[Disclaimer: I received a review key for The Warlock of Firetop Mountain through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators. The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played, and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience. Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]
Systems: Windows, macOS, Steam OS, Linux, Nintendo Switch
Release Date: August 30, 2016 - September 13, 2018
Publisher: Tin Man Games
Time Spent:
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I'm going to preface this article with a bit of a confession. While watching a
retrospective of the original Final Fantasy over on Final Fantasy Union's YouTube channel, I first heard how Square had originally wanted to title their new RPG game
Fighting Fantasy, but decided against the name because there was already a series of books with that title. Wanting to keep the alliterative double "F's," (previous titles being
Cruise Chaser, King's Knight, Deep Dungeon, and
Rad Racer), Square changed the name to
Final Fantasy instead. What I didn't know was that
Fighting Fantasy was also an IP co-developed by Steve Jackson (different than the Steve Jackson of
Munchkin and
GURPS) and is/was a series of single-player fantasy (and other genres too) RPG books that functioned a lot like the
Choose Your Own Adventure series, which was later turned into video games and board games alike. What I also didn't realize was how closely the
Fighting Fantasy formula and aesthetic influenced the design, look, and feel of
HeroQuest. Seeing as how I'm finding myself resubmerged in the
HeroQuest ecosphere, I jumped at the chance to play this nine-year-old adaptation, playable on both the original Switch and Switch 2.
Now that we're here, I hadn't originally planned on writing an article about The Warlock of Firetop Mountain until after the first of the year, but I've had quite an early experience that I wanted/needed to write about it in First Impression form. So here we are, only an hour in.
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The Warlock of Firetop Mountain is a video game adaptation of a board game adaptation of a Choose Your Own Adventure-style single-player RPG book. What drew me to this game was how well it captured the look of a miniature plodding along on a board, albeit a highly detailed board that builds itself as the player explores the dungeon. The player's miniature doesn't just slide or glide along the dungeon floor, but bounces appropriately, as if controlled by an invisible hand that's counting the number of places the pieces move. Upon entering a room/chamber, a text block pops up that gives a description of what the character sees beyond what is visible on the digital board, be it sounds or smells that can only be conveyed through text. Sometimes, there's an additional visual component, like a drawing that looks like it's straight out of a quest book that the gamemaster might show the players or be printed in a book from the late 80s or early 90s.
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The battles in the game are a little more complicated and have been my source of frustration. The battles are played out on a grid like a modern tactics game, albeit in a very confined area and, at least for the moment, confined to a level battlefield. The player decides if they're going to move or attack, and once you decide what you're going to do, the computer-controlled characters act at the same time. Your purpose is to avoid enemy attacks while anticipating what they're going to do. When it's one enemy, it's mostly manageable, but when you're a single hero going up against two or three enemies, and trying to not be on a square that could be attacked while also trying to attack to reduce the number of enemies, following the tells of the enemies can get confusing and frustrating really fast.
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While dying is something that has happened to me several times during my first couple of hours playing, thankfully, the game has implemented a save feature. When you come upon a wooden bench in the dungeon, you're given the option to rest, which also saves your game, rest, and consume rations, of which you start out with four, or just skip entirely. The secondary benefit to resting is that you also regain 5 points of stamina, which doubles as your HP. Because this is a video game, you'd think that you could spam the save points by inching along the dungeon, killing a few orcs, then doubling back to save and rest, but the developers already thought of that. As you progress through the dungeon, I have only come across a few instances where I were able to double back, and never was it back to a save point.
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What I've found frustrating about dying is really two-fold. First, since you recover 5 stamina, having that health boost will provide you with ample time to further explore the dungeon, which also means that you're more likely to be further away from the save spot when you die. And that means that any progress you made is erased because when you respawn, just like in the old days, it's at the save point; the only thing that I believe carries over are the number of Souls you collect, which, I believe, can be used to purchase additional character/miniature sets who all have different equipment, stats, and gear. The other semi-frustrating thing is that the dungeon is set, which means it never changes, which means if you start over with a new character, you're always going to be seeing that sleeping Orc guard just inside the door if you go west, or the Orc patrol if you go east.
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You know, while writing this First Impressions article, I think I've come to accept the game design choices as those of a video game, and less like a board game. Because the game does such a great job in recreating that living board game visual, it's at times hard to separate my feelings about playing a board game and playing a video game. If I think of the game as a video game, dying and having to restart from a previous point is a familiar mechanic. If I'm playing a board game and my character dies (murdered by Orcs, snakes, Goblins, or by traps, as was the most recent case), that's usually the end of the game, and the desire to stop is near absolute. As of this writing, I've made three runs, and I think tonight will be my fourth, and we'll see in my upcoming Game EXP article if my feelings about the game have changed at all since today, because I love the look of the game and the care that went into making it feel like a video game version of a board game. Now I just need to remind myself that I'm playing a video game.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Unlock Forgotten Skills
P.S. I would be very surprised not only if Dellaños didn't know about the Fighting Fantasy books, but if he or his brothers didn't have one or two of the books growing up.
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