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| Nox Archaist |
A little known but useful Internet fact: Ultima fans and their money are quickly separated. Yes, Gentle Reader,
YOU too can make good money selling more Ultima to people who were once into Ultima (most likely back in the 1980s), and now want more Ultima (most likely in the style of the 1980s). That is: in its day, the Ultima CRPG series had elicited so many positive feelings, and built such a fanatically loyal audience that even today, thirty-something years after the heyday of the series, and more than twenty after the days the Ultima Dragons (an overactive fan group who seemed to run half the late 90s Internet), pitching an Ultima project to the Kickstarter audience is sure to start a stampede. The fans will pay, and they have deep pockets – so make sure to open up those “name a Pirate/Barkeep/Lord after yourself” reward tiers, and design a stretch goal where Lord British and Iolo will
personally deliver your boxed copy, and sing
Stones right in your living room.
Indeed, Yours
Truly (although a Johnny-come-lately, and not an Ultima Dragon) has spent generously
on various Ultima-inspired Kickstarters. There was
Unknown
Realm for the PC and Commodore-64, which, three years after its
proposed date of delivery, increasingly looks like either a very unsuccessful
game development project, or a very successful scam. There is
Skald:
Against the Black Priory, which has released multiple increasingly
impressive demos, and seems to be late but firmly on track. There was
Underworld
Ascendant, a game… no, come to think of it, that one did not exist, and
I did not foolishly waste $100 on a boxed copy that never even shipped in any
form people were promised. Yes: too many failures can harden a man’s heart, and
make him wary of funding Yet Another Ultima-Knockoff Kickstarter. Thus, I
missed out on
Nox Archaist, which promised all the usual things these
projects tend to promise (a new Ultima homage game! an endorsement by Lord
British! pixels! a game box! a thick manual on real PAPER! a CLOTH MAP! some useless
renfaire gizmo related to the game story!), and then I forgot all about it. But
Nox Archaist came out just as promised, game box and hand-sealed letter and all
– and
you can still buy a
post-Kickstarter version, along with the T-shirt and the spiral-bound
notepad. (Or you can buy an inexpensive digital version if you make your saving
throw vs. Temptation. Go on, I will wait.)
The following
review is the result of around 8-10 hours of play, encompassing the “first act”
of a highly open-ended and obviously much larger game – certainly not the whole
picture, but a reasonably wide one.
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| For a hundred dollars, you also get a dongle |
If you are
asking yourself, “Did he really write ‘Apple ][?’” or “Isn’t that
something very old?”, the answer is “yes”. This game was developed for an
early 1980s computer system, and although it was done with a lot of hindsight, and
pushes the system’s capabilities beyond the limits possible in 1983-1985, it is
not just a game with a vaguely chic retro aesthetic – it is a real approximation
of a major, no-expenses-spared Apple ][ title. On your PC, it will run on an
emulator (no special computer wizardry required), but if you are so inclined,
you can make a disk image on a handful of Apple ][ floppy disks, and play it
like it was really meant to be played.
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| Shipwrecked in CGAland |
To say
Nox
Archaist has “crude” graphics, or that its speaker-based beeps and boops
(lovingly emulated on your sound card, running in a high-end Windows 10
environment) is to miss the point.
Nox Archaist has varied and fairly
sophisticated graphics for 1984, with sprites to simulate your character swinging
his (or her, or xir – yes, there is an “other” gender, and weirdly enough, that’s
not woke posturing, but a loving homage to
Ultima III: Exodus) sword, or
sitting in a chair, or swimming in shallow water, or sinking into quicksand. This
is the best simple tile-based graphics can offer with its weird
colour artefacts
and reliance on basic symbols to carry its meaning. Modern games
depict;
old games
symbolise; and this lost art is new again in
Nox Archaist.
From simple props come surprisingly meaningful and distinct places – the crude
hovels of a wayside village, the throne room of a castle, or the depths of the Mythical
Underworld. In fact, the game even features bits of modulated speech, something
which would only come to Ultima with
Ultima VII: The Black Gate (1992). This
is, if anything, a game way before its time.
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| On the trail of the orcs |
Behind the
archaic
façade runs a remarkably complex game. It has a rather intricate
user interface with very Ultima-like quirks – you still e(X)it your horse to
dismount, (I)gnite a torch to illuminate your surroundings, and execute a
series of Tabs and number keys to bring up inventory and character sheets – but
it is not really hard to learn, and quickly becomes second nature while
allowing a fairly good level of environmental interaction. The charm
of
the early Ultimas often comes from layering a dozen small “tricks” on a simple
basic system of movement, fighting, and conversing with NPCs, and using them to
build a rich world and a complicated game.
Nox Archaist has this stuff
in spades – lockpicking, jumping over obstacles with horses, engaging in
ship-to-ship combat with cannons or boarding action, day/night cycles for NPCs,
line-of-sight vision (and the cover of nighttime/underground darkness) for your
party, excavating rubble with a pickaxe, falling into quicksand, and all these individually
tiny little things – make for a rich and fascinating game environment.
