The Dark Heart of Ukruul Retrospective Interview

RPG Codex offers a new retrospective interview on The Dark Heart of Ukruul with designers Ian Boswell and Martin Buis. If you need a refresher, you can watch/read our RPG spotlight on the game here.

Dark Heart of Uukrul is widely considered one of the most challenging CRPGs out there. Was it your intention right from the start to create an expert level scenario? What prompted that decision, and why the emphasis on puzzles?

Ian Boswell: I didn’t realize it was considered one of the most challenging. But that’s nice to know because we did set out to make the game memorable, and the things the player remembers most are solving challenges, not hacking up monsters. It’s the puzzles and the plot that people remember. Both Martin and I were fond of puzzles and intellectual challenges, so we imbedded some of our favourites into the game, and created new ones of our own. The very best puzzles, I find, are ones where you see the pieces, but the (big picture) is hidden from view until you put the pieces together the right way, and then the logic dawns on you and everything makes sense.

Martin Buis: One of the design points we really wanted to get across was that dying was a really big deal in Uukrul, and that this would drive combat and exploring to be more emotionally charged and encourage times when the player would be aggressive and times when the player would be cautious. This meant that there had to be consequences to death, and even some fatal traps that you couldn’t escape. We were loathe to allow backups and reincarnation as these would weaken that feeling. Playing the game, and reading walk-throughs, I’m pleased that this aspect of the game comes through.

We both enjoyed puzzles a lot, and that was a big differentiator for how we thought about the game. A lot of the pleasure in games is about learning the rules of the game, and then discovering how to exploit them. So we tried to incorporate that at all levels of the gameplay. There are little puzzles, like how to explore an area, puzzles with longer arcs, like how priests work, and the overall game story. For the harder puzzles we worked to ensure that there were multiple solutions, so that you didn’t always need to solve them intellectually.

One of the most famous and ingenious puzzles in Dark Heart of Uukrul is the crossword puzzle. Who came up with the idea and how tricky was it to implement it?

Ian Boswell: That was me. I’ve always liked cryptic crosswords, the sort where each clue is a little puzzle in its own right, words which look like nonsense until you read them the right way. Coincidentally, a crossword grid can look like passages crossing each other in a dungeon map. So I decided to design a region where the passages formed a crossword, and build a multi-layered puzzle around that.

If we had just said (now here’s a crossword puzzle you have to solve), it wouldn’t be special. Instead, without knowing what’s going on, you find your party walking around these passages that don’t appear to go anywhere, each passage contains a nonsense message, maybe you draw a map and notice that it’s symmetric, it looks a bit like. and the penny drops and you realize you’re walking around inside a crossword puzzle. I think it’s that very moment that players remember, more than anything else in the game. Then you’ve still got to solve the crossword clues, figure out what to do with the answers (they open secret doors), and work out how to use the strange information revealed behind those secret doors.