Elvira: Won! (with Final Rating)

Elvira: Mistress of the Dark

Horror Soft (developer); Accolade (publisher)

Released 1990 for Amiga, DOS; 1991 for Atari ST, Commodore 64; 1992 for PC-98

Date Started: 6 January 2014
Date Ended: 11 January 2014

Total Hours: 9
Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)
Final Rating: 29
Ranking at Time of Posting: 65/131 (50%)

At it's core, Elvira is an adventure game, not an RPG, and like many adventure games of the 1980s and early 1990s, it has the virtue of brevity. It took me about six hours to fully explore it and figure out the puzzles, and another two and a half hours to win it with a fresh character. I've found that this divide between learning and execution holds for a lot of adventure games and adventure/RPG hybrids. When I replayed all the games in the Zork series in the mid-1990s, they each took about a week of banging my head against the wall trying to figure out the puzzles, followed by about three paragraphs of text to actually beat the games from start to finish. A player who already knows the territory and puzzles could get through B.A.T. or Hero's Quest in 90 minutes each. When I played "The Case of the Sultan's Pearls" scenario for SwordThrust, it took me about two hours to fully explore the castle, only to find that the winning series of commands, when starting fresh, is:

>N. N. ATTACK BUTLER. LOOK BUTLER. GET SULTAN'S PEARL.

There are very few straight RPGs that you could finish in such a speed run. Even if you had all the maps for Pool of Radiance or Dungeon Master in front of you, you still have to invest the time to fight the combats and build the characters.

I won the game with only 60/100 "experience points." I think the others would have come from mixing the other spells offered in the game. As I indicated last time, only a handful of spells are actually necessary to win. The others are optional and help with combat, but until you reach the endgame and know what reagents you need for puzzles, you're afraid to waste them on spells that aren't necessary.

I ended my last narrative having found all of the six keys needed to open Emelda's chest. The difficulty was finding the chest. For a while, I was stumped. I had solved every puzzle that I knew about and had visited every location that I could find. Then I remembered the cannon at the top of one of the turrets.

Lighting the cannon was the only puzzle in the game that I felt was unintuitive, and even it wasn't that bad. I first had to find a pair of tongs in the castle basement. The only problem was that every time I tried to take them, the ghost of the torturer would kill me.

The solution I came to, mostly by accident, was to put the tongs into my canvas sack. From an anonymous comment thread on my last post, I gather this was an unintentional workaround. What I really needed to do was to take the bones of the torturer (I originally thought they were from one of his victims) to the catacombs and lay them to rest in an empty coffin, then return and get the tongs. I did lay the bones to rest eventually, but I didn't tie the two things together.

Anyway, with the tongs in inventory, you can use them to remove a piece of coal from the stove in Elvira's kitchen. You take the hot coal to the cannon and use it to light the fuse. In another fun animation. the cannon blasts a piece out of another turret.

Two feet to the left and I would have blown up the chest. Then where would we be?

 
For reasons I don't really understand, destroying half the turret allows you to go up into it. It was blocked before. There lies Emelda's chest. You use the six keys and retrieve from it a Scroll of Spiritual Mastery and a ceremonial dagger.

 
After this, there was another interval in which I didn't know where to go to find Emelda. Eventually, I thought to use the "Alphabet Soup" spell on a rune stone I'd discovered in the catacombs, and it suggested there was a secret room within the catacombs. I returned and explored a bit more, and finally noticed a hole on the floor of one of the corridors. The hole was just big enough for the rune stone. When I inserted it, the floor broke apart, revealing a passage big enough to climb down.

Confronting Emelda in her throne room.

 
Emelda was in the room below, and she started draining my life force the moment I entered. Defeating her was a three-part process of inserting the Crusader's Sword into the stone in front of her, using the Scroll of Spiritual Mastery (which stripped away her glamour and revealed her undead nature), and stabbing her with the ceremonial dagger. The first part stumped me for a while, and it took several reloads for met to get it all right.

Some things apparently run in the family.

After my victory, the screen changed to a shot of Elvira beckoning me, and the endgame text vaguely suggested some kind of ribald reward:

Elvira beckons to her hero to follow her so that she can show you how grateful she really is for saving her from the evil powers of Emelda. Follow your mistress and collect your just reward.

It would be true-to-character if the next scene showed Elvira giving me a check for $50 and then demanding that I leave her castle. But the game isn't that witty. Instead, the credits roll and the player has the option to start again.

