Hi guys, and welcome to Let's Play Cavequest! I'm guessing that you're not familiar with the game, and that's ok. I'm not hugely familiar with it myself. It's a shareware dungeon crawl from 1985 that I had a copy of sometime in the '90s. For some reason I started thinking about it the other day, and thanks to the miracle of the internet, I managed to find it despite not being able to remember the title or much else beyond that it looked sort of like a roguelike (but with fixed dungeons), you could find ingots lying around, and that the instructions described zombies as the most deadly enemy, because they're already dead so they're hard to kill. Something about burning them and cutting them up, I think.
After a series of non-productive searches along the lines of 'ingots zombie ascii', I hit up the mobygames database and got lucky. Once I'd found out the title, I plugged 'cavequest' into google, which got me a bunch of more recent games I wasn't interested in, so I tried 'cavequest -"cave quest"', and struck gold. That blog post revealed that it wasn't actually an ascii art game, but the familiar content let me know I was onto the right thing. A little further down the list of google results was a download of the game from the internet archive. Nice!
From there it was just a matter of installing DOSBox (how have I never done that before?) and getting started:
We're looking for QUEST.COM
Here's the title screen. As you can see, my downloading the game off the internet for free is perfectly legal. I hope. The SCROLL files I believe contain the manuals for the game. I should probably read them, but I'm itching to get going and I've read them before anyway. I'm sure it'll come back to me.
I hit Y for sound effects, and the screen goes blank while the simulated sound of a PC speaker climbing through its frequency range comes from my headphones. I'm glad I'm not wearing them. As the sound gets high the screen flashes and Zeus speaks:
Clearly he's put a lot of thought into his choice. Actually, getting kicked out of the land of the gods to become mortal sounds like kind of a raw deal.
Looks like there's some kind of save feature. Nice.
Alright, the stats screen. I have no idea which of these will be useful, or if they'll level up later or be fixed for the whole game. I take five levels in each:
This leaves me with 1500 life points. They'll be converted to silver for buying stuff in the town before the game starts.
I descend through the stars to earth and land in the armory.
I spend most of my cash and get what seems like a decent initial setup. I'm not sure how much weight I can carry before it slows me down or whatever weight does in this game. I'm also not sure how much difference better gear makes.
Aww fooey, I forgot about the Witches Lair! I spend all my remaining money enchanting my sword (which plays a little sound effect) and buying what little I can afford, mainly healing potions. Again, I don't really know what all this stuff does.
There are five levels to the dungeon, each more difficult than the last. I decide to start on level one.
Alrighty, here we go! That's me at the bottom, the walls are funny a's, and the little dot near my sword is some money.
I walk over to it, hit 'G' for get, and I'm one copper richer. My life points have also gone from 0 to 20. Why? Dunno. The black line through my belly is where the treasure was before I took it.
I move on to the next room and encounter my first monster: a skeleton! Crap, how do I attack? It closes in on me quickly, and I hit the 'A' key for attack. This causes me to draw my bow. I guess 'A' is for arrow. I try 'S' for sword, and the monster dies. Nice! This nets me another 20 life points, and bumps my total slain from zero up to one.
I pop across the room and pick up another treasure. This is going pretty well! Now, everybody knows that the way you navigate a maze is you hug one of the walls. I usually stick to the left side, but since I'm on the right already I might as well go that way.
The right exit takes me from room 2 to room 18. Maybe I should have gone left! There aren't any monsters here, at least, so I march forward and snag that 50 coppers. Nice! Then again, I was spending silver before. I wonder what the exchange rate is? I notice that I'm getting 20 life points for each action. Didn't my life points get converted into money when I fell from heaven? How does that square with collecting small amounts of money? Hopefully once I get enough points I'll be able to buy stat ups.
I carry on to the right:
Room 19 is no more dangerous than room 18, but significantly less generous. I try moving by holding the button down in this room, and aside from making me harder to see this also depletes my restedness pretty quickly. If you get too tired you can't act. Luckily, it's recharging pretty quickly too. Say, let's check the inventory:
I guess that's what I bought from the Witches. I don't know what these things do, and I also don't know how to make them do it. Oh well.
Room 20 appears on the same screen as room 19, but with different walls. In fact, room 19's walls have changed, too. I think that happened when I came out of the inventory screen. Weird. Anyway, you can see here that the game is kind of picky about where you stand when you pick stuff up. Despite my sprite's hand being in the exact place where the treasure is in the second shot, I can't grab it until I'm standing on it (also I guess 'G' in this game is for grab, not get).
I move on to the right and face some more skeletons. You can see it took me a little while to attack the first guy, but his attacks on me weren't doing any damage. I guess my armour or my shield or my dexterity stat or something is just putting me out of reach of skeletons. After I put it out of its misery, another appears. I think that that's just how things work in this game: one enemy at a time. I kill all three, and move on to the north.
