In addition to all of this, you sometimes run into one of three enemy types. Except for the final boss, they always appear in pairs. Except for a couple of places, they always appear where you have plenty of room to maneuver around them. Although their movement patterns aren't as predictable as in Dungeon Master, so you can't always settle into a familiar pattern like the "combat waltz," they're slow enough that you can basically run circles around them and attack from the sides and rear. This is important because spellcasting enemies are more than capable of killing some of the weaker party members with a single attack. Because there are no tactics but to avoid them, and because they die fairly quickly, all the character development and equipment acquisition is largely wasted. What difference does it make if your armor class is 35 or 40 if you can't afford to get hit at all?

 

     

In my previous entries, I was content to compare the combat mechanics to Dungeon Master, but I didn't explain any of what that meant. In combat, each character can attack with an equipped weapon (melee or ranged) or cast a spell. Only the front-rank characters can hit with melee weapons. After choosing an action, there's a "cool down" period of a couple of seconds before you can do anything again, but spells and weapons have different cool downs, so if a character is equipped with both, he can attack twice without much delay. As usual, picking up missile weapons after a battle is annoying.

Enemies are confined to their side of the squares they occupy. Characters can only attack enemies on the side that mirrors the character. So if my first and third characters, occupying the left side of the formation, manage to kill the enemy on the left side of the square they're facing, they can't do anything for the rest of the battle. The other two characters have to kill the right-side enemy. You can change the formation, but it's rarely helpful to do so unless you want to change what skills your characters are building.

 

     

Many of the character mechanics are brought over from Arcan, where they were used a bit more extensively, and thus under-utilized here. None of my characters had achieved "Master" rank in any skill by the end of the game, even though I used the first two characters for melee and the second two for spellcasting almost exclusively. (All enemies are fixed, so there's no grinding possible even if it were necessary.) The "Wizard" and "Healer" classes only get one spell each, and neither one that you'd cast with much frequency, making it nearly impossible to level in them. Altogether, I only found seven spells, compared to 10 in Arcan, which is a larger game. Each character, meanwhile, has 13 spell slots. There are 12 spots in the grid that shows active spell effects, but only two spells in this game that put anything in the grid.

 

     

The food and water mechanic also makes little sense. You find plenty of food, and you find a couple of fountains that fill your waterskins and empty jars full of enough water to play nearly the entire game on one visit. Because starvation and thirst aren't a problem, there's no downside to resting to restore health and magic points (which doesn't advance the food/water meter anyway). There's an encumbrance limit, but my characters never hit it despite my never dropping a single item. In short, the engine allows for RPG mechanics that the game doesn't actually use. If it removed enemies entirely, the gameplay experience would hardly change.

I don't mean to sound like I'm lodging nothing but complaints. The game's cleverness occasionally delighted me. There's a fiendish teleporter on Main -1 that activates just as you're about to reach a door. It shifts you about 30 spaces to the southwest to an identical-looking door. The automap kind of ruins it, but it can screw up your manual map if you're not paying attention. There are a couple of spinners in just the right place to confound you. On Main -2, there's a square that activates a couple of shooting fireballs, but only after a delay long enough to let you stroll right into their path. I'm relatively neutral on most of the puzzles just because they're not quite why I play RPGs, but I can see some fans enjoying them.

 

     

As I said, the first four levels of the dungeon are heavily interconnected. When the game begins, you only have five spaces to explore on the main level before you have no choice but to drop through a pit to Main -1. Once there, you have a roughly 7 x 7 area to explore before you have to drop down another pit to Main -2. From there, several isolated stairways go up to Main +1. Your explorations on that level are confined to a central area and a couple of side areas. One of these side areas contains the first of many indecipherable messages: "SIDE | CHILDREN | IT'S ALREADY HERE." You have to drop back down to Main via a pit to continue.

After quite a few hours noodling around on those first levels, but before I'd opened up all of the available wall space (which I expected, since Arcan used every bit of it), a staircase led up to Main +2, which caused me to rant a bit. I think I would have quit if I'd known there were four more after that. Keep in mind that a 38 x 38 level is 1,444 squares, or the size of about three levels (you have to account for the unused space in the "worm tunnel" approach) in Wizardry or five in a Gold Box game. It also takes a lot longer to explore the space in Walls because of all the testing that you have to do. Still, I persevered.

 

     

Main +2 had a large open section with at least seven levers creating different wall configurations. I missed one originally and nearly gave up, but I made a final loop, found the unpulled lever, and opened my way to Main +3, the most linear of the levels, assuming you navigate safely through a section where pits open up the moment you pause on their squares (one of these is necessary to access an optional area of the level below, with some equipment). This level also has the least amount of unused space, which the developers managed at the expense of making a good third of it completely empty, not a single enemy, treasure, or puzzle. Just an alternate fountain for restoring the sustenance you expended while bumping into every stupid wall for over an hour. There's also a small teleporter maze.

