Lone Wolf: Flight From The Dark + Lone Wolf 2: Fire On The Water Review

Anyone who ever had any connection to 80s table top role-playing games and Fantasy gamebooks should know in his / her sleep who Joe Dever (R.I.P.) and Gary Chalk are. Dever’s magnum opus set in Magnamund spans over a couple of dozen books, and were intriguing like few other stories that drew inspiration from the same sources.

Lone Wolf: Flight From The Dark and Lone Wolf: Fire On The Water were the first two books that were adapted into video games…

STORY

…and they were also to be the last… (Unless the entire franchise is re-booted at some point on modern platforms!)

Both games were also exclusive for the ZX Spectrum. A third game (Lone Wolf 3: The Caverns Of Calte) was announced shortly after, but it was never released… (Was it even developed?)

THE GAMES

So we can merely treasure the two games that were made. When reviewers talk about some media that closely follows the source material, they should naturally keep Five Ways Software’s “Lone Wolf”-games in mind. The story is dead on. As is everything that the games offer. It even directly references the 350 sections in each of the books, meaning that the entire story is in the game. (Plus some unique sections.) What’s missing is the amount of text that are in the books. There simply wouldn’t have been enough space for those longer paragraphs. (And each game is already divided into two separate loads due to the size of the programs.)

The real-time battle scenes may not look all that exciting (And they probably aren’t the most exciting battle scenes that you have played in a video game either.), but they contain more than meets the eye. (RPG mechanics behind the scenes.) If you have read the early books, you will immediately recognize what everything is – Everything from names to what a Mindblast and Mindshield is.

You are the last of the Kai warriors, and you’re accidentally escaping death as your monastery is attacked by the Darklords. As a sole survivor, you swear revenge and realize that you have to get to the capital Holmgard as quickly as possible and warn the King about the invasion. In Holmgard, you are then given the Seal Of Hammerdal which will prove to be one very conclusive item in the exact right moment towards the end of Fire On The Water.

The two games are meant to be played back to back as you can save your progress in Flight From The Dark and continue in Fire On The Water.

CONTENT

When Flight From The Dark begins, you train your skills in battle vs. an instructor. This is an unwinnable (?) battle and as a “punishment” for not paying attention or whatever, you are sent to the forest to gather firewood. (Which is why you don’t end in the slaughterhouse to begin with.) Fighting improves your skills and your energy is based on “Endurance”. It gets depleted when you get injured, or, don’t eat or sleep properly.

The game takes place on single-screen scenes. The hero, originally known as Silent Wolf, is of course in all scenes whether he is walking to the next one, talking to an NPC, or fighting enemies or monsters that get in his way. The scenes are animated with a matching background. Below the scene, the program outputs text depending on what’s happening. The wolf’s head with a number refers to the section in the actual books. The bars on the sides of the scene represent your “Combat Skill” and “Endurance” respectively.

Lone Wolf wouldn’t be Lone Wolf without the Kai Disciplines, and they are naturally included – Sixth Sense, Healing, Animal Kinship, etc. These improve during the course of the game. Other than that, you have your backpack and belt pouch with some gold Crowns. (The currency in the Lastlands.) And traveling without a weapon is suicide as you can’t fight bigger monsters with your bare fists.

Apart from fighting and trying to get to Holmgard and further to Durenor, you will constantly be making choices. These are displayed by pressing the “1”-key. Just like in the books, you may select path or decide at critical points what to do. The only difference is that you can’t cheat by either memorizing the number of the section, keep the index finger on the last “safe” page, or flip back to the previous section should you die. But on the other hand – You can save a game on tape. Pressing “9” makes the choice and “2” repeats the last text. “0” lists your items, weapons, and gold Crowns.

CONTROLS

Fighting has the most keyboard commands as you can either chop, swipe, or thrust. (Using keys: “O”, “I”, and “U”.) “E” and “R” walks towards / away from an enemy. “N” is for parrying. “A” is an attempt to escape. (Doesn’t work all that often.) And finally, you have “V” for Mindshield and “W” for Mindblast.

(And don’t worry – You won’t have to press several keys at the same time in impossible combinations.)

GRAPHICS

Lone Wolf has nice and fitting layout with the entire game rendered on a parchment scroll. (Plus nice red dragons resting on top of the the gameplay window.) The backdrops for each scene are decent enough (Cities, forests, etc.) and the blank area in front of the background is reserved for the cute sprites for the characters and monsters.

As this isn’t an action-based game in the least, you get the very classic two-frame animations to illustrate what’s happening in each section. Even if it looks simple and crude, it’s better than reading the same lines of text over and over again, e.g., “You hit the Kraan for 8 points of damage.” It works like a dream in “real” RPGs, but here, it would take away from the visual presentation.

What about stats windows…?! There are none. You only need the “Combat Skill”- and “Endurance” bars. You never know how much Endurance an attacker has until he or it lies dead on the ground.

SOUND

Simple one-channel tunelets beeping at different occasions and almost as simple sound effects telling the player when weapons hit enemy flesh and so on. You just don’t play these games for their audiovisual qualities.

SUMMARY

While it’s admirable that Five Ways Software adapted the books into fully functional video games, it’s harder to recommend them to someone who hasn’t read the books or are at least familiar with Lone Wolf as a franchise. And someone who has read the books will have every plot point spoiled from the outset.

And maybe this is why there was no third game. (Although I would have loved to play Lone Wolf 4: Chasm Of Doom.) The developers might have realized that they can’t carry that right amount of substance without the entire text from the books, and that the “experiment” had ran its course. And / or that simply repeating the formula wouldn’t be to the games’ benefit…

Flash forward around seven years, because then, nobody knows what the hell happened when Audiogenic decided to release a “Lone Wolf”-related game called The Mirror Of Death. It has barely anything to do with the original franchise. It’s an odd combination of a platform game and an arcade adventure with a ridiculously small map… (Developer Mr. Micro, who made a whole bunch of entertaining games, must have had a bad “day”.) I don’t know about you, but when I think of adventures in the Lastlands, I don’t fuckin’ think about climbing endless ladders while avoiding poisonous spit from at least a dozen Gargoyles…?!

No. As adventure games with a strong and solid foundation in classic table top role-playing campaigning (Going by the way the stories are structured.), these two original “Lone Wolf”-games are a nice distraction and a welcome variant to the heavier 8-bit RPGs that were becoming increasingly popular at the time… But I still recommend reading the books instead. Simply because there are so many more of them, and because the games more or less require that you are familiar with the concept. Someone going in with fresh eyes won’t have the best of times. (Or being able to figure out what “everything” is by merely playing the games.)

Note: The games originally shipped with the books.

Developed by: Five Ways Software
Published by: Arrow
Version Reviewed: ZX Spectrum 48K
Genre: Adventure
Players: 1
Alternate Title: Flight From The Dark + Fire On The Water
Also Available On: N/A
Released: 1984