My Apologies

I did not get an entry together for tonight. Unfortunately, I had a very busy week. Having reached the end of that week, I'm in a particularly good mood. A careful scan of the main page (sorry, mobile users) may reveal the reason why.

Game 548: Realms of Darkness (1987)

It was a long road to get here.

     

Realms of Darkness

United States

Strategic Simulations, Inc. (developer and publisher)
Released 1987 for Commodore 64 and Apple II, 1989 for MSX, PC-88, PC-98, Sharp X1, Sharp X68000

Date Started: 12 April 2025   

      

We've gone back in time. This is SSI's own Silver Age, 1984-1987, before the Gold Box, before the Dungeons & Dragons license, when it was primarily a wargames company but occasionally took a chance on an RPG brought to them by an independent developer like Charles Dougherty (Questron), Winston Douglas Wood (Phantasie), and Ali N. Atabek (Rings of Zilfin). In a way that I probably did not appreciate when I was playing some of those games for the first time, someone at SSI had a remarkably good eye for innovative titles that may have been inspired by Ultima and Wizardry but pushed beyond the boundaries set by those games, in ways that sometimes didn't work but were always interesting.

   

Realms of Darkness fits into this era perfectly. The designers were Gary Scott Smith and Alex Nghiem, who met at an Apple II computer club in Wichita, Kansas. Smith had been noodling with a dungeon game for a couple of years, and he drew Nghiem into the project. Smith handled the programming, Nghiem the graphics. When they had a playable demo, they shopped it to various publishers. SSI, showing its customary taste, snapped it up. A few years later, Smith and Nghiem wrote Tangled Tales (1989), which earned Smith a 10-year stint at Origin Systems.

     

This is about all you get for a backstory.

        

The game is an adventure-RPG hybrid with several unusual, perhaps unique, elements. Its overland exploration (including shopping) looks like any first-person adventure game of the period. Underground, it becomes pure Wizardry—except that you get textual descriptions of the environment, and you can hit ENTER at any time to bring up a text parser and start typing Infocom-style commands.

       

Solving a puzzle with the text parser.

      

You control a large party of eight characters drawn from as many classes: fighter, thief, sorcerer, priest, friar (martial-artist), champion (fighter-sorcerer), knight (fighter-priest), and barbarian (fighter-thief). Each has minimums in the game's attributes: intelligence, wisdom, agility, strength, and vitality. During character creation, the game rolls six values from 1-19. You allocate them each to a particular attribute, and then the game tells you what classes you can choose. (This is all quite similar to Wizardry, including the prestige classes.) You then chose race (human, gnome, dwarf, elf) and sex.

      

Assigning ability scores during character creation.

     

Based on the manual's recommendation to have two priests, I ignored the vanilla fighter class and went with:

    

• Cadoc, a male human champion
• Kastillia, a female elven knight
• Bilge, a male dwarven barbarian
• Faerish, a female human friar
• Timid, a male gnome thief
• Presstra, a female elven priest
• Palliata, a female elven priest
• Sarogoth, a male human sorcerer

        

The final party.

    

The manual offers absolutely no backstory for the game world, but it seems to be a standard high-fantasy world drawn from Tolkien and D&D. Gameplay begins in the city of Grail. It becomes clear that the player is going to get a series of quests in a linear order from a guard captain in the city. The manual walks the player through the opening stages, including getting the first quest (recover an ancient king's sword, Zabin, from some local ruins), buying equipment, and the first few minutes of dungeon exploration.

       

Finding the first dungeon.

      

You move around the overland area with the WASZ cluster—or the JKNM cluster if you want to go northeast, northwest, southeast, or southwest. Since it's never necessary to do the latter, except to save time, it's easier just to keep your hand on WASZ. You cannot turn in the above-ground areas; each square has only one static screen. There are a variety of single-key commands like C)ast a spell, P)urchase, E)quip, and G)et. Anything more significant requires the text parser. Character sheets are brought up by hitting the corresponding number, and 9 gives a summary of everyone.

