Mystic Towers: retro review
Yesterday morning, I was peacefully doing my business on the computer when my sister stormed in with a triumphant expression on her face and a CD in one hand. “Look at what I found!”.
The CD with the green label which she was now waving in front of me was a compilation of PC games from the mid-nineties; an old friend which introduced me to classics such as Duke Nukem II, and many other games whose names had been long forgotten. As I opened the small leaflet that came with the case, I began reading the contents, and stopped at a name.
“Mystic Towers”.
Mystic Towers falls right in the category of the incredibly obscure PC games from the early nineties. It’s kind of amazing how many games were produced in that era and how little we remember of them - I guess it’s the fate of most things that happened in the immediate pre-internet. As such, it should come as no surprise that, except for a few download links and a handful of screenshots, googling this game brings very few interesting results.
Undeservingly so: Mystic Towers is one damn good game.
Mystic Towers
Genre: Adventure
Platform: PC (DOS)
Released in: 1994
Developer: Animation F/X, Apogee (current 3DRealms)
Publisher: Apogee
Mystic Towers’ star is an elderly wizard in retirement by the name of Baron Baldric (”a Baron Baldric game”, reads the subtitle in the intro screen) who is sent on a quest to free the Lazarine Towers from monsters using the magic of his ancestors. Although he’s the good guy, he’s miles away from being an archetypal hero. I mean, among his idle animations we have him picking his nose or scratching his package. And since we’re already talking about it, this must be said: other than having a variety of amusing quirks, he’s also amazingly well animated for the time; in fact, everything that moves in this game does it with style, and what doesn’t is still very pretty to look at - even fifteen years later.
The game’s premise is that, every time Baron Baldric enters a tower, he has to destroy all monsters and the monster generator in each tower in order to collect the red exit key and progress to the next level. There are 12 towers in total; each one of them has 15 monsters living in it distributed through 5 floors with 9 rooms each. Easy enough, one would think. Of course, this is just the top layer underneath which we have an amazing gameplay depth. Although most rooms look very similar to each other, the puzzles they offer are always different. For example, some rooms have teleport panels which, if activated with the proper spell, allow Baron Baldric to jump to another place in the tower. However, the spell itself may not be in the same room as the panel. Another room may have a switch for a door that’s out of reach; you’ll then want to look for an item on which to climb, or alternatively for a Levitate spell. Some rooms have coin-operated machines which will power up your weapons or give you some more to use; others have power-ups such as a magical shield or an invisibility cloak, while others yet are marked by runes that indicate the presence of something hidden in that room.
Another part of the exploration is keeping Baron Baldric alive and in good health. There are three life bars on screen: one health bar that is affected by damage from monsters and traps, one hunger bar and one thirst bar. Were Baron Baldric left without eating or drinking for long enough, his health bar would begin to deplete and he’d eventually die. Of course. Luckily, food and drinks aren’t hard to find; however, there are some you’d better off not touching - picking up a poisonous mushroom will cause instant death. There are also some beverages which will make Baron Baldric drunk and that you may not want to drink if a monster is nearby (if you’re alone, though, go for it - the result will be priceless).
As for the monsters, there are dozens of different creatures to be found. Each monster has its own area which won’t leave and, even before entering its domain, its presence is signaled by a portrait of said monster in the top right corner of the screen. All these warnings are justified by the fact that monsters in Mystic Towers are really more like area bosses, and fighting them consumes a lot of spells and energy; so, if you feel like you aren’t ready to face a monster, you can just walk away. Most early levels monsters can damage the player only when coming close to Baron Baldric; as you progress, you will find more and more monsters with ranged attacks.
On a related note, the designs of the monsters are amazingly creative. For example, look at the little blue guy in the screenshot here. It’s called an Azurblast, and it’s…a duck robot on a wheel? How cute is that?
In spite of the game being very slow-paced, it never comes to the point of being boring, and even though there’s a lot to look for in each room, completing a tower doesn’t take more than 20-30 minutes. It’s kind of amazing, actually - most jprgs turn me off because they’re so slow, and this game manages to keep my interest perked while being slower by several orders of magnitude.
When I first played this game, I thought it had no soundtrack except for the sound effects. Replaying it now, I found out that it does have a soundtrack, so I think it was just my audio card that was not supported. It was either that or the version of the game I had. Whichever my problem, it makes me sad that I couldn’t get to listen to the soundtrack before, because it’s gorgeous. It has only a few pieces, but they are all beautiful. The two exploration themes are especially interesting in which they loop only after 12-13 minutes and have an amazing variety. If you’re curious, the soundtracks are here and the one I like most is this one. If it weren’t for the sound quality, I would have never guessed it was videogame music. It doesn’t sound like something that’s made to be in the background - it goes from slow and atmospheric to fast and intense and has a serious drums line in some parts. Definitely not what you’d expect from videogame music, and especially not from such an old game.
Every game has its flaws, and Mystic Towers isn’t immune from flaws. The biggest one is probably that, after a few towers, the room layouts begins to get repetitive. Not the puzzles, just the graphics. Things get confusing when everything looks alike. In the few reviews I managed to find for this game I’ve also found some criticism towards the fact that fighting monsters is underwhelming and requires no strategy - and it’s true, but I can’t find anything bad in that. I think this game is really more about solving puzzles and exploring the towers than fighting the monsters. That could be just me, though.
Mystic Towers’ greatest charm is its unique feeling. Once you’re acquainted with it, you can’t mistake this game for anything else. It belongs to its own genre. It’s sad that it never left the obscure status - it could have been a classic.
If this is the first time you learn of the existence of this game, go play it now. It can be downloaded here (for free, since so many years have passed) and runs just fine with DOSbox.
Other reads on Mystic Towers (lol, who am I kidding, these are probably ALL of them):
This concludes my review for this game. Now I can stop pretending I’m a srs bzns blogger. No, wait, I’m making a new tag just for this kind of posts.
In any case, goodnight.