 |
Deadly Rooms of Death Developer: Caravel Games Based on: Chess boards, the idea that cockroaches only run away because they're scared of you, and Daleks. |
Games | PC | Deadly Rooms of Death
Article by Merus | April 13, 2009
Forgive me a short descent into dreaded new games journalism. It's difficult for me to describe Deadly Rooms of Death. I'm too close to the subject, I think, but even then I don't think this is a game that's easily described. Katamari Damacy? is about making balls of stuff. Halo is about a space marine shooting aliens. DROD? It's... well... hmm.
It doesn't seem that hard: DROD is a very straightforward game to understand -- its distant ancestor is a game called, depending on your country of origin, Robots or Daleks, a game where players have to outrun beelining enemies that explode if they collide with each other -- but as the game piles on it becomes increasingly chaotic. Capturing the fun of that chaos is the tricky bit. I've seen it described multiple times as one of the best pure puzzle games of all time, one that simply can't be replicated as a physical game, unlike other titans of the puzzle genre like The Fool's Errand, which actually started life as an elaborate paper puzzle. But I'm compelled to muddle ahead anyway. Writers more capable of doing it justice than I will likely never run across the game -- and if they do, they'll probably be at as much of a loss as I am to encapsulate this unique little snowflake, uncompromising in its purity of design, sincere in its uncompromising difficulty. So I guess it's up to me.
I feel like I'm eulogising the game, and in a way that's true, though it feels more like I'm letting go of an old flame. The truth is, I've liked the idea of games in general, and I've liked games, but I've only ever really loved one... and it's the only one that's ever loved me back.
The orb in the southwest corner is bound to open up all the doors. The corridor is easy to defend, but the roaches in the southern chamber can't be killed in time. The best approach is to quickly kill the goblin and make a stand in the chamber until enough roaches are cleared, then clean up the brain to the north.
I first discovered DROD during what will probably end up being the nadir of my life. I was below the poverty line, living in a pokey granny flat attached to my uncle's house. The dishes had mould on them. I didn't have enough money to afford any commercial games, so I made do with an old Game Boy Pocket with Pokémon Blue and my PC. I had a hard drive full of emulated games from back when I lived on campus, before they grew sick of me avoiding classes, and another folder full of freeware games. One of my favourite resources was Home of the Underdogs. One of the largest, and certainly the most noble, abandonware sites on the early web, Underdogs was a repository purely for games that weren't commercially available. If the games were purchasable, even through mail order, they'd provide order details. Each game had a writeup, screenshots, categories -- this was back before tags had been invented -- and ratings. I sorted the list by the latter category, filtered the results by the Puzzle genre, then downloaded the top five or so. At the top of the list was DROD.
I'm not proud of this period in my life, but I think it was an experience I needed to have at some point. I learnt the ultimate consequences for procrastination, that opportunity after opportunity passes you by until you become a bitter husk cursing the world for never giving you a break. It's still not really something I've internalised, as our esteemed editor will readily attest regarding my relationship with deadlines; and it's something that the creator of DROD, Erik Hermansen, had to learn as well. He mentioned to me, once, that as a young man he'd rented an office for six months to create a game, and spent the entire time playing Age of Empires. Erik had kicked around the idea for DROD for years, trying out ideas on chess boards (the checkerboard patterns of the floors in the game is an artifact of this prototyping), but it took decades to turn it into an actual game -- and by the time it came out, the year was 1997, and DROD was a 2D game in a 3D world.
Even if the game had been released earlier, there's no guarantee that it'd have done well. It's a puzzle game -- not the softer, reflex-based style of puzzle game exemplified by Tetris?, but something that involves much more logic and reasoning. This already dooms it to relative obscurity. Those that like that sort of thing then have to accept its brutal difficulty level, and the bland-looking programmer sprite art that meshes poorly with the grotesque-styled portrait art. (While the newer releases in the series are better-looking, they're still not great.) It's an easy game to dismiss out of hand. It didn't have any FMV, or any cutscenes at all for that matter. Ocarina of Time? came out only a year later, but at a glance you'd think five, even ten years, separate the two games. An ugly, 2D, turn-based puzzle game that kicked your ass was not what the market wanted, and the publisher stopped promoting it and moved to 3D games not long after.
