The Stack

It turns out that level 50 is indeed the highest attainable. I have attained it, and I am now spending my time doing the last remaining batches of side-quests, forging new items, and researching spells. I’m a little reluctant to pursue the main quest line, because it seems to be funneling me towards another potentially regrettable decision.

There have been several choice points in the game so far. The first one occurs when you’re told to recruit Syrus Darkhunter, famous slayer of undead. When you first meet Syrus, he asks for your help capturing a necromancer named Moarg and bringing him to a prison in a city where Syrus is unwilling to set foot. Why won’t he set foot there? He refuses to say. Moarg, on the other hand, is quite willing to give you information, provided you set him free. Now, as far as I’m concerned, Syrus has only himself to blame if I don’t trust him. I’ve had experiences in D&D with NPCs who were supposedly on my side but who put everyone’s safety in jeapordy by withholding plot-crucial information for no good reason, and this scenario reminded me of that a lot. (See also Yeesha vs. Esher.) So I accepted Moarg’s proposition, hoping that his intelligence would be more valuable than Syrus’ assistance. It turns out that it wasn’t particularly valuable, but to my surprise, I got Syrus’ assistance anyway, due to my character lying to him.

Only in Lord Bane’s realm, when we were fighting Moarg’s colleagues, were my unintentional lies exposed. And so Syrus left the party — not a great loss, since his “10 damage to undead at the start of battle” is a mere drop in the bucket at this point, but still, a loss. I suspect it might have been possible to keep him by temporarily disbanding him before fighting the necromancers, but I didn’t think of it at the time. Removing people from your party is something you don’t usually don’t have any reason to do in this game, sort of like closing doors behind you in an adventure game.

Another early choice involved a potential ally who wanted me to escort his daughter to another city, where she’d be forced into a loveless political marriage. Once more, I struck a blow for freedom and against keeping promises, gaining the princess as a party member and incurring some extra encounters later on when her father sent soldiers to get her back. In general, though, other choices have been less morally ambiguous — things like choosing whether to return a magic item to its rightful owner or keep it for yourself. (I’ve been forging my own magic items anyway, thank you very much.)

That choice about Moarg, though, apparently “started me down the dark path”, if the necros are to be believed, and there’s someting I can do with a sword Moarg gave me if I “want to know true power”. I kind of want to defeat Lord Bane and achieve my primary mission objectives for the whole game, but I’m also curious about what the bad guys are so eager to show me. So far, their one big claim to power is that then they die, Lord Bane just raises them from the dead again. And as the player, I have that power already.

I seem to be approaching the end of the game. At least, I’ve reached the vicinity of the castle of Lord Bane, God of Death and primary antagonist, who’s appeared personally a couple of times to taunt me and set his minions on me. I’m also nearly up to character level 50, which may or may not be the highest attainable level — it’s certainly the last point at which you get a new spell just for levelling.

At this point, a couple of things are happening to change gameplay. First, my opponents and I have high enough skills all round that any move has a significant chance of being followed by a free extra turn, especially if there are combos and cascades involved. Things can change very rapidly without your being able to do anything about it. Second, elemental resistance is becoming a large factor.

The way elemental resistance works is this: Each side has a percentage rating in all four elements. That percentage is the chance that a spell cast by the enemy will fail if it uses the relevant color of mana. Resistances don’t usually go very high — the highest I’ve seen was a Fire Elemental that had something like a 30% resistance to red. Still, even a 10% resistance is enough to put paid to certain tactics. For most of the game, I’ve been making heavy use of Entangle, a spell that makes your opponent skip a number of turns determined by your green mana reserves. Whenever there were multiple sets of skulls ready to go off, or other tempting targets, I’d cast Entangle to get them all — not even necessarily to get them myself, but to keep them from being used against me. In other words, I was using it at exactly those moments when I least want to risk losing a turn to a miscast and giving the enemy first crack at everything.