       

Walking around town.

    

The small town has:

   

• A guard captain's office. Here, you get quests by entering parser mode and typing TALK. It probably would have taken me a while to figure that out on my own, so I'm grateful to the manual.

       

Getting the first quest.

      

• A tavern. Its sole purpose seems to be to sell food. 

      

And lunch and dinner both cost more than the best weapons or armor in the game.

      

• The Hall of Heroes, where you can exit back to the character utilities.

• An inn where you can sleep and restore spell slots. It took me a while to figure out that you don't interact with the innkeeper with P)urchase; you just go to the rooms. It doesn't seem to cost anything.

   

The innkeeper seems to want you to sign in, but you can just walk past him through the curtain.

      

• A blacksmith where you buy weapons and armor. We bought some starting items, but our starting gold didn't go very far. Everyone got daggers and maybe some padded armor.

      

This is a pretty lame selection.

     

• A provisioner where you buy torches, ropes and hooks, and so forth.

• A couple of screens that just show the town path.

      

The exit from the town is south from the provisioner's shop. It takes you into a forested area with, as best as I can tell 26 squares. However, one of the squares has an old man fishing, and if I talk to him, he says, "If you value your lives, don't go beyond the river because Gorth rules the land with an iron hand." I don't know what "beyond the river" means. There are some river screens in the south, but I don't know of any way to go "beyond" them.

       

The "game world," unless something else opens up.

        

The old man's warning.

       

There's a temple in this area, where you can heal various conditions, including death and the horrible things that can happen if restoring death fails: "Restore Ashes" and "Restore Dust" (again, this goes back to Wizardry). Two other squares in the outdoor area have stairs or ladders down to dungeons.

    

Options at the temple.

     

The forest is dangerous, and the manual warns you to hie to the first dungeon, northeast of town, rather than poke around too long in the outdoor area. I won about half the battles I attempted while mapping the area.

  

Combat begins by telling the player the party composition.

    

This one might be a problem.

      

The player then has options to fight individually, have everyone fight, bribe the monsters with silver, bribe the monsters with food, flee, act friendly (sometimes), surrender, or go into the party inventory or some game utilities.

    

Well, this is goddamned terrifying.

    

If you fight individually, the character has various options depending on class: fight, turn undead, cast a spell, use an item, and so forth. (As the characters level up, there will be additional options for some classes, like a "flying kick" for the friar and a "sneak attack" for the thief.) You cannot choose specific enemies to target with attacks or spells. Unlike Wizardry, actions execute as you select them for each character, rather than at the end of the overall selection process. Enemies' attacks are threaded with the characters'.

   

In dungeons, only the first four characters can fight in melee range (and there are no bows or otherwise any considerations of distance), but outdoors, everyone can participate. The "everyone attack" option is particularly useful here, saving you from specifying individual attacks for each character, although you wouldn't want to use it when you have spells to cast.

     

These outdoor enemies were too hard.

    

Spells use Wizardry's slot-based system; Level 1 characters just start with two slots in the first level, but that includes a mass attack ("Fireball") for the sorcerer and "Healing" for the priests. Still, at Level 1, those rear characters don't have a lot to do.

        

Sarogoth has two Level 1 spell slots and four spells to choose from.

      

After battle, characters get experience and silver. Sometimes you find a chest that must be examined, disarmed, and opened. Experience is apportioned partly based on what the character did during the battle, but everyone gets at least something, which is nice. 

    

The victory screen after my first winning battle.

      

The interface changes when you go underground. It becomes a classic Wizardry wireframe dungeon with walls and doors, and you can turn in each square and face all directions, although there's no indication what direction you're facing. Maybe there's a "Compass" spell later. Combat works the same way, and there are both fixed and random battles.

     

I explored the first level underground, which was mostly 16 x 24, though with an odd bit jutting off to the west (as I mapped it) and nothing in the northeast corner. The space-to-encounter ratio was pretty good, and there were at least half a dozen times I had to use the text parser to type in a command. I worried that the lack of a list of commands in the manual would be a problem, and maybe it will be later, but so far obvious prompts like TALK and EXAMINE have worked fine.

