{"id":7257,"date":"2022-10-20T01:49:03","date_gmt":"2022-10-20T08:49:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/?p=7257"},"modified":"2022-10-20T08:23:08","modified_gmt":"2022-10-20T15:23:08","slug":"wizardry-iv-memories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/archives\/7257","title":{"rendered":"Wizardry IV: Memories"},"content":{"rendered":"

The third level of Wizardry IV<\/em> — which is to say, level 8, because you start at level 10 and work your way towards the entrance — is the first one that I remember from my first pass at the game. Level 10 is too simple in design to be really memorable, just a series of nested rings with guardians between them. Level 9’s whole deal is that it gives you a winding corridor with a zillion tiny rooms off it, and the only trick is that yes, you really do have to check them all. But level 8 has a gimmick. A message by the stairs down announces it as “death by a thousand cuts”: it looks like a completely open space, but it’s really a minefield — essentially a maze where you have to figure out where the walls are by walking into them and taking damage. Although “walls” is really too strong — you can ignore some of them, right? If you’ve got healers with you, you can take a few mines. But you can’t ignore them completely. So it’s all a big exercise in map-making without relying on visible cues.<\/p>\n

More importantly, though, level 8 introduces an element that I misremembered as occurring earlier. Just before the stairs up, there’s a message: “Have you forgotten something?”<\/p>\n

This is one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen in a game. You see that and you immediately start to wonder. Is there something I’ve neglected? Something I failed to realize I should have done in the early levels? Will I have to go back through the minefield?<\/em> It feels like an accusation, but a maddeningly non-specific one, one that leaves you with no clue how to act on it.<\/p>\n

Having been on this ride before, I know that the question “Have you forgotten something?” becomes a repeated motif, like a catchphrase for the game. It’s really directed more at Werdna than at the player. Nonetheless, it still brings a bit of a grue. It comes right when you’re congratulating yourself on your progress, having made it through a difficult challenge, but it isn’t really all that difficult a challenge, is it? Mapping the mines doesn’t take any special insight. It just asks you to be methodical, perhaps for longer than you’d like. This lulls you into a certain state of mind, and the question shocks you awake, shakes you out of your complacency, reminds you that there’s a bigger picture that you’ve been ignoring while your attention was on more immediate concerns. Yes, you have forgotten something. Immersion is forgetting. Time to remember.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The third level of Wizardry IV — which is to say, level 8, because you start at level 10 and work your way towards the entrance — is the first one that I remember from my first pass at the game. Level 10 is too simple in design to be really memorable, just a series […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[348,242],"class_list":["post-7257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-wizardry","tag-wizardry-iv-the-return-of-werdna"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7257"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7257\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7261,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7257\/revisions\/7261"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}