers and inns to restore them faster.

An NPC eventually told me that there are 5 towns, 3 villages, and 2 castles to explore, but only a few are accessible from the starting mainland: Ludden, Emara ("City of Kings"), and Barren Sheol. There's a castle, but I'm unable to enter because apparently peasants just can't go entering castles--which makes sense when you think about it. I always thought it was odd that just anyone could wander into Lord British's throne room and bedchambers.

How rude.

Among my explorations, I learn that EIDO is some kind of mapping spell, I can learn about magic in the town of Lost (which is rumored to be just a rumor), and that I'll need keys to jimmy locks.

An apprentice cartographer gives me a spell name.

There is one dungeon (Mysti) accessible on the opening mainland. Dungeons break the Ultima style by being top-down, but movement is a little different because dungeons track facing direction while the outdoor areas and towns do not. The facing direction determines who you're attacking when you hit "A" and down which hallways you can see. It also creates a bit of a "stutter" as you move around, because when you change direction you have to hit the appropriate arrow key twice. It's innovative but not terribly necessary.

Dungeons have both monsters and chests, and they respawn when you leave and return. Chests on Level 1 seem to have 0-10 gold pieces; those on Level 2 have 11-20, and so forth. It's pretty easy, if time consuming, to enter, grab a lot of gold, leave, and get healed if necessary. Slowly, I upgraded from a dagger and cloth to a mace and leather, and soon I'll have a sword and chainmail. This opening phase seems to be largely about improving weapons, armor, and maximum hit points, and then ultimately saving enough gold for a boat.

Fighting a cleric in a dungeon.

The Kingdom of Syree is hardly the worst Ultima clone, or even worst game, that we've seen, but it just happens to reach me at a time when I'm thoroughly exhausted with this particular sub-genre. At least, unlike The Seventh Link, it doesn't appear this one is going to take very long. The game files themselves suggest about 10 towns and castles and a few dungeons. If I can wrap it up in two, that will be good.

Time so far: 3 hours

Missed Classic: Spellbreaker - The Chase

Written by Joe Pranevich

You've heard the classic story: boy meets girl, girl meets boy, boy and girl happen to be levitating rocks on a Tron-esque grid? It's classic. If I have to say one thing about Spellbreaker, it is not afraid to have interesting and difficult puzzles. And despite the number of times that I have been stuck in this game, I've nearly always managed to get myself unstuck by looking at the problem in a different way. As we approach the end of the game, the overall picture is coming into focus. Connections are forming between the areas that the cubes take us, but I wish I did not have to spend the first half of the game feeling like I was playing a text-adventure version of Quantum Leap. Oh boy…

One other thing: this game is long. I'm ending this post at just over 18 hours in, making it the longest Infocom game by far and that does not include any of my time replaying from scratch last entry. The only longer game in this marathon is mainframe Zork which clocked in at roughly double where I am now. No actual Infocom release has taken me more than twelve hours to win. If they had planned to make this the "grand finale" of Zork, I think they succeeded under that metric at least.

Let's play!

Wow. That looks complicated.

Two Dead Ends

We ended last week having just solved the octagon maze and with a new cube in-hand. I blorple it to end up in "No Place". It is a lot like a place, except the room description says that we're not in a place and my brain has no idea how to process not being any place, except somehow there are also exits east, west, and south, presumably to places. The mind boggles, but I head east first. That me to a vault filled to the brim with treasure. Could it possibly be the vault we discovered at the end of Zork III? The only exit from the vault is a locked door with a complicated mechanism although it's strange that it is locked from the inside. I cannot seem to interact with it in any way. Is there a puzzle here or just a locked door? Rezrov is not powerful enough to open it.

I start to sift through the room for things I might want, but anything I pick up is listed as "treasure" in my inventory without distinction. I can teleport out with no problem, but doing so transforms the "treasure" into "junk". I either need the treasure and therefore need to exit through the vault door to keep it as-is, or perhaps all the treasure really is an illusion… maybe even the door? I'm not sure where the we are going with this one, but there doesn't appear to be anything for me to do here right now.

Restoring back to "No Place", I discover that west is the typical broken exit that we have with each of the cubes while south leads me to a very strange plain.

The 1980s were truly a special time.

Imagine, if you will, a plane with intersecting lines moving in all directions. There are hovering boulders sliding on the lines from place to place. I cannot follow the lines or go any direction at all because the ground is too slippery for walking. Even magic seems to be broken here as spells just fizzle out. I can't cheat by using the magic carpet either. A green-eyed boulder is nearby and I can talk to her, which is somewhat surprising because she's a rock. She tells me that I'm not as odd as the last person that visited her. Could that be the assailant from the beginning of the game? I point out a brown-eyed rock in the distance and she says simply that he's not as pretty as she is. This increases the total number of vain green-eyed talking boulders in adventure games to… one. The good news is that the she's willing to give me a ride in exchange for some food. All she wants is something high in phosphorus.