 

The first dungeon level, at least assuming that you start facing north.

        

Some notes on the first level:

   

• There's a pile of rubble right next to the entrance. CLIMB RUBBLE allows you to see a message on the ceiling: "Illusory wall in chief's room."

• The "chief's room" refers to the goblin chief, not far away. Once you defeat him, you can indeed walk through an illusory wall to find a metal card, a rainbow potion, an "Unlock" scroll, and copper earrings.

• There are several doors that require a Green Key to open. There are two Green Keys to be found on the level, one by searching a messy bed. The other is given to you by a rat if you first find a piece of cheese in the galley and bring it to him.

      

It's not exactly realistic, but at least I didn't have to fight with the text parser. This all happened from EXAMINE HOLE.

     

• There are two magically-locked doors on the level. "Unlock" is supposed to be a Level 1 sorcerer spell, but I didn't get it yet. Fortunately, there are ways around both doors. For the southern one, you just have to find an alternate passage. For the northern one, you can teleport to the other side of it if you MOVE ALTAR at an appropriate encounter and teleport back by wandering into a bubbling pool of liquid. The area with the pool of liquid is the odd one that juts out to the east. The walls are ragged here, as if to suggest a natural cave.

      

The small "rough-hewn" area.

      

• The southern magically-locked room has a sign on the door: "Danger! This door locked for your safety!" On the other side, accessible by going a longer way around, you find a ghost who tells you that he was also searching for the lost sword Zabin, and that a sorcerer broke it in two.

       

For a moment, I forgot that Zabin was a sword.

      

• Part of the sword is found in a room to the far north. 

     

Quest half-completed!

     

• One room has an old man sitting on a box. If you TALK to him, he offers to entertain you for 25 silver. Pay him, and he puts on a puppet show, then causes a hidden door to open.

• There are some one-way doors and one-way walls.

• The stairs going down are behind a metal wall with a slot. You must INSERT the metal card to open it.

        

Enemies were mostly forgiving, but I did have characters die twice. They included goblins, goblin guards, skeletons, giant spiders, attack dogs, wizards, and tribe priests. They only deliver a few silver pieces per battle, so even by the end of the session, I still couldn't afford all of the meagre items in the blacksmith shop, especially where I had to pay for resurrection and a couple of de-poisonings.

     

I guess these odds are fair.

      

I went back to town to rest and restore my spell slots frequently. Unlike Wizardry, the game remembers the dungeon state. Fixed battles remain cleared, and you cannot find the same treasures twice. Doors don't remain unlocked, however.

    

Miscellaneous notes:

   

• It's possible to break the party into two smaller parties and rotate between them. I don't know yet under what circumstances it will become necessary to do so.

• Although you can save anywhere, there's no way to reload without rebooting the game. Character deaths are immediately written to disk; even rebooting the moment they happen doesn't help. I don't know what happens when all the characters die; the manual doesn't address it and it hasn't happened yet.

• After the title screen, there's an opening cinematic that suggests a very different sort of game. It shows a brief vignette of an adventurer exploring in a side-scrolling interface. He comes upon a chest with a doorway behind it. A skull rises in the doorway. The adventurer blasts the skull with a spell, then opens the chest. The chest is apparently trapped, because the adventurer disappears and turns into a ball of floating light that goes through the doorway.

    

An opening cinematic gives you a completely incorrect impression of the game.

    

• As the existence of the tavern indicates, characters need food. It won't be an issue for a while, as they all start with 150 rations, and they deplete slowly. 

• Sound is limited to "boip" when you go through doors and "bink" when you walk into a wall.

• I've been in touch with Smith, who confirmed that he was inspired by Wizardry and Phantasie. The game's approach to inventory, including the process of equipping characters, is similar to the latter game, as is the way it divvies earned experience.

