The Deceptive Sceptre is a small sized level that has you reclaiming Lord Bafford’s sceptre from a small hamlet. In order to get it, you have to take out the hired hand who is guarding it. All difficulty settings have the same two mission objectives.

You start in a room with very high walls. There is a servant who is apparently admiring a painting on the wall. He can hear you but he cannot see you. A wooden ramp leads down to another room. There are the same painting again, three chaiselounges, a chair and a table with 100 loot on it. There is also a guard who will attack you on sight. A door leads outside the building down a narrow cobble street. You can jump up for a quick peek behind the walls surrounding the street. There is nothing behind them except the blackness the level boundary. The street ends at a small stream and a bridge. Two more swordsmen are guarding it. You can’t sneak by them but you can try to get the stream between you and them, sometimes they fall off the ledge and drown. At the other end of the bridge is a table with 8 water arrows on it. You don’t really need them because behind the door nearby is that guard you have to kill anyway. Go inside and take him out, then grab the sceptre.

Kill a guard and get the sceptre? That sounds suspiciously like the LGS-tutorial for DromEd. The Deceptive Sceptre is no doubt a first time effort. It’s like the author started toying with DromEd and after a couple of days he decided to release what he had created so far. Hence unpolished architecture and unadjusted lighting in a level where objects don’t cast any shadows and people look like the Charcoal Man from some angles.

So, how is it? Bad yet inoffensively so and most importantly: mercifully short. And hey, the author got doors working. That’s more than I managed on my first day with DromEd.