The checkerboard tiles hark back to DROD's creation, but they serve another purpose, making the size of each square clear without spending precious pixels on the border.
And yet, DROD gathered a cult following. It shouldn't be surprising to GameSpite readers that the nature of a game's looks, whether it contains all the whizbang features players expect, and whether it's any good at all are three completely different questions. DROD was pure gameplay, almost roguelike in its purity. Each level is built up of puzzle rooms, all of the same size, 38 by 32 squares. Each room contains an arrangement of monsters and dungeon elements, designed to trap the player into doing something thoughtless. Frequently, the player will render the room unwinnable and will have to rewind to the last checkpoint, or the border where they entered, and try a different approach; even more frequently, a monster will move into the player's square and kill him. The player character, an ugly man named Beethro Budkin, takes up one square, as does his Really Big Sword™. Each turn, the player makes one move: move one square in a cardinal direction, rotate the sword around Beethro, either clockwise or anticlockwise, wait and skip the current turn, or rewind. If the player moves the sword into a monster's square, it dies in an explosion of blood (unless it's immune to sword strikes), and the room is solved once all the monsters are dead and Beethro leaves the room. (Several of the game's puzzles make it easy to kill monsters, but seal the only way out as you do so.) Once the player moves, the monsters move, according to a simple, deterministic rule specific to each type of monster. The most common enemy, the roach -- the game's deliberately silly premise is that Beethro is a medieval exterminator, and the roaches in dungeons grow really big and develop a taste for flesh -- beelines towards Beethro on its turn, moving diagonally until it's in the same row or column as Beethro, and then orthogonally until it reaches him. Other monsters move a bit more elaborately, but not much more: the Living Tar acts like a big blob of wall that can be carved up into hostile pieces and has to be quickly penetrated to prevent the creature in its centre from expanding the Tar to cover the room; another, the serpent, is immune to Beethro's sword, and takes up multiple squares. It moves orthogonally, preferring vertical movement during some turns, horizontal the next -- but if it can't move at all, it shrinks into nothingness.
I've only described the basic rules, and already I can say things about how the game takes a couple of core ideas and runs with them. Take a look at the monsters' move sets, where more complex behaviour ends up becoming unpredictable behaviour, and then think of all the people who try to make "realistic" AI that ends up being no fun because it's too unpredictable. Or look at Beethro's miniscule move set -- it's easy to remember and easy to design a control scheme for, and the game makes itself more elaborate by introducing more and more elements and monsters, which it can cut out (for balance reasons, or just to keep the game simple) by simply not putting them in the room. Contrast it with a game like Zelda, where as the game progresses players get more and more powers they can use at almost any time - and, eventually, powers start duplicating or overriding existing ones, or acting as glorified keys. It's a lot easier to make the levels engaging when the levels themselves are the way the game introduces complexity.
The red squares are trapdoors, and disappear once moved off. Like most elements that have appeared in other games, DROD plays hardball -- this is an easy room. This hasn't stopped the player from irreversibly screwing it up, however.
We're pretty far into this article, and I still haven't really described what it's like to play DROD. I can tell you the controls and what you do, but the "elevator pitch" is frustratingly out of reach. It's a roguelike, except without random dungeons, permanent death, character levels or any items at all. It's a puzzle game, except that it has a plot (well, the later games do) and you explore and kill monsters, and there are no falling blocks or matching three. It's a turn-based game, which is the description Erik eventually settled on, clearly frustrated as to how to sum up his game. The problem is, the game's utterly unique, and the only way to really get it is to put the effort in yourself and play it.
