Game 152: Dark Designs II: Closing the Gate (1990)

Dark Designs II: Closing the Gate

Softdisk Publishing (developer and publisher)

John D. Carmack (designer)

Released 1990 for Apple II, 1991 for DOS

Date Started: 3 July 2014
Date Ended: 4 July 2014

Total Hours: 4

Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)
Final Rating: 30
Ranking at Time of Posting: 78/150 (52%)

Dark Designs II is less a sequel to Dark Designs I: Grelminar's Staff and more a second half. Since the first game took me only 5 hours and one posting, it would have made sense if I'd just played this one immediately and rated them both as a unit. They use the exact same engine and mechanics, and I recommend reviewing my post on the first game before reading this one.

The basic plot is that a "mysterious warlord" is threatening the kingdom. In a volcano called Delkeina, he's opened a portal to another plane and is summoning demons, devils, "chaos avatars," liches, and worse. In the first game, the party explored the ruins of a castle to find a magic staff with the ability to close planar portals. Now, with the staff in hand, they're assaulting Mount Delkeina itself, battling their way through hordes of summoned monsters to their source.

The game supports importing the party from I or creating a new one. Imported characters start at a significant advantage, with all their levels, spells, and equipment from the first game. All of my imported characters were Level 10 (and almost midway to Level 11), whereas created characters start at Level 9. Imported characters will never have to use the second game's equipment store, spell store, or healer (since the priest probably comes with "Cure All").

The main menu. You have to return here throughout the game to recharge spell points.

The party explores a mountain lair of five twisting levels, with corridors and rooms revealed as you explore them. As with Dark Designs I, a strength of the game is the way it organizes its dungeons into logical, named rooms, with a little bit of accompanying flavor text, and groups of enemies that make sense in context. Some of the rooms have amusing designations, like "AGGRESSORS' SWIMMING POOL," "A USED-TO-BE SEALED DEMON LORD ROOM," and "ICE DEMONS' FROLICKING ROOM." The center of each level is the volcanic core, and you can easily go stumbling over the edge to your doom if you don't pay attention.

I always admire games that enliven drab graphics with evocative descriptions. A few other shots:

 

 

Combat remains unchanged--somewhere between Wizardry and SSI games like Shard of Spring. Although you see characters on a tactical map, you can't actually maneuver them around it. The only thing that matters is which "rank" the characters and enemies are in, because it determines who can fight in melee combat. The two front characters start in melee range; the two rear ones have to spend a round moving (F)orward. Each character selects a combat action--attack, cast, use item, change weapons, move forward, or move backwards--in turn, and then all execute at once in order of speed.

Entering combat options. My characters are on the right; the enemies are on the left. They're all in the front rank, so I can target any of them. I think maybe this was the last combat of the game.

The sequel offers no new spells, nor any missile weapons. "Found" equipment is rarer than in the first game, and throughout the entire game, I only swapped out weapons or armor a few times. Gold is plentiful but essentially unnecessary except for resurrections, which are so expensive that you really can't afford them more than a couple of times, making most deaths an occasion for reloading. Oddly, where every chest in the first game offered exactly 96 gold pieces, the chests here all offer exactly 24.

Uh . . . no one?

Also like Wizardry, the only way to recharge spell points is to return to the "store" area outside the dungeon. Thus, the typical dynamic is to explore the map as long as you can, until you run low on spell points and hit points, then make a beeline for the exit (or, if you saved enough priest points, you can cast "Word of Recall"), recharge, cast healing spells, recharge again, and then re-enter the dungeon. If the game had only allowed saving in the town, it would have some of the tactical tension of Wizardry, too, but alas you can save anywhere, removing the delicious fear that comes with over-extending yourself during your explorations.

My crippled party limps back to the surface.

What makes Dark Designs II a little more annoying than its predecessor is that spells are far more necessary. The enemies are a lot harder, necessitating lots of healing and mass damage spells. Unfortunately, your spellcasters get paltry spell points. I started this game with 26 wizard points and 33 priest points, and I maxed at 28 and 39. Any spell worth casting is between 6 and 8 spell points, meaning I can cast maybe 4 or 5 spells before I need to head for the exit and recharge. My party combination of two fighters, a priest, and a mage made sense for the first game, but it would make  more sense to ditch one of the fighters for another spellcaster in this one.

