Black Cat
Magister
Chapter the first; Another witch hunt? Really?
In which we get to read the introduction to the plot, which is about all the plot we will ever get, and then receive a quick tutorial on how to play Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. Afterwards our heroine will play through the prologue and get her meat puppet killed so we can delight in the bloody carnage.
Released in 1990, Elvira, Mistress of the Dark was Horrorsoft's second game, as far as I know, and the first in their awesome trilogy of B-Horror inspired dungeon crawlers with kind of silly plots, a noticeable focus on the exploration and the adventure elements, and plenty of awfuly grotesque ways for our characters to die. Their previous game, Personal Nightmare, was kind of along the same lines but much more of a classical adventure with a tight time limit than a dungeon crawl.
Our meatpuppet in this game is a nameless castle cleaner, a kind of amateurish ghostbuster making a living on tending to paranormal phenomena in old castles and houses, contracted by the titular and kind of iconic silly B grade movie hostess to face the legions of hell that have invaded her old familiar castle to try and revive her evil witch of an ancestor and spread darkness over the entire world. As you may have already noticed you should be leaving the premises if you are from the storyfagotry bureau, for there's nothing here for you. At all. Not even a little bit.
If you aren't one of those, however, the game's pretty cool. You get to explore the castle and die many a bloody and painful death, to solve some inventory puzzles and duel many monsters while collecting magical reagents for Elvira and searching for the keys hidden around the place or protected by the most powerful monsters, trying not to work ourselves into a dead corner that would force us to restart and more. And there's also that underlying silliness to it all, creating that very same atmosphere of being inside a really cheesy and kind of genre savvy B-Movie that Waxworks had, and that the sequel to Mistress of the Dark, Jaws of Cerberus, takes to its natural, and most literal, extreme.
But then that's kind of obvious in a game series that shares roots, themes, and more, with this movie.
In any case, and as I always do, this first update is just for introductions, background information, and the like. This is kind of important with this game because, as was normal among games from the time, the only background we are going to ever get is printed on the manual, and the rest of the game will kind of assume you already know it much in the same way Waxworks assumed we knew the plot from the manual and went straight to the gameplay with just a small sumary at the begining, so we more or less didn't knew we had to save our Bro until we, like, did it, and stuff.
So, let's
In case someone wonders, a Dybbuk is a kind of evil spirit of Jewish and Qabalistic lore. When someone really sinful or wicked dies one of those things may be spawned, which are basicaly the spirit of the deceased after either escaping from hell, being rejected entrance to hell, or being kind of recruited by hell. A newly created, level one Dybbuk has only the power to slightly influence thoughts, emotions, ideas, etc. A powerful and ancient Dybbuk, meanwhile, is a very powerful form of errant influence and may be even able to, similarly to a demon, possess the living or even steal their bodies after kicking the previous tenant out.
They are, in a way, not very different to the Gaki, but while the Gaki are hungry spirits eternally lusting after some particular thing and influencing the living into pursuing such things to feed on their feeding on it, the Dybbuks are spirits lusting after a life and a body, and not caring who they screw along the way.
Not even my jokes are that bad. I'm really impressed.
So that's all of our plot already taken care of, ladies and gentlemen. In order to stop Emelda the evil witch from returning and bringing hell to earth or whatever she's trying to do we need to find six keys and Emelda's own chest, and thus to the book containing the secrets of her return. From here on it's about how we get to do it, how her nasties try to stop us from doing so, and how the game abuses us as we advance.
This is the first thing we see upon arriving to Elvira's castle.
As you can see, it's quite similar to Waxworks' interface, if a bit rougher. Room shows us on the black square in the lower center of the screen the items we have already noticed, or left, in the room we are in. In the same window does Inventory list our inventory and Weapons our, uhm, weapons. Up and Down are obvious. The four arrows too. On the oposite side we have a list of all available verbs, the ones that can be applied to what we have clicked on, in this case our bag, lit. Below we have the options to pause, save, and load, and pause actually doubles as quit. The two eyes at the lower corners serve the purpose or indicating damage taken or done when out of the combat screen, mostly when using or suffering from magic, or when running away. The left eye is what they do to us, the right one what we do to them.