Overall, I feel like Elvira was a bit superfluous to the proceedings, and for a while I wondered if the game wasn't originally constructed without her. It wouldn't have taken much effort to add her to the framing story and the few in-game places in which she appears. The back story doesn't even jive with the film, really: in the movie, she inherits a mansion, not a castle; it's in Massachusetts, not England; and at the end of the film, it's destroyed. However, it's clear that Adventure Soft had obtained the rights to use the Elvira character at least a year earlier (I'll talk about this at the end), so this seems unlikely.

Regardless, while they crafted an interesting and relatively enjoyable game, the developers missed opportunities to truly make it an Elvira game by incorporating more elements from the types of shlock horror films associated with the character. The puzzles and enemies are mostly generic fantasy and horror tropes, and with the exception of Vampira, they don't seem to draw any obvious inspiration from B films. If I wanted to make a real Elvira-inspired game, I'd modify the plot a bit. The castle is haunted, but in such a way that it creates its horrors based on things it finds in the subjects' own minds. When it delves Elvira's mind, it finds decades of awful horror movies and populates the castle with Blacula, The Blob, intelligent rats from Willard, and perhaps a Killer Tomato or two. I guess that might have run into some copyright problems, but the point is the game doesn't quite have the campy humor or irreverent sensibility that you'd associate with Elvira, and most of the enemies and puzzles are played straight.

If they had made a game like this, I'd probably be complaining that I didn't like it because I don't like goofy, campy humor. Nonetheless, I think it would have been more true to the character. As it was, it felt like a decent horror game in which Elvira--a character I don't particularly like but also don't particularly mind--played a tangential part.

In my GIMLET, I give it:

• 3 points for the game world. I give it credit for its horror theme and its tightly-constructed castle architecture, and a little for the back story involving Elvira's ancestor.

• 1 point for character creation and development. It mostly fails in this vital RPG category. There's no character creation, and the only development is with the incremental increases in weapon skill.

• 2 points for NPC interaction. Elvira herself is really the only NPC; other characters are encounters to be defeated. She's...there. I guess I cracked a smile at a couple of her lines.

• 6 points for encounters and foes. In adventure/RPG hybrids, I tend to use this category to evaluate the quality of the puzzles, which serve as "encounters" in such games. I liked the puzzles in Elvira. They were difficult, but difficult for minutes rather than hours, and generally fair. The enemies were fun to look at but not very different when it came to combat.

I could only defeat this guy with the Crusader Sword.

• 3 points for magic and combat. Combat is fast-paced but utterly non-tactical. As I outlined last time, the spell system was intriguing but mostly optional. I give it some credit for the variety of spells and the game dynamic associated with finding their reagents, but I wish the game had done more with the spell system.

• 2 points for equipment. There's a lot of stuff to carry, but most of it is for solving puzzles, and I already gave the game credit for that. The small selection of weapons and armor is another blow to its RPG aspirations.

• 0 points for no economy.

• 2 points for the main quest, which offers only one outcome and no player choices.

• 5 points for graphics, sound, and interface. I quite liked the graphics. The sound in the DOS version was sparse, mostly limited to combat attacks. I give it a little credit for the music even though I don't really care about game music. Mostly, I was surprised at how well I took to the interface. As you know, I'm normally not a fan of a mouse-only interface, but it worked surprisingly well here, even if there were times I wished I could just go forward and turn with the arrow keys.

• 5 points for gameplay. It was nonlinear in the order that you can tackle the puzzles. I thought it was pitched at just the right level of difficulty and lasted just about the right amount of time.

That gives a final rating of 29, which sounds like I didn't like it very much, and I didn't--as an RPG. It's a decent adventure game, the presence of Elvira notwithstanding, but it lacks the combat, economy, and equipment that would have made it a true hybrid.

I guess Horror Soft knew what its selling points were.

Alas, not everyone felt this way. As I discussed in my first post on the game, Computer Gaming World famously gave it "Role-Playing Game of the Year" in November 1991 after considering J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, Wizardry: Bane of the Cosmic Forge, Worlds of Ultima: The Savage Empire, and Eye of the Beholder. I haven't played any of these games besides Bane, but to call that one alone an inferior RPG to Elvira is just absurd. Meanwhile, the same issue put Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire in the "adventure" category and had it lose to King's Quest V; I wonder what would have happened if they'd switched Quest for Glory and Elvira and put them in their appropriate categories.

Those of you who are excited about Elvira, never fear, you'll get to hear all about her continuing adventures in Elvira II: The Jaws of Cerberus (1991). From its description, it sounds like it incorporates more RPG elements, including a choice of starting classes and more combat tactics. 1991 also saw a side-scrolling platformer called Elvira: The Arcade Game in which the player actually controls Elvira and kills enemies. I note that this is the same year that produced The Simpsons arcade game, which had Bart and Marge wielding a skateboard and vacuum cleaner as weapons, and a Hudson Hawk title in which the protagonist beans enemies with baseballs. Clearly, this is an era in which audiences looked at their comedy figures and said, "these characters are funny and all, but what I'd really like to see is them killing people."

