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Death Gate
REVIEWER/Diana Griffiths
PUBLISHER/ Legend Entertainment
DEVELOPER/Keyboard, Mouse
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Overview
Death Gate is based on the Death Gate novels by Tracy Hickman and
Margaret Weis. The Death Gate novels and the game are about the
relationships between five different races of people.
The story begins with the magical Sartan race feeling so threatened by
their rivals, the magical Patryns, that they magically sunder the world
In the scene above the Sartan high council gather in preparation to
sunder the world.
The Patryns are trapped in a fatally dangerous place known as the
Labyrinth. The rest of the world is divided, as in the scene above,
into four realms on which the 'mench' races live. The mench comprise of
elves, humans and dwarves and are generally non-magical and are settled
on one of the four realms of fire, air, water or earth.
Two thousand years after the sundering, a Patryn, called Xar, escapes
from the Labyrinth. He discovers the Nexus, a safe beautiful Sartan
city outside the last gate of the Labyrinth. Each day he re-enters the
Labyrinth and helps other Patryns to escape. Very few Patryns have done
so, when Xar helps the protagonist Haplo through the last gate. (One
scene from the Labyrinth is depicted above.) Xar has been studying the
Sartan library in the Nexus and plotting his revenge on the Sartan. He
assigns Haplo as his emissary to travel to the four realms and collect
information and items to forward his plans of conquest. Haplo travels
to each of the realms, meets the mench, but very few Sartans, and in
doing so helps Xar, but begins to have ideas of his own as he gets to
know and develop relationships with the individuals he meets.
The game captures much of the spirit of the books, and although not as
rich, is a highly entertaining game of adventure and discovery. Playing
it will surely encourage people to read or re-read the Death Gate
novels!
Most of the game play is from Haplo's perspective. In other words, what
you see displayed is from Haplo's point of view. Haplo is benign and so
are _most_ of the characters he meets. However it is possible to die.
There are classic save and restore features to recover such situations
and even an undo option for undoing the last action, or inaction on
Haplo's part.
Puzzles
Most of the puzzles are quite straightforward if you listen carefully
to _everything_ you hear and use common sense logic. There are a couple
of non-adventure puzzles: One is reminiscent of the Seventh Guest,
Victorian variety while the other reminded me of the Incredible Machine
puzzles. I found the puzzles exactly the right level of difficulty. I
didn't feel cheated at any time and all puzzles and their solutions fit
into the logic of the story and the characters within the story.
Graphics
The game can be installed as either SVGA or VGA. I played in both modes
The VGA mode looked pretty good but didn't match the detail of SVGA
mode, appearing blurred in comparison.
The graphics were realistic but in keeping with a fantasy story, live
actors were not used to portray the characters nor were real settings
used for the places. The scenery and look of the characters depicted
seemed completely in keeping with the imagery of the Death Gate novels.
Every scene is beautiful, created by award-winning fantasy artists and
was consistently high quality through out. There is very little
animation. Some of the characters when talking make some minor lip
movements or other small expressions and body movements.
Cut scenes are full screen, fully animated with appropriate sound
effects. Initially, the cut scenes are dramatic and impressive.
However, there really are very few of these and most are seen
repeatedly as Haplo travels from realm to realm and within realms.
Music & Sound
There is music throughout the game. Usually, each different scene has a
different associated piece of music. Each piece of music is in keeping
with the scene it plays with. I kept the music on constantly. There
were one or two pieces I found quite delightful.
The characters' dialogue is acted quite well. I found all voice actors
were reasonably skilled and believable, but a few of them seemed very
good which unfortunately put the frequently heard Haplo at a
disadvantage. A typical dialogue screen is shown above.
The sound effects only seem to occur when something significant
happens. I actually found myself jumping when I first played the game!
But I have played adventure games with more overall background noise
which promoted better realism.
When replaying the same dialogue over you can speed things up by
clicking during the speech. This will stop the character who is
currently speaking. Multiple clicks will be needed to speed up a
long dialogue between Haplo and his companion. The sound quality was
excellent. The only glitch may have been unavoidable; when Haplo's
ships blasts through the Death Gate, with a thunderous noise, the music
breaks up.
There is a volume control for the music. There are also toggles for
music, sound effects, character dialogue and Haplo dialogue. All
dialogue is displayed on screen, so spoken dialogue is not essential.
However, I left all sound options on to enhance the game experience. A
minor detail, but it was not possible to disable the dialogue display.
User Interface
When in normal game interaction mode, the screen, as shown above, is
divided into various sections:
The top right, two thirds of the screen is the picture or scene Haplo
is viewing.
This can be toggled to a map as shown above. The map is displayed as
thumbnails of the places you have visited so far in the realm you are
currently visiting. You can also move from scene to scene via the map.
The lower right of the screen is the inventory. You can store
everything you pick up in the inventory and you do gather many items!
You can scroll through the inventory to look for items. I don't think
things moved around in the inventory but I did find it a little awkward
finding things in the later stages of Death Gate.