Unfortunately, I don't have any and cannot proceed this way. With repeated attempts, I am unable to find anything different in any of the areas that I already explored. There's no way through vault door, nor is there anything else I can do on the plain. I am stuck.

A Whole New (Boring) World

I expect that this game is very difficult to follow in written-out chunks every week or so. I'm taking very good notes which I need to be able to sit down and write against later and I'm still having difficulty keeping the whole game in my head. I am especially confused about places where I experimented and then gave up. Did I do that in my current save? Did I not? I don't remember.

I have a note from last time that I'm not satisfied that I did the correct things with the carpet, either in the way that I bought it with the opal or in what to do with it afterwards. So I head back there and play around. It turns out that you can haggle with the vendor and talk him down to 500 zorkmids. This involves "offering" him different amounts starting from high to low and if you get it just right he'll agree to 500 after a few tries. In my case, I found that if I started with 300 and increased my offer by 50 each time, he eventually comes down that amount and I can pay using my coin, saving the opal for a puzzle later. I feel better about this solution overall.

What should I do with the carpet? I know that if we fly up from the bazaar, we discover that we're in the mountains that have the roc's nest and the guard's tower. I didn't map it before, only explored it more or less at random. I'll take a more structured approach this time. Unlike typical exploration, we have altitude to contend with. I find four separate levels to explore: "above", "high above", "very high above", and "dizzyingly high above" the ground. Any further up than that and it is always the same text, while any lower than that and we crash or land but either way results in death. You can keep going higher and you never seem to die of asphyxiation, but maybe I just wasn't patient enough. For my part, I concentrate on "above" since we need to be able to see things below us to land on them. I do head up and explore a bit higher, but unless there is a castle in the sky or similar, it is all empty air. I can come back if I get stuck again.

When Aladdin sang his song, he expected more interesting terrain.

There are an infinite number of empty rooms stretching in all directions. Just as before, I locate the bird's nest and confirm that the guard's tower just four rooms east. I do not find any way back to the bazaar, the mountain at the beginning of the game, the ocean, or anywhere else. Even so, this is everything I need for a new idea:

I am going to race the roc.

Whenever I come up from the bazaar, the roc is already at its nest. But when I teleport to the oubliette and climb my way up on the ice floe to the guard's tower, the roc is circling and not at its nest. What if I climb out then immediately jump on the carpet and head west? I try that and it works! I beat the roc home and find the nest unsupervised for the first time in the game. Unfortunately, I arrive just as the egg is hatching and if I stay for more than a couple of turns, the hatchling kills me. I memorize my spells in advance so I just land, grab the cube and the carpet, then "blurple" myself away. I am not going to be a snack today!

Portrait of Belboz from Zork: Grand Inquisitor

Third Dead End

Using the Roc's cube takes me to the "String Room" with exits to the south and east. Naturally, only one of the exits work but the other takes me to the "Enchanter's Retreat" where the retired Belboz and other former leaders are retired to a life of quiet meditation. Why aren't they helping since everyone else is a frog? I guess they figure I have it covered. Belboz, my mentor from the first two games, is there and we can ask him a bit about what is going on. He tells me that someone had visited him a few days prior, impersonating me, but that he knew it wasn't me because he did not know things that I would have known. So he asks me a question: "Of the Neuromancers, who is the best known?"

Of course, I have no idea, but I do have the manual and the several trading cards that came with the game.

Oysters and fish are not vegetables.

I answer "Berknip" from the cards and he seems relieved that it is me. He hands me an iron key. I ask him about the cubes and he makes them sound impressive, as if the knowledge of them can make or unmake the world, but nothing else I ask seems helpful. I try the key in the vault and that is not the correct place to use it. I'll have to keep looking.

I am stuck again except this time I do not even have notes that I missed something along the way. I explore more with the carpet. The solution turns out to be going through my spells to see which ones I haven't used yet. I've created frozen icebergs, shrunk giant snakes, put a statue to sleep, repaired a hut, grew out some ragweed, animated a statue, and blew away fog. The only two spells that I haven't found uses for yet are "yomin" to read minds (although that did provide some hints) and "snavig" to transform into an animal. I try to find things to transform into.

A Fishy Solution

It doesn't take me that long to find an animal that I can transform into: a fish. If I use the "water" cube and take a splash landing into the ocean, you end up where I fought with a grouper to capture a message in a bottle. That grouper is still there if you return. After hiding my stuff in the zipper, I try "snavig" and am able to become the fish. Swimming down, I discover a cube at the bottom of the ocean. Unfortunately, the fish still eats my cube and I lose all of my stuff because everything sinks. I have to find an alternate approach.