Resistance isn’t the only thing that’s making spells useless. Some of the more advanced undead have abilities that drain green mana, making it a lot harder to cast spells with green components. Now, I know a lot of spells, but you’re only allowed to take six of them at a time with you into combat (plus a seventh determined by your mount). I’ve been making only occasional adjustments to my loadout through most of the game, as I learn new spells or decide to experiment with new tactics, but now I’m starting to pick my inventory on an enemy-by-enemy basis. I commented before on emergent changes in effective tactics. It’s nice to see that this is still going on, in a reasonably unforced way, this late in the game.

At its core, the way you interact with Puzzle Quest is identical to the way you interact with Bejewelled. On a PC with a mouse, this means that you have two ways of swapping games: either click on the two gems that you want to swap, or hold and drag one gem in the direction of the thing you want to swap it with. Either of these two input methods suffices for any swap you can make, and indeed it took me a while to notice that two existed. I’ve been clicking rather than dragging, and only discovered the dragging version accidentally, when my hand joggled too far during a click — something that’s happened often enough that I wish I could turn the dragging off. It isn’t even just a harmless annoyance: when you accidentally enter an invalid swap — which is to say, one that doesn’t form a row of 3 or more — you lose 5 hit points and your turn ends. The hit points don’t hurt so much, but failing to act can be devastating.

The presentation, though, can and does go beyond that of Bejewelled, for the simple reason that there’s more to present. There’s a good deal of information on the screen — hit points, mana levels, spell names and costs — and even more available through tootips — both combatants’ skills, the effects of their equipment, descriptions of spell effects. Whenever any aspect of the game state changes, the change is indicated through glowy particle effects over the appropriate part of the display. This is a nice touch. I’m seldom watching the particle effects, since they occur at the exact moment that the board changes and I’m anxiously scanning it for exploitable patterns, but they register in a near-subliminal way.

Combat in RPGs is always an abstraction. Even in a relatively concrete system like D&D, there’s a sense that the actions explicitly taken aren’t all that’s “really” going on: combat rounds are supposedly six seconds long, which is an awfully long time to make a single sword thrust. Combat in Puzzle Quest is of course a great deal more abstract than that, but it still makes me wonder how much can this be regarded as an abstract representation of combat.

It’s the spells that are really suggestive in this regard. I call them “spells” because the game does, but in a lot of cases “special attack” is more apt. For example, ogres have a “spell” called “Thump!” that simply does 10 points of damage. It’s not hard to imagine this as an action that the ogre performs, and the “red mana” that it needs in order to perform it as a matter of summoning up its strength.

Or consider the sandworm. The sandworm has a potent combination attack consisting of the spells Sinkhole, which doubles the target’s green mana while halving mana in all the other colors, and Swallow Whole, which is a direct damage spell that increases in strength with its target’s green mana (the color that Sinkhole just doubled). Now, the four colors of mana correspond to the four elements, with green being earth. So one can imagine how sinking into the ground would increase your access to earth magic while decreasing your access to any other kind. Swallow Whole is trickier to explain — does your contact with the earth enable the sandworm to swallow you more thoroughly or something?

The Haste spell is a particularly interesting case: While it lasts, it does 4 points of damage to the opponent whenever you get an extra turn. This isn’t at all what I’d expect a spell called Haste to do. I’d expect it to do something more like grant its caster extra turns. But there are other spells for that, such as Entangle and Petrify — things that emphasize immobility on the part of the opponent, not additional mobility on the part of the caster. What Haste does, though, is it gives the caster an extra motivation to take advantage of things that grant extra turns. So the end result is that casting Haste has haste as an indirect effect.

The most tactically interesting spells are the ones that alter things on the board. There’s a spell called Burn that turns all the green (earth) gems into red (fire), and another called Freeze that turns all the red gems into blue (water, the closest thing the game has to ice). Griffons have a spell called Soar that turns all the green and blue gems into yellow (air) — a pretty clear representation of moving the arena of combat away from the land and sea and into the sky. Spells like these, executed at the right time, immediately create multiple rows of 3 or more, which collapse and then cascade and probably yield extra turns.