Elvira was developed by the U.K. company Adventure Soft under its Horror Soft label, and the interface for Elvira is a clear update of the label's first adventure game, Personal Nightmare (1989):

Personal Nightmare has the same commands and approach to inventory, but it doesn't have the combat system or attributes.

Interestingly, the box cover for Personal Nightmare (also known as . . . A Personal Nightmare) prominently features Elvira. Clearly, Adventure Soft obtained the rights not just to make a video game based on Elvira, but to use her likeness for its Horror Soft series. In addition to Elvira II, we'll see Horror Soft again with Waxworks (1992). Three of Elvira's developers--Alan Bridgman, Michael Woodroffe, and Simon Woodroffe--worked on all of these horror titles, as well as the Simon the Sorcerer series from Adventure Soft.

Next we'll be returning to the 1980s with a review of Dungeons of Daggorath. I've removed Angband from the "upcoming" list because it's going to take me longer than I thought to offer my posts on Moria first. Sorry for those who were looking forward to it; we'll get there eventually.

Elvira: Black Magic

Instructing Elvira to create a potion out of various reagents (left side) drawn from my inventory (right side).

Some kind of combat system involving random monsters is the easiest way for an otherwise straight adventure game to claim RPG credentials. If B.A.T. didn't have wandering hostile robots and aliens, if Quest for Glory didn't have random creatures in the forests, and if Elvira didn't have undead guards popping up in every doorway, we would regard all of them as pure adventure games. Such games adopt their RPG elements to give a non-deterministic challenge to the player, contrasting with the deterministic nature of the puzzles. I rather like the juxtaposition, the same way I like it when challenging puzzles show up in RPGs.

I've already won Elvira, but rather than offer one huge posting on combat, magic, the endgame, and my final rating, I'm going to split it into two, discussing magic, combat, enemies, and equipment here and the game-winning puzzles in the next one.

Enemies frequently appear in doorways that you click on.

Elvira's combat didn't bore me, but it's not a very good tactical experience. As I recounted in the first post, most enemies--undead guards, monks, skeletons--pop up randomly as you try to navigate from one area to another. After giving you a few seconds' glimpse of your enemy's arrival (and a chance to cast a spell or escape), the game takes you to the combat screen, where you and your opponent proceed through multiple rounds of combat and defense. When in the attack phase, attacks continue until the defender successfully parries, at which point the roles reverse.

This feels uncomfortably like fighting some kind of Muppet.

I never figured out if it made any difference whether I lunged or hacked during attacking. The choice of blocking or parrying while defending, on the other hand, makes a huge difference, depending on whether the enemy is attacking from his left (parry) or right (block). After some experience, I found that the swings you need to block take longer, giving you more time to click the button. Thus, I found a good strategy was to stay on "parry" as the default and only switch to "block" when I saw the wider swing coming.

The overall goal in combat is not to escape all injury, but just to be good enough that your health doesn't deplete before the end of the game. The only way to regenerate lost life points is to drink healing potions. Elvira gives you one at the beginning of the game, good for a couple of doses that each restore 20%. You can theoretically have her mix up some more, though I didn't find all the ingredients for them. In any event, a moderately-skilled player could easily reach the end with all the initial health, making both healing spells and damage spells irrelevant.

Practically every screen has some reagents to collect. It took me a while to figure out that these reagents might appear as innocuous grass or shrubs that simply looks like part of the background, or even invisible entirely. The spiders, centipedes, beetles, and earwigs you collect from the basement don't show up on the screen; you have to click around the room until the game tells you they're present, then go into the room's "inventory" to drag them to your own. The lesson here is to click on everything in the game.

If you say so.

A key puzzle is to find the reagents for the "Herbal Honey" spell so that you can identify the various plants in the garden--the source of about a third of the game's reagents.

Loading up my inventory in the garden.

When you have the right reagents to make a spell, you bring them to Elvira (after you've returned her recipe book, found in one of the castle rooms). You specify the spell you want, and the ingredients it requires, and sit through an animated sequence in which Elvira brews a potion out of them. Some of these potions nonsensically turn into scrolls when you drink them.

Unfortunately, most of this reagent-collecting is wasted time. There are really only two necessary spells in the game: the aforementioned "Herbal Honey," and a spell called "Glowing Pride" that lights up a secret passage where one of the keys can be found. You need the former to find the reagents for the latter. There is a third spell, "Alphabet Soup," which translates runic language and is helpful to read both a sign in the castle and a message on a rock. The latter helps find Emelda in the endgame but isn't fully necessary.