• You may have noticed that my system of drawing random games has brought a "Darkness" theme to the "Recent and Upcoming" list. In this case, Realms of Darkness turned out to be a compromise between the titles suggested by Smith and Nghiem (Spellbinder) and SSI (Seven Realms of Doom).

     

I was well into my fourth hour with the game before the characters leveled up. When they cross the experience point threshold (1,000 in my case), they automatically get extra hit points and spells. My spellcasters did not move up to the next slot yet, so that must happen every other level. 

    

Cadoc was the first to level up.

      

So far, Realms of Darkness seems like a solid game, at least as playable as Wizardry or The Bard's Tale. It's a nice counter to the idea that after three or four passes through the 1980s, all that's left are dregs. I'm sorry that it took me so long to get to it. I don't remember all the specifics, but I do remember that I had trouble getting the emulators to work with every version that I could find. Many commenters tried to help me over the years, but I kept having problems. Eventually, commenters Abacos, Busca, Laszlo, MacCentric, and LanHawk all independently sent me working versions. I thank you all and apologize that there was so much duplication of effort. I also apologize to reader S. B., who wrote to me about the game in 2020, and I promised him I'd get to it "within the next six months." I hope you're still reading.

   

Time so far: 4 hours

 

BRIEF: Hired Guns (1993)

 

These are some grim characters.

       

Hired Guns

United Kingdom

DMA Design (developer); Psygnosis (publisher)

Released 1993 for Amiga and DOS

Rejected for: Insufficient character development

    

Hired Guns is one of many things in life—triathlons, Cirque du Soleil, Finnegans Wake, theremin music, brutalist architecture—that I find impressive without actually enjoying. It takes real effort to make a four-character game with four different view windows operating at the same time. But as a single player who can mostly only concentrate on one window at a time, why would I want to play in such a tiny window, especially in the days of such low-resolution monitors?

  

Now, gameplay doesn't have to be a one-player thing. It supports cooperative multiplayer, with two players using joysticks or up to three players sharing a keyboard. Again, impressive. We don't see a lot of cooperative multiplayer games in this era. Swords of Glass (1986) and Bloodwych (1989) are the only two that come to mind immediately, at least in the first-person RPG genre. But it must have been awfully cozy with Player 1 controlling QAOP, Player 2 with his hands on the arrow keys, and Player 3 using the numberpad. If Irene ever leaves me, I guess I could try it on a first date.

     

The character in the upper-left is shooting at an enemy on the ceiling.

           

Hired Guns defies genre. I can see why some databases call it an RPG. There are elements that feel like Captive (1990) and other Dungeon Master clones. It has attributes (even if they never improve) and experience (which despite its name is more of a score). It's fundamentally a first-person shooter, but it has the gridded movement and overall feel of a "blobber," although the four characters occupy their own squares and don't necessarily follow each other. (It shares many of its characteristics with Space Hulk from the same year, and I'm curious if there was any cross-pollination here.) Perhaps most important, the game itself calls its campaign an "RPG Game" on the main menu.

 

DMA apparently thought that the difference between an "action game" and an "RPG game" was the length of the mission.

        

The game is set in 2712, and the backstory for the game at large (as opposed to the in-game campaign) is little more than a group of four mercenaries from various backgrounds have come together for a mission. There are three types of missions: training, action, and "RPG" (which in the context of this game just means an ongoing campaign). The five training missions each get you accustomed to a different aspect of gameplay. There are 17 "action" missions that take place on a single map. Some of them are competitive. The campaign takes place across 19 maps and comes with an extensive backstory.

   

Whichever mission you choose, you begin by selecting your four characters from a list of 12. They include men, women, robots, and cyborgs, with descriptions like "Pilot," "Freelance Assassin," "Battlefield Medic," and "Marksman." Each has a different combination of physique and agility (the only two attributes), and each starts with different equipment. Each character has a very dim gray-on-black portrait but a more conventional artistic depiction, along with a full backstory, in the game manual.

     

Adding characters to the party.