Even more intriguing, though, are the spells that involve the board geometry, such as Besiege (a “spell” used by catapults, which destroys a random 3×3 section of the board and gets full effects for every gem in it), Call Lightning (destroy one column and get the full effects) and Charge! (destroy one selected row, get the full effects, and do 5 points of damage). These paradoxically work against any attempt at interpreting the action as an abstraction of combat by not being abstract enough. They’re over-literal, and rebuff any attempt to take them seriously. They’re also among my favorite spells in the game — Charge! in particular has all sorts of tactical uses.

Although it could probably get by on the novelty of its gameplay alone, Puzzle Quest actually does something a little interesting with the plot. The premise is uninspired — the peaceful cities suddenly come under attack by orcish slavers and undead, just like in about half the D&D campaigns ever devised. But rather than just go on an uninhibited slaughter spree into Mordor, the player character, recognizing that the orcs are taking captives at an unusually aggressive rate, goes and talks to them in their city in order to get more information. There are even quite a few side quests you can do on behalf of the “evil” races, such as killing various monsters for an ogre gourmand who’s gotta eat ‘em all. Do enough of these quests and he joins your party to save time.

This isn’t to say that it’s Ultima VI-style “we’re all brothers under the skin/scales/chitinous plates” time here. Sometimes the enemy can’t be negotiated with, even if you try. One ogre chief, when asked “Is there really any need for war?”, memorably replies “Is there really any need for PEACE?” But overall, the monsters have been more helpful to me than my supposed allies, who have been stinting on aid even in the face of the return of ancient evils bent on taking over the world, preferring to sit back and watch me win the war singlehanded. They’re far enough from the real action to think it’ll never affect them. It’s the orcs and ogres and minotaurs who are already starting to live under the lash of something scarier than themselves and, in some cases, not liking it.

Diplomacy with monsters isn’t unheard of, of course, especially in RPGs. I think of Ultima Underworld, which has settlements of peaceful goblins and ghouls, or the peaceful resolution to the Triton quest in Quest for Glory V. But it’s unexpected here, where all the story is really required to provide is excuses for ever-escalating combat. Also, to get slightly political here, I’m slightly reminded of the immediate aftermath of 9/11. People are already forgetting this, but at the very beginning, there was actually some debate about whether the attacks should be treated as acts of war or as crimes. Terrorism, after all, usually falls under the purview of the police, and the clearest antecedent — the 1995 car bomb attack on the WTC — was handled by the NYPD and the FBI, not the armed forces. Now, in Puzzle Quest, you’re not dealing with terrorism, but unquestionable acts of military aggression by foreign powers. However, the PC largely treats it like a criminal investigation anyway, questioning witnesses in order to try to find the guy at the top, and cooperating with whatever the local authorities are when possible, even when the local authority is a dragon god. I’m not saying that the creators of Puzzle Quest have a political agenda here, but it’s a strange way to write a fantasy epic.

This morning, as I looked at my desktop and its excessive clutter of icons, my eyes were immediately drawn to places where I could form rows of three similar icons by swapping adjacent ones. This is a familiar phenomenon. You play a game, it trains your brain. It can feel like the game is taking over your mind, but I’d explain it in more benign terms: Visual pattern recognition is something we humans are highly optimized for, and a game as fundamentally abstract as this gives your brain patterns that it can spot in all sorts of places. It doesn’t know at first that it’s only supposed to look for the pattern in the context of the game, but it usually figures this out after a while.

It isn’t even really a phenomenon limited to videogames. I experienced similar things when I was learning to play Go: I’d walk into a cinema, say, and see what seats were taken, and automatically decide where the next person should be seated to increase defensive strength most efficiently. There may be something about grids in particular that encourage this kind of thought. Grids are ubiquitous in both games and in our artificial modern environment, but they aren’t seen in nature. So I can imagine that the brain’s pattern recognition subroutines, having evolved to deal with natural things, would tend to see all grids as anomalies and thus as likely manifestations of the same thing. But this is pure speculation.

Anyway, having just come off a stint of The Typing of the Dead, this all seems like more evidence of the medium’s underutilized potential as a training tool. If we’re going to be teaching our brains to do tricks, they might as well be useful tricks, no?

