Chaos Strikes Back: Final Rating

Dungeon Master: Chaos Strikes Back

United States

FTL Games (developer and publisher)

Released 1989 for Atari ST, 1990 for Amiga, FM Towns, PC-98, and Sharp X68000. Ported to Windows in 2001 by Paul R. Stevens

Date Started: 17 January 2013
Date Ended: 13 February 2013
Total Hours: 38
Difficulty: Hard (4/5)
Final Rating: 45
Ranking at Time of Posting: 67/82 (82%)

Raking at Game #455: 404/455 (89%)

I've mentioned before that in addition to a "CRPG Addict," I'm also an avid crossword puzzle solver. Like most American cruciverbalists, my favorite site is The New York Times crossword puzzle section (there are a few outliers who prefer The L.A. Times or The Wall Street Journal, but they're as deluded as people who prefer the Stormcloaks in Skyrim).

My rules for completing crosswords aren't terribly dissimilar to my rules for completing CRPGs. I give myself a minimum time limit, so I can't give up in frustration too quickly; aside from doing today's, I work through a list of past crosswords in chronological order; and I don't allow myself cheats or spoilers. The moment I realize I need Wikipedia or a dictionary to progress, the crossword is "done"; I record my time, count my blanks and errors, and log my score. Then I use Wikipedia and the dictionary to teach me something new.

The New York Times crosswords get progressively more difficult from Monday to Saturday. (Sunday is a special, larger puzzle pitched at a Wednesday-Thursday difficultly level.) My favorite days are Wednesday and Thursday. They provide enough of a challenge to stump me momentarily, but I almost always complete them. Monday and Tuesday are just about speed; there's no question I'll finish them, so I just try to beat my average time. Saturday is a "given" for the other reason: I've logged more than 500 solving times and errors in a spreadsheet, and I have never--not once--completely filled in a Saturday Times crossword without help. [Ed. How much changes with practice. Nearly 10 years after I wrote this, I routinely complete Saturdays, and now I look forward to Fridays.] So I do it just for the challenge. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday: I love them all for their own reasons.

But not Fridays. If I was a Battlestar Galactica character, I would call them "Fracking Fridays," so you can imagine what I really call them. My solve rate is about 35% with them. Every time I open one, it sits there, mocking me, making me wonder how it's going to beat me, how it's going to make me feel stupid, how it's going to highlight my inadequacies as a solver. It might lure me in with an easy top right, in which I quickly fill in every square, and then smack me across the face with a bottom left in which I can't get a single clue. I've never had it tested, but I'd bet my pulse and blood pressure rise whenever I even think about firing up a Friday. It's so bad that in the roughly one-third of the time that I finish it, I'm almost pissed at the puzzle, like it let me win.

Come on! You're not even trying!

Chaos Strikes Back felt like a Friday puzzle. By my third posting, I began to seriously question whether I would be able to finish it. Did any of you notice that I was padding the hell out of my postings? Both "A Spot of Violence" and "Lessons in Maneuverability" represented a couple of dozens squares of actual movement, so I framed them in all kinds of philosophical stuff--I even repeated a lot of the material from the first in the second--just so I'd have something to put out.

Eventually, I got over the hump, but throughout the game I was dreading the final area. I kept thinking, "If the puzzles are this hard on the lower levels, what's the top level going to be like?" and I'd have to go take an antacid. When I finally ventured up there, it was about 23:00 on Wednesday, about time to go to bed, and I told myself just move one square at a time, take notes, map carefully, and you can call it a night the moment it gets frustrating. Only it never did, and I won the game about 30 minutes after arriving on the top level.

This last area was essentially the only area where combat tactics saved the day. Fortunately, I'd been hoarding my magic boxes, bombs, poison potions, and other goodies, and I decided to throw them in abundance against the enemies. At the time, I was figuring I'd just get past them to map the area beyond, check things out, and reload so I wouldn't have wasted all my magic on a dozen enemies. Little did I know that I would soon find a key, open a door, and win the game.

Some of my inventory before the final area.

Thanks to my commenters and some walkthroughs, I realize that I missed a lot of the challenge of the top level, and there was a very creative and difficult puzzle that would have made this area both harder and easier. But when you're playing the game blind, there's no sign that says, "Hey, go this way for a more challenging but more satisfying experience!" So when I won, it felt a little like a Friday puzzle that didn't really try.