Then we have our stats. Strength governs how much damage we do in melee combat and how much we can carry before becoming encumbered. Resilience determines the amount of damage we can take or absorv. Dexterity is about having the initiative at the start of a fight and how fast we will regain it as the combat progresses. Skill is about how proficient and cool we are with our currently equiped weapon, and raises the more we use it. Life is, more or less, our HP. Experience I believe works more of a progress or completion indicator than the traditional way.
That's more or less it. Right now we only have a grey canvas bag with a shoulder strap, yay. The only interactive element on the first screen is the white sign next to the castle's entrance, and there we click.
We proceed to the, uhm, area between the outer gate and the inner gate of the castle. The gatehouse? The, uhm, airlock? In any case, there we are. Then we proceed through the door to the left, which happens to be the office of the captain of the guard. Oops.
Yum, rats. :3
During the game Elvira will make us any spell we need as long as we have collected the components ourselves. However, the formulas aren't listed in the game itself but on the manual, so it works kind of like a copy protection scheme. Also, we will need to recover Elvira's spellbook before we can count on her witcheries.
A... what?
There's nowhere safe on this bloody castle, believe me.
We now appear outside, in the courtyard. Behind us is the door to the dungeon we just escaped from. First things first, I use the dagger to make it my chosen weapon. Then I examine the spells to see what I have. The two potions are Fire Dagger and Fingerlight, and drinking them will give us a given amount of castings of the corresponding spell. The jelly like thingy is for healing.
Since we are with the spells, the spellbook is actually pretty funny in that it is written in the same kind of faux olde englishe many english speaking Wiccans, Neopagans, and other classes of Next Gen witches just love to write their
And I don't remember which was the name of the one that gave you the Healing Jelly thingie so I will have to post that one later. In any case, the main, and maybe only, way to increase your stats other than experience and skill is to use potions that temporarily do so, with or without added side effects. It's a pretty cool system that adds extra complications to the experience, given spell ingredients are very limited on this game.
Before closing this introductory update, however, there are two more things that need to be done. The first is explaining the combat system, and for that I have already something in mind: I wander around the courtyard until I get my bearings and then go straight to the gatehouse, my small dagger in hand and ready for a duel that will shake the heavens! Along the way we notice we are now trapped here, because otherwise it wouldn't be fun at all.
The captain of Emelda's guards knows his time has come and, without further words, stands and prepares his sword. Then we see, for the first time, the combat interface, and we can use either the main window or the menu to the right to fight: Lunge is the same than clicking on the left half of the main view, and hack the same than doing so on the right half. The one who has the most initiative goes first, in this case us. Depending on how the round goes and how effective our attacks are we keep the initiative and go again or he obtains it and we must defend. In the later case the words will change into block and parry, and again they will be equivalent to clicking on the left or right, respectively, halves of the main view. To know which one to click you must learn to read the animations the enemy do when attacking: He will do one animation when you must block and he will do a diferent one when you must parry, both ending with the attack hiting you on the half of the main view that goes with that defensive maneuver.
Finally, the numbers below the two buttons indicate the damage we are doing the enemy, while the numbers above them indicates the damage we are receiving. I did not take many screenshots because I was actually trying to win and this battle is pretty difficult, but let's just say I was really rusty and it did not went as planned.
And that was the second thing we did need to do: The death screens! Now our Elvira experience is complete, and next time we meet we will actually begin exploring the castle and stuff. And whether I am good or bad at the combat is kind of a crapshot: Some days I devastate everything without even trying, some days everything kills me without giving me the least chance. So you'll get to see death screens a whole lot, I reckon.
That's it for today.
See you next time!
of my memory.
Since it is obviously not happening, after a while I go back into the blacksmith's workshop and search the place again until I find his crucible inside the box I mentioned already in a previous update. I go back to the kitchen, drop my armor, go back into the blacksmith's, take the crucible, and then go back to the kitchen, and try to melt the crucifix in the crucible... And with the kitchen's fire.