     

The campaign takes place on a planet called Graveyard, and when I say it has an "extensive backstory," I'm underselling it. There's a 48-page booklet devoted to the history of the planet and a separate 48-page booklet devoted to the history of the system that the planet is in. Since I only plan to BRIEF the game, I'll just say it's a war-torn system and the titular hired guns have been sent on a hostage rescue mission.

The campaign starts on a map called "Abandoned Depot"; after clearing this area, the player has a couple of paths, and I don't think he or she has to necessarily complete every map.

       

Having completed the first scenario, I have two choices about which way to go.

      

Each character has his own window with tabs at the top that allow cycling through four screens: first-person view, inventory, area map, and character sheet. By toggling a "gem" icon in the upper-right corner, you can tell characters to follow each other or not. 

       

Each character here is on a different tab.

     

I played through the first map and part of a second. I found the graphics ugly and hard to make out; as always, my colorblindness probably played a role. There were times I only knew that an enemy was in front of me because it started attacking, or because I couldn't move forward. I found it very easy to forget to re-equip weapons after picking something up, and also very easy to accidentally shoot at nothing when I was trying to move forward.

     

Moving through the corridors in a line.

    

There were a few light puzzles in the first scenario. I had to find two keys to open a double door. There was a place with two monsters behind force fields, and I could deactivate them if I wanted to, leading to additional treasures after I killed the monsters. (Treasures include weapons, ammo, healing items, and various technical devices.) One section had a series of three platforms moving up and down. I had to cross them to find a keycard that opened the exit.

  

All characters have to exit to move on. My understanding is that characters are healed between missions, but death is irreversible. 

     

Getting my last character out of the scenario.

      

After 15 years of doing this, I have become jaded to claims that the Amiga version is better, but having watched some YouTube videos, I would say that here it is warranted. The graphics are a smidge clearer, but more importantly, there are some excellent ambient sound effects (the humming of machines, dripping water, peals of thunder) that give the game a lot of atmosphere. The Amiga version also features occasional messages from the characters that scroll across the center of the screen. They're cute but clearly drawn from a database of generic comments (e.g., "I'm itching for a good fight") and pop culture references (e.g., "Let's go back to the drop ship and nuke the site from orbit") and not necessarily context-specific save the occasional "get out of my way!"

       

A message scrolls across the screen in a screenshot from an Amiga version video.

     

As always when I play an innovative game that isn't technically an RPG, a part of me wants to push forward, but in this case that part is discouraged by all of the aspects of the game that I don't like, including an overall feeling of cumbersomeness that's hard to explain. It also isn't a good use of my time given the size of my list.

       

      

DMA, based in Scotland, came on the scene in 1988 with Menace, a side-scrolling shooter. They released several other action games (Ballistix, Blood Money, Shadow of the Beast) before scoring an international hit with Lemmings (1991) and its many sequels. Hired Guns was one of the few games released between 1991 and 1997 that were not part of the Lemmings series. In 1997, they made their biggest splash with Grand Theft Auto, which set off a chain of events that caused them to be bought by Rockstar Games and to be renamed Rockstar North. There, they are still going strong and presumably working on Grand Theft Auto VI (2035).

Warriors of Legend: I'll Do You One Better

 

I don't like people who sic their pets on me.

    

As this session begins, we've fully explored Illandria and are ready to try again to find Moc Madure, hiding in some caverns beneath Mount Gunderbad. We already explored the caverns a bit in a previous session, but we were driven away by large trolls. I guess you have to equip the "stone heart" like a shield to kill those creatures. Maybe I missed an NPC back in town who would have told me that. I also wonder if spells might work on them, but I didn't try. There are only a couple of the trolls, in any event.