Rating the game is going to be difficult. In a 2004 review, Roger Ebert tried to explain his star rating system with a quote that seemed perfectly sensible to me:

[T]he star rating system is relative, not absolute. When you ask a friend if "Hellboy" is any good, you're not asking if it's any good compared to "Mystic River," you're asking if it's any good compared to "The Punisher." And my answer would be, on a scale of one to four, if "Superman" (1978) is four, then "Hellboy" is three and "The Punisher" is two. In the same way, if "American Beauty" gets four stars, then "Leland" clocks in at about two.

And that is why "Shaolin Soccer," a goofy Hong Kong action comedy, gets three stars. It is piffle, yes, but superior piffle. If you are even considering going to see a movie where the players zoom 50 feet into the air and rotate freely in violation of everything Newton held sacred, then you do not want to know if I thought it was as good as "Lost in Translation."

Because you were curious.

But in my blog, I've generally adopted the opposite approach: my rating is meant to reflect, as accurately as possible, my relative enjoyment of the game, and I rank 1978 low-res games alongside modern masterpieces. I don't give games the benefit of the doubt based on the technology of the times, I don't give them points for being "a classic," and I don't give them points for achieving exactly what they set out to achieve. Beyond Zork set out to be a goofy text-CRPG hybrid, and succeeded wildly, but it lost points with me for a) being goofy; and b) having no graphics.

When I reviewed Dungeon Master, Georges called me on this. He wondered why I couldn't give an "N/A" instead of a 0 to the game in the "NPCs" and "Economy" categories, reasoning that "a non-existant element is not necessarily a badly implemented or designed one." It's a fair point, and constructing the GIMLET to average, rather than sum, the scores would have accomplished what he suggested. I thought about doing that. I thought about doing it again while playing Chaos Strikes Back, but I couldn't justify it when I took the idea to its logical extreme. What if a game featured only one of the GIMLET categories but did it exceptionally well? I'd have to give it a high final rating based on an averaging system, but it wouldn't be a great CRPG.

Thus, in defense of what is to follow, I offer my reply to Georges at the time:

The purpose of the scale is no more and no less than to rank how much I,personally, enjoyed the game as a CRPG. In the [GIMLET posting], I tried to outline the elements that would make a "perfect" CRPG if the game scored a 10 in all of them. By your proposed revision, a game could get a perfect score even if it didn't have these elements, but without them, to me, it wouldn't be a perfect CRPG. Thus, if Dungeon Master had featured ANY NPCs, even bad ones that resulted in a very low score, it would still be a better CRPG (to me) than it is with no NPCs at all.

I still think this is true. If Chaos Strikes Back had featured even one NPC--Lord Chaos--and there had a been a few dialogue options with him when you encounter him on the top level, I think it would have enhanced the game. But I realize it would have been contrary to the developer's purpose, so before I begin the GIMLET, let's be clear about one thing: Chaos Strikes Back achieves precisely what it sets out to achieve, and it achieves it perfectly. If you read my entries on the game and you thought, "This sounds like the kind of game I would enjoy," you should absolutely play it. Chaos Strikes Back is the unbeatable example of a Chaos Strikes Back-style game.

A "Chaos Strikes Back"-style game being the type of game where you have to figure out how to use a keyhole, a coin slot, and a teleportation field while simultaneously fighting respawning eye-ghosts.

Whether it's a great CRPG is a different story. The game isn't even much like its predecessor. Instead, it uses a CRPG engine to offer a very different sort of gameplay experience. In this, by the way, it is also a perfect game. There are only so many things that the Dungeon Master engine allows, but Chaos Strikes Back uses all of them to construct its puzzles. Once you know the possibilities of the engine, you have all the information you need to suss out the solution to the puzzles. This is in contrast to a lot of modern games that suddenly introduce new code or a new interface for their puzzles. I got annoyed when Dragon Age: Origins suddenly introduced a puzzle involving sliding floor tiles, for instance, since nowhere else in the game can you fool around with moving items on the ground.

All right, let's do this. Since so many aspects of the game are similar or identical to Dungeon Master, it might make sense to read my final rating of that game, too.

1. Game World. Chaos Strikes Back is one of those games that technically has a framing story, but it plays so little role in the game that you could easily construct a completely different story and have it fit logically with everything you encounter during gameplay. Drakkhen was another recent one (in fact, with that game, you essentially had to construct your own story). But with Dungeon Master, the developers at least tried to have the story make sense, while in Chaos Strikes Back, they dropped all pretense. "Here's some nonsense written by my wife; just go play the game," seems to have been the attitude. In-game, there's nothing to distinguish the story from a hundred other dungeon-crawlers, but I suppose I should give it points for at least having one, and making things like "the four paths" and the Corbum ore clear at the outset. But the one really good thing about the game's "world" is that it's persistent,and every change you make--moving items, killing enemies, opening doors, solving puzzles, and so forth--lives on. Score: 4.