There are 21 other spells offered in the spellbook supplement to the game, and most of them are optional attack and defense spells. Some increase attributes. For instance, "Knightyme Pleasure" offers protection from magical weapons, and "Brain Ache" decreases the enemy's combat skills. These might be necessary if the enemies were harder, but as it is, I got through the game without them. There is one sequence, in the hedge maze, where you face a series of goblins that poison you if they get into melee range. You need a bunch of attack spells and crossbow bolts to ensure that you kill them at a distance. It's possible that if I'd taken longer in the maze, or had to enter it multiple times, I would have needed more attack spells here, but as it was, the ones that Elvira gave me at the beginning of the game were enough.

If I don't nail him before he gets closer, I'll spend the next few minutes slowly bleeding to death.

You can get into trouble with some of the spells, as there are a fixed number of reagents in the game. There's only one "flame flower," and you need it for the "Glowing Pride" spell, so if you blow it on "Fire Sponge" instead, you can't win. You could also lose by mixing two "Iced Magick" spells (these cure wounds), using up both thistles, one of which is also needed for "Glowing Pride." Until I won the game, I didn't know what spells would be necessary to solve puzzles, so of course I erred on the side of not mixing spells I didn't absolutely need. By the time I had it all straight, I'd already won, so there wasn't much point in replaying just to experience more of the spells.

"Spagetty [sic] Confusion" decreases enemies' combat skills.

The spell system also, in several ways, serves as a copy protection system. First, you have to learn from the book what the various spells actually do. Their names ("Maidens Turnover"; "Lucky Surprise") don't often give much hint as to the effects (half damage from non-magic weapons; increase dexterity). Second, you need the book to know what reagents to give to Elvira to mix. If you give her the wrong ones, she gives you a warning. If you do it three times, she kicks you out of the game.

Oh, no! If only "restoring" were a thing!

Finally, the original game came with a red acetate lens that you needed to read some of the text in the book. This prevented players from simply photocopying it for each other.

As I mentioned in the last post, there is a ton of items in the game, most of which are unnecessary for any puzzle, so you have to be careful about which ones you choose to pick up. Fortunately, the game remembers where you dropped stuff, so I just ended up using Elvira's kitchen as an equipment depot and dumped everything there until I knew I needed it. There is a small selection of weapons: the initial dagger, a long sword, a battle axe, a sledge hammer, and a "Crusader's Sword" that you get late in the game from puzzle-solving. You have a separate associated "skill" score with each, and it increases incrementally as you land blows in combat. I'm not sure if the axe is a better weapon than the long sword or vice versa, but I found it was best just to stick with one, since you never break or lose weapons and it maximizes your skill development.

Armor (which increases the "resilience" attribute) consists of a few shields and a suit of armor. The latter seems like a good idea--it increases resilience from 10 to 55--but it weighs so much that you can't carry much else without getting overtired. Once you pick up too much stuff, the game gives you  a message that "the combined weight of everything you are carrying is tiring you," and it saps two points of strength every move until you lighten your load. The strength drain is, as far as I can tell, permanent, so you don't want to get into this situation in the first place. Eventually, if you persist in carrying too much stuff, you sink to your knees and fall asleep, and Elvira fires you.

Does that mean I don't have to risk my life for you anymore? 'Cause that's kind of like winning, right?

I suppose a good strategy, if you were having a lot of trouble with combat, would be to don the suit of armor, don't pick up anything else besides your weapon, and fight random combats until your skill improves. Ditch the armor when you're more skilled and experienced.

Most of the game's key enemies don't fall to standard combats and spells. The vampiress sleeping in one of the bedchambers needed some wood through the heart. At first, I thought the crossbow would be the answer, but it didn't work. Later, I found a stake among some fireplace logs and thought that was all I needed. Unfortunately, piercing a sternum with a piece of wood, however pointy, isn't quite as easy as Buffy the Vampire Slayer would have you believe. I had to find a sledgehammer in the gardener's shack before I could effectively use the stake. When I did, I was treated to a mildly horrifying animation sequence--one of the few times in an RPG that I've felt truly bad about killing an enemy. She looks like she's in legitimate pain and terror.

I also don't think that's how a "sledgehammer" works, but whatever.

Her death wasn't even necessary. All I got for it was a bit of vampire dust--used in one unnecessary spell--and a couple of crossbow bolts from her closet. Incidentally, looking at the vampire dust provides the description of "a small pile of dust from an ex-vampira," which might be a sly reference to Vampira, the TV horror hostess from the 1950s upon whom Elvira partly based her character. She later sued Elvira for copyright infringement and lost.

