I’ve never encountered Below the Root in the wild. Some of this has to do with the fact that neither the Apple II or the Commodore were very big, here, but a lot more of it has to do with the fact that computers and computer gaming have had a slightly different trajectory where I live and so, this game just flew under the radar.
I first encountered it on the web at about the point where Abandonware started becoming a prominent facet of video game archival, but I’ve never sat down to play it, before now.
Instead, it’s taken almost twenty five years for me to decide, “now’s the time to try this,” and what’s eventually nudged me over the edge was The Trickster’s posts along with an interesting take on the game that’s cemented my interest.
I tend to like games that try things, and here’s a game that doesn’t want you to commit violence at all. I’m all for that.
To get going, I’ve done exactly as the manual suggests: I’ve watched the introduction and the sample quest to get an idea of what I’m in for.
The problem is that the sample quest [a recording of someone else’s game play] seems a TINY bit spoilery, but ah. It’s too late now.
Now, though, I have to make a handful of choices. The first of these is which version I should play. As noted in the title card, there are several releases of the game for different systems. It’s difficult, now, to trace which version is the original [though I strongly suspect it’s likely the Commodore 64 one], but they’re each interesting in their own way. So let’s discuss that first:
- The Apple II version has bleeps and bloops that sound a little like the PC version, but boasts some nice colours. This looks a bit like the composite CGA IBM version and so I think they’re mostly comparable, but…the Apple II version also wants me to disk swap. Annnd hard pass on that.
- The PC version should just be a booter. That is: I would power down my machine, stick the disk in the drive, power on the machine and wait. The version of DOS on the game disk would boot and take me directly to the game. While that’s convenient, and there’s no disk swapping, I also get the WORST looking colours of the lot if I plump for just-CGA. Composite RGB in CGA mode gives me nicer colours but worse text. [And since this is in the era of PC-speaker music, I absolutely get the worst music of the bunch.]
- The Commodore 64 version has OK colours, but it too requires disk swaps. However, the music is [not surprisingly] leagues better than the what I was hearing on either of the other two machines.
In the end, I decide on the PC version. Mainly because someone’s written a version that doesn’t need you to boot into it that also has slightly enhanced save game capabilities.
The next major decision is choosing my Quester
Your quester is [unsurprisingly] the person you’ll be playing throughout the game. They have a small number of scores [mostly to do with stamina and psychic abilities] and they hail from different parts of the game world, which affects where you start out.
These are:
- Neric: Neric starts near the Star Grund, which the manual tells me isn’t very far away from the shops. His starting stats are: Spirit Limit: 5; Stamina 20
- Genaa: Genaa starts in the Grand Grund and has NO spirit skill at all. So: Spirit Limit: 0; Stamina 20
- Pomma: She starts out in Sky-Grund. Her stats are: Spirit Limit: 10; Stamina: 10
- Charn: The manual goes out of it’s way to note that Charn “can pense emotions but not messages.” I’m not sure what that means. Either way, he starts out in the Silk Grund. His stats are: Spirit Limit: 5, Stamina 15.
- Herd: Herd lives in Broad Grund, though he started off life “below the root.” Like Charn, he “can pense emotions but not messages.” The manual also mentions that he’s “very rational.” His stat line is: Spirit Limit: 5; Stamina: 20.
A few odd things to note: the first three characters are all Kindar – one of the races in the game. The manual also mentions that Pomma is Raamo’s sister – my understanding of this is that Raamo was the main character in the books, and thus, you’d be “continuing the thread of the books” if you were to play them. [Which makes sense. The internet suggests that one of the reasons the game came to be at all was to retcon the ending of the final Green-Sky book.] The same is also true of Neric, who was evidently Raamo’s friend and companion throughout the Green-Sky trilogy. The final couple of characters are both Erdlings.
From what little I’ve read [because I’ve never read the books], it seems to me that the Kindar and Erdling were once the same race, but something happened and they split apart. With this split, the one half of the race developed psychic powers [pensing], while the other sort of did, but also kind of didn’t.
I also find it interesting that in choosing your character, you’re choosing your difficulty. I will intentionally be choosing Neric to start, but I’m hoping that once I understand the game a little bit better, I’ll swap over to Genaa for the full experience.
In the next post, we’ll talk about some actual game play!