Warlord's Temple - Final

Ah, yes, and a bucket. A staple of all libraries.

Williams shows a bit more mercy here, leaving the player to fight basic ruffians. There's ample arrows on the ground as well so it should be easy to deal with the limited number of shots to clear this room out.

For now it's another dead end, with the vines being too thick to proceed, but at least our hero has some experience now. The scoring system makes it so that it's crucial to fight these ruffians, and avoid taking damage since that not only means a loss of health, but a loss of possible points. If the player wants to get the Destroy spell, they'll need to achieve nearly a maximum score.

The dead ends continue almost immediately from the northern path. Again there are some basic enemies to be fought, but there's a little more to this board.

Firstly, there's a really blatant coding error in the individual arrows on this board which have a typo when trying to give ammo to the player resulting in them being uncollectible. I'm unsure how this wasn't caught since there's so few arrows here that the player is almost certainly going to try and pick them up.

Then there's this suit of armor which comes to life after the lions are destroyed and the player lines up with it. Again, this is no demon statue. The suit of armor shoots far less frequently and is vulnerable at all times making it pretty easy to deal with.

Though it has one last surprise once it's defeated, spawning another group of lions for the player to fight.

Lastly, the room is blocked off by a large mass of debris rather than vines. The temple has been explored as much as it can for now, and it's time to find some other way to proceed.

This involves running out to the cave and filling a bucket. Just a reminder that this isn't regular water, it's described as having a mystical glow to it which will no doubt be important.

There are still those giant centipedes running around too, but it's still not worthwhile to attack them since getting more ammo involves running across multiple boards to pick up another six shots. I leave them alone and decide to figure out what good my water is.

Getting an option to pour it on the quiver statue in the pedestal hall seems promising at least.

There's no real reason for pouring water on a statue, but it works. I do wish there had been something in the game's text about magic water and softening stone or something what with the giant library and all. Instead it's just guess the action which with the limited number of objects around isn't all that difficult.

The bucket disintegrating afterwords is a pretty exaggerated attempt at making the player get rid of an item they no longer have a use for.

The magic water turning the quiver from stone to leather shifts the way the game is played, as suddenly the six arrow limit goes away entirely, letting the player stock up as many arrows as they can find.

Having closer to 40 arrows makes the snake boss a lot more reasonable.

Or so I say. The snake's movements are definitely designed to make it difficult to land a hit on them with lots of turns away from the player. The reward for defeating the snake is 50 experience points. Technically, it's an optional fight as you can squeeze in enough experience through other boards to not need it, but you'd run a very real danger of taking too many hits to be able to skip the fight.

Experience points come into play finally as the sword in the stone can't be pulled out unless the hero has at least 75 experience. It's a pretty flashy effect!

Not the sword, but the switch, is what causes this passageway in the eastern corridor to open up, revealing a path deeper into the fortress.

This looks like a secret exit that connects the temple with the cave the player's been in previously. It's also a surprisingly tough action scene here with the ruffians since they move several spaces at a time and each little row or column the player's in is rather short. If you're not careful it's easy to lose a lot of health or waste ammo.

Or in my case, just get hit once since I was on the verge of death already.

What surprised me about the connection to this board, is that the upper path was visible the entire time and I somehow never noticed it. There are no monsters to fight up top, so it's just a way to show the player that they're venturing into the same cave as before.

The back recess of the cave has a wizard who gets very excited to see a new face, which given the circumstances soon to be revealed, isn't all that surprising.

The hidden room itself wasn't spared the wrath of the vines. The source of the cave's spring is here as well, and then there's the poor wizard.

The wizard here has been chained to the wall for ages. Alas, our hero's sword can't break through them.

Of course, we've already seen the powers of the water from this spring, so dipping a cool sword in it only improves its abilities. No neat special effects this time however. The powering of the sword is told entirely through text. (Don't you dare get pedantic about how ZZT's graphics mean that everything is text.)

The truth comes out! The wizard and hermit are the same wizard and king in that diary. Cursed by Dreadfire, they have been trapped within the kingdom for centuries, kept alive only for torment. Dreadfire was sealed away, but the curse remained.

More pertinent to me at the time, was the opportunity to finally get some health back. Each berry gives 5 health, giving a much needed 60 health.

Opting for arrows transforms the berries into ammo, but the game generally does a decent job of maintaining a readily available stock.

The wizard also has the ability to teach the player some spells, making the experience system really start to be important.

The first spell, the only one the hero technically has to acquire, is levitate, which is used not on the player, but on the debris blocking the northern hall in the temple. Unlike the other spells, it's free to collect at any time.

