May Maturity 12: Anvil of Dawn (Intro)

Like the first Lands of Lore and Stonekeep, I kind of see Anvil of Dawn as being this last hurrah for an aging sub-genre format, one that wants to promote some smart ideas and level design over breaking the bank to produce a state-of-the-art 3D visual extravaganza. Anvil does deal in rudimentary pre-rendered polygonal graphics, as you'll see below, and its strict adherence to the four-directional format belies a lot of mechanical evolutions to the format that has, surprisingly enough, allowed it to age far more gracefully than its graphics have. I'd be curious to see more of it, but first: a proper introduction.

When I Said That Hangover Cure Thing Earlier, I Think I Meant "Advil of Dawn"

Anvil of Dawn's sort of going for a Hyborian Age angle for its setting, with a lot of well-armored barbarians walking around deserts and some vaguely Asian magic users.The Lord Humongous here is the antagonist of the game, and the avowed enemy of the elusive King Nair.The game has plenty of ugly polygonal art, but I didn't want to sleep on its equally hideous 2D art for its characters. This guy, Master Azariah the Sage, looks particularly gnarly. He's actually a good guy! We think!

Conversing with him is the Lady of the land of Tempest, and was presumably meant to be attractive at one point during development. The two belong to one of the last holdouts of the above warlord, and are debating the last resorts available to them. Which are us! Well, one of these chucklefucks. Like Lands of Lore, you only have the one character, and you have to choose from a group of pre-sets with different stat distributions. However! In Anvil of Dawn, you can pick any of these five goobers and redistribute their stats yourself. You could make Brian Blessed in the middle there a bookish mage, if you wanted.I picked the tall Amazonian in case I needed to pick up something from a high shelf. I kept her stats mostly as-is, though a little more evenly spread around. Anyway, here's what the game's main window looks like. It's like Myst if Myst was about blind interior decorators.I'm not sure if I quite captured it here with this interstitial mid-turn, but Anvil of Dawn had a scrappy idea to recreate the facsimile of a fully 3D world. Instead of Doom/Ultima Underworld's sprite-scaling to create the false impression of 3D, Anvil of Dawn went with pre-rendered environments that have pre-generated animations that occur whenever the player moves around. It can lead to the occasional visual glitching effects when turning, but it's a fairly clever alternative to sprite-scaling, which the developers didn't think looked realistic enough. I'll... maybe decline to comment about how well they pulled that off.

Side-Note: Some UI stuff to bring up, since that was another priority the developers took to heart. The main window of the game is lacking any kind of HUD or side-bar, beyond the character portrait at the top right and the map and compass at the bottom right. Most of the game's menus are found within the character sheet, which can be summoned by clicking the portrait. Likewise, you can get a much bigger view of the map by clicking on its icon. Stuff like the options menu and save/load screens are placed inside the character sheet, to minimize the amount of junk on the screen while playing. Between the pre-rendered graphics and the relatively icon free playing window, the game was deliberately designed to maximize the immersive appeal of first-person dungeon crawlers. It definitely feels distinct among its peers, but I'm not sure they were quite there yet. However, I think the true strengths of the game lie elsewhere, and we'll show those off in just a moment.