There's a mid-game puzzle in which Elvira's kitchen gets taken over by a fat, monstrous cook who beheads you with a meat cleaver if you linger. Thanks to Sheila's warning about paying attention to what Elvira had to say, I figured the key to beating the cook was to use salt.

So, just to be clear: you've been eating what the monster in the kitchen has been cooking?

I found some salt in the cellar, brought it back, and threw it at her. This provided another memorable animation. Afterwards, Elvira returned to the kitchen and things returned to normal.

Was she a slug or something?

The major quests of the game are to find the six chest keys, find Emelda's chest, collect the items needed to defeat her, and then find Emelda herself. I'll detail finding the keys now and the rest of it next time. Four of the keys were quite easy to find:

1. In a stable. You have to get past a werewolf by killing it with a silver-tipped bolt. I recounted this last time.

2. On a notice board in the gate captain's office. He falls, after a long time, from a regular combat.

3. Around the neck of a hawk. You need to shoot him with a crossbow bolt before he plucks your eyes out. Shooting him kills both the hawk and (for some reason) the undead austringer.

Was the hawk undead, too? If not, I feel kind of bad.

4. In the basement on the body of a dead torture victim.

 

The fifth was a little harder, but not much. In the kitchen, there's a dumbwaiter that, when operated, reveals a secret passage. You can't go down the passage yourself, as Elvira tactfully points out. Elvira will happily crawl down--and, to the delight of 1990s teenagers, back out . . .

. . . only to report that it's too dark. Thus, you must mix up that "Glowing Pride" (light) spell and send it down the passage in advance of Elvira. She returns with a key.

The sixth took far longer than the others combined. It's held by a guard on the battlements, but he won't die from standard combat (the game warns you he looks "invincible"). You have to shoot him with a crossbow, which causes him to fall off the battlements and into the moat.

There's no easy way to get to the moat. You have to explore the catacombs (a separate map from the basement) and deal with the nasty creatures there, including a bunch of flying skulls and the demon who hurls them.

This looks like some creature from another game or film. It's driving me crazy, but I can't quite place it.

One of the coffins, when opened, floods the catacombs and supplies a secret exit. You have to swim through flooded passages--quickly, or you drown--and emerge in the moat.

The moat is an odd map area with three horizontal water "rings" between the castle wall and the moat's edge, three vertical rings of depth, and maybe a dozen movements in any of the rings either clockwise or counterclockwise around the moat. You have to get to the middle horizontal ring at the moat's bottom to find the guard. It took me a long time to explore, as you can only move a few spaces underwater before you have to come up for air.

After you find the key, you have to find your way back through the passages and a locked grate before arriving in the castle's well. Again, there's lots of opportunity for drowning along the way.

There's one other object, besides the keys, necessary to find before the endgame: the aforementioned Crusader's Sword. This was my favorite puzzle of the game. It starts with the recovery of Elvira's missing ring from the hedge maze. You have to fight your way through a bunch of goblins (being careful to destroy them at distance) before reaching the goblin's lair. A few bolts or spells flung into the lair kills the rest of them, and the goblins disappear from the maze.

The ring fits into a receptacle on a cross in the chapel's castle. This opens up a secret area containing a mural of knights and an angel along with a gold crown. If you try to leave with the crown, you get another of the game's memorable death screens. (A note in the gate captain's office served as a warning about this.)

The solution to the puzzle lies, of all things, in the Latin on the image: QUICUMQUE MEUM REGNUM REDINTEGRAT ILLE GLADIUM SALUTIS TENEBIT. It translates as: "He who renews my kingdom will hold the Sword of Salvation." If you use a Christian prayer scroll here (found in a bible in one of the bedrooms), the mural falls apart, revealing a skeleton behind it holding a sword. "Renew my kingdom" means to put the gold crown on the skeleton's head, at which point you can take the sword and escape safely. Technically, you could solve this without knowing any Latin, but the translation does enhance the experience.

This is the kind of puzzle I like. It forces you to pause, consider your inventory, consult some resources, and figure things out logically. Most of the game's puzzles have been like this--moderately challenging but fair. (Only one, having to do with tongs, depends on unintuitive use of the game's commands and inventory.) For the most part, there was never a moment in the game that I felt I had no avenues left to explore, and I had to resort to a "shotgun approach" of just trying everything in my inventory. That's a measure of a decent adventure game, if not a great RPG.

Elvira: Castle of Blood

Now that's what the CRPG Addict needs to truly become an indestructible man.

