Torvak the Warrior (1990)

Torvak the Warrior is a relatively early game from Core Design, which of course would go on to fame for creating the Tomb Raider series. Torvak is yet another poor barbarian warrior who comes home from the war to find the whole place burned down and all villagers slain by the forces of a necromancer. With no rest for the weary, Torvak picks up his axe and heads off to make the sumbitches pay.

This takes the form of a side-scrolling hack-and-slash game in which Torvak has to generally go from left to right over five levels, but those levels can get a bit mazelike and feature long vertical shafts and hidden secrets that offer extra points and power-up items. Torvak will face human berserkers, green-skinned orcs, rat-men, oozing swamp creatures, and rock-men, among several others.

Torvak begins with his axe but he can pick up a broadsword, a warhammer (leave this one alone, it's terrible), or a ball-and-chain. He can find shields for protection, and he can find potions that allow him to unleash a limited number of magical attacks, handy for facing level bosses.

The game superficially resembles stuff like Rastan, but it's a slow, plodding experience. Torvak, with his top-heavy upper body and relatively stumpy legs, moseys along his way, stops moving while attacking, and since bigger enemies often take multiple hits to kill, he frequently has to take a shot, then leap backwards to create enough space for a second attack. Although he has an explosive jumping ability, he's definitely more akin to Arnold's lumbering portrayal of Conan than Robert E. Howard's quick, pantherish original.

Torvak the Warrior seems to have been initially designed for the Atari ST, then ported to the Amiga, a phrase that probably triggers old Amiga fans' PTSD. The Amiga version got a modest upgrade to Matt Furniss's soundtrack, but nothing else. The relatively limited colors and lack of parallax scrolling betray the game's ST origins, and even the improved soundtrack comes at the cost of forcing the player to choose between music or sound effects, but not both simultaneously, a common issue with Commodore machines because of their limited audio channels.

To its credit, though, the game plays fairly, controls well, and it looks okay even if it's not a technical marvel. Core had some good artists (Lee Pullen and Terry Lloyd in this case), so their games often had a clean, attractive look and distinctive characters. The levels have the standard swamp/mountains/jungle themes, but there are evocative background details like giant skulls and rotting carcasses of huge creatures littering the ground.

Torvak the Barbarian is better than many games, but there are also many games better than it.

Supplemental reading: Legend, by David Gemmell

Heretic (1994)

Art by Brom

 

Heretic is the fourth game released by Raven Software, a studio founded by Brian and Steve Raffel. With their debut game, an Amiga Dungeon Master clone called Black Crypt, John Romero of id took notice of them and the studios formed a partnership in which Raven would develop games based on game engines id created - ShadowCaster was built on the Wolfenstein 3D engine; Heretic and its sequel, Hexen, were made on the Doom engine; Hexen II on the Quake engine; and onward. Eventually Raven was bought out by Activision and sent to the slave mines to spend eternity working on Call of Duty sequels, but that's not important here.

Heretic's story is mostly conveyed in the manual, which tells us of the Sidhe, "an ancient elf race adept at arcane sorcery and keepers of the Tomes of Power." The Sidhe are attacked by three Serpent Riders from Hell, who begin forcibly converting everyone to a cult called the Order of the Sign, but the Sidhe are immune to the Serpent Riders' mind control, leading the Serpent Riders to brand them...HERETICS! The two more powerful Serpent Riders depart, leaving one behind the manage the situation on Earth and slaughter the Sidhe, but one Sidhe remains to continue the fight and that's you.

Upon starting the game, it immediately becomes clear that Heretic is effectively Doom with the knob cranked all the way to the Fantasy side of the meter. You run and fight monsters, find color-coded keys, and find the exit. Brian Raffel said the studio planned on Heretic being more of an RPG, as they were all D&D fans, but John Carmack advised them to just "do it like Doom, and add the fantasy flavor and other stuff." (This process of starting with something relatively complex and then stripping it down to make a simpler, action-heavy experience sounds a bit like how Wolfenstein 3D and Quake were made. Perhaps it was one of id's advantages in that their games didn't suffer from feature creep like many others but instead emphasized accessible, impactful gameplay.) 

So Heretic became a Doom-like game, but with some expansions on the game engine. You could look and up and down (although the game still auto-aims for you if enemies are above or below), you got a modest item inventory, you could cast a flight spell, and by using a Tome of Power item you could gain powered up alternative-fire versions of the weapons. Most amusing is the morph ovum, a magic egg that turns monsters into chickens.

The weapons are all fantasy-based variations on Doom's arsenal. You start with a simple staff for melee attacks (instead of your fists) and a weak magic wand for a pistol. The crossbow is the shotgun equivalent, the Dragon Claw is the chain gun equivalent, etc. One of the more memorable weapons is the game's version of the chainsaw, a pair of magical gauntlets that send lightning into enemies at a touch.