Instead of stashing my stuff in the zipper, I drop everything I am carrying in the Water Room itself. I memorize "snavig" and "blorple" so I can get back, but I take the dive into the ocean unencumbered. That still doesn't quite do it because the fish will steal the water cube if I am not careful. I can transform and eat it myself, but there doesn't seem to be a way to regurgitate it back out. I eventually settle for also taking the smoked fish with me and feeding it to the grouper as soon as I see him and before I transform. He ignores the now-sinking cube and apparently is not above a little fishy cannibalism. Survival of the fittest, right?

Casting "snavig" takes a few tries and I restore several times to get a casting that works on the first try, but I manage to swim down to his nest. Unfortunately, I cannot pick up the cube while in fish form and I previously learned that eating it was a bad idea. Eventually, I take the wait-and-see approach. I stay underwater until I transform back into a human, immediately grab both cubes, and swim to the surface. I make it just before I run out of air and now I have a new cube! I'm making this sound a bit easier than it was; getting the timing right took trial and error.

"Don't try it, Anakin! I have the high ground!"

Hot Lava!

The new cube takes me to the "Light Room" with one good exit, to a volcano. Immediately after I arrive, a fragment of lava falls at my feet. It is too hot to touch, but I can freeze it to pick it up. There doesn't seem to be anything else to do here so I take the rock back to the strange bounders that I found at the beginning of this section.

Feeding a rock to the boulder is exactly what I needed to do. The green-eyed boulder now allows me to ride her and I can follow the tracks on the plain. Each time I do, the distant brown-eyed rock (which I now see has a cube on its back!) also moves. It's a bit of a dance, made more difficult because I can't quite seem to find a way to speed up the green-eyed rock or catch all the way up to the brown-eyed one. He seems to be avoiding us. I try randomly for a long time, but I do not stumble on the solution. Time to get analytical! I ignore my brown-eyed friend and map out our environment:

It's a document icon!

What I find is a collection of 15 rooms, with north/south or east/west tracks between each room with one exception, a diagonal line in the upper-left corner. I thought initially that going over the same track too many times would rub it away, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Although we can make some good guesses, the text doesn't quite let us know precisely where the brown-eyed rock is at first, only whether it is near or far and in what general direction. Once we have the map drawn and printed out, I put counters down to track where I am and where I think the brown-eyed rock is.

I continue to play with this puzzle, but it's not deterministic. If you save and restore, the rock can choose to move a different way after the restore. But no matter how hard I try, the rock is very effective at always staying a few squares away and there is really no way to trap it. The best you can do is figure out its exact location using the process of elimination.I look for ways that we can block off exits by dropping things onto the track, but that doesn't work. I try to get close enough that maybe I can jump across even if it isn't in the same square as me, but even when I get it on a diagonal I still cannot leap across.

Just to give you an idea how to work out where it is, from the start I tried these directions:

I go south and the brown-eyed rock goes north
I go west, it goes south
I go east, it goes south again
I go north, it goes south again

At this point, I am 100% certain that it is in square D4 and I am back in B2. But what good does that do me? Not much except getting us into known spots which allows me to know his exact location for the rest of the puzzle. The trick is obviously something to do with the northwest corner. I thought at first there might be a hidden room, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I try very hard with dozens of restores to force him to go on the diagonal so that I can catch him, but that doesn't work. If I go on the diagonal, I still cannot catch up to the brown-eyed rock because I can never get there when it is anywhere close enough for it to matter. He seems too "smart" for me, even when I save-scum.

In the end, I take a hint from the blog and find that I am on the right path. By heading over the diagonal, I'm essentially taking two moves instead of one and this subtly changes the dynamic between the two stones. It doesn't solve anything immediately and if the brown-eyed rock doesn't make a mistake, it doesn't matter one iota. But… I do that and he eventually moves towards me when he shouldn't. I guess my strange movement disrupted his algorithm. With that, the gap is closed and I am able to successfully maneuver to bump into him in a few turns. As soon as we get close, he is mesmerized by the green-eyed rock's beauty and I can just jump across and grab the cube. I guess she wasn't just vain after all.

With that, I will end our session for this week. We had some great puzzles this time and I am ashamed that I needed to ask for help on the rocks when I probably would have noticed the brown-eyed rock doesn't play perfectly after the diagonal slide. My desperate hope is that I can wrap this very long game up next post. I'm having fun, but it's still time to put this one to bed.

Time played: 6 hr 30 min
Total time: 18 hr 20 min
Inventory: 11x white cubes ("earth", "soft", "water", "air", "bone", "change", "noplace", "string", "light", and an unused one), zipper, magic burin, knife, spell book, pruning shears, gold box, bottle, opal, compass rose, magic carpet, iron key
Spell Book Contains: caskly, throck, blorpie, yomin, rezrov, frotz, gnusto, malyon, jindak, lesoch, espnis, liskon, tinsot, snavig
Score: 415 of 600 (69%)

Zal.:.

5/26/2019

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Game 328: The Kingdom Of Syree (1992)

Missed Classic: Spellbreaker - The Chase