Outside of combat, Puzzle Quest plays more or less like a conventional RPG, but one played on a scale I more associate with strategy games such as Heroes of Might and Magic or Master of Orion. All travel is conducted on an overland map, and constrained to delineated paths between cities and other important sites. Anything within a city is represented as a bunch of menus. You can acquire companions over the course of the story, but they’re not full characters with their own stats like the PC. Instead, they provide situational combat help, such as automatically doing 10 points of damage at the beginning of battle when fighting undead, or increasing your Battle rating by 10 when fighting Good characters¹ — in other words, the sort of bonus you’d get from a Leader or Hero in a strategy game. There’s even the option of conquering the cities you come across and collecting tribute from them. Tribute is generated every game month, and to collect it, you have to visit the cities personally, just like certain strategy-game resource generators. All in all, the frame game might be better described, not as RPG, but as strategy game with just one hero stack. But then, strategy games of this sort share a lot of mechanics with RPGs — they have a common ancestry in miniature wargaming, and the seminal Heroes of Might and Magic series in particular was based on the Might and Magic RPG series.

I mentioned conquering cities. This is done through the same tile-matching combat system as regular encounters, except that cities as opponents have a different special powers and different equipment slots: instead of one Helmet and one Armor and one Weapon, cities get one Tower and one Gate and so forth. Unfortunately, this game doesn’t support scavenging equipment from fallen foes. Otherwise, I would definitely try wearing an iron gate to my next encounter. You might think that conquering a city would be a big deal for the NPCs living there, but, in an extreme example of game/story orthogonality, no one seems to notice. At one point, I acquired a party member who gives a bonus during sieges, and he merrily helped me subjugate his home. At another point, I was on a diplomatic mission to a neighboring kingdom, trying to get their assistance against the undead hordes. On your first attempt at delivering your message, you’re turned away at the gate by a guard, even if you just laid siege to the place and conquered it.

Now, to back up a step, you might be wondering where equipment comes from if there’s no scavenging. Well, there are quest rewards, and there are stores in the cities, and there’s crafting. Crafting is accomplished through tile-matching. But! It is different this time. There’s no opponent, you can’t use spells, and your goal is to delete a certain number of special “hammer and anvil” tiles (the required number depending on the power of the item you’re crafting) before running out of legal moves. There are a few other variants like this for other special actions, like researching new spells (delete a quota of each color, and also of special “Book” tiles that only appear when you delete a row of 4 or more) or training mounts (defeat the mount with a time limit on each move). My favorite such minigame is the one used for capturing creatures (so you can learn spells from them or use them as mounts), which is, to my mind, the only part of the game that really qualifies as a puzzle. You’re given an arrangement of tiles, but unlike all other occasions, it’s not random, it’s not full, and it doesn’t fill up. Your goal is to delete everything, which can be trickier than it sounds.

1. No, you don’t have the option of turning evil, or at least not in the parts I’ve seen. But there are some knights who you have to defeat in friendly matches to prove your worthiness. [↩]

The heart of Puzzle Quest, the mode that you spend about 90% of your time in, is a competitive tile-matching game. There have been other competitive tile-matching games, such as Puzzle Fighter, but all others that I know of involve two players competing in realtime on separate playfields that affect each other indirectly at best. Here, we instead have the two players — or rather, the player and a computer opponent — taking turns in the same playfield. This alone has a profound effect on how the game is played. Normally, the player of a tile-matching game can expect to devote turns to setting up combos. But here, you actually want to avoid setting things up, lest your opponent take advantage of them before you can. There are ways to get multiple turns in a row — the simplest being to make four-in-a-row instead of three-in-a-row — but you can’t use such things most of the time.

At root, the tile-matching works like Bejewelled: you swap two adjacent tiles in order to make at least one row of three or more, the matching tiles are deleted, and tiles fall downward to fill the empty spaces (possibly forming new matches and triggering a cascade of additional deletions). But instead of just increasing your score, the specific types of tile have different effects. Skull tiles do damage to the opponent when matched, and are the chief way you win combat, at least in the beginning. There are coin tiles which provide bonus cash and star tiles which provide bonus XP. The remaining four basic tile types provide you with four different colors of mana, corresponding to the four elements. With mana, you can cast spells.