I got stuck for a long time at the beginning of Elvira, trying to figure out how best to map it. I rather like games that either offer an easy mapping solution (most grid-based games) or don't require any mapping solution (games with auto-maps). Mapping adventure games is always a bit more difficult than RPGs because they're more likely to play tricks with directions. I liked that Hero's Quest didn't screw around with any of that, and I could map the game in big blocks in Excel.

But few adventure games are as map-friendly as Hero's Quest, instead offering landscapes in which an east exit from Area 1 might turn into a southern entrance into Area 2. To map this, you need boxes with lines that bend in between them--quite easy to draw, a little more difficult to do on the computer. It gets worse with too many up and down passages and you can't figure out whether to create multiple maps based on the "level" . Elvira is even more complicated, since it offers no directionality at all and the various areas aren't of equal geographic size. After fiddling a bit with boxes and lines in Word, I eventually gave up on computer-based solutions and just went back to hand-drawing. I was surprised at how liberating it is--until you hit the edge of a page or start to crowd the boxes and finally have to re-draw the whole thing.

In the "experimental" phase of playing an adventure game, or quasi-adventure-game, I mostly just worry about creating the initial map and annotating the areas that clearly require some kind of puzzle solution to pass. If the solution is obvious, I solve it right away, but otherwise I don't worry about it until I have a more holistic sense of the territory and its items. I also don't worry much about death at this stage, since I don't intend to complete the game with a single character.

At the top of the horror castle.

I like the geography of Elvira. The castle has the types of things you'd expect a castle to have, without seeming unrealistically large. There's a small inner courtyard with turrets in the corner. Stairs in the turrets climb to a rampart on the first level and to a view of the countryside at the top. Outside the walls are a garden, an archery target, a hedge maze, and a groundskeeper's shack. The inner keep has several levels with sensible rooms: bedrooms, a bathroom, an armory, a chapel, a kitchen. There are catacombs beneath the castle.

Moving throughout these areas subjects you to random encounters with guards, undead, and ghoulish creatures that I guess, from the manual, are "monks." I still can't seem to figure out the best way to anticipate attacks and block them. Since there's a 50% chance that an attack will come from either direction, I've just been sticking with one or the other until it works and I get my own chance to attack.

Don't look in the basement--this is what you get.

The good news is that my own attacking abilities have improved. My skill has steadily increased with successful attacks, and I can often get into a rhythm where I land several attacks in a row. I'm hoping to take on the gate captain soon, though it might be that he's a puzzle to be solved rather than an enemy to be defeated in combat.

As for puzzles, I've been taking note when I encounter an obstacle:

• A guard that the game warns me is "invincible" (and, indeed, I can't seem to even land a blow in combat)
• A locked gate at the bottom of a well.
• A passage at the bottom of the same well that I can't fully explore because I keep drowning.
• A cannon in one turret pointed at another.
• A man in a stable who turns into a werewolf and rips my throat out.
• A vampiress sleeping in a bed who wakes up and kills me when I enter.

Could this be Count Dracula's great love?

• Various locked doors.
• A garden full of plants that I can't identify.

I hope all this pollen doesn't attract the wasp woman.

• A guy with a hawk. He tosses the hawk into the air, and it plucks my eyes out.
• A sign at the top of a set of stairs that I can't read because it's in some runic language.

 

Part of the Necronomicon?

I figured out the solution to the werewolf first. He gave it to me as he was turning, which the game depicts through a fun animation:
 

Looks like the moon of the wolf is out tonight.

I thought he was suggesting a silver-tipped bullet, given the presence of a gun in the armory. One of the first things I encountered in the game, right next to the starting area, was a forge with a crucible, so it got me thinking about something I could melt to create a silver bullet. I found it in a silver cross in the dead groundskeeper's shack. Incidentally, one of the highlights of the game so far has been the recovery of maggots from the groundskeeper's body (they're one of the listed spell ingredients).

More than any other, this game truly captures the horror of death.

I melted the cross in the crucible but just got a bunch of molten silver, which I had no use for. Later, after I found some crossbow bolts in the drawers in the bedchambers (someone has some kinky stuff going on), I returned and dipped one in the crucible.

Creating a silver bolt in a crucible of horror.

I had found a crossbow in the armory, but I first had to learn how to use it by practicing a bit on a target.

Now, with a wooden crossbow bolt, I can become one of the fearless vampire killers.

With the crossbow and the silver-tipped bolt, I returned to the stables and shot the wolf. He turned into a skeleton and then disappeared, and beyond him, concealed behind an iron ring, I found a gold key. I thought it might just be a key to one of the random locked doors, but when I examined it, I found it was labeled "secundus," so I'm thinking maybe it's one of the six keys to the chest. One-sixth finished?