The monsters, however, aren't precisely 1:1 Doom variations. There are flying gargoyles, golems, undead warriors, snakemen, flying wizards, etc. Some come in intangible "ghost" variations that can only be killed with particular weapons. 

The game is often called a Doom clone in a somewhat pejorative way, like people recognize that it's fun but lament that it wasn't more unique, but the thing is that "D&D Doom" or "medieval Doom" or "fantasy Doom" is still Doom and therefore is still pretty good. Raven developed a reputation for making excellent action games, especially FPSs, and Heretic shows they had those talents from early on. Heretic has creative level design and the gameplay additions are interesting without overcomplicating the experience. The art design and audio are very good. It's maybe not quite as "heavy" as Doom in the sense of having a thrash metal edginess about it, but it set the stage for fantasy FPSs carrying more of the sword-and-sorcery feel going forward in its sequels and other games like Witchaven. When a fantasy FPS is made even today, people often compare it to Heretic and Hexen before anything else.

COVER ART: Dragon Wars (1988)

 Boris Vallejo's cover to Dragon Wars, which was a sort of unofficial Bard's Tale IV...before they actually made Bard's Tale IV a short while ago.

Are they fighting the monster or saluting it?

Prince of Persia (1989)

 

It seems like there are a couple of particularly strong cinematic influences that keep coming up in sword-and-sorcery games. Conan the Barbarian is the obvious one, and the other is Ray Harryhausen's fantasy movies, mainly his Sinbad movies and Jason and the Argonauts (those reanimated skeletons keep turning up...). Jordan Mechner's Prince of Persia in many ways feels like a Sinbad movie adapted to video game form.

Mechner broke onto the scene in 1984 with Karateka for the Apple II. Karateka, about a Japanese martial artist battling through a forbidding castle to rescue his princess, stood out for its high quality animation and innovative cinematic touches, such as cutting back and forth between the hero and his next enemy as they advanced toward each other and between-level cutscenes that showed the villain scheming. Mechner, never a very prolific game creator, returned a few years later with Prince of Persia, which looks and plays like a refinement of the concepts he was working with in Karateka. The rotoscoped animation is even smoother, the combat is more engaging, and the game is just bigger and more ambitiously designed with its maze-like levels compared to Karateka's strictly horizontal castle layout.

Prince of Persia begins with the sultan's daughter being approached by the grand vizier, Jaffar (it's always Jaffar, why the fixation on Jaffar?), who gives her an ultimatum to concede to marry him within one hour or die. "All the princess's hopes now rest on the brave youth she loves. Little does she know that he is already a prisoner in Jaffar's dungeons...." The player then takes control of the hero, who has just been locked within a...weirdly spacious, multi-tiered cell. Fortunately, a part of the floor collapses under his feet, revealing a tunnel into which he escapes. From here, the player can find a sword that he uses to out-fence guards barring his path and make his way through 12 levels, from the dungeon to the upper reaches of the palace. Along the way, he has to overcome many more guards of increasingly deadly swordsmanship, reanimated skeletons, boobytraps such as spikes that rise up from the floors, and some situations that involve magic, most notably a mirror that creates an evil doppelganger of the hero, before confronting Jaffar in a climactic swordfight.

True to Jaffar's word, the player has one hour of real time to get all the way through the game, although the game does allow a save to be made after level 2 is passed. A good strategy to conserve time is to save at the start of a level, explore until the most efficient route to the exit is found, and then reload and make a serious run to the exit. Most of the non-combat gameplay involves running across platforms, triggering doors to open with pressure plates in the floors (a nod to the death traps in the Indiana Jones movies), and then making difficult jumps across wide gaps before the gates can close. Secrets can be found by probing the ceilings for loose plates. Potions are scattered about that can refresh health or poison the player, and there are some with unique effects, such as one that allows the prince to fall like a feather. Combat is simple - the player can lash out with his sword, or perform a parry, and timing and positioning determine if a hit is scored. The combat was designed so that when the hero and an enemy are going full speed, it would resemble the fencing in swashbuckling films like The Adventures of Robin Hood.

Prince of Persia effectively established a new subgenre of games that people took to calling "cinematic platformers" because of the way they often use rotoscoped animation and relatively realistic characters, emphasize cinematic storytelling, and stress a more measured, careful style of play compared to standard platforming games like Super Mario Bros. Games that followed Prince of Persia include the French-made Flashback and Another World (aka Out of This World), Blackthorne, Nosferatu, and The Way, among others. It could be argued that the original Tomb Raider games adapted the genre to work in 3D, as they also emphasize platforming challenges with a frail, somewhat realistic character. The way Lara Croft has to carefully get in position to make leaps is very much akin to how cinematic platformers work.

