Moraff World revisited

Continuing my previous post of retro "2-1/2 D" games from the 90s, I was able to get Moraff World running in DOSBox at a usable size by hitting Alt-Enter for full-screen mode.

After playing for another hour or so and finally dying, here are some tips and observations:

The main hazards are the unmarked pits ("chutes") that drop you down to lower levels where you are less likely to survive.  As soon as I fall into a pit, I look for the nearest ladder back up, but sometimes fall down another pit before I can get there.  Once you have found a pit, it stays on the map as a "*" symbol.  I ended up down on level 10 as a level 2 PC, and it did not go well.

One time I fell down a chute to a room with no ladders or doors.  You can bump into walls to look for secret passages, and sometimes walk right through the wall.  But when there are no exits at all, you have to hit D to dig a hole in the floor.  This is pretty funny, with some text messages to entertain you.  Oddly, I once dug down and ended up in another room (same shape and size) with no exits, with a ladder up exactly where I dug down, but when I took the ladder up, I was back in my previous room with no exits, and my previous digging did not create a ladder down, so I had to dig dwon twice to get somewhere I could get out of.  That's a bit buggy.  Digging really should create a pair of up/down ladders after putting in the effort.  So what if I don't have a stack of ladders in my backpack ... the backpack itself is imaginary.

The first time you die, you get a message about fading to black, then a message that your resurrection contract has been honored and you are returned to full health back in the town.  Messages will nag youu to get a new contract, but they start at 500 JP and the price goes up slightly each time.  And before I could get the 510 JP the invisible guy was asking for, I died again, game over ... and my player was removed from the splash screen list.  Gone for good.  Revenge of the Roguelike!

The "town" in this world is probably the least sensible towns in a game I have ever seen.  It is a maze with ladders going up, showing on the minimap as color-coded boxes.  And somehow, you could be 100 blocks away but that ladder at the brown box is always going to go up to the Flea Bag Inn.  Not some other inn, which would be fine, but the same exact one.  Somehow.  I don't know why they didn't just render that to level as a bunch of rectangles with names like every other game of the era.

Just don't go up the ladder that says "Wilderness", because that crazy page barely works at all.  Kudos to the developer for trying to render actual terrain for mountains an valleys, but it's just broken.  Moving left and right you will be following the contours, which is cool.  Up and Down moves you more or less as expected but if you go too far it loads another funky map.  There is a blue "D" on some of those maps.  The help text says to move over the D and hit "e" to enter the dungeon.  The dungeon I came out of didn't line up the first 20 times I tried going back, and it was right at the edge loading the map I didn't want if I went even one pixel too high.  The other D that I found went down to one block with walls on all four sides.  That's not a dungeon, it's a tomb.  I did finally find my way back, but I can't shake the feeling that going back into the original dungeon generated a fresh new dungeon anyway.

The big issue with the Wilderness map is that it's empty.  Nothing to do.  If you touch water it offers to sell you a boat for 10,001 JP, but why?

The game is still a fun romp through software of yesteryear.  I remembering getting pretty deep into that dungeon way back when.  It's hard to believe it was almost 30 years ago.

Over on Reddit r/dosgaming, here's a topic from waxsublime about finally beating the game after 30 years.  One of the commenters says he actually helped with the graphics in the original game.

An interesting mix of history and things dredged up from me memory.  The graphics are quite poor by today's standards (or even the standards of 20 years ago), but there is a certain catchy charm to peeking around just one more corner and then trying to get back up to the weird town in one piece for ore HP for the next trip...