Even the Amiga animation showing Chaos "forging" the "ore" doesn't make any sense.

2. Character Creation and Development. I utterly fail to understand Dungeon Master's system of "reincarnating" or "resurrecting" existing heroes rather than just creating your own characters, and the process suffers a little more in this game than the first, because you have such a weird variety of bestial characters to choose from (contradicting the previous game). The skill-use-based development system, on the other hand, remains very good. Although leveling doesn't come as rapidly as in the first game (my characters gained maybe 2 or 3 wizard levels, 1 fighter level, 1 priest level, and no ninja levels) if you import characters, it's extremely satisfying when it does, and there are nice rewards in terms of statistics. I like that you can choose to make characters specialists or generalists this way. This game introduced a new element by aspecting the paths to these various skills, making it rather important to have an experienced wizard on the DAIN path and competent fighters on the KU path. There are still no real role-playing choices, but I was otherwise very satisfied with this area of the game. Score: 6. (Note: I realize I gave Dungeon Master a 7 in this category, but in retrospect I feel like I ranked it too high. Read the bullet points in the original GIMLET posting to understand why.)

Not bad for an old man.

3. NPC Interaction. Still none, which still makes it a lesser CRPG if not necessarily a lesser game. Score: 0.

4. Encounters and Foes. Dungeon Master bucks the usual trend of the era (the D&D games being a notable exception) by introducing extremely memorable enemies who have a wide variety of strengths and weaknesses. You develop visceral reactions to the chortling of Gigglers, the screech of Couatls, and the clanking of Death Knights, and you gear up for the right strategy the moment you see any of them. It has some old "favorites" from Dungeon Master but also introduces some new ones. There were places I didn't regard their respawning as bonuses the way I often do, but they certainly gave you plenty of opportunities to grind.

On the "Encounters" side, the game doesn't really offer any good role-playing encounters the way I described in the fall. But as with many games, the puzzles serve as a kind of "encounter," and this game does better than Dungeon Master by even giving you a few choices in how to solve them. They're not role-playing choices (based on characters), exactly, but they do allow you to play in a certain style. Score: 7.

5. Combat and Magic. I was less enchanted by it in Chaos than in Dungeon Master, mostly because the game didn't really seem to expect you to engage in it with a straight face. There were too many places in which creatures endlessly spawned, too many creatures that were essentially undefeatable without screwing around with dodging and stair-scumming. But I gave the category a high score in Dungeon Master and I have to give it a high score here. Although the game is real-time, it offers real tactics in its combat, from deciding the right attack with a particular weapon to adjusting the formation of the characters to, yes, actually moving around and even using the environment (the right maneuvering means that enemies pound each other with fireballs instead of the party). Some creatures could be taken out by turning the dungeon's own traps against them. On the magic side, though, I wish there had been some new spells. I guess there was in the Amiga version. Score: 7.

6. Equipment. The game has much that I like in this category: a wide variety of weapons and armor items, including many places to equip and wear them; many magic items to use; puzzle items; and items partly randomized throughout the dungeon. There are logistics associated with item weight and balance, but not so much to be annoying. But it loses many points with bafflingly dumb elements, including the inability to determine (in-game) the armor class of certain items or the uses of others. Even the relative damage and speed of weapons needs to be determined through careful observation and recording. And since this game twists around on itself, you can't be sure that a weapon you find on Level 8 is better than one you found on Level 3.

The spoiler list for the items shows that things are even worse. A falchion dropped at one location will open a door at another; a cape dropped at one location will activate a teleporter at another. Leather boots in the inventory hold open a wall. Another item improves luck, which you can't even see. Random items prevent the spawning of some enemies. If you have to crack the source code to see this kind of thing, then I'm sorry, but it's stupid. Score: 4.

7. Economy. This gets one better than Dungeon Master by having a slightly more robust economy. There's no "cash," but you do find individual coins as inventory items, and you can use them to get a selection of items at a couple of locations. It's not as good as a real shop, but it's better than nothing. Score: 2.

 8. Quest. One fairly nonsensical main quest; no side quests. Unlike Dungeon Master, there isn't even an alternate ending. Score: 2.