I find the spellcasting aspect very reminiscent of Magic: The Gathering. Like M:tG, there are a variety of effects, from direct damage to status effects to things that manipulate the board, changing tiles or deleting an entire row at a time or whatever. Like M:tG, mana color is important, and, while you can accomplish things more efficiently by specializing in a particular color, over-specializing makes you vulnerable. And, like M:tG, you can spend large portions of a match waiting for the colors you need to come up. In fact, fishing for mana is even more frustrating here than in M:tG, because of the way that the mana source is shared: you can spend turns waiting for more red tiles to come up so you can cast the direct damage spell that will win the match, only to have them come up at the end of your turn and be immediately grabbed by the opponent.

I mentioned that specializing in a color makes things more efficient. This is mainy due to the Mastery skills. There are seven skills you can assign points to when your character levels, each increasing the benefits of one of the seven basic tile types. Raising your Fire Mastery skill, for example, will increase your red mana capacity, give you extra red mana for matching red tiles, and increase your chance of getting an extra turn when you match red tiles, thus making it possible to get red mana faster. So the more advanced your character is, the faster you tend to get mana in your areas of specialty. Eventually, this can make it more efficient to deal damage using spells than doing it directly with the skull tiles (unless you’re specializing in Battle, the skill that makes the skull tiles do more damage). I always find it satisfying when the rules of a game make the emergent strategies change over the course of play.

The nice thing about this whole system is that it isn’t just tile-matching embedded in an RPG frame. The tile-matching affects the RPG and the RPG affects the tile-matching in a very tight loop. They are inseperable; each alters how you think about the other. The story, on the other hand, is just tacked on, and is pointedly ignored by the game mechanics in ways that I’ll describe in my next post.

Puzzle Quest seems like the logical next step in our examination of nonstandard combat mechanics. Like Bookworm Adventures, it’s a RPGification of a casual game mechanic based mainly around pattern recognition, this time Bejewelled and other “match 3″ games. Match 3 games are usually classified as puzzle games, even though they generally don’t contain what I personally think of as puzzles — which is to say, things where the player’s effort goes toward trying to figure out a solution. Presumably it’s because their lineage can be traced back to Tetris, and thus to polyominoes and other assembly puzzles.

But before I go into the gameplay, I’d like to talk about distribution channels. This is a game that’s available both on physical media and through online download, as is increasingly often the case. In the past, I’ve preferred to get games on discs where possible, but I’ve been rethinking this lately. On the one hand, physical discs give a greater illusion of permanence, which is important to those of us who like to play old games. There are discs on the Stack that I’ve had for more than 15 years. I don’t think I still have any downloadable installers that old on my system (and yes, such things did exist back then, mainly for shareware titles), nor the means to re-download them from their now-mostly-defunct publishers. On the other hand, my still-green experiences with long-distance moving have taught me how easy it is for physical objects to get lost, and Steam is making downloads seem like a more solid prospect, by making downloads from multiple publishers available under a single account that you’re less likely to forget about, and by being less likely to go out of business soon than a single indie publisher.

I started using Steam only very recently, and basically out of impatience: the one software retailer ¹ within easy walking distance of my apartment didn’t have the Orange Box in stock, and I wanted to play Portal right away. And since the Orange Box was going to require “activation” through Steam even if I bought it retail, there seemed little harm to it. (I’m not happy with “activation”, but I’m willing to tolerate it on the assumption that I’ll be able to download a crack if Steam goes out of business.)

Now, Puzzle Quest can be obtained through Steam, but also through other online distributors. So it clearly doesn’t require Steam activation (although for all I know the Steam version might require activation anyway; if the process is fast and automatic, you wouldn’t necessarily notice it happening). Still, I chose Steam, mainly because I would otherwise face the inconvenience of creating an account on some other system. And when you think about it, that includes most online stores where you could buy the physical-media version. So Steam is basically the iTunes model, providing enough convenience that you’ll use it in preference to other channels. I’m wary that they’ll abuse this power, like any DRM-enabled distributor seems to do eventually, but not wary enough to resist being sucked in.