I heard you like screenshot captions so I put this screenshot's caption inside the screenshot so you can screenshot while, etc.Something I've missed this month: a quest log! Well, it's more like a diary, but it records all the story-relevant details in case you need to check back. Or if you just want to read a novelization of the game from an in-game character that, honestly, has better things to be doing.The game has a lot of treasure chests, which I'm way on board with. I wondered if this isn't to cut down on the amount of crap lying around, but there's a lot of that too.You're told by a servant boy that you slept in, everyone else has already left, and you're to meet with the Court Magician for some basic magic lessons and the Armorer for a starting weapon. The Court Magician grants you a healing spell - extremely useful, even if I don't have much aptitude with magic - and a single elemental offensive spell. I went with the ice spell, because I've been watching a lot of My Hero Academia and Todoroki is the shit.The Armorer will give you one of four weapons that represent the four types in the game - slashing (swords), thrusting (spears), hacking (axes and choppy things), ranged (never choose ranged in these games, unless picking up all your ammunition after every battle is your idea of a good time). It's important to stick to one type, as you'll slowly go up skill levels through constant use. Ditto for magic.The inventory screen! I waited until I had a weapon to show this off. You don't really have a space concern - there's a lot you can fit in that middle square, plus you'll find sacks and chests to carry stuff later - but there is a hard weight limit which sucks. This is also where they hid the spell book, the journal, the options screen (those sliders), and the save/load disk. Sneaky stuff. The top right button is how you get back to the action.So, here's where Master Azariah, the creepy hobo from earlier, reveals his masterstroke. He had you sleep in late on purpose so he could magic you behind enemy lines while everyone else went out and distracted the big guy. It's just like Lord of the Rings, or the Pokémon anime perhaps. I just hope the rest of my buds are cool fighting and dying for my benefit without realizing it. I'm sure they'll see the funny side.Anyway, his plan involves me stepping through this creepy wobbly blue thing, so away I go I guess. And here I am at Gryphon's Keep, the first dungeon of the game. We're well beyond enemy lines at this point, perfect to figure out how to defeat the warlord's big magical McGuffin whatsit. To be fair, I was skimming most of the story up to now.There's enemies here, naturally. The combat in this game has a clever feature in that the player's attacking speed defines the pace of the fight. This guy will attack me every three or four seconds if you hammer the attack button, but will slow down if you do, allowing you to strategically consider your next move in a sort of tactical real-time. You could also throw careful strategy out of the window and just do the ol' combat waltz: swing, move away before his attack connects, get back in close, swing again, repeat until the enemy dies of frustration.Speaking of which, these guys have some badass death scenes. I hope this is true for all the enemies I'll meet. Nothing like your corpse exploding into a magical skeleton for effect.Hey, you know what they say about a guy with two knives, right? There's no point dual-wielding in this game, incidentally, because you can't attack during a cooldown. Might as well stick with two-handed weapons, or a shield for added defense.For whatever reason, the game tracks all the piles of viscera and bones you've left in your wake. Possibly to help you keep track of how many enemies you've defeated, or if there's an item left on a corpse you missed. It's important enough to get a "dead monster" listing in the key. By the by, the pink "objects" here are fixtures like candelabras or statues, which are counted alongside all the pink objects you *can* pick up. Probably could've used the red icon for that distinction instead of for dead monsters.A lot of the enemies down here carry keys around, almost all of which lead to optional chests. I wonder if in later dungeons you'll get fewer keys than there are places to use them, forcing you to choose the most preferable chests. Gee, I hope not. I like stuff.This seems a tad elaborate. No wonder people are afraid of chains.Lord Gryphon is a prisoner here, and refuses to leave (he's dying, he says). He gives us a signet ring to hand over to his subordinate Parselfal, who should be waiting outside the keep. I dunno, he seems fine to me. I guess one of his boots is missing; that might make it hard to walk out of here.I neglected to show this off with any of the previous chests, but once one runs out of items your cursor changes to this thumb down. I like that the protagonist has the same avaricious priorities that I do.How is a hammer a hacking weapon? Why have two "broad-sided" weapons if they have different damage types? Anyway, this is a quick primer on weapon types in case you already forgot. There's a few of these notes around, and I'm hanging onto them for reasons that aren't apparent.The first floor of Gryphon's Keep is full of traps, unlike the dungeon floor which is where you'd probably need traps to deter escapees? The big rolling rock is a classic staple (sup Sen's Fortress), though apparently these guys can cause game-halting bugs if you're unlucky.This runaway Pink Floyd Laserium special effect patrols a single corridor, and hurts a lot if it hits you. I just let it wander by if I can help it. Maybe give it a little wave as it passes.And then there's this kind of trap. These fire showers just appear randomly while exploring, and you have to get out of the way until they eventually vanish. It'd be nice if I knew where they were coming from - there's no clear indication what causes them.These altars are a curious feature of the game. They can be activated by certain charms you can find while exploring, which are then consumed in the process. The markings on this altar indicate that it's a mana regeneration altar: you can use Yin-Yang items to replenish magic here. Other altars have different symbols for different types of consumables (one that heals, one that builds resistances, etc.). We also found a new spell! I got a whole sentence into this description before realizing I probably need this to fix a bridge somewhere before I can continue the game. I suspect there'll be other spells like this.Anyway, that's Gryphon's Keep, more or less. It's a huge place full of traps and locked doors and chests and enemies. Did I mention it was the first dungeon of the game?And here's what I'm carrying. I've got quite the stack of curatives at the bottom there, as well as a number of weird consumables I'm going to hold onto for the time being. I also found some armor, a helmet, and a shield while exploring, so I'm hoping I'll be a little more durable in the dungeons to come.With the clearly important mending spell in my possession and almost more trash than I can carry, it's time to venture out into the world and see how long I can stay alive in these hostile lands. Sure looks blurry out there.Oh Jeez. This world map. This game's going to take more than a week, isn't it?

Let's end this here, with the completion of the first of what will probably be many more dungeons to come. For as ugly as the game is, there's a lot that appeals about how "back to basics" the game's direction feels. There's some smart ideas for spellcasting - your mana regenerates, but only if you're moving - and combat, and I sort of like the overelaborate level design and ridiculous number of pressure plate puzzles and traps. Even with all the pre-rendered clutter, the huge enemy character sprites and their gory death animations are kinda metal, and I'd like to see more of the game's varied art direction going forward.

I can't make any promises that the game will be completed by the 31st, but that's when the Outro will land and May Maturity wraps up for another year. I should have plenty more to say about Anvil of Dawn by then, I suspect.

< Back to May Maturity