One of the things I like about the game is that enemies have the same spells as the party. This is rare for the era, although generally a staple of Dungeons & Dragons-derived games. Nothing is more annoying--but in an almost delightful way--to get a chaos avatar down from 100 hit points to 5 only to have him cast "Cure All" on himself. One of the oddities is that enemy spellcasters also have "Word of Recall," but instead of transporting them out of the dungeon and to the town, it transports the party! This can be alternately beneficial and annoying depending on how close you were to needing a return anyway.

The game shares a problem that I identified with Wizardry II, where you hardly gain any levels in the sequel. I gained 10 levels in the first game and only 3 here. That created a much more limited sense of character development.

Lesson learned: always follow the sign.

Despite these drawbacks, it took me less time to explore the mountain than the first game's castle. Unlike the castle, the mountain didn't require full exploration to find a series of keys necessary to unlock the doors to the next levels. There was one such door here, but for the most part, exploration was open, and I reached the endgame before I'd revealed every corner of the dungeon. I didn't find a single secret door, despite searching for them in places where secret areas seemed obvious. My party went through a series of abandoned rooms, monster barracks, laboratories, and so forth before finding a key necessary to unlock a door to a forgotten chapel. Inside, I battled some undead for a "Holy Sword," then met an ancient spirit, upset that this "once sacred mountain" had been turned into a "stronghold of evil." He automatically teleported me to the titular gate.

At the gate, there was some confusion because the game never actually shows the gate or tells you that you're standing in its square. I initially moved past its room into the next one, where I found a never-ending series of combats against various creatures. It turned out I just needed to use the staff somewhere in the general "chaos gate" room.

Using it causes the gate to collapse on itself, which of course causes the entire mountain to come crashing down. The game gives you about three moves to get out of there before it happens, so you have to hope your priest has enough spell points for "Word of Recall"; otherwise, you get a message that everyone died but "at least you closed the gate."

Closing the gate!

If you make it out, the end game message indicates that without his chaos-supplemented armies, the Warlord's forces are destroyed by the combined might of the kingdoms. But the Warlord himself remains free, and the game promises an encounter with him in Dark Designs III: Retribution.

Until reading that endgame screen, I had no idea that there was a third Dark Designs. MobyGames doesn't have it. Apparently, it was released only for the Apple IIgs. I've added it to my 1991 list.

Oddly, after winning, the game freezes the party members and refuses to let you continue to play them. You can generate and play with new characters, but the level maps remain saved, so the new party encounters only random monsters and can't "win" the game again. (How they're able to explore the dungeon despite its destruction is left unexplained.)

Although I rated the first game a bit low (31), I was generally positive in my review. The two games aren't epic RPGs; they're little diskmag games, two among many cranked out by staff developers operating on monthly deadlines. You have to admire them for not trying to be more than they are. They're tightly-programmed and plotted, pitched at just about the right difficulty level, compact, and winnable in an afternoon.

You can read my first review for the GIMLET. In this one, I'd subtract a point for more limited character development, one point for a somewhat useless economy (unless you really want to save for resurrections), and one point for less equipment than the first game. I'd add two points to gameplay for being a little more challenging and a little less linear. The final score of 30 ends up being essentially the same as the original. I still wish the developers had thrown in a few NPCs and maybe a non-combat encounter or two, either of which would have pushed the series into "recommended" territory.

Based on screenshots, the third installment seems to have some improvements to the graphics and game engine, so I look forward to it. For now, back we go to Fallthru.

***

Looking ahead, Corporation is supposed to be my next 1990 offering, but I've investigated it, and while it has attributes and skills for the various character options, I'm not sure if they improve during gameplay. That's a key component of my decision on whether it's truly an RPG. It would be nice if it wasn't, because so far I hate the controls.