***
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| NAME! JOB! BYE! NAME! JOB! BYE! |
At its core,
Nox
Archaist is a game of investigation. Sent by Queen Issa to investigate a
mysterious cult that has taken foothold over a cluster of islands, captured by
your enemies and imprisoned in a ship’s brig, but saved in a shipwreck, you
will have to uncover a way to an unseen and powerful enemy while building a
powerful and well-equipped adventuring party on the side. Your first clues will
lead to a small town, then an increasingly open world crisscrossed by clues and
leads. This is Ultima in its best sense: talking to NPCs,
you hit on capitalised KEYWORDS, which lead to other places and people you will
find in a different corner of the world.
There is a
“quality-of-life” feature in the form of a simple quest journal, but to
untangle the leads in Nox Archaist, you will have to take notes in a
real notebook, and spend time poring over your player map (this is missing a
whole lot of locations you will gradually discover, or get pointed to). Perhaps
you will have to journey to Castle Suurtheld and consult Nox Yvviar on CULT
activities. Or you will have to visit one of the Queen’s agents in Knaerwood
and ask him for HELP. Perhaps you will also seek out one of the local trainers
to improve your skills. Or the answer may lie in a book in some library (these
are small, brief vignettes high on local flavour).
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| 8 AM. Lord Hraakvar is still asleep |
The essence is
the sense of an interconnected milieu, one whose locations you will revisit
again and again, getting deeper into a labyrinth of sub-quests, references, and
mysterious finds. Like Ultima, the world opens up gradually. First sticking to
the overland and the proximity of settlements, you eventually start exploring
the wilderness and smaller dungeons; then find that these dungeons open into
enormous multi-level affairs that feel like OD&D’s “Mythical Underworld” megadungeons
(and they might all be connected on the bottom in a deep interconnected realm:
at least this was the case in the greatest of Ultimas,
Warriors of Destiny).
You will acquire new ways of navigating the world: horses which let you easily
ford rivers which were once hazardous; skiffs to sail shallow waters; and ships
to brave the stormy seas and visit distant islands (these larger ships can store
up to two skiffs to make landing convenient). The setting expands as you play –
and there might even be a flying carpet at the end.
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| Buxom |
The Isles of
Wynmar is a high fantasy setting. In our ultra-modern age of ceaseless deconstruction,
this vaguely positive Merrie Olde Englande hodge-podge of benevolent monarchs,
wise-cracking peasants and chivalric nobles looks almost avant-garde. The isles
have their troubles with corruption, mountain orcs emerging from their
strongholds to raid human villages, and the scheming cult that’s spreading
tentacles across the land, but it is a place where good and evil are distinct
and well demarcated. It loses some shades of grey, but it gains playfulness and
colour, something refreshing in a more cynical era where mediaeval worlds are usually
presented through a ubiquitous mud-filter. Wynmar scales back some of Britannia’s
“thee and thou” pretension, but it has its jocular bards, stout bowmen and saucy
tavern wenches in the best traditions of the genre. Public order is maintained
vigorously: I once attacked a cloud of buzzing insects near a rural outhouse,
and was soon attacked and decimated by the local militia. Now that’s law and
order!
***
Nox Archaist’s
character building is nominally free-form – you can
advance your characters in any direction from hand-to-hand combat to archery,
assassination and magic – but the difficulty curve encourages strong
specialisation. You are better off with three niche heroes than three
generalists, as they will be able to wield better equipment (there are strong
stat limits) and dish out better punishment, while a jack-of-all-trades group
of PCs will find themselves in a serious difficulty trap.
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| The Goblin Shaman: Attempt 32 |
After the first
few battles with hooligans and rabble-rousers, the level of challenge goes up.
Your first dungeon foray will bring you against a group of wolves, and here,
the need to toughen up will be made obvious after the first few utter defeats.
The true test of your offensive and defensive abilities will be the mini-boss
of the first serious dungeon, the Goblin Shaman. If you can beat him and his
band, you have built your adventuring party correctly – if you can’t, you may
want to earn some more experience, or reconsider your options. And it will get
harder: just venture a bit beyond the shaman’s cave to find out.
With these
considerations in mind, the stat/equipment accumulation game is simple but satisfying.
You do not have Ultima’s fascinating reagent-based magic system, but there is
an abundance of stuff to obtain, equip, and go to town with. Armour goes from
cloth, leather and brigandine to chain, scale, and plate, and right up to
frost, storm, drake and dragon (for the mightiest heroes). For the start, having
the requisite Strength to equip a pair of chain gauntlets feels like a reward well
earned.
***
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| A round for the local lads |
As I have
outlined above,
Nox Archaist is a worthy successor to the Ultima
tradition. Here, you will find a large and deep game comparable to
Quest of
the Avatar or
Warriors of Destiny (although with the graphics of the
older
Exodus) with all the quirks of something out of the
early 1980s.
This is an important qualifier: the game is from a tradition that predates a
lot of the games that established the way modern CRPGs are made, and while it
makes numerous improvements to make the formula easy on gamers today, it comes
with CGA-tier aesthetics, bizarro discoloured fonts, and antediluvian ideas
about game design. That is to say, I can’t recommend it highly enough to fellow
old-school gamers. If this is the particular experience you are looking for,
Nox
Archaist will deliver in spades; if you are too young to have experienced
the old Ultimas in their time (this also describes Yours Truly), this is a good
occasion to try.
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| Some well-deserved rest |
