Yesterday on Ranking the NES, Jeff Gerstmann played the 8-bit Nintendo version of Hillsfar. I've heard the name, but I never knew what kind of game it was. I assumed it was just another of the 1980's "gold box" D&D games, with the first-person exploration and top-down, tactical battles. I've tried Pool of Radiance and decided those kinds of games aren't for me, although I'm sure they were mind-blowing at the time.
Hillsfar is a different kind of game. It's sort of an RPG-inspired minigame collection. The conceit is, Hillsfar is a police state where no one's allowed to have weapons or use magic. So the only combat is in the arena, and it's a sort of real-time, very very low rent Punch-Out clone. Everything is real-time: as you explore the city, random people come up to you and offer to sell you things. As you're sitting in the pub, random events happen while it waits for you to select an item from the menu. Traveling from one location to another requires playing a real-time minigame where you're riding your horse, jumping over obstacles and ducking attacks from birds and arrows. Calling it a "minigame collection" is a little reductive, but it's not too far off the mark.
It's a weird game, especially the NES version. It ranked 555/584 so far. I tried playing it, and that's an accurate ranking. Everything about it feels terrible to play. And yet...
The main loop of Hillsfar is a formula I really enjoy: guild quests. Whatever class you pick, your first task is to find your guild, join, and start doing small quests for them to make money and increase your rank. I love that tight loop of small tasks. That's what makes Daggerfall and Shadowrun so replayable. Since Hillsfar resembles one of those, I thought I'd give the DOS version a try and see if it controls any better.
It does, so much better that it's a completely different game. It still doesn't have smooth animation (except the horse riding) but the controls are responsive and the tile-based movement is extremely snappy. I rolled up a halfling thief named Bilby, and set out to earn my fortune.
How do you get to the city? Well, if you see the hills, you've gone too far
The main activity of the game so far is exploring top-down pseudo-random dungeons looking for loot.
Treasure chests are scattered all over the dungeon. But some of them are locked. When you play as a cleric or fighter, there's not much you can do about locks except try to force them with brute strength. But when you're a thief, you have access to lockpicks, and I actually find the lockpicking minigame kinda fun.
Locks have somewhere between 4-7 tumblers. You have to match the lockpick to the tumbler. Lockpicks are 2-sided, so you can press space to flip to the other side. You press enter to insert a pick. They can sometimes get jammed, in which case you have to press enter multiple times. But you can't mash it, because you may accidentally use it on the next tumbler. If you use the incorrect pick for a tumbler, sometimes nothing happens, but you have a chance of breaking it or triggering a trap. It seems simple, but finding the right pick when some of them are upside-down can be tricky, especially when you're on a timer.
The whole dungeon is also on a timer: at some point, the exit will appear and guards will show up to start chasing you. Once you reach the exit, you escape the dungeon with whatever gold and items you found (and whatever damage you took from traps.)
It's at this point that the fun stops, because there's nothing to spend gold on but consumable items. You can buy rings of knock that will automatically open a locked door or chest for 250; potions of healing that you can carry with you for 250; you can have "cure critical wounds" cast on you for 500; and you can pay 12-20gp apiece at the thieves' guild to replace any lockpicks you may have broken. As far as I can tell, there's no way to level up or buy items that permanently improve your situation. I wasn't being cheeky when I said the game's only "RPG-inspired": there doesn't seem to be any RPG at all in this Dungeons and Dragons game. It's all smoke and mirrors.
Also, each guild only has three quests to complete. I'm stuck on the second thief's quest, so I looked in the hint book (PDF included with the GOG version of the game). It says I need to explore the sewers in the northwest part of town, and the quest item I need will be in the 5th locked chest. Well, I've unlocked 5 chests and I'm not finding the quest item I need, so I guess I'm done with Hillsfar.
I'm looking at the rest of the quests I completed and it doesn't seem like they change at all from game to game. The first quest item is in the first chest you open in any sewer. The second quest item is in the second chest you open in the hermit's den. The third quest item is in the first locked chest you open in any sewer. Et cetera. So it's really nothing like Shadowrun or Daggerfall at all. It's just a bad adventure game with some minigames that range from bad to okay; but the okay minigames are pointless, it's easy to get stuck and even the walkthrough provided by the developers isn't helping me make progress. So I'm gonna give this one an NG and move on. Sorry, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons computer product, I hope we can still be friends.