Once again the next room appears on the same screen, but this time there's nothing in it. My plan dictates that I take the right side exit.
!
OK, so exposure to this in my childhood might explain my fear of spiders. This giant bug kills me before I have a chance to act (and these .gifs are running significantly slower than the game is. I think I need to fiddle with the settings in DOSBox). I guess I need better stats or gear or something before I go this way again.
Zeus is a generous soul. I continue and wind up back at the armory:
I dunno why they bothered with this, given I just lost all my money. Maybe if I'd changed to cheaper gear I'd have gotten some money back?
I select to go back to level one.
Then I immediately turn and leave. Notice the lack of treasure in the room. If they aren't respawning then I'm in the same position I was when I first entered the dungeon, minus the 62 coppers I removed from the game before dying. No thanks!
This gives me the option to save, which I decline, some undeserved congrats from Zeus, and the option to quit, which I take. In retrospect, this would have been a good time to see if leaving the dungeon would give me the chance to up my stats using my life points, and to convert my treasures to money to get better gear. Oh well. Next time.
So, that's all for today! My plan for this LP is to map out all five levels of the cave and hopefully learn how to play the game properly. I'm not sure if there's a win condition or if I'll just be stopping when it seems appropriate. If it's all too hard, that might be pretty soon!
Step one for now will be reading the SCROLL files, I guess. They're pretty lengthy, but pretty neat, too. SCROLL.HNT is a short list of hints, as the filename suggests. SCROLL.USE is the manual, written with a nice combination of practical directions and game flavour, and SCROLL.OLD is "History and Descriptions", which I think is maybe supposed to be an old scroll your character finds lying around with information on the cave in it, though it starts "Hail and well met!", so maybe it's an old guy talking to you. Here are some samples of each file:
Participation time! I'll be starting a new character for my next run. How should I build him/her? I start with 9000 life points/silvers, and all the prices are on the shop screens. If you wanna plot out exactly how I spend it all, I'm into that, but if that's a bit too much work and you just want me to pump it all into strength and take on the caves naked with a stick, I'll give that a shot too. Or you could have me spend none of it, but that'll probably be a pretty short run.
Next Time: I read the manual.
After a series of non-productive searches along the lines of 'ingots zombie ascii', I hit up the mobygames database and got lucky. Once I'd found out the title, I plugged 'cavequest' into google, which got me a bunch of more recent games I wasn't interested in, so I tried 'cavequest -"cave quest"', and struck gold. That blog post revealed that it wasn't actually an ascii art game, but the familiar content let me know I was onto the right thing. A little further down the list of google results was a download of the game from the internet archive. Nice!
From there it was just a matter of installing DOSBox (how have I never done that before?) and getting started:
We're looking for QUEST.COM
Here's the title screen. As you can see, my downloading the game off the internet for free is perfectly legal. I hope. The SCROLL files I believe contain the manuals for the game. I should probably read them, but I'm itching to get going and I've read them before anyway. I'm sure it'll come back to me.
I hit Y for sound effects, and the screen goes blank while the simulated sound of a PC speaker climbing through its frequency range comes from my headphones. I'm glad I'm not wearing them. As the sound gets high the screen flashes and Zeus speaks:
Clearly he's put a lot of thought into his choice. Actually, getting kicked out of the land of the gods to become mortal sounds like kind of a raw deal.
Looks like there's some kind of save feature. Nice.
Alright, the stats screen. I have no idea which of these will be useful, or if they'll level up later or be fixed for the whole game. I take five levels in each:
This leaves me with 1500 life points. They'll be converted to silver for buying stuff in the town before the game starts.
I descend through the stars to earth and land in the armory.
I spend most of my cash and get what seems like a decent initial setup. I'm not sure how much weight I can carry before it slows me down or whatever weight does in this game. I'm also not sure how much difference better gear makes.
Aww fooey, I forgot about the Witches Lair! I spend all my remaining money enchanting my sword (which plays a little sound effect) and buying what little I can afford, mainly healing potions. Again, I don't really know what all this stuff does.
There are five levels to the dungeon, each more difficult than the last. I decide to start on level one.
Alrighty, here we go! That's me at the bottom, the walls are funny a's, and the little dot near my sword is some money.
I walk over to it, hit 'G' for get, and I'm one copper richer. My life points have also gone from 0 to 20. Why? Dunno. The black line through my belly is where the treasure was before I took it.
I move on to the next room and encounter my first monster: a skeleton! Crap, how do I attack? It closes in on me quickly, and I hit the 'A' key for attack. This causes me to draw my bow. I guess 'A' is for arrow. I try 'S' for sword, and the monster dies. Nice! This nets me another 20 life points, and bumps my total slain from zero up to one.
