Review: The Black Cauldron (game)

Last month I revisited Disney's The Black Cauldron, a rather misbegotten adaptation of Lloyd Alexander's The Chronicles of Prydain (or at least the first two books) which is not without its merits, but certainly not a success either. It did, however, inspire me to track down the tie-in computer game released by Sierra On-Line in 1986.

I played this relentlessly as a child – not quite as often as King’s Quest, the game series that was a formative and intrinsic part of my childhood – but enough so that it brought on intense feelings of nostalgia. I haven’t played any sort of video game released since the mid-nineties, and I don’t think sophisticated graphics will ever appeal to me in the same way the 2-dimensional pixel art of that period does.

SPOILERS

In many ways The Black Cauldron was ahead of its time. One of the first games to be directly inspired by a Disney film, it also included two distinct branches of gameplay based on the player’s choices (leading to Multiple Endings) and the removal of a text parser in favour of function keys (F6 = do, F8 = look, and so on) in order to be more user-friendly for children. These features were innovative at the time, and have since become standard parts of game design.

(However, it also included the infuriatingly tedious requirement for Taran to systematically consume food and drink, with timed warnings that ranged from “your throat is dry” to “you’re gonna die if you don’t drink RIGHT NOW!!!” It’s stressful and irritating, and often leads to no-win situations if you’re robbed of your food and water flask and can’t get back to them in time).

And although the graphics are clearly inspired by the Disney film, from the backdrops to the character design to the musical score, there are still a few indications that designer Al Lowe was familiar with the book series. If you successfully get Hen Wen to the Fair Folk, you’ll be greeted by Gwystyl, a character who appears frequently in Lloyd Alexander’s five books, but never in the film. It’s actually quite heartwarming to discover his inclusion.

The game also came with a manual which… okay, here’s a funny story. I read The Chronicles of Prydain properly when I was about twelve or thirteen years old, and throughout the five books there’s a sustained mystery about who Taran’s parents are. This was especially interesting to me considering I had read the game manual several years before, which spells out in clear detail that Dallben found Taran while he was just an infant in a battlefield strewn with dead bodies – with no indication as to whether he belonged to the nobles or the peasants who died side-by-side.

And it turns out that this answer, casually mentioned in the pages of the game manual, is the backstory Lloyd Alexander provided in the books themselves. So I knew all along the secret of Taran's birth. I’m sure there’s a moral to be found in that anecdote, but I can’t fathom what it might be.

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There are essentially two distinct branches to be found in the game's story, one that cleaves very close to the film, and one that’s essentially a “what if” scenario based on the possibility that Taran actually did everything right. As in the movie, Dallben tasks the young Assistant Pig-Keeper Taran with the protection of the oracular pig Hen Wen, whose magical powers could lead the horrifying Horned King to the Black Cauldron, which has the power to create an army of the undead.

In the opening stretch of gameplay, you can either lose Hen Wen to one of the roaming gwythaints (as in the film) or successfully get her to a Fair Folk way post. In the former case, you then have to reach the Horned King’s Castle in order to rescue her (along with Eilonwy and Fflewddur Fflam in very minimized roles) and in the latter, you’ll be asked to seek out King Eiddileg of the Fair Folk and assist in whatever he asks of you. Either path will eventually take you to the Fair Folk kingdom (situated beneath a lake, though there are different ways to reach it) and the Marshes of Morva, where the three witches may or may not barter for possession of the titular Cauldron. Both will require at least two trips to the Horned King’s Castle…

There are variations throughout – for instance, while on the Golden Path I accidentally went to the witches’ cottage too soon, and had to forfeit the magic mirror to prevent myself from getting turned into a frog. You can defeat the Horned King either by throwing yourself into the Black Cauldron (sometimes circumvented by Gurgi if you’ve given him an apple earlier in the game) or by showing the King his reflection in the magic mirror, which leads to him destroying himself.

There are two ways into the Horned King’s Castle – either through the crocodile-infested moat or by sneaking onto a cart pulled by a henchman across the drawbridge, and multiple ways to access the dungeons (a secret passage through the wine cellar, or by deliberately getting captured and awaiting Elionwy’s rescue). Then there’s the wallet of food that self-replenishes (another Easter egg from the books) and a final multiple-choice ending when the three witches appear and offer you any number of things, from the return of your magic sword, a book of knowledge, a suit of magic armour, or the resurrection of poor Gurgi.

Heck, you can even choose whether to feed Hen Wen gruel from the fireplace or corn from the shed!

And of course, as per any Sierra game, there’s a number of ways in which to die.

***

There was so much more depth and flexibility in narrative than I realized as a young player, though the real reason I made this post was to share some of the graphics. If you follow me on Tumblr you’ll know that I love pixel (or 8-bit) art, and replaying the games from my childhood always makes me appreciate just how creative the artists were, to create so much mood and atmosphere out of such a limited colour palette. It was especially impressive in The Black Cauldron, in which three areas of forestland gameplay are given distinct feels.

First the area surrounding Dallben’s cottage, which is essentially a “safe zone” in which nothing bad will happen to you. The colours are pastel and the trees are white, with pale grass and deep blue water:

Then there’s the deeper forest, where the bark of the trees goes from white to brown – here’s where you meet Gurgi, where the gwythaints roam, and where there’s a slightly more ominous feel:

This is especially prevalent in the following picture, where you’ll notice the strange phenomena in the sky. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what it’s meant to be – rings around the moon? 

But it leads to the dark and scary part of the forest: trees that’re straight out of The Wizard of Oz, with tortured faces and purple bark. Purple bark? It doesn’t matter how strange that is, it works within the context of the game:

You may have noticed a few black trees in there as well; they’re the ones that surround the Marshes of Morva, indicating a danger that’s quite separate from that the Horned King poses…

Just with a simple palette, the game differentiates between several areas of the forest, signaling through its colour scheme just how dangerous they are (or are not). Looking at the edges of the screenshots, you can probably even tell how they'd all be pieced together on a map, as occasionally one of the trees from a different area is glimpsed on the edges of another.

The Fair Folks also have a unique design when it comes to their dome-shaped underground homes:

And the Horned King’s Castle is pure Nightmare Fuel, from the exterior (complete with jagged lightning and circling gwythaints)…

To the sickly green moat…

And the underground dungeons…

Yet even here is a spark of beauty. Though the film completely glossed over it, one of the castles in the book upon which this one is based actually contains the barrow of a long-dead king, and if you find the right secret passage, you can see it for yourself…

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And that’s how I’ve been entertaining myself during lockdown: escaping into the pixelated worlds of my childhood.