The Keys To Maramon

 Amiga 1200, The Keys To Maramon (1990) game

The key to 'The Keys' are finding keys - copper, brass, bronze, iron, steel, silver, and finally, gold, which will then unlock doors in the catacombs beneath the beleaguered town. I rather enjoyed this odd little game, it has that necessary simplicity of gameplay, while also a level or two of complexity beyond: resource management before there was resource management. Okay, so there had been other games where you could level up characters, and titles such as 'Defender of The Crown' where you built up resources, but how many games could be described as 'Gauntlet' with a touch of 'Zelda: Majora's Mask'? The playing field is limited to the enclosed walls of Maramon, a town on an island which is being attacked every night by monsters from the abandoned catacombs below, pouring out from one of four towers, depending on the day of the week, and as the hero hired to save everyone, your job is to kill them all before daybreak - if any escape they'll do damage to one or more buildings, which in turn will require a day or more to be repaired (and prevent your use of them). Miss too many monsters and eventually too many buildings will be damaged and you'll be kicked off the island by Mayor Andello. Manage your daytime well and you'll begin to build up supplies (gold to buy a look at the library's books which boost your stats, or weapons to fight more effectively, armour to marshal your hit points better, and herbs to increase your effectiveness in battle), pay attention to where the monsters come from on a given night and you can be in position to strike them down as they exit the tower, saving you valuable time and effort running around town.

Hit points can be recovered by taking an hour's break in a rest house (the same can be done at night in the Strongrooms which act as storage units if you require, though you don't get as much return on your time investment, presumably sleeping fitfully as you hear the town burned and pillaged around you!), or using a restorative at any time, which can be bought, found or come as a reward for killing monsters. As can other herbs that temporarily increase various attributes. Time passes at a rate of one hour every few seconds, so you do find yourself rushing around from place to place for much of the game, hitting the rest houses to boost your health for the evening's work, visiting Tamar the weapons guy to buy a new one from his large selection, since they're all surprisingly flimsy and don't hold up for long (though you can resort to fists if you have no weapon at all), or gradually getting to the point where you can afford the Rare books in the library (200 gold per look - extortionate!), which unlock vital information needed to progress. On Fridays you're paid by the Mayor if you visit City Hall, and on each day there'll be different people to talk to in the taverns. I found the best way to use resources was to quickly sleep in the early part of the day to revive health after the nightly battle, then buy the cheapest weapon possible (a Hammer), run to the two towers as you had a greater probability of the monsters appearing there, and just as night draws on, giving yourself one of each herb to give you the best chance at beating the nasties quickly. Eventually you catch on to where the monsters will be and it becomes much easier.

Even so, your real mission is to learn the secret to the keys, getting them allows you to descend into the deadly catacombs where even more monsters need to be dispatched, while at the same time you can't explore too far or you won't get out in time to rest up or be there for the next night's attack above ground, so there's strategy involved. As you progress you find more Strongrooms which contain gold and other things you can take which helps boost your progress, until you get to the point where you've read all the Rare books and feel ready to take on what I supposed was a Dragon in the deepest hole. I say 'supposed' because I managed to find five keys (which I assumed were all that were in the game), killed all the monsters on that underground level, had increased my stats and earned plenty of gold. Trouble was, as soon as I walked through the archway the game scrambled. Unfortunately, whether through programming error or the fact this is a port rather than being specifically for the Amiga, this game is broken. I noticed it much earlier: whenever I tried to save progress (you have four slots on the disk), the screen would often mess up, flashing colours, all kinds of wonkiness that could sometimes be put right by pressing '0' to check your stats and then again to return to the game screen. Even worse, sometimes the act of saving the game itself would freeze it failing to save at all (when you rebooted it would say [BAD SAVE] in that slot). It was fine to save over, it wasn't that it corrupted the disk, but it was debilitating and agonising since you never knew for sure if your progress was secure!