I pop across the room and pick up another treasure. This is going pretty well! Now, everybody knows that the way you navigate a maze is you hug one of the walls. I usually stick to the left side, but since I'm on the right already I might as well go that way.
The right exit takes me from room 2 to room 18. Maybe I should have gone left! There aren't any monsters here, at least, so I march forward and snag that 50 coppers. Nice! Then again, I was spending silver before. I wonder what the exchange rate is? I notice that I'm getting 20 life points for each action. Didn't my life points get converted into money when I fell from heaven? How does that square with collecting small amounts of money? Hopefully once I get enough points I'll be able to buy stat ups.
I carry on to the right:
Room 19 is no more dangerous than room 18, but significantly less generous. I try moving by holding the button down in this room, and aside from making me harder to see this also depletes my restedness pretty quickly. If you get too tired you can't act. Luckily, it's recharging pretty quickly too. Say, let's check the inventory:
I guess that's what I bought from the Witches. I don't know what these things do, and I also don't know how to make them do it. Oh well.
Room 20 appears on the same screen as room 19, but with different walls. In fact, room 19's walls have changed, too. I think that happened when I came out of the inventory screen. Weird. Anyway, you can see here that the game is kind of picky about where you stand when you pick stuff up. Despite my sprite's hand being in the exact place where the treasure is in the second shot, I can't grab it until I'm standing on it (also I guess 'G' in this game is for grab, not get).
I move on to the right and face some more skeletons. You can see it took me a little while to attack the first guy, but his attacks on me weren't doing any damage. I guess my armour or my shield or my dexterity stat or something is just putting me out of reach of skeletons. After I put it out of its misery, another appears. I think that that's just how things work in this game: one enemy at a time. I kill all three, and move on to the north.
Once again the next room appears on the same screen, but this time there's nothing in it. My plan dictates that I take the right side exit.
!
OK, so exposure to this in my childhood might explain my fear of spiders. This giant bug kills me before I have a chance to act (and these .gifs are running significantly slower than the game is. I think I need to fiddle with the settings in DOSBox). I guess I need better stats or gear or something before I go this way again.
Zeus is a generous soul. I continue and wind up back at the armory:
I dunno why they bothered with this, given I just lost all my money. Maybe if I'd changed to cheaper gear I'd have gotten some money back?
I select to go back to level one.
Then I immediately turn and leave. Notice the lack of treasure in the room. If they aren't respawning then I'm in the same position I was when I first entered the dungeon, minus the 62 coppers I removed from the game before dying. No thanks!
This gives me the option to save, which I decline, some undeserved congrats from Zeus, and the option to quit, which I take. In retrospect, this would have been a good time to see if leaving the dungeon would give me the chance to up my stats using my life points, and to convert my treasures to money to get better gear. Oh well. Next time.
So, that's all for today! My plan for this LP is to map out all five levels of the cave and hopefully learn how to play the game properly. I'm not sure if there's a win condition or if I'll just be stopping when it seems appropriate. If it's all too hard, that might be pretty soon!
Step one for now will be reading the SCROLL files, I guess. They're pretty lengthy, but pretty neat, too. SCROLL.HNT is a short list of hints, as the filename suggests. SCROLL.USE is the manual, written with a nice combination of practical directions and game flavour, and SCROLL.OLD is "History and Descriptions", which I think is maybe supposed to be an old scroll your character finds lying around with information on the cave in it, though it starts "Hail and well met!", so maybe it's an old guy talking to you. Here are some samples of each file:
SCROLL.HNT
Don't get lost! Keep a pad with you on your journey and jot
down notes or draw a map.
SCROLL.USE
If you leave the armory without purchasing a blade, the
armorer will take pity on you and give you a stick with which
to beat monsters. Don't laugh. Many a strong fighter has
done in many a monster with a good stick.
SCROLL.OLDAh, memories! I had all these printed out as a kid, and I'm enjoying reading them again now. I'll be taking that advice from the hint file (just gotta find some graph paper), and I'll be reading the list of key commands in the manual before I go delving again.
The Zombie be the swiftest creature in the caves. He be
human, like you and me, but brought back from the dead. As
he be already dead, you must chop, fry, beat and pulverize
him before he will stop his relentless attack.
Participation time! I'll be starting a new character for my next run. How should I build him/her? I start with 9000 life points/silvers, and all the prices are on the shop screens. If you wanna plot out exactly how I spend it all, I'm into that, but if that's a bit too much work and you just want me to pump it all into strength and take on the caves naked with a stick, I'll give that a shot too. Or you could have me spend none of it, but that'll probably be a pretty short run.
Next Time: I read the manual.
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