Sandwiched between the pictures and the inventory a small area is
reserved for text messages such as scene descriptions and points
awards.
To the left of the inventory is an area used for the magic icon, and
sometimes icons representing characters that are accompanying you. When
you invoke the magic screen, shown above, you can make up your own
spells using the rune bones (spells) you have collected, or select one
of the spells you have learned and cast it as is or modify it. Setting
up magic spells is quite entertaining in itself and somehow adds some
magic user realism to the game!
In the lower left corner is a compass rose which indicates which
directions are available for travel. Clicking on the direction arrows
will move you in that direction. Also below the compass rose are two
additional game commands: Undo and Wait. Undo undoes the last
operation. Wait passes time. This is useful when you are waiting for a
particular event to occur.
In the remaining upper right area of the screen are the available verbs
that can be used to perform actions on the scene and inventory. There
are several fixed verbs, such as Look, Take, Put. When selecting
certain items, special verbs are displayed. For example, selecting a
bottle of liquid may make the 'Drink' verb available.
When you tire of seeing the same cut scenes again and again, they are
zappable through. Repeatedly mouse clicks will do this, or you can use
the ESC key and/or the F7 key which disable most long animated cut
scenes.
System Options
The system options are more extensive than usual. There are several:
Help, Save, Restore, Sound options, Status/Score and Quit.
The Help option is a very well done on-line tutorial that walks the
player through the user interface.
The start of the on-line tutorial is shown above. Believe it or not, I
was stuck right at the start of the game, not knowing how to Talk to
Xar! I was misled by all the available verbs. In fact talking is
achieved by (obviously) clicking on the character you wish to address!
In fact many actions can be performed by just clicking on the picture
and often the default verb selected is appropriate. Apart from my above
poor start, I found the user interface completely intuitive. I did not
run the on-line Help until I came to write this review (and it does not
tell you how to talk to characters either!)
Save lets you specify a 30 character descriptive file name. I reached
no limit on save files.
The Status/Score displays your accumulated points. You are awarded
points for completing various actions as you progress through the game.
In fact, I discovered that no matter how many points you accumulate, on
finishing the game you are always awarded the maximum 1500 points! I
found the points awards and accumulation rather meaningless. I think
Legend just added this as some players judge their progress this way.
Installation
When installing Death Gate from the CD you can perform a minimum
installation or copy the complete game to hard disk. Due to disk space
constraints, I asked for the minimum installation, and the installation
program then did a performance test to ensure that I would get fast
enough performance from my CD drive. It also performs a performance
test when you request SVGA. The sound card did not seem to be
automatically detected as I was asked to specify which sound card I had
installed and wished to use for music and which for sound. However, I
did not have to supply IRQ settings, which was wonderful! The game
installed with no problems and ran perfectly. If you are using
Smartdrive, you do have to make sure you have Smartdrive turned off for
the CD-ROM which means a quick edit of the autoexec.bat file that you
have to do manually.
Run-Time Bugs
I have played Death Gate through in SVGA mode three times. Each time,
there was a minor bug, where the cursor leaves a static copy of itself
lying around. This is cleared very easily. I suspect this is a SVGA
specific problem as I did not see it occur when I played in VGA mode.
When I tried to run the third time in SVGA mode, I could barely get
started before the game hang. I had installed Death Gate on my
'Stacker-ed' hard disk. Since the game ran fine every other time, I
honestly can't say whether the game was at fault. Anyway, when I re-
installed, all my saved files were still available and I lost nothing
as a result of this problem.
Hard Copy Documentation
Legend have provided very little hard copy documentation. It is
important to read the Game Manual or the readme.txt on the CD but most
of the game play information is in the on-line Help tutorial. There is
a trouble shooting section, in the manual, should it be needed (I
didn't). The manual also lists the keyboard commands to perform all the
actions, verbs etc. I found the mouse was able to perform every action
I needed and did not need to touch the keyboard. There is also a short
story included in the game box, written by the authors of the Death
Gate novels, set in the same universe but at an earlier time.
Closing Sequences
The game ends with a short final dramatic cut scene, then goes into
text mode to describe the events. I found this rather disappointing.
The last Legend adventure game I played (by the same game designer) was
Gateway II: Homeworld. This had one of the best endings I have ever
seen, and I really appreciated it. Legend clearly, and sadly for me,
decided not to repeat putting so much effort in the closing sequences.
Summary
I thought this was a wonderful game. The genre certainly appeals to me
and having read the Death Gate books did not spoil the game for me at
all. In fact, I may have appreciated it more as a result. The game is
robust, the scenery and characters are all drawn beautifully, the music
is very good to excellent, the user interface very intuitive, the puzzles
fair, logical and interesting, and above all a great story unfolds as you
progress. What more can an adventure game fan want? I think the game
designer, Glen Dahlgren, has found his niche, in high fantasy adventure
with serious overtones. Death Gate will be a hard act to follow, but I
sure hope Glen finds another great fantasy series to adapt to an adventure
game.
This 1994 game may well be my favorite game of 1995 (I am writing this
in June, '95)!
