Below the Root is an adventure game released
in 1984 by Windham Classics, a division of
Spinnaker Software.
It is titled after Below the Root, the first
of the Green Sky Trilogy of novels, written
by Zilpha Keatley Snyder and published between
1975 and 1977.
It is an early example of what later became
known as the Metroidvania genre.The player
can assume the role of one of five characters
with different abilities, a member of one
of two races — the Kindar or the Erdling
— and attempt to settle the existing differences
between the two groups.
== History ==
The game was based on a series of books by
Zilpha Keatley Snyder.
Explaining how the game came about, she wrote:
"Like so many of my books, the trilogy's deepest
root goes back to my early childhood when
I played a game that involved crossing a grove
of oak trees by climbing from tree to tree,
because something incredibly dangerous lived
"below the root."
Years later when I was writing The Changeling
I recalled the game, and in the course of
embellishing it for that story, became intrigued
with the idea of returning to the world of
Green-sky for a longer stay.
The return trip took three years and produced
three more books.
Initially published in 1975, 1976, and 1977,
the trilogy was later reincarnated as a computer
game (published by Spinnaker Software of Cambridge,
MA).The computer game transpired when I was
contacted by a young computer programmer named
Dale Disharoon.
After Dale introduced me to the world of computer
games, I wrote and charted, Dale programmed,
and a young artist named Bill Groetzinger
made marvelous graphics for a game that takes
off from where the third book of the trilogy
ends."
The original world of Green-sky first appeared
in Snyder's novel The Changeling, where it
was a fantasy world conceived by two schoolgirls.
As such, it featured princes and princesses,
wicked queens and familiar fairytale situations.
However, many of the details appeared in the
later novels.
Green-sky as the girls imagined it is a low-gravity
planet whose residents live in "softly rocking"
houses built in the branches of enormous trees
and "glide like blowing leaves" between the
branches; "nothing was ever killed under the
green sky" and the people live on a wide variety
of fruits and nuts; they have brightly colored
monkeys and songbirds for pets.
Their skin is pale green, and their hair is
darker green, often blossoming naturally into
flowers.
Below the ground live creatures of unspeakable
evil, which must not be allowed to penetrate
into the upper world.
== Premise ==
The Kindar of Green-sky were a utopian and
strictly pacifistic society, ruled by leaders
known as the Ol-zhaan, whom the average Kindar
believed to be godlike.
"Unjoyful" emotions like anger and sorrow
were banned, and kept under strict control
by a system of meditation, chant and ritual,
accompanied by the use of narcotic berries
(which some people, including little children,
overuse).
The people were vegetarians, although they
did eat eggs, and kept brightly colored monkeys,
songbirds and occasionally small tree bears
as pets.
The books establish them as descendants of
European Caucasians, orphans who fled Earth
due to war.
Supporting this, many of the "alien" terms,
such as "sima" for tree-monkey, "grund" for
tree, and D'ol being a corrupted form of "Doctor,"
are clearly rooted in Latin, German, or French.
Infants were born with paranormal powers,
which should be retained into adulthood, but
were disappearing earlier with each successive
generation.
The people lived in fear of the forest floor
and the pash-shan, legendary monsters said
to stalk below the roots of their magnificent
tree-cities.
In the books, a novice Ol-zhaan named Raamo
and his friend Neric (one of the game's playable
characters) set out to discover if the monsters
truly exist.
What they found were the Erdlings, a dark-skinned
race made up of exiled Kindar dissidents and
their descendants.
Where the Kindar live their whole lives in
the shade, the Erdlings seek places where
the sun penetrates the caverns.
They have been living in the caverns and subsisting
on plants, mushrooms and the occasional unwary
rabbit (lapan) or ground bird, plus fallen
fruits from the Kindar orchards.
They are superb craftsmen, metalworkers and
jewelers; they have fire, which is unknown
in Green-sky, and transport people and supplies
by railway, using steam propulsion.
They have no taboos against anger, sadness
or other "unjoyful" emotions, and (possibly
as a result) appear to have retained much
more of their psychic powers than have the
Kindar.
Their discovery shakes the very foundation
of Green-sky's social order.
The Erdlings are released from their exile
and the Ol-zhaan disbanded, but reconciling
the two societies takes a long time.
An unnamed society of disgruntled Ol-zhaan
(called Salite in the game) and the Nekom,
vengeance-seeking Erdlings, began patrolling
the branch-paths and causing unrest.
Furthermore, Raamo himself apparently perished,
silencing a voice for tolerance and unity.
In the game's manual, you are told that the
wise old woman (and former Ol-zhaan high priestess)
D'ol Falla has a vision, in which she heard
these words: "The Spirit fades, in Darkness
lying.
A quest proclaim - the Light is dying."