The game has excellent art direction. The smoothness of the animation - the rotoscoping was based on films of Mechner's brother - was really striking at the time, and the graphics effectively bring across the Middle Eastern atmosphere without requiring a lot of clutter on the screen. The game looks only as detailed as it needs to be. Once you know the controls and move around a couple of screens, you just get how you need to play the rest of the game. Some welcome touches include that the enemies are just as vulnerable as you are - if you harry them backward off a ledge or into a trap, they'll die as surely as you would - and spike traps can be passed if you walk carefully through them instead of the instant-kill-on-touch quality seen in most games. The music, composed by Mechner's father, is sparse but also memorable. There's a rare sense of elegance and restraint in every aspect of the game's design that also extends to how the game handles the sorcerous elements. The game might involve sword-swinging skeletons and mystical doppelgangers, but it still feels like a relatively naturalistic world compared to the crazed delirium the afflicts most games in historical settings (and movies that are inspired by such games). You're just a man trying to rescue his lady from a sorcerer and his minions in a castle. There's no need for the whole planet to be in jeopardy from armies of flame-puking demons rampaging everywhere (not that that can't be fun in the right hands...).  

Supplemental reading: Desert of Souls, by Howard Andrew Jones

Witchaven (1995)

                     Art by Ken Kelly

Witchaven, developed by Capstone in 1995, is an early attempt at doing a melee-focused FPS. There had certainly been first-person games with fantasy themes, but Ultima Underworld and Elder Scrolls: Arena were more focused on creating a real-time RPG experience, and Heretic was essentially Doom but more heavily tilted toward a fantasy theme. Witchaven is more about the speed of the FPS genre but with melee weapons and modest RPG elements included.

The premise is that the player controls a knight named Grondoval who has traveled to an island under the control of a witch named Illwhyrin. Illwhyrin is performing grotesque rituals so she can call forth demons to unleash on the world. By killing her, you can make the whole problem go away.

The weapons you use to do the job include a dagger, a short sword, a flail, a broadsword, a bow, throwing axes, a battle axe, a halberd, and a magic sword. The weapons degrade with use (effectively equivalent to the ammo needed in regular FPSs) and need to be replaced when damaged, although you can always resort to your fists if necessary. There are different suits of armor that can be picked up, and a shield can further reduce damage, but if the shield is destroyed the player can dual wield his weapons. The player can also use magical scrolls to do things such as illuminate dark areas, force open doors, cast magic missiles, or even fly. Scroll use is restricted by the player's experience level, which goes up by killing enemies. Finally, there are potions that can be accumulated and used for health refills, curing poison, resisting fire, or getting certain kinds of boosts for combat.

Among the monsters are goblins, undead skeletons, magic-slinging hags, fire demons, ogres, and even occasional dragons. Illwhyrin herself will appear in a few levels during the game, teasing the player on the way to the final confrontation. Many of the monsters are claymation models, while Illwhyrin is played in digitized form by Capstone's product manager Judy Melby. 

Advancement through the levels is the classic FPS method of picking up colored keys for corresponding doors, although to use the exit the player needs to also find a magical pentagram and bring it to the exit to be teleported to the next level.

Witchaven, apparently based on a tabletop RPG, is the first game officially made with Ken Silverman's Build engine, being released just ahead of Capstone's game based on William Shatner's TekWar novels. It uses certain Build engine tricks such as levels with more verticality than you'd see in Doom, halls twisting above other halls, and large chunks of scenery shifting when triggered. 

The game is a classic case of being more interesting than good. One of the reasons why there are relatively few first-person melee-fighting games is because it's hard to create a sense of weight or impact from that perspective and Witchaven isn't one of the games to transcend this problem. You do get used to the attack system (and the game gets almost comically easy when you do) and how to time strikes so the weapon is falling down on the enemy at the right moment, but it doesn't feel good. You watch the weapon come down and maybe it registers a hit and maybe it doesn't. The art direction is nothing special and the game looks ugly and jagged compared to the more popular entries in the genre. The character actually strafes faster than he walks forward, even when in water. Some levels are outright bugged - I was stumped on one level only to look up the problem online and discover that the level suffers from a button that doesn't work, requiring that the player use the open door spell to proceed. One wonders if the whole reason for spells like open door or flight was as much to work around bugs as proper level design. Attempts at atmospheric lighting don't seem to work quite right and even using the light spell doesn't help much. The soundtrack is mediocre and buggy as it often seems to revert to a single track. The dragons look goofy and barely move, content to just breathe fire on the player, and if you've taken the resist fire potion they're completely helpless while the potion is active.

With all that said, the game has just enough to keep you playing if you're feeling indulgent and have maybe played through all the more notable FPSs. The game earned a certain amount of notoriety in its time thanks to its amounts of gore, and there simply aren't very many fantasy FPSs out there even now. The game closes with the usual Conan movie homage, with Grondoval reclining on a throne, promising further adventures on his way to a throne of his own, and Capstone cranked out a sequel the following year.