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