Your character (one of five from the series)
then begins the game looking for clues to
the meaning of D'ol Falla's vision in hopes
of restoring peace to both nations.
== Gameplay features ==
This game was highly ambitious and had many
subtle and clever details woven into its universe.
First of all were the social norms of Green-Sky.
Theft and violence were alien concepts to
most of the books' characters.
Therefore, one could not (as is common with
adventure games) simply walk into a room and
pocket an unattended object.
One had to find the owner of the object and
ask permission, buy the object with money
(called tokens) in a shop, or locate the object
in a public area.
In the books, the Kindar economy was a moneyless
quasi-communism; it was the Erdlings who used
tokens and were used to being able to buy
whatever they could afford.Particularly interesting
was the extremely low level of violence in
the game.
The player could be hurt only by falling,
coming into contact with snakes or tree spiders
(invented for the game), or walking into walls.
These incidents merely resulted in a jarring
"bump" sound effect and an animation of the
character crouching and rubbing their head,
as if recovering from a nasty knock, rather
than any gruesome or graphic injury.
The worst that could happen would be your
shuba tearing, so that you could no longer
glide until you obtained a new one.
Even the occasional adversary did not hurt
one's character grievously, although one did
slowly lose health points and game time, and
might find oneself sent back to one's nid-place
(house) with an ominous notice that "you were
found unconscious."
Alternately, your character could be kidnapped
and held prisoner by the racist factions of
the Salite or Nekom in one of the two "prison
houses" in the game.
A player with no other way to escape these
prisons (or who found themselves otherwise
trapped) could "renew", which was essentially
a process of slipping briefly into a sort
of recuperative coma, which resulted, as with
the loss of all health points, in a loss of
game time and the character returning to their
nid-place (again, assuring that the character
could never actually die during the game).
In the Nekom "prison house," you could find
a machete (called a "wand of Befal" after
Axon Befal, the Erdling faction's leader),
but its primary use was to cut thick vegetation.
If you killed people with this blade, there
were serious, permanent penalties to your
abilities.
Taking lives would essentially make the game
unwinnable, which is consistent with the themes
expressed in the original story.
It was among the first games that offered
a choice of multiple protagonists, as well
as a choice of gender, age, race, and beginning
level of psychic powers (referred to as "Spirit-skills").
Furthermore, people treated the characters
differently based on your choice of avatar.
A child character could be invited to play.
Erdling characters could be given a chilly
reception at some Kindar houses and vice versa.
Consistent with the books, these people were
portrayed as being opposed to any alliances
between the two cultures, and thus had to
be avoided whenever possible.
Pensing to read thoughts and emotions when
encountering a stranger provided clues to
their attitudes and distinguished friend from
foe.
While the game's technology limited the extent
of these features, they were certainly present.
Another interesting detail is that the vegetarian
Kindar characters did not get much nutrition
out of eating meat, and temporarily lost psychic
abilities.
Likewise, the narcotic Wissenberries were
somewhat more health-damaging to Erdling characters.
In the books, Kindar — even children — often
used the berries in rituals and ceremony,
as well as recreationally, and for relief
of physical and emotional pain.Most of the
gameplay focused on the challenges of getting
the character to move around the game world.
Various objects in the game were used for
this.
Of primary importance was the shuba, a flying-squirrel-like
garment which allows the character to glide
diagonally instead of falling, and also prevented
the character from being hurt by falls.
Along the way, one learns a variety of "Spirit
skills" or psychic abilities of progressive
difficulty.
The Spirit-skills, which included telepathy
(called "pensing"), telekinesis (called "kiniporting")
and the ability to make tree branches grow
to create temporary bridges across impassible
gaps ("grunspreking") are the key to making
progress in the game world and achieving the
ultimate goal.
Communicating with animals as well as people
through telepathy is vital to enhancing the
character's Spirit-skills.
The graphics were exquisitely colored, highly
advanced for the time.
Users have described the deeply evocative
and compelling qualities of the images as
being one of the main reasons they kept playing.
Snyder's husband Larry wrote a number of bell-like
musical phrases very much in the style of
the choral chant important to both cultures
as described in the books.
As in today's games, these pieces are heard
when an important discovery is made or the
player gains important skills or advances.
The game is a direct sequel to the books,
and is meant by the author to be taken as
canon.
It originated in Snyder's realization that
one of her final plot elements had been a
huge mistake.
She was being flooded with mail from adults
and children, but could not see any way to
change the ending now that the book was on
the market.
In addition, she had believed the event she
described to be necessary to the ultimate
resolution of the plot.
Introduced to the concept of computer games,
Snyder saw a way to redeem the situation while
keeping and even advancing the original plot.
The object of the game is to solve the mystery
of what really happened.
== Reception
