Missed Classic: Valhalla - Abandoned

Written by Morpheus Kitami

Welcome back to Valhalla, the game I started back in April and kept putting off continuing for other games because it wasn't quite the right time for this kind of mapping. Considering I was putting off starting this game for a while, that tracks. It's not quite the game that's taken me to the longest between starting and finishing as far as posting it on the internet goes, but it's getting close. This is feeling like a lot of effort for not a lot of content.

I had a clear objective starting out. Make a map. I needed to find a way back into Asgard, possibly a way out of Asgard that isn't a one-way trip. My very existence seems to offend Loki. Map making is awkward, because I have no pause function and I'm on a hunger timer. There were three ways of doing this:

• Trizbort, which wasn't working for whatever reason. (I love Linux sometimes)
• Paper map, which sounds like a lot of fun when you have no idea what the scale of the place is and every room is something like "A Marsh in Midgard."
• Get a map someone else made, which I did after a while, but everything was diagonal for some reason and it was all very confusing.

I'm going about this out of order, but it said one important thing, that some pathways require artifacts. I'm pretty sure I'd never figure that out without that knowledge, because in a game where nothing is told about where you can go, that's cruel. Late in-game I find out, quite by accident, that you can go diagonally, that is northwest, southeast, etc. That's 9 paths you have to figure out, including the ring jumps.

Not the final map, obviously, which is far more messy.

In the end, I used the web version of Trizbort. As you can see, the map is weird. Diagonally isn't necessary...oops, until it is. There's one spot in Midgard separating the entrance to Hel from the area you can enter Asgard. I only tested jumping twice, and that actually caused more trouble than just mapping the game out since areas are not entirely obvious. In case I forgot to mention it, you need a ring to jump, and each jump uses the ring. Everything's a limited resource, except weapons and armor.

The game is surprisingly small, which is worrying. There must be something more, it doesn't help I can't enter a lot of castles just yet, but if there is, I have a problem. Food. My character might be a god, but he needs quite a bit of food and wine to not die, which is limited. I wish this game had darkness instead because this is more annoying than the roaming hostiles. I can spam commands so they don't do anything, I can't not need food.

Since I didn't yet try Hell again after my initial mapping out, I look at it again. After all, if you're going to hide something, you're going to hide it in Hell. At least, hidden in the ringways. There are a couple of chests, nothing valuable, but a jump in the random hall here leads to a cave.

It's oddly sealed off from the rest of the map, only that ringway in, possibly, and the only way out is to go through a passage into some mountains, which is then one-way into a room with no way out. There's nothing of value here as of yet, so I suspect this might just factor into something else later. That, or I'm going to be really desparate for food later.

There's a cave in Midgard in another section, which has three wines and a ring. Where does it lead? Nowhere, I have to jump out. And that's it for my tour of Hell, there are no more ringways there. So, it's time to tour Midgard seeing where the ringways go. A lot of them basically just ease transportation between the halves of Midgard, but one, the last one in fact, actually leads somewhere new. (That and one teleport into the cave from earlier)

El Vinos, a castle. There's Mary and a chest. (Reminder, I don't get anything other than a name, but someone inside here seems important) I wonder what goodies are inside the chest? Maybe one of the artifacts I've gone so far for? It has to be something...and it's wine. A lot of wine, but just wine. Fine, where does this go out to? Nowhere, apparently, because I can't leave and I can't jump out. People sure are coming in. I attack Mary and she leaves, because frankly I'm annoyed. I do the mature thing and type a swear word and Mary comes back in, not amused, and attacks me. That happened. Then more people come in, Mary returns and one of the others kill Mary. Nobody actually drops anything when they die, so if Mary was holding something I wanted, tough.

The problem is that now I've jumped everywhere, and my only real solutions now are to enter areas with items I didn't have before...which I guess is an axe, or ask people for artifacts. You know, if the latter was an answer to the problem, I don't think I would need to find them to begin with. So I check a walkthrough, because by any reasonable metric this game should have been finished a year ago. So, checking the solution and getting confused, then checking the map again and cross-referencing my own, I see that in order to get the first artifact I need to summon Boldir outside a castle northwest of Hellgate. There's a hint in the manual for this, but it just says "darkness in Midgard".

Yes. I didn't realize that you needed to do this despite the manual clearly stating that characters can unlock doorways. On a similar note, not having an item can lock a doorway. To get out of El Vinos, you need to have no helmet. Make your own jokes, because I'm half pissed I didn't realize that there were still missing mechanics and half pissed because I missed that "where" tells you the exits + the items in everyone's inventory and help is supposed to give it to you...occasionally.

Such as in front of the place you need to summon Boldir. The summon command allows you to teleport anyone to you...in theory. Boldir won't let me summon him. I can summon Hel, which ends about as well as you would expect. So I restart, following a walkthrough exactly, and ended up with the same result. And the artifact in there is something I need to get the other artifacts, so I'm pretty much stuck.

This Session: 2 hour 10 minutes

Final Time: 3 hour 10 minutes

I'm not going to rate this, I didn't get through enough to give it a proper rating. Though I note that I probably could say some pretty mean things about this game and they'd be true. This needs a lot more effort than I'm willing to give. I will say that I've said some very nice things about the game off-hand that clearly aren't true, and I regret saying that. It certainly isn't a classic as some say.

I will state one thing in it's favor, I was never worried about it being in real time. If I'm not sitting around pondering something the game offers a very fair experience in combat and in getting attacked. It's possible to run around not getting attacked without feeling rushed, even in areas full of enemies. I imagine it would be very fun just fighting. As an actual puzzle solving experience, it seems as though I cannot even begin to get into the action.

There was another challenge than the score guess in guessing my favorite song named Valhalla. Nobody guessed Crimson Glory, but in the spirit of making this entry slightly less disappointing, everyone who tried gets 5 CAPs, awarded whenever we get to our next finished mainline game.