   

We get access to a few more caves and find more treasure, including a complete suit of mithril, as far as I can tell the best armor in the game so far. I have to wonder if I'm missing something, though. I keep fighting my way to deep caverns and finding +2 swords and Dragon Mail, in the treasure piles, but statistically they don't seem to perform as well as Thor's Hammers, which show up all the time in post-combat loot, and mithril mail, which is sold back in town. Perhaps there's something more complex than just attack and defense power going on. Maybe certain weapons work best against different types of enemies (though the hammers seem to kill things awfully fast) or certain armor protects against different types of attacks. I don't know how you'd determine this.

      

This sounds like a cool item, but it pales in comparison to the "Thor's Hammers" we found during the first hour.

    

As I fight dragons and giant spiders and trolls, it really hits me how ridiculous combat is in this game. You have to left-click on enemies to attack once and right-click to attack repeatedly. Why would you ever just want to attack once? Meanwhile, the first character to attack usually blocks the enemy so it's impossible, with everyone moving, to successfully click again on the enemy with a different character without accidentally clicking the first character. Why is there no "everyone attack the closest enemy" option, or otherwise some kind of auto-attack like in Drakkhen (which this interface roughly resembles)?

      

At least it's easier to click on the giant enemies.

      

Eventually, we find our way to a bridge over a flow of lava. With Brand leading the way, we cross. Halfway across, Brand drops suddenly through the bridge and into the lava. On a reload, I try crossing higher/further to my left, but I end up in the lava even sooner. It takes a few reloads before I can find the right path. If there are any environmental cues, I can't see them.

     

Following each other to the beyond.

       

On the other side of the bridge, the passage winds to a stone door. Behind are passageways to two caverns. Two large dragon heads come out of each of the two passages and start breathing fire, but we're able to make quick work of them. 

     

It looks to me like you guys live uncomfortable lives.

      

The left passage goes to another dragon head and then to a treasure room, where we find a Skeleton Key and some herbs.

   

The right passage goes to Moc Madure, a dragon-headed guy sitting pathetically on a throne. "I don't like people who kill my pets," he says. "Death is too good for you." As soon as dialogue ends, he starts tossing fireballs at us and kills two of the characters almost immediately. My hammers don't seem to do any damage to him at all. I assume the Dragon Sword will kill him, but I have no luck there, either.

   

Finally, I turn to spells. It takes me a bunch of tries, and even after those tries, and later experimentation, I can't quite figure out what's happening with targeting. It's hard to click on the right place with a spell to get it to actually cast. My perception is that it's harder if the spellcaster is holding a shield instead of an ankh or Book of Sorcery, but I could just be imagining. Either way, "Armageddon" doesn't seem to do anything to him. But after about half a dozen attempts, I manage to nail him with a "Flaming Death" spell, which kills him.

      

Right at the moment I hit him. This shot was hard to get.

      

Beyond his throne room is a chamber with an obelisk that holds his part of the Chaos Key, plus another Skeleton Key.

   

By the time I get back to Illandria and sell all my loot, I have enough money for all of the spell scrolls I haven't already bought, so I decide to get serious about investigating the magic system. Spells are created by mixing reagents, and scrolls provide the recipes. I verified that you can't just buy a scroll, check out the recipe, and reload. You have to have had the scroll in your possession at least once. After that, once you record the recipe, you can sell it.

         

"Invisibility" requires powder, mandrake, and berries.

     

There are 17 reagents: dragon's blood, carrot, serpent's eye, ox heart, grain, powder, bone, bat's wing, lion's mane, mandrake, clover, rat's tail, herbs, berries, garlic, mushroom. All but dragon's blood are sold in shops for 5 gold pieces each. You have to get dragon's blood from the dragons in the Mount Gunderbad caves. Annoyingly, each character only has 10 slots for reagents (which stack), so one character can't hold all of them. When you mix reagents into spells, you can fortunately cycle through the characters as you toss them into the cauldron.

   

Aspects of inventory management discourage much spell use. You can only buy reagents one at a time, and you can only mix spells one at a time. There's no way to move all the reagents between characters (as a stack) to speed up the mixing process; you have to move them one by one.

   

Once created, spells are inventory items that can be traded among characters, but I've been having Astrovir do all the casting.