The spell list is pretty short, Levitate, Destruction, and the three listed here make up everything. At this point, the player really has no idea how far into the game they actually are, so I found myself thinking at first that learning a spell would consume that many points. In reality, it's just the minimum score needed, so with my 136 points here I was able to pick up Freeze and Sword Power Blast.

Disappointingly, the game doesn't give the player any information on the spells other than the names and experience to learn them. There's no talk of what they do or their costs.

Gaining access to the levitation spell finally lets the hero venture down the last path of the temple.

If you were expecting a new area to explore, and for the newly introduced spells to be of use, well, not quite. Heading into this room leads directly to Dreadfire, with a turn-based RPG battle system.

The art of Dreadfire is cool, and does a good job conveying that the player is up against a massive creature. There's some nice introduction music for the fight (which you'll hear later on) that helps build that mood that this is supposed to be a climatic showdown.

The player is locked in as soon as they move off the edge of the board, and Dreadfire addresses the hero directly. I love how clueless the protagonist is that he is in fact the chosen one.

It's yet another example of the basic ZZT RPG battle system, but early enough this time that it was probably kind of impressive.

The player can attack with their bow if they have ammo, or his sword as basic attacks. The spells still don't provide any information, other than a number which is how much experience it costs to cast them. While it wouldn't make sense to make these infinite use, they end up basically being one time things since they all cost so much, and as this is the only fight you'll want to see what each spell actually does.

Here's where I ran into issues with this game. Warlord's Temple aims at being a game where you can take on the final boss without having to collect all the spells, but encouraging the player to do as much as possible to gain experience and learn more powerful magic. Except what ends up happening, is that if you don't learn the game's ultimate spell, you just won't win without save-scumming.

Your non-magic attacks only do one damage at a time, putting the fight at the mercy of the RNG giving you hits and Dreadfire misses. Instead to win, you really have to get all the experience possible.

So, it's time to scrounge up some exp. The obvious one is the cave which has these centipedes. ZZT rewards 1 point for shooting a head, but 2 points for shooting a segment. So you'll get higher scores if you're not afraid to break up the centipedes into multiple monsters, or you can really max out the points by always shooting the last segment since this won't result in another segment turning into a new head.

It's slow and tedious work. The points add up, but it's still not enough to hit the 250 target.

That requires going back to the room of statues and finally managing to actually kill the demon. This is the point where I actually looked up to see that it was actually killable in the first place.

Even then, it's just barely enough. 252 points thanks to perfectly shooting the centipedes, and defeating every monster in the game. If I got hit by one extra lion and one extra ruffian, I'd have been unable to collect this spell.

On the next attempt, things are lot more even. I was almost expecting the "Destroy" spell to simply be an instant win, and the fact that it costs 0 experience to cast corroborated my theory. Instead it's just a one time use that does six damage. Honestly, that's not that great, but it is enough to even the odds.

I didn't even notice, but the player gets 50 experience just for entering this battle. It's too late to go back obviously, but it does mean a little more flexibility when casting spells.

After some back and forth Dreadfire is defeated and the hero busts out some 90s sounding dialog.

The board here itself is kind of neat, it's an RPG battle scene, but it is still part of the temple in some way. When the battle is over, the player gets to move along through it like any other board.

This leads to the game's ending cutscene, which again is done in a way where it feels like a gameplay board. The player is confined to a small area with nothing to do but watch and listen, but it's not the usual style of pinning the player in a corner. The ending has some more music, which is pretty straightforward series of tweaks to a single set of notes, but it sounds really good! This is some excellent ending music, and again helps build up the mood of this triumph of good over evil.

It starts off as a joyous ending, with the wizard arriving to thank the hero, and some cool effects as the sky returns to a cheery blue shade. The effect really looks striking with it replacing the red sky piece by piece rather than just a flat change of red to blue.

The hermit is revealed to be the king, and there's a joyous reunion between him and his wizard. Their nightmare is over, the curse lifted, and they can finally after hundreds of years, rest in peace.

The wand moving around is also cute. The game draws to a close with the hero, clueless as ever, becoming the new king _and_ wizard. Yet, it's still kind of a melancholy ending really. The evil has been defeated, and you're the new ruler, and that's all well and good, but the implication is that Dreadfire has had control of this kingdom for 500 years and that it's entirely been abandoned save for the old king and wizard. The chosen one is inheriting an empty kingdom. Things can start anew, but the old kingdom is long gone.

Oh, and then the credits ends with a lot of links to long dead websites. mWorld still exists in some form here. And anybody familiar with the story of Sivion for MegaZeux will get a good laugh at "INCREDIBLE progress".