Welcome to the walkthrough section of my Shadows Over Riva site.
The first half of this game is quite non-linear, and you can visit the first five areas in this guide (Riva City, Boron's Field, the Countryside east
of Riva, the Dwarven Mines, and the Sewers) in any order you like, and go back and forth between them at will. Each of the following six
areas, however, will only be opened to you after a certain quest event has occurred to trigger it.
Truthfully, I didn't enjoy this dungeon very much. You have to keep fighting the boss wizard over and over again, which is dull, and
you can't use the "computer combat" option on almost any of the combats in the tower, so if (like me) you've come to rely on it, you're in for a long
slog of wrestling with the lousy combat interface whether you like it or not. Also, you have to split the party (which is never anything but a pointless
annoyance) and sleeping to recover astral points is a logistical headache, both because there are few safe places to sleep and because the
character who's been separated from the party will start starving if you leave him alone too long, so you'll have to keep switching back to
him to feed him and make him take drinks. Here are some specific notes on this dungeon:
1) Don't bother exploring the swamp the tower is located in. There's nothing in it but sinkhole traps, water you can't swim across no matter how
many times you try, a geyser you can't do anything with, and a bunch of boring fights with swamp rantzies. One encounter with some interesting
(but basically harmless) mosquitoes will happen soon after you enter the swamp, and is unavoidable.
2) When you enter the stables (the first room you can access in the tower complex), be sure to save your game before touching the cages,
as you may want to reload and take a different tack. It does not matter what you say to the servant, though some of his responses are amusing.
3) Explore the garden and tower area thoroughly, and if you get stymied, look for alternate entrances.
4) As soon as you get inside the tower, be sure to save the game again. It doesn't matter what you say to the sorcerer when you meet him, but
you may want to reload and try the other options just for the heck of it, since some of his responses are interesting or funny.
5) You can, in fact, leave inventory items on the wizard's coat rack and return for them later. I'm not sure exactly why you'd want to, but you can.
6) When you have to split your party, leave your weakest character behind at the crank (he or she will miss the entire rest of this adventure.) You
can save yourself later aggravation if you make sure to leave the abandoned character plenty of food and water, but if you forget, there's a barrel of water and
shelves full of food right on the first level for him or her to collect.
7) Save the game before inserting any colored diamonds into keyholes. The clue for this puzzle is either poorly done or poorly translated, and
even if you think you know which gems to insert, you may be wrong; you will lose the chance at accessing some of the hidden statues if
you waste diamonds on wrong guesses.
8) Feel free to destroy the statues; there are no ill effects to this that I could determine.
9) When you get a note mentioning a "fresh breeze," save the game -- you can find yourself in a situation that could cause a lot of frustrating replaying
if you don't have a recent savegame to fall back on.
10) If you find yourself trapped in the library, it's because it's impossible to leave the room while you're carrying any of the books from the shelves.
I don't think there's any way around this, but they're not any use anyway once your mages have read them once.
11) After the (I think) third time you fight the wizard, be sure to examine the pentagram where his body has fallen, as there is a useful item there.
12) The answers to the three riddles on the fourth level are all the same, and only one word is accepted by the game as the correct answer --
which happens NOT to be the most common English name for this object. If you're sure you know what the answer is but the game just keeps
rejecting it, try a synonym.
13) Don't worry about it when the allen key breaks -- this will only happen when it is no longer useful, so you're in no danger of your game becoming
stuck.
14) It's not clear whether the villain you have to fight the next several times is supposed to be the dognapping sorcerer back from the dead again, or a
different wizard who just happens to have been living in the same tower, but either way, he will not stay dead until you finish rearranging the picture over
the altar. Every time you move a certain number of tiles, he will attack you again, so the more efficient you are, the fewer extra fights you will have to
endure.
15) Once you've killed him for good you can finally leave the tower. The main party and the character you left behind will have to exit separately and
reunite outside the tower complex; then they can report back to Haffel and return to town.
After returning to Riva, you'll need to engage in some more plot investigation before you can reach the next stage in the game.
Save before going to meet Malmodir in the Harbour Maid. You will be confronted with several
sudden-death scenarios in the next section, and will lose a lot of inventory items there no matter what you do. You may want to
consider stashing all your herbs in one of the chests in the graveyard, along with any unnecessary heavy items like tools, bedrolls,
and so on. You won't need any unusual equipment where you're going. (You will, mercifully, be able to keep all your magic items.)
In the most pointless annoyance of the game, all your equipment is stolen as soon as you arrive on the pirate ship, and then you immediately get all of
it back, and have to spend 5-10 minutes redistributing it correctly among your characters.
Oddly, once you've accomplished this mundane task, it only takes a few minutes to escape from the pirate ship -- just walk to the westmost of the two ladders
and go up (but save first, because you'll have to navigate a text menu with plenty of instant-death options.) Of course, you can explore the pirate ship
more thoroughly before going up that ladder, but you're just going to have to jettison any loot you pick up at the end anyway, and even though you can kill
any number of these sailors in combat without breaking a sweat, there are several points on the ship where they can "swarm" you and defeat you
automatically, so I found navigating around the ship to be more of a pain than it's worth.
Brace yourself; you're about to have all your equipment stolen again, and not all of it will be given back. I don't know why the RoA games
like deleting all your hard-earned possessions so much, but if it's really going to bother you, save your game before going to the Harbour Maid, reload once
you see which items can't be recovered, and then stash those items someplace safe before going back to the tavern. You may want to stash unnecessary
heavy objects before leaving, too -- otherwise you could end up needing to jettison weight (losing still more stuff.)
Adventure Game Walkthroughs