      

My list of cleric spells and their reagents.

      

While I'm running around town collecting scrolls and reagents, I happen to re-visit Sahhar the Sage, who reminds me that I was supposed to find a secret room off of Moc Madure's treasure room. I forgot about that. With a sigh, I head back to the caverns and start testing out my various spells in and out of battle. This is what I can report:

    

• "Cure Poison" and "Heal" (cleric) do what they suggest and work fine.

     

Astrovir cures himself after a battle with a spider.

      

• I figure "Plank" (cleric) must be the solution to crossing the bridge safely, but it's not. When cast, a timer appears at the top of the game window, so clearly it's active, but it doesn't stop me from falling into the lava.

     

It would have been funny if this spell had just made you lie down uselessly for a few minutes.

      

• Similarly, I can't find any use for "Detect" or "Stone Speak" (cleric) despite casting them in a variety of locations.

• I assume "Unlock" (cleric) would have unlocked the doors I've been picking. Since I've already opened them, I can't test it.

    

It does not work on this lock.

      

• "Armageddon" (mage) destroys all enemies on a combat screen. Nice.

       

It does not destroy everybody across the entire world.

     

• "Fireball" and "Flaming Death" both shoot missiles at enemies. The enemies I try them on all die instantly.

    

I nail a guy with a fireball.

     

• "Freeze" also shoots a missile, but it doesn't seem to actually do any damage.

• "Invisibility," as far as I can tell, does nothing.

    

After fighting my way back to Moc Madure's lair and clicking on everything, I still can't find any hidden chamber, so I don't know what Sahhar is talking about. 

     

Sahhar's response to us not having anything for him. Is that another barbarian joke?

       

It's also clear that some of the dialogue in town has changed. (Also, houses have respawned items.) I don't really want to run around talking to everyone again, but where before I had dialogue options relating to Moc Madure, now everything is about the Black Witch. This one guy named Taggazah tells me a long story about her: A little girl was born blind and deaf, so her mother took her out into the woods and left her to be eaten by wolves. Instead, demons took residence in her, healing her sight and hearing, and she became known as the Witch of the Ghoul Forests of Zingara (another Conan reference). As for her real name: "The walls know. The very stones shall shout." And somehow a magic potion will make them speak.

    

He looks like another guy whose torso is cut off, but I think he's just sitting in the chair behind the table.

      

Back on the world map, we head to the ruins. Someone told me the Black Witch would be in the ruins, but I forget who. The Skeleton Key fits in the lock we previously discovered, and a wall section swings open. It takes us into a labyrinth in which we're repeatedly attacked by giant spiders, leaving us poisoned and making us grateful for that spell. 

 

The labyrinth is long and difficult to navigate, with teleporters, buttons, and levers. As with the lava caves, there are rooms with waterfalls and treasures, including a "Resurrection" spell scroll. There are more trolls, but fortunately I still have my Heart of Stone. There are glyphs on the walls in some places, and I try both potions and "Stone Speak" on them but get nothing. There's one place where the number 3-1-5-7 appear on a wall.

       

Another waste of a "Stone Speak" spell.

         

Eventually, I come to a long room full of stone tiles with letters. There are only six letters represented: MAGORH. When I step on the "wrong" one, a snake comes out of the ground and bites me. Through trial and error, I figure the name I'm supposed to be spelling out is GAMORRAH, but it's not that easy. First, if you're on a "G" and there are multiple "A" tiles next to it, the game only wants you to go on one of them; the other triggers the snake. Second, movement isn't precise enough in this game to navigate across such small letters. After taking a ton of damage, I just walk through the rest of it by waiting until I heal, walking a bit, getting bit, then waiting until I heal again. I don't mind. I have plenty of other things to do while waiting.

       

"How do you spell 'GAMORRAH'?"

        

The entrance to the Black Witch's chambers is on the other side. It's guarded by another troll. I kill it and enter her bedroom. "Welcome to my home, sweet children," she says. "You look tired and hungry. Might I have the honor of offering you a nice meal and a soft bed?" The game gives me several snarky responses.

