A Dwarvish-Mead Dream

Now we're returning to those cooler looking board designs. This is a real nice looking mountain and cave mouth. Were it not for the portraits in this game, I'd be tempted to make this one the preview image for this article.

After singing praise for the bright and high-contrast colors of Mead's first dungeon, Coolzx betrays me with the more standard "stone walls" look for this third one.

There's some bizarre two-headed creature that somehow got into that tiny room in the corner. That would be Bestial. But before facing off with him, there's some red k's to fight, which don't translate to anything in ADOM, so they're probably some original variant of kobold.

I guess not.

Glenn meets Bestial, and doesn't seem to make the conclusion that the giant two-headed dog is the very same two-headed dog he was told about. Bestial seems no smarter, not quite sure if they want to use I/We when talking about themselves.

Bestial is supposed to be intimidating, but Glenn shows no real fear, and seems to just go along with getting the dungeon's treasure to prove to Bestial that he can rather than to try and avoid a fight.

Bestial opens the gate to the rest of the dungeon, and Glenn can resume his kobold battles.

Descending deeper, there's not much to add. Some more kobolds and gold, a "cure heart" that gives 100 health, and a one-way passage through some boulders and pushers that are meant to create a moment of tension for the player knowing they can't turn back now.

This game's been pretty easy so far, so it doesn't quite have that dramatic of an effect.

This leads to a cutscene where Glenn discovers a wounded Garlash and helps him out with some healing potion. The guardian of the dungeon isn't a fan of this new trespasser and it's time for the next fight, with the mysterious Razorre.

Not gonna lie, this dude does look like he can kick some ass.

Dungeon crawls, ZZT action, RPG battles, and now a dueling engine. Coolzx continues to include more and more in his game.

I can't not use this screenshot. I love it.

If the player already knows how the engine works from dying in it or having played the game before, the way to skip the instructions is to just hit enter on any other line.

This is a weird way of doing it though, as most every other ZZT game would include the "yes" option and just have it jump to the same label that hitting enter does. In fact, ZZT even lets you spoof a prompt with !;Yes where the label to jump to is left blank, so no such jump happens.

The mechanics are pretty simple, and a bit like the ones seen in Nevada Bob's robot fight, but one sided. Honestly, having seen this thing in ZZT, I'm amazed at how much more difficult "see up and hit down" is versus "see up and hit up".

The scene shifts from the RPG style board into one for the swordfight, which is a bit of a disappointment since this board is so much more bland to look at in comparison.

So the setup is like this: The command is stated and you get some time to hit the opposite button. The timing is pretty reasonable, at least at first, but it does get more difficult.

This one actually does kind of drag on for a bit too long. You input the opposite of the specified direction, Razorre makes his retort, and it goes on. Slip up at all and die.

The inputs get longer, and the thing that makes it difficult is the needless popup after each input. When you see "Right slash then down slash!" the actual keys to press are "left, enter, up, enter". The weird break feels unnatural and makes it harder to focus.

Which really gets annoying at the end when you have a sequence of four inputs to make.

Thankfully such a sequence only needs to be done once, since the duel comes to an end with Razorre kind of just giving up. The trend of interesting ideas leaving things to be desired in execution continues.

Good orc.

Something good came out of all of this at least, Garlash has decided to quit it with the murders and pillaging, so Glenn's at least saved a village (for now).

Garlash gives Glenn the Razorre's treasure, and Glenn heads back up to the dungeon entrance.

The scene ends with an exit to the blocked off passage from before, where Glenn can now open it up and head directly to Bestial.

Bestial is a villain of their word, and takes his leave, giving Glenn access to the dungeon's proper exit.

The chapter concludes and we move on to "Chronos". This is where the game gets weird.

Glenn emerges in the wilderness and again, Coolzx makes some straightforward but pleasant to look at geography here. Sadly Glenn can't take the time to appreciate it because he's already in danger.

Not content with the gameplay mechanics seen before, Coolzx now compresses his RPG system into a random encounter format.

So, the previous engines have all been fun, if not something developed enough to carry on an entire game on their own. The variety has been to Mead's benefit, and definitely made this adventure a lot more memorable than it would have otherwise been. This engine though, is really bad. The RNG means you miss constantly, and it takes way too long to defeat an enemy for a simple encounter, of which you can get multiple per board if your luck is poor.

The rewards are meaningless, and worst of all there's no healing coming up. All this does is slowly grind the player down until things get unwinnable.

Fortunately it's only two boards long, and possible to make it across to the next town without even a single encounter if you're really lucky. I thought I was being clever by leaving the previous board mid combat by moving off screen before the next pop-up could execute, but this just meant that the next encounter had the 10 remaining HP from the previous one.

There is some variety in there being multiple enemies you can run into, but hitting a lesser bestial is just a longer and more difficult slog that doesn't play any differently than the hill ogres.

Glenn arrives in town, nearly dead, and still technically in an encounter with that 2 ammo for the enemy HP. Again I'm a fan of the art, it's a very abstract perspective with this giant tent over the market that's larger than the one building. Plus there's that really cool shadow.

The villagers offer little help. None of them sell anything, healing or otherwise that might help Glenn and his 400 gold out. One woman dumps all the information on the town, its name is Forepast, and it's got an elder. Also the villagers are homeless and sleep in the market?

The subtle lighting here is still good, but not as cool as it was in the church in the previous town.

It is kind of funny to me that Glenn is surprised at somebody knowing his name when the game opens with him saying he's not surprised at all by a stranger knowing it.

Glenn gets to hear of his future, which takes place in the future, but like, really future, where it sounds like he's going to finally fight Bestial over some newly introduced macguffin called the chrono orb.

I split this conversation into screenshots rather than transcribing the scroll just for the amazing "I've met the bitches" line.

Anyway this game about traveling between reality and dreams at will involves doing none of that, but it does involve time travel.

Here it is, it's the chrono orb. We don't know what it does, but I guess it's a time thing and I guess Bestial wants it gone. This feels a bit fatalistic in that Glenn and Bestial are already kind of planning on killing each other and I guess it's going to happen in the far future because Glenn is going there now.

I'm assuming this is supposed to be 3000 years in the future, as the game was released in 2000. I don't recall the year the game takes place being stated anywhere.

The future sucks by the way. Everything is gray and dead, aside from the still clean looking river.

Glenn has seven health and is attacked by a wild robot and killed immediately because there's no healing.

I ended up having to just cheat for health, which is such a shame in this game. Mead has been doing a good job of holding my interest and making me want to see what happens next, not for its story, but because Coolzx keeps adding more engines. Just adding a place to heal in Forepast would have prevented what's ultimately the game's worst moment.

The future of Forepast however, looks really neat. It's certainly weird-future looking.