Die, monster dog!

I have a sneaking suspicion that it will turn out I needed that cross--for the vampire, perhaps?--and there's some other silver object that I needed to melt to create the silver-tipped bolt.

I have an idea how to solve both the rune and garden puzzles, and they revolve around the game's spell system. Elvira hangs out in the kitchen and will take ingredients you find and turn them into spells. Two of the spells are listed as "Alphabet Soup" (allows reading of runes) and "Herbal Honey" (provides knowledge of plants). My two problems are that I haven't found all the ingredients for either spell, and the kitchen has been taken over by some crazy woman who, the moment I enter, hacks off my head and puts it into a soup.

My fate at the hands of the mad butcher.

Elvira refuses to re-enter the kitchen until I deal with her, so I guess that's the next major puzzle.

The she-freak proves useless.

The image above is one of the many postmortem images available, depending on what killed you. They all involve slightly different artwork (puncture neck wounds, plucked-out eyeballs) on the same image.

You'd think there's be one B-movie title with the word "drowned" in it, but damned if I can find one.

Please, no hints or help on any of the above. I haven't gotten far enough into the game to be stumped.

Game 131: Elvira: Mistress of the Dark (1990)

Elvira is one of those characters of whom, like Pee-Wee Herman or Super Dave Osborne, I've always been vaguely aware, but without actually understanding their contributions to entertainment or culture. I had to look up her Wikipedia page just to understand what Elvira actually did. I had this idea that she used to introduce movies on USA, but I think I had her confused with Rhonda Shear.

It turns out she used to introduce B-films for a Los Angeles television station in the 1980s (re-broadcast on a New York station). She developed that into a home video series. She got her own film in 1988 with Elvira: Mistress of the Dark, and I can only assume I knew about her from seeing the video repeatedly while browsing my local Blockbuster.

I watched a little of her shtick on YouTube, and I confess I don't really get it. Sure, there's the cleavage, but even the 1980s, there wasn't a lack of that on television. I can't imagine wanting to watch a film called Count Dracula's Great Love anyway, but if I did, I'd probably just want the film to begin. Back when I watched films on television, I used to get annoyed with nonsense like this, whether it was Annabelle Gurwitch making sloppy joes during breaks in The Shawshank Redemption or Nick Clooney delaying the first scene of Bringing Up Baby with some anecdote about Cary Grant wearing a woman's dressing gown. Plus, I have the whole problem with camp. As someone who's never understood the appeal of The Munsters, The Addams Family, the song "Monster Mash," or The Rocky Horror Picture Show, I'm clearly not in her demographic.

I realize this is a snobbish thing to say, but if Netflix's "best guess" for how much you'll like Elvira: Mistress of the Dark is more than 2.5 stars, I think you have to re-evaluate your entertainment choices.

Even if you like Elvira and her type of campy humor, it's difficult to imagine someone watching her TV show or film and saying, "this really needs to be a computer role-playing game," but nevertheless here we are. 

The manual sets up the story with a series of diary entries written by the Elvira character. She's inherited Killbragant, a Gothic castle on the English moors, and she hopes to turn it into a spooky bed-and-breakfast. The story is full of silly but sometimes clever references to B-movie characters and themes: "a kitchen that's better equipped than Dr. Frankenstein's lab"; "a heap of legal papers big enough to hide Rodan"; "the place has been deserted since the Bloody Mary days." Anyway, it transpires that in days of yore, the castle's mistress was a witch named Emelda. She fell under the spell of an evil wizard named Beremond, slaughtered her people, murdered her husband Sir Elric, and reanimated corpses and skeletons in the catacombs. Before she died, she left instructions for her resurrection in a "Scroll of Spiritual Mastery," locked in a chest with six locks. She gave the six keys to her underlings, who later died in the castle.

Elvira's presence in the castle apparently causes Emelda's spirit to stir, and soon the place is crawling with ghosts, goblins, and gremlins. Elvira's plan is to find the ones who have the keys, open the chest, and figure out how to stop Emelda's return. In this plot, she has enlisted a "freelance ghostbuster" from a nearby town, and the game begins as he, the player, shows up at the castle gates.

Despite my skepticism as to the subject, I had already heard that Elvira had won Computer Gaming World's 1991 "Role-Playing Game of the Year," so I figured it must have really good gameplay. Even before I started playing the game, I was anticipating a pivot point in this review, where I'd say something like, "Given my ambivalent feelings about Elvira and her campy humor, you might expect me to completely pan her RPG. But guess what? It's a fantastic game!" Unfortunately, I can't quite say that. In fact, it's a little baffling to me that this would be the "RPG of the Year" in any year. It doesn't bode well for the upcoming crop of games on my list.

