Games Convention 2002: Mistmare

Myrthos, 2002-09-04

Mistmare starts in the year 1996 in Europe. However the world is different than we know it. In an alternative timeline there has been no industrial revolution, there are no cars or mobile phones and there is magic. The world is in turmoil and large parts of the continent are covered in thick mist with magical properties that forbids the passage through central Europe.
You play Isador, the inquisitor monk, send out by the church to find a man, who has been deemed by the church to be a murderer and an antichrist.

The Setting
Some 600 years earlier a fog started to spread over Europe, destroying the minds of anyone who dares to enter it. The fog has claimed the lives of millions and pushed the civilization to the southern lands of the continent. The Holy Roman state, the only surviving state in the southern part of the continent, has been unable to fight the fog, although it has been practicing powerful and useful magic for hundreds of years. In the 13th century, the Church has been able to eliminate the plague epidemic using its then-powerful Link towers, a spell-casting mechanism connecting all major European cathedrals, but has been since able only to create a volatile northern border, preventing the Fog to spread to its southern lands.

You take the control over Isador, who has been brought up by the monks and serves now as an inquisitor monk of the church having both knowledge of combat and magic.

The Game
You create your character by choosing from a variety of options. Your character attributes are determined by three spheres: Lunar, Solar and Terran and a spiritual and corporeal aspect. From them the usual statistics are derived, such as health, strength, intelligence, concentration, willpower and agility. Besides that your character also will have an alignment that is influenced by the actions it takes. But it also has an influence on which type of spells you can use most effectively.

The game uses a skill-based system, that is divided into three groups; combat, passive and adventuring. When using a skill a character gets better in it. The more difficult the situation, the more the skill proficiency increases. Skills also have a level which can only be increased by finding a teacher or a proper book. Where combat skills improve your fighting abilities and passive skills increases abilities such as defense and stealth, the adventuring skills are the skills that will get you through most of the quests.

Mistmare uses a system of time management. Each episode in the game has a specified duration and the character needs to finish each episode in the game in a certain time period. It will be no longer possible to take those quests that would exceed this time period. Although it adds some extra pressure and might improve the gameplay because of that, it sure does not benefit the explorer who likes to try out everything there is.

Character improvement is not triggered by experience points but is defined at certain points in the script. At that time it's possible to learn new skills, improve current skills or improve the character attributes by changing the affinities towards the 3 spheres or learn new spells.
Everything has it's price, but not everything has the same price. Some things will cost you time, others money or objects and some only occur because of certain scripted conditions. Sometimes, more than one choice is available to the character, of which only one may be taken. So basically your character improvement is completely handled in-game and by interacting with other characters or objects in the game.

Magic
There are two realms of magic; the realm of liturgy and the realm of alchemy. Liturgical magic influences living matter and is directed by sound and as such requires a study of chords, where each chord contains elements of one of the three spheres. The effects of these types of spells will be different when casted empty handed or when they are cast while wearing a weapon. The realm of liturgy is divided into harmony and shriek spells. Those with a lawful alignment will find the first one most attractive, those with a chaotic alignment the second one. Harmony contains spells that influence the corporal or spiritual abilities of characters or improve your defense, whereas the shriek spells will do the opposite.
To cast a spell one needs an object that creates the appropriate sound, such as church bells.

The realm of alchemy affects dead matter and is made up out of different formulas. Combining formulas in certain way will give you a spell. To cast it a reagent is required, which also determines the effect and the power of it. The different reagents with the different formulas should make for a lot of different spells that can be used.

Combat
There are two types of combat available, combat inside the fog (nightmare) and outside the fog (normal). The difference between them is that in the nightmare mode, damage is inflicted to the concentration of a character (influences spell casting), whereas the second influences its health.

Winning a combat situation will improve your character depending on the combat mode. In nightmare mode, the spiritual parameters are increased (intelligence, concentration, willpower), whereas in normal mode the corporeal parameters (strength, health, stamina) are increased. Loosing on the other hand will result in the character running away. In nightmare mode, the character looses its marbles and runs off to somewhere to heal. In normal mode, the character limps of to a safe place. Loosing a battle will cost you one day from the available time pool.

There are no team members that fight with you, but with the harvesting skill you can catch nightmare creatures and set them loose later to aid you in combat. This will fail more often than it succeeds and requires you to be rather skilful to have a decent amount of success. Of course when you fail then the creature will be aware of you and attack you.
Trapping these creatures will cost you some time from the total available time.

Some final comments
Mistmare is using the 3D Lithtech engine with which they created a slightly dark atmosphere. Even though the graphics looked good, there wasn't much extra's in the scenes. The rooms looked rather empty, but then again half of the time I was in some kind of monastery and they are probably used to living without a lot of stuff.

The camera can be controlled in three ways. You can rotate the character around the character and fix it in that position and you can move the camera from a birds-eye view to a ground view, where the camera hovers right above the ground. There were however only a few positions to which the camera could be fixed in this direction. Somehow when I was inside I never found the proper one. Outside I did not have any troubles with it though. Besides this the camera can also be zoomed in or zoomed out.

The controls are rather simple, you walk by right clicking somewhere and actions take place by left clicking. Combat is initiated by clicking on an enemy or by getting close enough to it. Depending on your combat skills you will have certain moves that you can use to defeat the opponents, each of these moves is animated differently.
Clicking on crates and such will give you it's contents when there they contain something. However none of them ever opened. This is both good and bad. It's unrealistic, which is bad but from my experience in other games, watching containers open and close is only funny in the beginning. After a while it's becoming tedious.

I played only briefly and it was a beta of the demo if I understood it correctly. The game looked nice and the time I spend with it was to short to get a real feeling for it of course, but if they managed to implement the character and skill building properly and deliver a story that is as compelling as it reads then it would really be a game to look forward to.