The game is 25 levels long: 350 rooms that go from "difficult" to "brutal". It's typical, in the later stages of the game, to spend an hour on a single room, trying possibilities and coming to understand the puzzle. It culminates in an honest-to-god boss fight, where you have to chase down and kill the Neather, an intelligent foe who opens and closes doors to block your progress and sends monsters to flank you. Once you kill him and descend the final end-level stairs, the ending begins: Beethro, safely at home, tells the story of your journey to his nephews and nieces, who butt in and argue about the approaches Beethro -- the player -- took. Beethro's narration draws from the player's actions, and the player's actions are played in a window as Beethro talks. It's a full shot of nostalgia that relies on the game feeling like an epic undertaking and the quite likely scenario that you played those early levels a couple of months ago. It's hard, and long, and when you finish the game treats your play as legendary. It's one of the most satisfying endings of any game I'm aware of, with the possible exception of the PC RPG Fallout? which pulls a similar trick, though Fallout focuses on the macro level instead of the micro level of what the player actually did. I've only seen one other game that takes the player's actions and places a new context over them, Braid. It's a powerful technique, and I'm surprised that it's not used more. But DROD was where I saw it first.
It was only a matter of time before I got stuck on a puzzle. It happens - DROD has a brutal difficulty level, in part because it builds its levels around grasping one core concept. There's rarely a place where a puzzle built on the same idea is repeated later in the level, and so there's no place where you get to practice your skills instead of doing something completely new. For an indie game like DROD, when you get stuck the only option is the official forums, and so off I trudged to ask for help. I suspect it was the self-selecting nature of the forum that made me stay, but stay I did, and it became my home on the Internet for five years.
//A portrait of the author, by DROD's creator, Erik Hermansen, to commemorate the author's time as the DROD site's webmaster.
It seemed an innocent request at first - someone on the forum though it'd be a good idea to have an FAQ. Another one of the regulars said that he'd do it when he had a spare moment, and for some reason I decided to race him. So, I cracked open a new tab and started looking at other forum FAQs to get a feel for the topics they covered, added in a few of my own, and then started writing. The second question on the standard phpBB was "why can't I post?" which is stupid because if they can't post they can't ask that question. So I put that down as the answer, then added a little more under it that actually answered the question. As I went, I started getting sillier and sillier, until the FAQ ended up being a comedy piece in fifty pieces -- a question, then an answer. I posted it a little later, and went to bed feeling all pleased with myself.
A few weeks later, I got an email from Erik. The webmaster of the "official" fan site didn't have the time to maintain the site any more, and Erik was looking for a new person. He'd seen the FAQ and thought my sense of humour was a good fit for his, and asked if I wanted to take on that responsibility. I thought of all the ways that it could go wrong, and said "Yes" anyway. Here I was, a 19 year old who'd let his life fall to ruins, and I was a valued member of a tiny internet community based around a hardcore puzzle game. It was, by a wide margin, the best thing going in my life.
DROD had been initially released as a commercial game, but in 2000, during the .com boom, Erik asked for the rights back from the company that published it, Webfoot Technologies, so he could open-source the game. I first played a revised version of the original game, which added checkpoints and the rewind button instead of the original's save slots, the new ending in place of the original's pathetic and deeply unsatisfying two-frame animation of Beethro dancing with the text, "You Win!", and a level editor. There was soon talk of using the new code base to build a sequel, with new enemies and new graphics, and attempt to sell it to the community who'd grown up around the remake, trading hints and levels, cracking jokes and shooting the breeze. It wouldn't, and couldn't be completely locked behind pay walls, because the game was still built on an open-source code base and it was too much effort to get permission from all the contributors to close it. Instead, Erik, and the most prolific contributor to the remake, Mike Rimer, decided to sell the new content, and leave the engine itself, including the import functionality and the level editor, open-source. In effect, the game had an unlimited free demo that could import any of the forum's levels, some of which were even better than the original game, and so the fans were fairly understanding.
Erik and Mike started shoulder-tapping people they thought would be valuable. They asked the better level designers from the community if they wanted to work on the new game, and one of them also happened to be pretty good with sprite art. They asked me if I wanted to help, as well, and once again I said "yes".
A room that appeared in both King Dugan's Dungeon, the after-the-fact name for the original DROD, and the sequel. This image was created for the preview for the sequel.