9. Graphics, Sound, Interface. There's nothing new to say about this. Both the graphics and sound are very good--not just for the era, but good in general--with enemies making unique sounds in both movement and attack. Many of the animated creatures look very cool. I still hate all the clicking. Score: 6.

10. Gameplay. Before Chaos Strikes Back, I didn't think a nonlinear dungeon crawler was even possible, but wow, does this game blow that notion out of the water. Not only can you take the four paths in any order, but even within the paths there are so many stairways, hallways, doors, and pits, that it's virtually impossible to visit every square in the game. (I think I missed about a quarter of them.) This, plus the randomness with which the game deposits your characters after leaving the junction of the ways, and the ability to solve puzzles using different means, makes Chaos Strikes Back enormously replayable in a way that Dungeon Master wasn't.

My GIMLET bullets for this category say that for a perfect score, "Game has the right level of difficulty: challenging without being exasperating." On one hand, I want to say that the "right" level of difficulty needs to be interpreted a different way for this game. The developers intended to make an extremely challenging game; players love the game specifically for that reason; and without the challenge, it wouldn't be Chaos Strikes Back. On the other hand, there are a couple of puzzles that seem extraordinarily unfair. On a third hand, the game really helps you out of those situations with the oracle--if you're standing on the right square when you consult it.

I'm going to give it a high score here but not a perfect one, for one primary reason: I don't like games that force me into a choice between reloading a lot or wasting a lot of time. The game "rewards" too many risks by dropping you down pits and teleporting you back to the starting area or the "Junction of the Ways," and at that point only the most masochistic players would suck it up and wander all the way back to where they were--only to likely have it happen again. Score: 7.

This produces a final score of 45, slightly below Dungeon Master's 47, but look: I don't care how much you love this game, I think you have to agree that Dungeon Master was better as a straight "CRPG."

They really played up the hint oracle.

Extremely hard CRPGs were a rare exception in this era, so I was very curious to see contemporary reactions to the game. Computer Gaming World from May 1991 features a mostly-negative review. The reviewer notes that:

The monsters, traps, and puzzles presented within are all of the most heinous, unforgiving sort, and will surely crush the bones and spirits of all but the dungeoneering elite. Chaos Strikes Back is a game which allows for only two types of players, the "quick" and the "dead" (p. 39).

This is true, and not necessarily a negative thing as we discussed. But he spends most of the review bemoaning how nothing has changed in the game engine since Dungeon Master, which drives me crazy. Using the same engine to tell a new story is a longtime staple of games, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with it as long as the engine is good. Chaos Strikes Back fans will especially love this paragraph, which seems to forget that the review is covering a 1989 game in 1991:

This gamer cannot help but to chastise Software Heaven and FTL Games for this long awaited rehash [his emphasis] of the original Dungeon Master. The "living dungeon" approach to RPGs is fast becoming commonplace, with titles like Bane of the Cosmic Forge, Captive, Bloodwych, and Eye of the Beholder improving on the Dungeon Master system...One wonders how long Dungeon Master and its chaotic sequel will survive before sinking into the mists of software history.

Yeah. It's a good thing I was here to blog about them, or probably no one would know about these games any more.

Most other reviews, however, were more positive than I expected, with Advanced Computer Entertainment calling it "ahead of its prequel," "unreservedly recommended," and "well worth every minute of the wait" (was waiting three years for a sequel really that long in the 1980s?). The One said that "it's enthralling, exciting, original, and unique. Another classic." Zero actually recommended that players go back and play the original, just to have characters for the sequel. The reviews have far fewer obscenities than I would have expected.

Our adventures in...whatever setting the Dungeon Master games supposedly take place...aren't over. Dungeon Master II: Skullkeep comes along in 1993 with an updated engine and the ability to explore outdoors, but otherwise the same look and feel as the original. I may pop in to Return to Chaos (2001), which updates the games to Windows and presents all three of the previous games as modules. I will not be playing Dungeon Mater: Theron's Quest (1992) for the TurboGrafx console or Dungeon Master Nexus (1998) for the SEGA Saturn console.

What mystifies me are all the fan-made remakes of both Dungeon Master and Chaos Strikes Back. I can understand updating games that have great stories (e.g., Ultima IV, Ultima V) to modern engines the same way I can understand remaking great movies with modern settings and special effects. But when a game is all about mapping and puzzles and has virtually no story, why remake it? Why not just play it in its original engine? Or create a new game with similar gameplay to the original, as an homage?

Not that I'm anxious for many more games like this. I'm looking forward to a significant change of pace with a couple of RPG/adventure hybrids, starting with Tangled Tales.