1. Software retailers just aren’t as dense in San Francisco as they are in Manhattan. Before the move, there were four within my customary orbit. [↩]

In the final level of The Typing of the Dead, the rotting corpses give way to what look more like artificial life forms or androids, grey-skinned and sporting built-in lightsabres and other superpowers. The advanced tech doesn’t stop them from just standing there like ninnies and letting you type at them for a while before they attack, though. That’s just essential to the way the game is played, especially since the phrases you type are getting pretty long by that point, but it fit the zombies better, because you expect zombies to react slowly. The end boss, the Emperor (the bosses are all named for tarot cards), is even more artificial-looking, a demon made of clear plastic. According to its creator (in an unbelievably awkwardly-dubbed cutscene), it was engineered to solve the world’s ecological crisis by ruling over humanity. Maybe this was less stupid in the original Japanese, maybe not. Some people have said that the schlockiness of the House of the Dead 2 material complements the game’s campy and self-mocking sense of humor. I just say that the cutscenes are not a significant part of the experience, and skippable.

The first time I reached this point of the game, I had only a few remaining lives, which Emperor Perspex quickly removed. The game does some dynamic difficulty adjustment, at least for bosses: after you get killed a few times in succession, it starts using easier words. But in order to take advantage of this, you need lives to waste. So after my first attempt, I resolved to earn enough coins to play with 9 continues instead of 5.

There are five coins to be earned on each level, and each of the five is earned in a different way. You can make it easier to get particular coins by adjusting your approach to the game. For example, one coin on each level is earned by completing the level without any continues, and is most easily earned by setting the difficulty level to “Very Easy” and giving your top priority to avoiding damage, even if it means letting civilians die. Another is earned for scoring above a certain threshhold (the threshhold varies from level to level). This is best accomplished by setting the difficulty to “Very Hard” — which confers some kind of score bonus — and giving the civilians top priority — who cares if you lose lives yourself, saving those guys is worth a lot of points! A third coin comes from getting an “A” rating on a certain number of words. Ratings are based on how fast you type, but only the time from when type the first letter counts. So getting lots of A’s involves refraining from initiating attacks until you’re ready to type an entire word in a burst, which can mean ignoring both your health and the civilians.

This kind of strategizing may be missing the point of the game: you’re supposed to win through typing prowess, not through gaming the system. But it kept me interested enough to keep on playing, by giving me goals to strive for that seemed easier than trying to fight Emperor Plexiglass again. When I had my 9 continues, I made another run for the end. Ironically, by then I’d had enough practice that I only needed 4.

After the ending, there’s an interactive credits sequence: as the names of the developers scroll by, you can type them. Typing an entire section of the credits before it scrolls away releases a zombie from a bacta tank, and the released zombies dance to the background music, forming a chorus line of the dead. I found this bonus segment unexpectedly difficult, because the names are mostly Japanese, and Japanese uses different letter patterns than those the game trains you in — not many English words contain the sequence “ryo”, for example.¹

Anyway, the game works! I can totally touch-type now, with punctuation and everything! It’s pleasing to be able to take a skill away from this experience; somehow, it’s always the weird games that are life-changing. Any game with a twitch element teaches you a skill, really, but usually it’s a skill that’s only applicable in playing that game, or sometimes other similar games. And this is definitely a twitch game — when I was at my best, I was typing from my brainstem. When I was at my worst, I was flailing at the keyboard madly, too panicked to see what I was doing wrong (usually something stupid like still trying to find a key I had already typed). That sense of panic, and the ability to overcome it, is something that you just don’t get from ordinary typing practice. I’d guess that even Mavis Beacon doesn’t provide it. No, if you really want to learn to type, what you need is zombies. Seriously.

1. The only one that comes to mind immediately is “cryogenic”. [↩]