The Stack

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 the local authorities when possible, even when the local authority is a dragon god or something. 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 characters ¹No, 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. — 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.

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

OK, enough smart-aleckry. I really did want to try Portal (Activision, 1986), and I could easily make another post or two about its content, but let’s talk about Portal (Valve, 2007). It’s a real gamer’s game, impossible to do in any other medium. I’m going to skip over the basics here, because they seem to have become an unavoidable part of geek culture just now. Something Awful and xkcd have riffed on the game, and “The cake is a lie” has become almost as oft-quoted a catchphrase as the intro to Zero Wing was a few years back.

And there’s a big lesson right there. Six months ago, if you asked anyone who paid any attention to the game industry what the defining game of the year was going to be, there’s a good chance that they would have said Halo 3. It had the big marketing push, the tie-in products, the article in Wired about their innovative development process. Microsoft positioned it as the Xbox 360’s killer app, and tried to make its launch into as major an event as the release of the final Harry Potter book. And they sold a squillion copies, because obviously everyone with an Xbox 360 had to have it, if only because nothing else of note was being released for the Xbox 360. But once they bought it, it just seemed to sink out of sight. No one talked about it — what was there to talk about? No, the game that people are actually still talking about is one created as an extra for an anthology package. I suppose that the folks at Valve felt that this was a relatively safe place to experiment, as there was essentially no money riding on Portal‘s success. In that regard it resembles an indie title, but thanks to its tie to Half-Life, it got a lot of polish and a wide release. The best of both worlds.

One of the most obvious ways this affected the game is that the developers didn’t feel it necessary to pad it out to the length that people expect of a major release. There isn’t a lot of repetition in the puzzles, and when an element is repeated, it’s generally to expose a new twist on the idea. This is generally a good thing, but I did feel that the puzzle elements had some unexplored potential. For example, the game never really takes advantage of the portals’ ability to reorient the player, apart from turning vertical momentum into horizontal momentum. But maybe there are some fan-made levels by now that do this sort of thing. That seems to be what fan levels are for: exploiting every detail.

Since Portal‘s memes are in the air and hard to avoid, I knew a fair amount about what to expect going in, including some things, such as the fate of the Weighted Companion Cube, that it would probably have been better not to know in advance. But there were still surprises. I’m going to get a little spoilery, so if you haven’t played the game yet, for goodness sake do so now. If you don’t want to spring for the entire Orange Box, you can get Portal individually via Steam for $20. This may seem like a lot for a game that takes about four hours to finish, but it’s a very high-quality four hours, and no more expensive than going to a cinema and watching two two-hour movies. And the movies wouldn’t even have bonus levels afterward.

Somewhat perversely, I had played the fan-made 2D Flash version before playing the original game. As a result, I was somewhat taken aback by how much tutorial the original has (especially given its length), and the way that it doles out the portal-making capabilities piece by piece. The Flash version gets started a lot faster, and actually does better job, in some ways, of exploring the puzzle potential of the basic concept. But it has a very different nature: it’s just a straightforward series of puzzles, culminating in cake (no lie).

Whereas Portal itself subverts exactly this structure beautifully. You have a set sequence of 19 puzzle-based levels to complete, as you’re reminded by the helpful signs at the beginning of each test area, and the last of those 19 levels is exactly what we’ve come to expect of final levels in puzzle-based games: it’s a kind of a final exam of all the techniques you’ve learned over the course of the game. The thing is, the game is only about half over at that point. Afterward, the narrative goes off the rails. Just the narrative, mind you. The gameplay is just as linear and level-based as ever. But for me, at least, escaping into the guts of the complex provoked a stronger sense of panic than anything else in the game. At one point early in that section, I was convinced that GLaDOS had sent something to chase me, on the basis of a couple of triggered motions and some ambiguity about the source of the sound effects, and I hurried to get someplace that could only be reached by portals. I think I was wrong about that — nothing of the sort happened in the game before or afterward. But it was a plausible development: I had broken the rules, so GLaDOS could break them too.

GLaDOS really steals the show, by the way. She reminds me a lot of SHODAN from the System Shock games, but less gothic and more childish. Somehow, the way she keeps repeating lies that have already been exposed, apparently unable to comprehend that you might not trust her, manages to keep being delightful. And her closing song, “Still Alive”, has managed to replace “Invisible Musical Friend” (the Skullmonkeys bonus room theme) as best videogame song of all time. I honestly don’t know if the game would have been able to find its way into everyone’s hearts without her setting the tone. It would still have the gameplay and the puzzles, of course, and Valve managed a similar sort of sardonic deadpan humor without her in Half-Life, but it’s not really the same.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, this game is taking over my life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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