At this point, being at level 4 after having cleared the first set of areas, this game reminds me most of the first Baldur’s Gate. You start with basically nothing, most things can easily kill you, and the mechanics can be opaque. Visually speaking it looks pretty good (which is amazing considering that the native resolution is 320×240) while the gameplay is a more mixed experience.
Early on at least, magic is not a viable damage dealer. So encounters come down to either baiting/kiting enemies away from their friends to beat them down 5-on-1, or making use of spells like Fearful Light and Festering Ooze to disable parts of otherwise unavoidable group attacks. You never, ever want to get into a ‘fair’ fight… because you will lose. Offsetting the deadly encounters is the ability to fully heal your party essentially at will outside of combat; there’s no limit to how much magic you can use, so just spam-cast the basic healing spell.
Character progression is both simple and complicated. On level-up characters get 2 Attribute Points (used to raise attributes) and 2 Skill Points (used to raise skills, spells, and aptitudes). The attributes are relatively straight-forward (though Dexterity not affecting dodge is bizarre), the skills/spells/aptitudes however are far trickier. Many spells do not improve much at all at higher levels, you can only have 3 skills active at a time, and some aptitudes can become incredibly powerful indirectly (if you have the right tools). So it’s quite difficult to choose what to advance in and extremely easy to end up wasting points.
Then you have weird ‘ease-of-use’ contrasts like being able to create infinite ranged ammo with a Linguistic Incantation, but the ammo has to be dropped on the ground first. Or new incantations being automatically written down as your Linguistics skill increases, but not having anything automatically marked on your world map or journal.
Some starting things:
– Create two additional Avatars at the start.
– One of them should be a Drow Frost Jackal for the item.
– Avoid fighting more than one enemy at a time.
– While the game is paused, healing items cannot be used in battle.
– If you use Woodwise on yourself, you can detect traps.
– Parasitic Orb is required to unlock Fairy Rings.
– Read everything, nothing is written down for you.
– Don’t sell keys, drop them on the ground instead.
– Merchant inventories are limited and extra items disappear.
– Set traps will disappear if you save/reload.
– If you only kill part of an enemy group, saving/reloading will respawn them.
– Wands are very good, and anyone who can cast spells should have one.
– Whether it’s day or night affects which encounters you’ll find.
– Day/night can be changed at will with Linguistics 4.
– GOG Galaxy installs the patch wrong, you have to move the contents of the 32/64 folder into the main directory.
‘Secret’ Linguistic Incantations:
– “Davi Bone(s)” to turn a bone or bones into healing items.
– “Shoar [Gem] Chip” to turn gem chips into whole gems.
– “Grafitus [Ammo]” to refill any stack of ammo to 100.
– The items above have to be dropped on the ground.
– “Nufri [Ruin Name]” to reveal some kind of secret.
– These are provided in the out-of-game Erlein’s Handbook.
Spells to consider raising:
– Blood Cocoon (works faster)
– Festering Ooze (increased radius/duration)
– Heat Metal (so it does damage)
– Feverish Haze (works faster)
– Cat Poly (up to 3dx dodge chance)
– Wolf Poly (up to 5d6 physical hit chance)
– Nauseate (works faster)
– Strangling Vines (up to 5d6 dodge penalty)
– Shimmering Scales (up to 3d17 AC and spell resistance)
– Ethereal Weapon (up to 6d8 damage and 3dx hit chance)
– Siphon Poison (works faster)
– Searing Light (up to 5d7+15 damage and 12 radius)
– Zana Morph (increased duration and up to 5d6 magic hit chance)