I wanted to scream when all of this exploration led me to yet another level, Main +4. Messages at the top of the stairs said, "PLAY NOW MY GAME" and "THEN COME TO THE GOAL," which were perhaps the most coherent messages in the game and gave me hope that the endgame was near. Hah.

The level was similarly linear, though at least it used less space. The centerpiece was a room with four alcoves, each with a silver coin, each protected by an invisible barrier. The four silver coins were needed to open a succession of walls later on. To deactivate the barriers, I had to pull three levers, each of which was in a hidden area revealed with one of those rotating arrow buttons. Oh, and the room with the coins and the room with the rotating arrow button were both revealed by wall buttons.

 

     

When the result of all of this effort was yet another staircase, I came close to despair. But the endgame was close. Main +5 and Main +6 - yes, there was yet another one - both used only about half of the available level space. They also had a couple of new tricks. A couple of easy lever puzzles opened the way to a locked door with a message that read: "WISDOM | IN JUDGEMENT | UNLOCKED THE DOOR." Another sign on an adjacent wall produced no message when I clicked on it.

Back on the main level, a door I hadn't been able to open since the game's first hour had a message that mentioned a Staff of Wisdom. I had found a key on Main +3 called the Key of Knowledge, and I assumed it would finally open that door. This proved to be true when a nearby lever teleported me back to the main level. Behind the locked door, a 1 x 1 space had a niche on three sides, each of which looked like its own copy of the Staff of Wisdom. However, when I took the staff, it disappeared from all three niches. Adding to the mystery, any time either of my rear characters touched the staff, it deducted three hit points from their totals, but the same wasn't true of my two lead characters.

 

     

A nearby lever warped me back to Main +3, and from there I walked back to the locked "wisdom" door. Buck had to help me at this point. The solution was to pretend the Staff of Wisdom was a key and click on the mute sign as if it were a lock. I don't know how he figured that out.

 

     

Beyond that was a corridor in which nearly every square triggered a couple of instant-death fireballs from the opposite end; I had to navigate a series of illusory walls to dodge them.

The game's final major puzzle was a large room with a keyed door and three alcoves in the corners. A rotating arrow button caused a different staircase to appear in each alcove. These four staircases led to four small areas of Main +6. In each case, the stairway closed behind me, and I had to find my way to a door that opened to a central staircase back down. Each of the four areas had a key hidden somewhere. One area made extensive use of illusory walls, another of moveable walls. One had a lever puzzle that confounded both me and Buck until Kalieum solved it: I had to pull a lever once to turn a formerly solid wall into an illusory wall; behind that was a second lever opening the way to the key. The problem was, if you pulled the first lever twice, the illusory wall turned into a wall with a niche. Since all of the other three keys had been found in niches, it made it look as if the fourth key was supposed to be there and it had just bugged out.

 

     

The four keys opened the way to a final area on Main +5. It was a large 14 x 15 area in which some walls in the middle spelled out "THE END." If that wasn't enough, a sign next to the only door out of the place also said, "THE END." There were a few enemies in this area, but nothing difficult.

The last door opened to a 3 x 4 room with a single enemy, presumably the "Bragos" mentioned in a couple of wall messages. He was a spellcaster, with at least twice as many hit points as any other enemy in the game, but he was no faster. Since enemies can only be attacked by characters on their side, two of my characters couldn't materially participate in the final battle.

 

     

The second he was dead, the game flashed to the winning screen at the top of this entry, and that was it.

As I was preparing this entry, I realized there was one lever in the final area (before Bragos) that I hadn't pulled. It opened up a wall space from which six or eight pairs of enemies swarmed out. They would have been legitimately difficult. I would have had to hide among the walls spelling out "THE END," attacking with guerilla tactics, ensuring I didn't get trapped or surrounded. But since there's absolutely no treasures or equipment upgrades in the area that the enemies come from, and you hardly need any more experience or leveling at this point, I consider it a good thing that I ignored the lever.

There's not much else to tell you. We've covered Motelsoft games before; you can learn more about them in my entries on Seven Horror's (1989) and Magic Tower I: Dark Stone Ritual (1992). We will see them at least 16 more times if I make it all the way to 2006. They were very good at analyzing successful elements of major commercial RPGs and replicating at least bits of them, and it's rare for any two of their games to be as similar as Arcan and Walls of Illusion, their final games for the Atari ST. I give Walls a 19 on the GIMLET in comparison to a 23 for Arcan; even though they're the same game mechanically, I thought the original had at least something of a story (good for 1 point) and the RPG elements were a little more meaningful. If you really like those mechanical puzzles, Walls is probably better. Plus, you don't need to translate anything from German (assuming you're not German).

There's an extent to which I've admired the Motelsoft games more than I've really enjoyed them, but I think we're about to see a big leap for the company, judging by screenshots for their 1994-1996 offerings. We'll see them next with Escape from Ragor (1994) or Megrims Rache (1994), which may be the same game. I don't think anyone has ever written anything about Walls of Illusion, but I have several commenters whose ability to search out obscure magazine articles and archived web sites dwarfs my own.