Vampyr: Talisman of Invocation

And now I'm going to shamelesly recommend a game that I haven't finished. Actually, I've even played only a small part of it.

Vampyr: Talisman of Invocation is a very old (made in 1990) FRP that no one had ever heard about. Which is a shame, because the game is extremely interesting. I am not much of a RPG person - mostly when I start playing such game I either get bored soon, or stop playing because everything is too complicated. Notable exceptions are Neverwinter Nights, Dragon Wars and this game.

So, what is this game about? Well, mostly about things all RPG/FRP's should be about - slaying infinite hordes of various monsters and doing all kinds of quests. At the beginning of the game you have a chance to create your character, pick his/her race, name and distribute points to various skills. As the game progresses you will earn more experience points, which you will (again) distribute to the skills of your choice. Basically, you move through a large (I mean REALLY large, even by today's standards) world of Quilinor. When you're on the open, you will often be attacked by the aforementioned hordes of monsters. But fortunately, there are plenty of cities and other places in Quilinor where you can take a rest, buy a new weapon, armour, have a drink and stuff like that. Unfortunately, I played this game when I was very young and I ran into a problem I couldn't solve, so I stopped playing. The quest was about finding a few King's men who have gone missing. If I remember correctly, I found them, but when I got back to the King his dialogue haven't changed - he was giving me the same task again. I tried to play this game later, but the computers got too fast in the meantime, so the game's technically unplayable if you don't use one of those slow-your-computer programs and I've always been to stupid to find out how to use them properly.

Anyway, back to the game. As I said, the world of Quilinor, where the game takes place, is quite large. And it's also rich with characters, both friendly and unfriendly. When you're in a city, you can go to a pub and talk to adventurers you find there and they will often give you information about different parts of Quilinor, monsters and similar stuff. Also, the world is not only large, but also, how should I say... "alive". For example, it contains cities, rivers, lakes, mountains, deserts, all with their own types of enemies. When you're in a city, as mentioned before, you can talk to people, buy and sell weapons, and other normal stuff. However, nothing prevents you from starting a fight with anyone you find. If you attack, say, a tough barbarian, he will probably kick your ass. If you attack a barkeeper, or a merchant, or fool, or someone like that, you will beat the up in no time, but this will draw the attention of the city guards who will be happy to do the same to you. However, this doesn't have to be the end of you. If you have a high climbing rating, you can try to run away from the guards, climb the city wall and escape. Another interesting thing to try is to maximize your pickpocketing skills at the very beginning and then trying to rob everyone you run into. If you have a high pick pocket skill, you will mostly be successful in stealing, meaning you will get lots of money, with pretty small probability to get cought. However, if you DO get caught, you will have to deal with the city guards (again). These are some nice things related only to those two skills. Knowing that there are many other skills (picking locks, finding secret passages, etc.) you can easily see that you can do many, many different things in this game, and it's hardly going to get boring.

I will say only a few things about weaponry and then finish this short review. At the very beginning the only weapon you have is some crappy dagger. As you beat more and more opponents, you will get more money to get new weapons and you can also take the possessions (including weapons and armour) from the defeated enemy. As with other things, the weapons are done very nicely. Not only you have tons of different kinds of weapons, varying in strength. The interesting thing is that the more fights you have, the more damaged your weapon is. So don't be surprised when your precious Longsword +3 breaks in the middle of a dangerous fight. So always have another weapon prepared.

You can see by the things I described that the authors took the game design very seriously. All those details, possibilities, large playing space etc. can mean only one thing - this is nothing short of a fantastic game and if you like RPG even a little bit, you shouldn't miss it. Even if you are used to modern games that take 100 cd's each and can be played in resolutions like 100000x100000. This game is completely turn-based, the graphics are so archaic that all characters are represented by small cards that move around over uninteresting backgrounds, etc. And it RULES! It takes less than half a megabyte on your hard disk when unpacked. I don't think I remember 1/2 megabyte being used so brilliantly, except in Prince of Persia. Ah, good old days...

I promise I will finish now, I just thought it would be fair to mention the authors of this great game: Those are guys named Brian Weston and Victor Shao. Of course, I don't know where are they now. This seems to be their only game. You can even meet them in this game - when you die, your game is not finished. You get transfered to Heaven and there among the angels you can find the two programmers. Don't start a fight with them, they will eat you for breakfast.