The Summoning

There are games that everyone recognizes as great. There are games which initially bask in the glory of adulation and then, through the passing of time and technology, glide gracefully into obscurity. Then there are the lost ones. Games which never got their due. Games which, though superb, never received any recognition. This column is about one of those games: Event Horizon’s remarkable role-playing game, The Summoning.

Most RPGs focus on either delivering a compelling plot (e.g., Planescape: Torment) or compelling game mechanics (e.g., Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne). The Summoning has neither of these. It is a cookie-cutter heroic escapade (Dare I refer to it as “kill foozle”?) set in a primitive game engine with a usable if somewhat clunky UI. What stands out about the game, though, is its rhythm. The Summoning is not a dungeon crawl, it is a labyrinth crawl. You wander through a maze of levels. Each level is, essentially, a little bundle of puzzles to be solved, with intermittent combat. As you progress through the game, this pattern of alternating combat and puzzles keeps things fresh. Just when you get frustrated with figuring out how to successfully spring traps, a little mindless bloodshed arrives as a break.

More people are probably familiar with Event Horizon’s subsequent “vampire” game Veil of Darkness, which used the same game engine. For my money, though, The Summoning is the stronger game. The combat is Diablo-esque, if it’s fair to apply that label to a game that came before Blizzard’s venerable offering. Your character has separate proficiencies for swords, axes, bows, and pole arms, and likewise for various types of magic skills. Although the game rewards specialization, weapons break after a certain amount of use, so you’ll inevitably become at least somewhat proficient in everything (“Damn it! All I’ve got is this halberd!”).

There are individual game mechanics that are brilliant. The spell system involves stringing together hand gestures to achieve magical effects. The puzzles go beyond the “find the brass key” variant that most RPGs inflict upon you. The citadel in The Summoning has a wonderful physicality and consistency. Pressure plates and traps abound. Some of the best moments in the game involve using one set of deathtraps to finesse another or by using the traps to dispatch particularly powerful enemies. Of the game’s mechanics, there are only two drawbacks. The first is a certain ambiguity on the part of the designers as to whether they want you to prefer the mouse or the keyboard. The second is that the game forces you to engage in a little too much inventory management (compared to the original Baldur’s Gate, the inventory juggling is light weight.)

The game is chock full of non-player characters. While simply written, they give a feeling of coming from a cohesive, somewhat malign and yet amusing universe. NPCs will send you off on hopeless quests to fetch items, murder other NPCs, and otherwise find excuses for you to improve your statistics, but they do it with such style that you’re willing to forgive the game its clichés. It’s not Dostoevsky, but it might at least be Piers Anthony (note: there is no sex with underage chess-playing pleasure-robots in The Summoning, so arguably it is actually better than Piers Anthony).

I have a lot of old floppy disks that I keep jumbled up in a box somewhere for no good reason. They are fossils, utterly pointless and unusable. I keep them out of some misplaced sentimentality, I suspect. Out of all of those hundreds of games, there are only three games whose floppies I actually hold on to so that I can recover them and play them occasionally. One of them is the Lost Treasures of Infocom collection. Another is SSI’s Roadwar 2000. The third is The Summoning.

You can still play The Summoning today. It runs swimmingly in DOSBox on moderately fast computers. The graphics are, of course, primitive by today’s standards, but that’s not such a problem. Given the isometric view, they serve perfectly well. A slightly bigger problem is that in today’s world of finely anti-aliased text, it can be fatiguing to read the blocky text in the game after only a short while. There’s nearly always a copy of the game for sale on eBay or Amazon. It’s worth buying, if you can find it.

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