Curate of Curiosities

Previously, we have seen Tobias Cornwall's earliest flash games. As you would expect, not even one of them was even close to a finished state. But that all changed come late 2005, when he started publishing more serious projects.

One of these was Super Mega Extreme Cyber Ortek Flier 2005 X. As its long, unwieldy title indicates, it is the successor to Cornwall's very first flash game, but despite being technically unfinished, it's far more fleshed out than its precursor.

Not only is the gameplay more in-depth and polished, but Cornwall actually went to the trouble of developing an actual setting and lore. Sure, it sounds like something that was thought up by a 12-year-old, but it's something.

The other one is Deliverance, released the same year. Not only was it his most extensive project so far, but it also served as the prototype to Mardek. In fact, a lot of Mardek's programming used this game as a base.

Like some of the games I've covered before, you can allocate your character's stats. The game recommends that you put points into vitality.

And so the game begins. You are Kiernan (or Yoana, if you selected a female character), a crew member on the Marauder, a space-faring vessel, on a journey to obtain a cure for your sick emperor, hence the subtitle, To Heal a God.

From this, you can already tell two things; one, that, despite having actual polish, it's still in a very unfinished state, and two, that he was still fond of this brand of irreverent, fourth wall breaking humor.

Of course, this doesn't mean that this game can't attempt a more serious plotline, as clumsily written as it is.

The starting premise is, the staff of the Marauder has found an energy signal on a nearby planet, and it is your job to investigate it to see if we can find the cure.

You'd better get used to this forest tileset. We'll be seeing it a lot in this game.

Of course, this will be the first time that you'll face a random encounter. There's not a lot I can say about the combat right now; it's typical turn-based fare. Just shoot the baddies with your rayguns, and heal up with your medkits. But here we run into one of the biggest problems with this game: the fact that the really low resolution makes the UI text nearly illegible. I'm sure this wasn't much of a problem back in 2005, when computers weren't as powerful, but now, not only does the game window take up a tiny fraction of my screen, but I have to strain my eyes just to make sense of the UI.

You go into some ancient ruins, fight a dragon, you know, the usual RPG stuff.

While I doubt that this will lead to the cure these guys are looking for, I don't see any harm in checking it out.

...I have no idea what's going on here. Who are these bug things? What are they doing here? Will they ever show up again?

For the record, I did not skip anything here. This happens right after that weird scene with the bugs.

Oh hell no, we woke up in that Rise of Yalortism thing! I'm pretty sure this is the exact same map!

Villageville? Of all the names you could give to the Typical RPG Starting Town, you went with Villageville? This is the kind of thing where you're not sure if this is a parody or not.

Yeah, this guy was really pushing this Yalort stuff, wasn't he?

Sadly, your fancy sci-fi rayguns, grenades, and medkits are gone, and in their place is a really crappy dagger and some potions made of God knows what.

Villageville is not very far from the monastery.

There's two unique mechanics that are introduced in this town that i have not seen in any of his other games.

The first is the weapon forge. You can buy weapon parts from blacksmiths, and use them to make weapons at a forge. For the time being, you would be better off buying ready-made weapons at item shops.

The other one is the spell forge, which does the same thing but for magic. However, you need to use a soul, which is very hard to come by.

The mage who teaches you how to use it gives you a soul stone that you can attach to your weapons to give them the ability to steal enemies' souls, but there are a few problems with that:

1. None of the weapons that we can forge at the moment allow us to attach anything to them,
2. Neither do they do a lot of damage to the enemies, so you probably won't be using them to kill enemies anyway.
3. Even if you do, the drop rate for them is incredibly low, so in the end, it's simply not worth the effort.

So, regarding Kiernan's companions, this guy at the inn claims that whatever accident caused you to wake up at the monastery also spirited them away. He says that he saw something fly off to the east of the village, so that's where we're headed.

The only major landmark that's east of the village (besides the monasteery of course) is this cave.

You fight a boss here, and here we encounter another of this game's problems. It's rather hard to see from the screenshot above but the boss has 200 HP. Doesn't seem so bad, right, especially given that the first boss we fought had 1000 HP? Even if you give both party members the best weapons available, you'll find yourselves barely able to scratch it.

That leaves magic as your only reliable means of dealing damage.

Remember Rise of Yalortism? This chapter has precisely the same setup as that game; you need to become a member of the cult to gain passage through the swamp to the north.

The objective of this chapter is to retrieve a crystal from the depths of a cavern directly south of the monastery.

