In this recurring feature, guest blogger Matt Morris takes us through the lost, the forgotten, and the overlooked video games of yore. Consider him your guide through all the best and most secret Hidden Levels.
Game: Avernum: Escape from the Pit (2011)
Genre: RPG
Platform: Windows, Mac, iPad
Developer: Spiderweb Software
Publisher: Spiderweb Software
Welcome back, game fans. Today I ask you to think back to a time many years ago, a time long-buried, when cozy game distribution platforms like Steam and GOG were but a twinkle in a young lad’s eye. The ancient scrolls tell us of this era—a time when great titans of computer game development wrought mighty slabs of software from magic and dreams, forging floppy disks and CD-ROMs out of sweat and brawn.
It was in this era that “shareware” was born. Long before being “indie” was hip and cool, smaller game developers (in some cases sole individuals) like Spiderweb Software’s Jeff Vogel, developer of Avernum: Escape from the Pit, were honing their craftsmanship in the world of boutique computer games and sharing their handiwork in the form of demos through whatever channels were available at the time—usually demo compilation discs circulated through magazines or in stores.
This is where our discussion of Avernum begins.
What is this game?
Let’s get this bit of information out of the way first—Avernum: Escape from the Pit is a remaster of a remake.
My intro about the unique mixture of whimsy and darkness that was the shareware era wasn’t just thrown in here for fun. Jeff Vogel, the founder and mostly-one-man-band behind Spiderweb Software, wrote a game in 1995 called Exile: Escape from the Pit that made the shareware rounds back in those days, and evidently it was successful enough to give birth to an entire franchise and set him on the path of game development for the following several decades. He remade the game from the ground up in 2000 as Avernum, and then finally remastered it into the form we will discuss today in 2011 with Avernum: Escape from the Pit.
(Trust me, it all sounds a lot more complicated than it really is.)
The game is an RPG in a very traditional sense. You pick and customize a party of four adventurers—people who have been cast down into a massive subterranean world called Avernum by a cruel and spiteful empire. In very traditional role-playing fashion, the backstories and actual roles of these characters are for you to decide, and for that matter, their ultimate goal is not set in stone either. The game can be won by completing any one of three major quests: finding the exit and escaping the subterranean world of Avernum entirely, slaying the surface world’s emperor for revenge, or defeating a legendary demon lord to bring peace and prosperity to Avernum itself. Enterprising players can even endeavor to accomplish all three. The world is your oyster.
If you have played old school computer RPGs, the nuts and bolts of this game would likely seem familiar to you. Visually speaking, the game uses an isometric perspective, and the turn-based combat is handled on a grid using D&D style number crunching to resolve the various melee, ranged, and magical attacks (as well as status effects and the like). Outside of combat, your time is spent exploring the underworld, chatting with locals, doing side quests, and so on.
Where the game differs from many others of its ilk is in the presentation. Avernum uses extremely simplistic graphics by 2011’s standards—nearly simplistic enough to be called icons. Furthermore, the game has no music, choosing instead to fill the soundscape with atmospheric ambiance and stock-quality sound effects. If this all sounds like a shoestring-budget affair to you, well, that’s because it is… by design.
You never know what you’ll find in the underground.
So what makes it so special?
There’s a beauty to the simplicity of Avernum and the many other games that Vogel has written. By eschewing fancy graphics and music, the game is able to focus on offering things like an engaging fantasy story, fun exploration, solid core gameplay, and a satisfying difficulty curve. It’s an approach that is born from necessity—Vogel freely admits in interviews that he is not particularly skilled with things like graphics and sound, so he keeps those elements as simple as possible in order to remain comfortably within his preferred wheelhouse of designing, coding, and writing. It’s a ballsy approach in today’s video game market, to be sure, but over the years he has amassed a loyal group of customers (myself included) who enjoy his games for what they do offer, rather than what they lack, and that seems to have kept his company afloat for a remarkably long time.
Over the course of several dozen hours in the world of Avernum, you encounter imposing dragons, silly talking spiders, and everything in between. The human NPCs littered throughout the world’s myriad towns have a lot to share about their views on Avernum, their backstories, and the problems that plague them. The non-human ones (well, the ones that don’t want to kill you, anyway) provide different perspectives as well. All-in-all, the world never feels shallow despite its humble graphical appearance, and I can safely say I never got bored with exploring its nooks and crannies. In fact, I’m fairly confident I left much of it unexplored entirely even after 50+ hours. There’s a massive amount of content here, so even the most content-hungry gamers can eat their fill at the table.