I'm not saying that it's a bad game. There are some promising elements. The graphics are quite nice, for one thing. They're well-integrated into a layout that makes the castle look and feel like a real place--a refreshing change from the featureless rooms and hallways of games like Wizardry VI and Buck Rogers. The interface offers an inoffensive blend of RPG and adventure game elements, perhaps a little better than B.A.T. and The Third Courier, but not as good as Hero's Quest or even--gods help me--Keef the Thief. I don't particularly care for the combat system, and character development promises to be scant.

There's no character creation. Every player starts nameless, with the same attributes: 50 strength, 10 resilience (like constitution), 80 dexterity, 99 life points, and 0 experience points (which, in this game, represent the percentage of the game completed more than any character development). The last attribute is "skill," which changes depending on the weapon currently wielded. I don't yet know if or how strength, dexterity, and resilience change, but skill increases as you land successful blows in combat--not a unique dynamic, but still rare for the era. The manual leaves the gender of the player ambiguous (clumsily covering by using "they" as a third-person singular pronoun), but I'm not sure why they did that, since the screenshots repeatedly show the player as a brown-haired male. I guess he's explicitly British, too, which makes for an RPG first.

The game offers some appropriately eerie music, and it's fun for a few refrains, but I turned it off fairly soon. Turning off the music is one of only a couple things you can accomplish with the keyboard; the game is otherwise entirely mouse-driven. The mouse ends up working well for things like inventory, but I don't know why it would have been so hard to program navigation to the keypad.

I've taken an axe from the wall and am preparing to take a shield.

The player can encounter an armory and get a battleaxe and shield just a few steps into the game, but there's really no point, as before you have a chance to enter the castle, you get a scripted encounter in which a guard hauls you to the undead captain of the guard, who strips your equipment and throws you in jail.

In a fun call-back to Elvira's TV appearances, which always seem to begin with her in a doorway, beckoning the viewer into her lair, Elvira then appears in the cell door to free the player.

At this point, we get a long bit of exposition in which Elvira reclines on a couch and tells the PC that he must stop Emelda, starting with finding a "strange guy in a sack" who stole her spellbook. She offers a few spells that she created before it was stolen and equips the player with a healing potion and a dagger. With some words of encouragement ("Now get out of here and do what you're being paid for!") she sends the player to the courtyard to begin his adventure.

This sequence involves the first use of embedded video that we've seen in an RPG. I think. I don't know enough about the technology, and it's tough to tell. I suppose it could just be a high-quality animation. Either way, it's only a couple of seconds on a continuous loop.

If you restart the game, you can just hit the SPACE bar during the beginning sequence to skip everything and start in the courtyard with the items Elvira gives you. That's a nice touch.

As you explore the castle, you fight occasional combats with random guards and fixed monsters. The combat system is action-based, though it is dependent partly upon the chosen weapon (at the beginning, of course, there is no choice) and partly the weapon skill. Mostly, it depends on player reflexes. Combat rounds are divided between attack stages and defense stages. During the attack stage, you can "lunge" or "hack." Once your opponent successfully blocks your attack, you enter the defense stage, where you can "block" or "parry." When you're successful at either, you go back to attacking, and so on.

Fighting an undead castle guard.

There's a clear choice about when to block or parry: when the enemy swings from his left (your right), you parry; when he swings from his right, you block. Sounds easy enough, but it takes a little time to learn how to interpret the attacks and anticipate which direction they're coming from. I haven't gotten good at it. I'm not yet certain whether there's some clear way to determine whether you should lunge or hack during the attack phase, so I've just been alternating between the two. I'll have more to say about combat when I understand it better.

The sounds during combat are fun, with the weapons appropriately clanging and the enemy screaming when hit. If you die from combat, you get a brutal death screen, and it seems to change depending on what type of enemy killed you. When a werewolf killed me, I was treated to an image of my throat ripped out.

Poor English lad.

Though you can rotate and turn as you explore, the game isn't quite fully 3D. You can't face every wall of every room. Instead, it's made up of a collection of static screens, some of which happen to be situated within turning radius of each other. You can click on most objects on the screen for a description . . .

. . . and you can pick up a ton of the objects, including paintings and lamps. I started collecting everything before I realized it would make more sense just to annotate their locations and return when I needed them.

Right now, I'm going through the familiar process of mapping each area, noting the objects, and annotating the puzzles. As in most adventure games, I expect I'll field a number of characters before I find the optimum path through the game. This, it occurs to me, is one of the distinguishing characteristics between an adventure game and an RPG: in an adventure game, you don't expect to win with your starting character.