You go inside, fight some sort of zombie priest, and come back out.

How many RPGs can you think of where you have to get roped into a religious sect in order to proceed?

Anyway, it's with this chapter that things finally get sort of interesting.

You play as Kerah, one of Kiernan's companions that got separated from him after the incident at the ruins.

And, like Kiernan, she starts her chapter with a really crappy dagger. She doesn't even get potions until a bit later.

She is almost immediately thrown into a boss fight, still armed with said dagger.

Also like Kiernan, she wakes up among the native inhabitants, though this time, they're lizardfolk with annoying to pronounce names.

Naturally, she feels the urge to leave these scaly freaks and make her way back to the surface, but there's a huge lake of lava blocking the way.

Between this cameo and the cyber dragon from earlier, the creator sure had a thing for lizards, didn't he?

You know, pointing out how derivative your quests are doesn't make them any less so. We all know that you're ripping off Final Fantasy, no need to call attention to it like this.

On the way to the temple, she meets up with Tattoo, who has his own reasons for wanting to get to the Earth Temple.

In the temple, there are four minibosses which take the form of...trees. I guess it fits thematically, but seriously, could he have at least tried to make them more imposing?

There's a boss fight with the temple guardian, and here was the first major brick wall of my playthrough. It has more than a thousand HP, and sky-high physical defence, so physical attacks are right out. Along the way, I picked up a spell that drains HP, but it doesn't do a lot of damage, plus both my characters ran out of MP well before I could defeat the boss.

I had to backtrack out of the temple, and through the cave back to town, just to pick up a spell that the boss was weak to. Needless to say, it was a long, long walk.

But eventually, I was able to claim the Earth Crystal, which gives us the power to walk over lava.

I can't remember if there are any other RPGs that I've played where getting plot items like these gives you abilities to use on the overworld.

With that, we can safely cross the lava field to the west of town, then say goodbye to Tattoo to finish the chapter.

Good thing there's a nearby village, with a boat no less!

And we're back to Kiernan and the other guy. Now that we've joined the Yalort cult, we're allowed passage through the swamp north of the monastery.

Right at the exit of the swamp is a town. As you would have expected from the title of the chapter, it's full to the brim with zombies.

At least now, we finally have a third party member. Unlike Peregrine, this one's basically a pure mage. More to the point, she has skills that are effective against the zombie horde.

And then there's a miniboss, who was the second brick wall. Since the town is being overrun by zombies, I have to go all the way back through the swamp and back to Villageville to stock up. Even then, that wasn't enough to stop him from just randomly one-shotting my party members.

If that wasn't bad enough, right afterwards, you fight Tattoo, who turns out to be the necromancer responsible for the zombie plague. This is why he couldn't come to the surface with Kerah, just so you know.

The objective of this chapter is of course, to claim the Wind Crystal, so we can use it to fly to the town where Kerah was last seen.

You go through a nearby forest, where you run into another village of nonhumans, one of whom joins your party. Hopefully this one won't try to start a zombie apocalypse.

Unfortunately, we can only have three party members at a time, so we need to leave someone behind. Peregrine over here seems to be the least magically inclined of the party, so he stays here with the talking wolves.

Like last time, you go through a cave, enter the temple, fight four minibosses (which, at least, are more imposing than talking trees)

I didn't take any screenshots of this area, but I believe that the Wind Temple might be the single worst designed area in this game. It's only a single floor, but it almost entirely consists of these single tile corridors that twist and turn in an attempt to fill all the available space on the map. A good half of them lead to dead ends, to boot!

And here's the last brick wall. Like most of the bosses in this game, the wind guardian can only be reliably damaged with magic. Unfortunately, the wolf village in the forest doesn't sell magic tomes. You know what that means? I have to backtrack through two separate dungeons to get my party properly stocked up! At least it's less likely to pull out the random one-shots.

Now that we have the Wind Crystal, we can just fly over the dull, poorly designed dungeons and swamps and just go straight to the only town on this continent we haven't visited yet.

Normally, we'd take a boat, but Kerah took the last one. Good thing we can fly now.

You enter Charleston, like the chief said, and the only thing you find is the creator's avatar, telling you that the game is over.

And that was Deliverance. Like most of Cornwall's early games, I can see why he wouldn't be interested in finishing this game. Between the cringeworthy dialogue, shoddy design, and misguided mechanics, there's not much about this game that's worth going back to.