The new game, called DROD: Journey To Rooted Hold, was going to be a new beginning -- a re-introduction of the old elements, adding a whole stack of brand new ones, redesigning elements from the original that relied on information hiding, expanding the tile size for higher resolution graphics, and incorporating a plot that pitted Beethro against a giant bureaucracy that lived deep underground, building pointless tunnels, with dark designs on the surface dwellers. I contributed some subplot ideas that I always thought it'd be neat to see in a game, like using symbols and context to represent plot twists -- in the first level, Beethro can find a symbol of the Architect's Association, who are revealed at the end to be in on the conspiracy by having their symbol appear again at the entrance to their tunnels. The intention is spoiled somewhat by having Beethro exclaim, "Gasp! It's the Architect's Association symbol! They must be in on the conspiracy!" Another idea, to have a little recurring subplot where a series of messengers would relay a call for the bureaucracy to defend against Beethro and garble it into a message for Beethro that he required help, worked much better. Unfortunately, I discovered that while I was in my element writing prose, I wasn't nearly as good at dialogue, where my lines came off clunky and stilted, and my plotting had the unfortunate habit of trying to go for the epic moments instead of keeping things more grounded and charming. I nominated a level to do, and when it was time to hand it in, it was three-quarters completed, probably a third too big anyway, the "introduction" room was the hardest room in the level, and one of the rooms contained a puzzle that I hadn't playtested and was easy to break, leaving players trapped in a tiny passage, unable to advance.
I was bitterly disappointed that I'd let DROD, and myself, down. I didn't feel like I had any real place on the team -- sure, I'd contributed a few jokes, but my job there was in part to be an "embedded reporter", keeping the fans updated on the progress of the game. This is hard to do even when the development team wants to, because the nature of game development is trying things out, seeing if they actually work, and cutting them if they don't, which to the avarage gamer ends up looking like a list of broken promises. Erik didn't even want to go that far, telling me to keep silent on the progress of the game and what we were doing so as to not stir up hype. In effect, I couldn't do anything other than make some half-assed contributions.
Eventually, as we grew close to release, Erik relented, and I put together a big announcement page detailing all the cool things we'd made. A couple of weeks later, we released, and something funny happened: the fans expressed disappointment. Despite keeping quiet for most of development, my pronouncements were enough to set unrealistic expectations. It only added to my own personal disappointment, but at least the game was good, right?
These golems, introduced in Journey To Rooted Hold, leave their body behind, which complicates clearing strategies. Thankfully, they're also dumb as a bag of hammers, or else this ambush scenario would have been much nastier.
The thing is, though, that I didn't think so. I knew the plot backwards, and had seen all the levels, so all that were left were the puzzles, which I felt often didn't match up to the original's. There were entire levels built off the same concept of lining the walls with bombs that detonate with a sword poke and making it risky to navigate through them, other puzzles that were maddeningly unintuitive, and others that I didn't understand even after asking for hints. Or maybe the honeymoon was over. There were bullshit puzzles in the original, as well, but I was ore willing to excuse them. When the game started doing episodic content, a year before the mainstream games industry (with the exception of .hack), I barely even noticed.
I stuck around for the community, but as the years went by that, too, started to move away from my tastes. I got a job at my parents' business, and then a job I got myself, and I grew older and grew up. My parents were secretly pleased, although by that point they'd come to terms with my passion for games well after they expectd me to grow out of it (in part due to spending an evening with Erik and his wife when he flew out to Australia for a holiday). DROD receded in importance, and eventually I stopped visiting the site. We never officially broke up, exactly, but we're nevertheless seeing other people.
Ultimately, we're defined by what we do, and for five years what I did was be a part of DROD and the DROD community. I don't think it would be the same game without me, even though at the time I would have argued the point, and I wouldn't have been the same without it. And it's left a mark on me that won't be easily erased: I pay attention to the abilities a character has, and how so few games have enemies that deviate from the "run towards you and hit you" template. I look at how few games take advantage of the players' investment in them, other than to suck cash from them. I can sympathise with the hardcore player who relishes the challenge of conquering something that looked impossible, even as they irritate me for trying to make my games too hard to play. I look at the debates over extended support for retail games and building a community, and episodic content, and player-created content, and I remember how DROD, with its silly name and terrible graphics and complete lack of checkbox-ticking features, did those things years before. And I wonder how different the game industry might be if more people than me and a few thousand others had played DROD.