     

Despite the way it's spelled here, I'm 99% sure those tiles wanted GAMORRAH.

     

I choose the second one, and she seems to like it. "You're a cool one. I almost regret killing you . . . Perhaps I shall simply let you defeat me. The centuries weigh heavily on me. Should you prevail, I would like one last jab at Khalimad. I bequeath to you a small detection spell that should prove very helpful. Do your best." (When it's all over, I do not have a detection spell, so I don't know what that was about.)

   

She then attacks. As with Moc Madure, regular weapons have no effect on her, so I start experimenting with spells. It takes me about six reloads, but I find that "Freeze" does the trick. Unfortunately, the process of casting it after combat begins—switch to Astrovir, click on "Inventory," wait for his inventory to load, click on the "mage spells" icon, wait for it to load, select the spell, click on the witch—takes so long that I can't complete it before she's able to kill at least one character. Fortunately, I have "Resurrection" now.

      

I even have a resurrection potion!

      

Just like Moc Madure, the Black Witch has a chamber with an obelisk, a piece of the Chaos Key, and a second key (the Dead Man's Key), plus a treasure chamber with a "True Seeing" potion and some other miscellaneous items. There's no way back except to go across that hateful floor again, which I leave for next time.

    

Why did they all need their own obelisks? It looks like each one alone could have united the pieces.

     

Miscellaneous notes:

      

• The game is dedicated to Catherine Anne Bartz-Todd, a producer for Virgin Games, who had a couple dozen titles to her credit (including Heimdall and Lands of Lore) despite being only 24 in 1993. She died in a motorcycle crash on California's Riverside Freeway on 6 August 1993. It's nice that they dedicated the game to her, but it's a bit morbid that the dedication is the first thing that comes up every time the party dies.

• The "fluffy pillows," which I cited as a mystery last time, come into play if you sleep at an inn. You apparently restore more hit points if you have one in your inventory. The thing is, hit points restore fairly quickly just by standing around, so it's rare that you would need to sleep at an inn (or even use a potion or spell).

• So far, there have been about eight types of weapons and four types of armor, helms, and shields. I have only found one type of footwear: leather boots.

• When I went to play this game the other day, I accidentally fired up Worlds of Legend instead. It made me realize how similar the games are. Both feature fixed parties of four members of different classes. Both seem Conan-inspired in their place and proper names. Both magic systems use reagent mixtures. Both have chaotic combat in which it's hard to click on the right things. Other than that, they're so different that it's hard to see how they could have possibly influenced each other.

• Among the many inventory mysteries are Mana Rings. My guess is that they regenerate mana faster than normal, the same way Regen Rings regenerate hit points. However, there are two colors of them, one regular blue and one dark blue or maybe purple. 

• I heard a couple dozen more barbarian jokes and they still have not repeated. (Best: "What would you get if you crossed a barbarian and a rabbit?" "A slow-breeding barbarian.") I'm sure there have been at least 50 jokes.

     

You guys just never give up.

    

• Stores have limited space and may run out of room as you sell things to them. I don't think they ever lose those items, so I suppose there's a maximum number of items that a player could ever sell. We saw this same limitation in WarWizard. 

       

Your stock room is too full for rings?

     

• Character development has been minimal. Everyone has gained 3 points of strength. My archer gained 2 points of agility from some early-game bow use, my thief 2 points of stealth from her lockpicking, and Astrovir 3 points of intelligence from casting.

    

I enjoy the process of exploring the game's locations. I like its graphics, although I think they make the common 1990s sin of trying to depict more than the resolution is really capable of supporting. But I feel like the authors made some bafflingly bad decisions in matters of interface, inventory, and RPG mechanics—less in a way that feels "rushed" and more in a way that just feels like they didn't know what they were doing. I guess is the norm for Synergistic games, which never seem aware that there's an entire genre going on around them.

     

Time so far: 9 hours