Cerise Magazine

You know those bits in martial arts movies where the impulsive young hero keeps insisting he’s ready to master the ultimate power, but his all-knowing mentor claims he lacks training and discipline? That’s how I feel during the first ten hours of almost every computer RPG ever made. My Baldur’s Gate wizard started with one spell and a piece of wood. My World of Warcraft rogue had to fed-ex parcels before she stood a chance against the local wildlife. Final Fantasy X made me wait until the second last town before I could customize my equipment, made worse by the fact one of my party members apparently knew how to do it all along and had only just twigged that it might be useful. Look, game, I’ve been playing RPGs for over fifteen years now. I, and others like me, am responsible enough to handle more than one new menu option every five hours. The elemental forces of the universe will not be unbalanced by my reckless misuse of the Bard class.

One of the few RPGs to break with this long and tedious tradition is The Desolate Room, a freeware game available from www.scottgames.com. Rather than learning abilities through level gaining or item collecting, the four playable characters have access to their full complement of skills as soon as the game begins. Not only does this eliminate the tedium of grinding for experience and money, the number of available options allows for genuine strategy in a genre where most non-boss combats are simply a case of bashing something until its hit points run out. Of each character’s ten abilities, only three, perhaps four will be standard damage-dealing attacks. The rest allow you to, for example, briefly turn the enemy into a defenseless toy, permanently reduce their defense by means of an arcade-style minigame, electrify them so that their own attacks rebound, or deplete their special power bar to prevent them from using similar abilities on you. Each character’s abilities are unique to them alone, and each character fulfills a specific role in the party, with your success determined by how well you coordinate their attacks. Every single choice must be considered in terms of how it’s likely to affect the following choices, and playing without a plan will lead to defeat even against low-level enemies. At first glance this looks like it’ll result in obsessive, overly complex micromanagement, but each ability is equally useful and all are clearly explained, allowing you to focus on your combat strategy rather than alt+tabbing over to a FAQ every five seconds. If a boss wipes the floor with you, the solution isn’t to gain more levels, it’s to re-think your approach.

Sadly, while the combat system is excellent, the exploration aspect is lacking in comparison. You see, the four characters you control in combat are actually virtual projections of robots who were killed by a computer virus long before the game started. Keeping them sort-of-alive is the character you control outside of combat, who is – literally – a coffee pot with arms and legs. Named “Coffee”, it lives alone on a collection of identical brown islands strewn with garbage and the remnants of deactivated robots. The islands can be fully explored in about ninety seconds, and the only object of any use is a still-functioning computer terminal which provides access to the game’s virtual “dungeon”. There’s a real feeling of isolation and melancholy on the islands, with muted colors and no sound except the wind as it blows dead leaves from place to place, and the sight of an ambulant coffee pot wandering around is pleasingly weird. The world within the terminal is equally striking, full of abstract shapes and bright, contrasting colors, accompanied by a soundtrack that’s not quite ambient noise and not quite music. Unlike the islands, the virtual world is a sprawling maze of interconnected rooms, recalling the dungeons in the original Legend of Zelda. The sheer atmosphere of strangeness evoked by both worlds is so strong that, at first, any amount of aimless wandering seems tolerable.

Then you learn about eggs.

See, when you’re exploring the world in the terminal, there are two bars underneath your health indicator. One measures how full your speed gauge will be when you initiate combat – in other words, how long it’ll be before your first turn. The second measures how full your charge gauge will be. All abilities drain a certain amount of charge, and if you don’t have enough to use the one you want, you have to spend that turn charging up again. What this means is that, should you start combat with either these bars low – or, worse, empty – the enemy will have gotten half a dozen turns in before you’re able to do anything, probably crippling your party in the process. After combat, every combat, win or lose, both bars are reset to zero, meaning you’ve got to fill them up again before your next fight. There are two ways of doing this. The first is to collect power-ups left behind by the (mostly) harmless green enemies which you can simply zap from a distance rather than fighting “properly”. However, because the enemies in each room are randomly generated, there’s always the possibility that you’ll run into the much nastier red enemies who, while they can also be zapped, will initiate combat if touched, meaning you’ll either die or have both your power gauges reset to zero. Worse, red enemies have a habit of appearing in groups of threes, can move through walls, are much faster than you and seal off the room you’re in, meaning you can’t double back. They’re also placed randomly, potentially directly on top of you, in which case you can’t possibly avoid fighting them. When your goal is simply to explore the inside of the computer, this kind of thing is tolerable, especially since you only really need each bar at about 30% to put up a decent fight. Where it becomes problematic is boss fights. Should you find a boss inside the computer – they’re hard to miss, looking like gigantic Space Invaders – you will need to make sure both gauges are full before fighting, otherwise you’ll almost certainly lose. In this situation, attempting to max out the gauges by killing green enemies isn’t really workable, because sooner or later a red one will attack and you’ll be back to square one. The only safe way to charge up your characters is to find the boss’s room, log out of the terminal and use Coffee to scavenge for eggs.

Eggs appear at random on the islands and give you boosts similar to the power-ups you get for defeating green enemies, only without the risk of being jumped by sentient viruses. The downside is that they appear very, very infrequently, and only ever spawn off screen, necessitating you doing dozens of laps of the islands in order to find enough. The only way to increase the frequency and quality of the eggs is by raising your egg collecting skill, except that the only way to raise it is… to collect more eggs, with each egg giving you a +1 bonus. Even with my egg collecting skill maxed out at 200, it still took far, far too long to power up prior to a boss fight.

I have a friend who tried designing an RPG where the characters’ statistics went down as they leveled up. Even he thinks this system is stupid.

Ultimately, the combat system is good enough to balance out the egg-related tedium. You get the feeling that all RPGs should work like this by now, giving you the freedom to develop a complex strategy as soon as your quest begins, rather than making you grind for hours to unlock anything half way useful. It’s not very long and there isn’t a great deal of replay value but, being freeware, neither of these things really matter. Deep and challenging without being difficult to grasp, The Desolate Room is one of the best indie RPGs available.

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The Desolate Room

Winter 2009 Issue

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