King Krolh and the Divine Sceptre have been taken away by a dark winged creature. Now the Isle of Helherron is in chaos, monsters are raiding the villages, and many feel a curse has fallen over the lands. A party of adventuring heroes is the only hope to restore order and discover the fate of the missing King.
Helherron is an old school top down view Role-Playing Game with tile graphics. Originally released in the early 2000s, the games development went dark for over ten years while the creator spent time as a monk in a Buddhist monastery before returning in 2017 to resurrect the project. The official website and downloads for Windows and Mac are here
and the best source of help is the official Reddit here.
Tropes
- Acceptable Breaks from Reality: Combat takes place on a zoomed in version of the main map. In order to keep battles dynamic, allow for proper manoeuvring and to stop battles becoming boring one on one slugfests, interiors of buildings and caverns are much larger than they appear to be, see Unnecessarily Large Interior below.
- Actually Four Mooks: A single creature sprite on the main maps can represent anything from two creatures to over thirty.
- Annoying Arrows: Played straight and averted - generally your own arrows will do less damage than your melee attacks but can still do a One-Hit Kill. Enemy archers are annoying as hell, come in groups and will happily plink you to death while you try to get to them through enemy fighters and can One-Hit Kill you too.
- Arbitrary Weapon Range: Archers can't fire at enemies in melee range, in fact they can't fire at all if there are enemies next to them - summoning creatures next to archers is a useful strategy due to this.
- Beef Gate: There is an unavoidable battle against three powerful undead on the road to the first main city to stop you going there and acquiring more powerful gear before you've worked your way up to it.note
- Bottomless Magazines: Averted - you'll have to reload your ammo periodically and buy/acquire arrows, bolts etc. as you proceed to avoid being stuck with nothing to fire.
- Breakable Weapons: While your weapons don't break, it's entirely possible for enemy attacks to damage or even destroy your armour. Damaged armour is useless until repaired - either with the Blacksmith skill or in at a blacksmith shop. Destroyed armour is Permanently Missable - having your shiny enchanted plate armour smashed by a Mook is likely to have you reaching for the reload screen.
- Character Class System: Standard Fighters, Mages, Priests and Thieves are augmented by Barbarians, Bards, Merchants, Monks, Rangers and Shamen.
- Class and Level System: All your characters belong to a class and level up with experience points in that class.
- Cloak of Defense: Various cloaks and capes increase protection, defense or both.
- Critical Failure: Your characters can not just miss, they can hit the wrong target, an ally or even themselves with an attack.
- Critical Hit: Aside from inflicting a One-Hit Kill, a critical hit can stun, confuse or cause an enemy to start bleeding to death.
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Demonic Spiders: Oddly, Piranhas, Sharks and Crocodiles. They are fast, hit very hard and as you have to fight them in the water mostly (crocs can be lured onto land) you can't manoeuvre properly or use incapacitating area of effect spells. - Draw Aggro: The main use of summoned creatures. Every attack or spell thrown at them is one less that can kill you and they are good for shutting down enemy archers by proximity.
- Guide Dang It!: The game can be counterintuitive at times - selling items and realising why the town gates are shut are non-obvious and realising that there are two caves to the east of the starting town and the starter dungeon is only two moves away can trip up a first time player.
- Honest Rolls Character: All characters have randomly generated (though re-rollable) stats and skills.
- Knockback: High damage physical attacks can do this, damaging the creature or you further if it hits a wall and damaging any other creature it's knock backed into. If you're not careful, your Squishy Wizard Fairy can be killed by your massive Troll Fighter getting knock backed into them!
- Massive Race Selection: In addition to the standard Humans, Dwarves, Elves and Halflings, characters can also be Golems, Fairies, Lizardmen, Orcs and Trolls.
- Named Weapon: Orcslayer, which does Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
- Nintendo Hard: The game is brutally unforgiving and combined with the single save system, players can expect to have to restart several times while they get to grips with the combat mechanics and party composition.
- One-Hit Kill: Any creature with vital organs can be critically hit in one and die instantly from any attack, but this applies to you as well as enemies.
- One-Hit-Point Wonder: Grid Bugs die instantly if hit by any attack.
- Save-Game Limits: Only one save per party. While you can reload if you die, woe betide you if you save in a bad position.
- Schmuck Bait: Attacking a travelling merchant, unless you are seriously overpowered, is likely to get you killed in short order.
- Shoot the Mage First: Highly recommended if you don't want your party confused, paralyzed, stunned, blinded etc.
- Squishy Wizard: Enemy mages are usually a lot easier to kill. Your own will usually be as the best race for a Mage is Fairy who have poor physical stats.
- Turn-Based Combat: All creatures including each individual party member move in strict turn order.
- Unintentionally Unwinnable: If you accidentally save with overpowered enemies about to engage you, you be stuck in a repeated unwinnable battle where you can't retreat quickly enough from.
- Unknown Item Identification: By default, magic items are not identified and have the description "strange <type>" applied until they are identified. The only reliable source of identification in the early game is certain NPCs in towns who'll identify them for a trivial fee - identify scrolls are too rare and the identify spell is a fifth level priest spell that you are unlikely to be able to find and/or cast until a fair bit later.
- Unnecessarily Large Interior: Combat takes place on a zoomed in view of the main map. This works fine outside, but as soon as you start a fight underground or in a building you end up with absurdities like the doorway to a shop being wide enough to admit six people standing abreast and ludicrously oversized rooms, however it's necessary to make the combat system work, see Acceptable Breaks from Reality above.
- Useless Useful Spell: Damaging area of effect spells such Fireball. They don't do enough damage to take out most enemies in a single hit (aside from Grid Bugs) and reducing the number of attackers by killing one is better than having a group of somewhat damaged ones still active. You are better off using either more damaging single target spells or area of effect spells such as Poison Cloud or Web that can slow, stop or incapacitate enemies.