This little bug threatened to ruin the whole experience, though as long as you saved regularly it was easy enough to get back on the wagon without too much trouble. But the game-ending fault, and this necessity of treating saves as a resource in their own right was why I couldn't give it the three stars I otherwise would have for its fun factor. It really was enjoyable to learn the game's ways, its unique day/night cycle, and its mix of simple fighting and RPG exploration and stat-boosting. It's true that the music was atrocious - I know it came out at the very end of that 80s period of gaming where things were much more simplistic, and before the 1200 arrived and games became bigger and more complex, but it does come across like a much earlier game. That may be because it was a port, and I'm surprised that a game so old worked on the 1200 at all, I certainly didn't expect it to when I slotted it into the machine! The graphics are also very basic, but there's a slight 'Settlers' tone to them, maybe because of little symbols like the mug of beer on the tavern signs, or the neat little houses and trees. The night casts a moonlit pall over everything and I found the visuals, if not exactly attractive in the best tradition of pixel graphics, at least pleasant. The same can't be said for the sound effects, one of the biggest throwbacks to ancient games, as your hero bip-bip-bips his way around like Pac-Man! You can turn off the sound, but then you'd miss the whack of battle and the occasional music when you enter a building, and actually the sound became somehow reassuring!

Still, you can't forgive a game its brokenness, and that can't be escaped: I thought I may never be able to complete it (wondering about its availability on DOSBox), because the Amiga copy seemed as if it couldn't be finished, in much the same way as a glitch at the end of 'Future Wars' prevented completion and I only saw the very end decades later thanks to DOSBox, which even so is never quite as good as the Amiga versions of games. However, in the nature of glitchy-ness, rebooting the Amiga and going back to the last save point meant I was able to get back into the game again, and it didn't scramble when I entered what I'd thought was the last part of the catacombs - turned out it was just one of many levels down, deep down, deeper and down, whacking many more monsters and desperately trying to arrange it so I could get back before the next night ended and I'd have at least some chance of clearing some of the hordes ransacking the village above. My tactic was to wait for Tuesday night, take out the arriving enemies from that tower (the far left on that night), then dashing over to the one directly to the right of it as that seemed to be the fastest route through the caves below, doing my business underground and getting back some time on Wednesday night because I knew the monsters coming out of that particular tower would simply stand there instead of roaming the village. Eventually I realised I was getting so far away that I wouldn't get back in the space of two nights and the day between and it was at that point I chose to press on (this was after the gold key had been recovered - sneakily you had to fight off above-ground monsters after getting as deep as you could go, to stop you from just rushing through the catacombs and ignoring the village's plight!).

The final test, such as it was (game endings tended to be much simpler in those days), led me to a last door into some wizard bloke's lair, for a sort of confrontation, though he escapes after some badinage, leaving the exit tunnels flooded. It wasn't a real time event, you just come out and have to find a route out of there (so not quite like the escape down the tower at the end of 'Ocarina of Time'!), and once you get back up to ground level the Mayor gives you a special pearl of great price and the game is over - you can even save your progress at this point (the save file says [GAME WON]), ostensibly to use this character in further games, though I have no idea if later chapters in the saga were released, and I didn't even realise the game was part of a series until I paid more attention to the back of the box! It wasn't a spectacular ending, there was no new piece of music or any credits, but in those days it was much more about the journey than the destination and I quite enjoyed it on the whole and was pleased the apparent game-ending bug was only temporary. I must admit that it did become a little repetitive, and the game world is oddly L-shaped since, other than tracking down stray monsters that might have wandered far afield, there was no reason to go to the top-right part of the village as it only contained trees - the furthest you needed to go in that direction was to visit the herbalist, Madame Rosel, and it was possible to find all you needed from dead monsters leaving them behind anyway.

I should just mention the great manual that comes with this game, its thick pages and glossy cover setting the scene with a bit of story relating to each of the four heroes you can choose from at the start (again, just like 'Gauntlet' you have an archer, a big hero, a heroine and a wizard, to the extent they even come in green, yellow, red and blue! I was missing the "GREEN ARCHER NEEDS FOOD, BADLY"!), and detailed information on the denizens of Maramon, and all you need to know to play. The kind of loving detail that tells you they cared about this game, leavening it with humour (games makers didn't take themselves quite as seriously in those days!), and providing a useful resource to refer back to. There is one other downside of being a port, and that's the horribly counterintuitive controls - the Joystick's fine, you can't go far wrong with top-down, eight-directional movement and one Fire button, but pressing 'esc' to pause the game? And pressing 'P' passes the rest of the day and plunges you into night? And to save the game you press 'Q' which is usually 'Quit'? Oh dear, someone's idea of a joke, or a failure in translation? It was the Wild West in gaming back then... So weird to think that only eight years after this, a game of the magnitude of 'Zelda: Ocarina of Time' could be released, but you can see the seeds of potential and ingenuity that surpasses simple sound and graphics at play here and I would certainly play other games in this series.

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