The core gameplay loop of questing, exploring, and slaying monsters is remarkably satisfying here. The game isn’t doing anything that players familiar with RPGs would be surprised by, but somehow the absence of cruft around the game’s presentation really expedites that hit of RPG crack to your veins. It’s a nutrient rich canister of distilled and concentrated questing, ready to be drained of its delicious nectar within moments of booting it up. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself hopelessly addicted before long.
Never fear, there’s lots of gear. Hear! Hear! Hold my beer!
The game deserves recognition for its generous approach to difficulty as well. Balancing an entire RPG of this size for one difficulty setting is already grueling work for a single person to accomplish, but Avernum goes the extra mile and manages to offer four distinct difficulties that allow the player to tailor the game to their desired experience. Want a game that harshly punishes every wrong move and requires you to think tactically about every button you press? There’s a setting for that. Prefer to cruise through the story and soak up the lore, slaying enemies with aplomb the whole way through? Avernum has you covered. It’s nice to have that kind of accessibility in the historically crunchy “old school CRPG” genre once in a while.
Lastly, it’s worth considering the game through the time-honored lens of authorship. As both a sprawling RPG and the product of a single developer, Avernum is a bit of a rarity in the market. It’s not uncommon to play indie games by single developers, but it is certainly less common for those games to have the kind of scope found here. You could argue that by virtue of his unique dedication to the CRPG genre as an indie dev, Vogel is one of the few true auteurs working in the genre. While he has made no secret of the fact that he looks to his own favorite games for inspiration when writing his stories—he says as much in a recent GDC talk about surviving in the indie business—he sells himself short a little on that point. There are elements of Vogel’s voice and storytelling that are authentically his own, especially when it comes to his offbeat sense of humor. Friendly spiders, for instance, are commonly recurring sources of comedic relief in Vogel’s games, beginning here in the first Avernum and continuing into its many sequels (they’re such a common motif, in fact, that they essentially give Spiderweb Software its name.) In Avernum specifically, the player can discover a secret cave filled with a spider society in which every spider is simply named “Spider.” There is even a side quest involving the spider chieftain… named Spider… who wants to rescue his comrade Spider from the larger, evil-er spiders to the west. This is just one small example, but it exemplifies the wackiness that Vogel likes to imbue into his fantasy worlds. Touches like these give you a real sense of authorial personality in ways that larger AAA CRPGs might not.
Any criticisms?
Like grand-pappy used to say, one man’s solid old school RPG is another man’s low budget cop-out.
The other man is wrong, of course, but it could perhaps be more charitably noted that Avernum and its brethren from Spiderweb Software are not for everyone. You’ve probably noticed from the screenshots I have included here by now, but the game truly is visually simplistic. I am not exaggerating when I say that gamers who put a premium on slick presentation will walk away disappointed. Likewise, the lack of music could be a deal breaker for many.
Keep in mind, though, that even as someone who loves video game soundtracks, it’s not hard to look past these absences to see and appreciate what Avernum does well. It’s just that breaking through that initial reaction can be a bit of a chore at first. We’ve been trained for so long to expect games to dazzle us that games like this are almost a shock to the system.
Here there be dragons.
Why was it overlooked?
Spiderweb Software games tend to fly under the radar in general, likely because “making a splash” simply isn’t in their DNA. You can’t easily grab the attention of the mainstream gamer with a humble game like Avernum in today’s market, but the game does prove you can certainly grab a niche for yourself. Jeff Vogel has been doing it for years, in fact.
(That’s not to say the game was a flop, of course. These are indie games, after all. How often does an indie game find itself in the annals of super-stardom? Not every game can be Undertale.)
This is a game that stands proud and tall as a niche computer game in an old-school format, with barebones presentation. And while that probably means a lot of people have overlooked it, it doesn’t matter at the end of the day.
How can I get a hold of it?
Avernum: Escape from the Pit is available digitally in various places, most commonly on Steam and through Spiderweb Software’s website. There is a rather large demo available on said website which can help you decide if the game is right for you, to boot. You can’t lose!
Final Thoughts
I keep returning to the word “boutique” when I think of Avernum: Escape from the Pit (and indeed, all of Jeff Vogel’s RPGs.) It’s the work of a craftsman who has been at his craft for more than two decades, and it shows. It’s not winning any beauty contests, but what Avernum has going on under the surface is worth celebrating all the same.
In the world of toys, there is obviously a wide spectrum of styles to play with, from humble wooden dolls to hundred-dollar state-of-the-art electronic action figures. If we think of games along these same lines, then doesn’t it make sense in a way that Avernum has something equally valuable to offer to the medium as its flashier contemporaries?
Should we expect every Geppetto to create a Buzz Lightyear? Or is there something inherently valuable about the plain simplicity of Pinocchio?
-Matt