Realms of Darkness: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

"Hark, good people, and let me tell you the epic tale of heroic adventurers who, braving all adversity, brought a message from a guy in jail to his brother. Hey, where are you going?!" -- some bard.

      

Realms of Darkness

United States

Independently developed; published by Strategic Simulations, Inc.
Released 1987 for Commodore 64 and Apple II, 1989 for MSX, PC-88, PC-98, Sharp X1, Sharp X68000

Date Started: 12 April 2025  

Date Ended: 22 May 2025

Total Hours: 41

Difficulty: Medium-Hard (3.5/5)
Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)    

    

Summary:

 

A fun game that combines mechanics from Wizardry, Phantasie, and text adventures, Realms of Darkness offers a consistent challenge and consistent enjoyment throughout its handful of unrelated quests. After assembling a party of up to eight characters from as many classes, the player heads out into a fairly standard fantasy kingdom (with lots of goofy anachronisms) to engage in a variety of low-key quests. Graphical outdoor and town exploration gives way to wireframe dungeon exploration. Most commands are by single keys, but occasionally a more complex puzzle must be solved with a (generally trouble-free) text parser. Combat mechanics and the spell "slot" system are drawn from Wizardry, with timing and initiative based on Phantasie. Character development is rewarding. There are no major problems with the game, but there are a few minor annoyances, such a lack of consistency in the theme and lore, the lack of any coordinates or directions in dungeons, inventory that's hard to analyze, and spells that don't work as advertised. Overall, a forgotten gem that deserves to be better-remembered.

    

******

    

I was determined to win at least one of these Darkness games this week, so when I couldn't make it happen with Journey, I put everything into Realms.

     

This troll looks like he's doing a dance move.

    

The game as a whole comprises five "acts" after character creation, starting in the small area immediately around the city of Grail:

      

1. Find the king's ancient sword, Zabin. This takes place in one of two initially-available dungeons. The sword is in two pieces. The dungeon you have to explore is three levels and about 1,070 squares.

      

2. Deal with a cursed crystal ball. This takes place in the second of the two initial dungeons, which has four levels and about 1,024 squares. You can deal with the ball by dropping a boulder on it or by convincing a pawn shop owner to buy it.

      

After you complete Quest #2, a new southern area opens up off the original outdoor area, via a bridge across a river. There are two more dungeons in this area.

     

A guard points us toward the third quest.

      

3. Kill a tyrant named Gorth. This quest takes place in one of the new dungeons, about 1120 squares. Gorth turns out to be a robot who you shut down by disabling his computer program.

       

4. Travel to the nearby city of Braddel with a message from a condemned prisoner to his brother. This requires you to go under a mountain range via a (technically) two-level but (really) four-area dungeon totaling over 1,100 squares.

     

Braddel is surrounded by a new outer world with five dungeon entrances.

    

Sounds like we'd better leave them alone, then.

      

5. Destroy the Rogue Alliance (as we've learned, the name of the game in Japan). Nobody actually gives you this quest. An NPC just suggests that, you know, maybe it's something you could do. To complete this quest, the player must:

 

a. Assemble the three-part key. Explore four single-level dungeons (about 768 squares) for the three objects and instructions necessary to make a teleporter, which takes the party to a new area.

 

b. Explore the dungeon in the new area to find eight Dragons' Teeth. This takes place across 12 levels (many of them very small) of about 1,200 squares total. 

   

A temple in the new area.

     

c. Infiltrate the Alliance dungeon and win about six fixed battles (about 320 squares). 

      

Overall, the game is about 50% larger than the first Wizardry in dungeon squares alone, which isn't as large as I expected. It feels larger, probably because it takes so long to get back to the town from some of the expeditions. 

   

When I last wrote about the game, I was in the middle of 5a. I had obtained the first of the three objects, the pyramid. I went back to the first dungeon I had explored and fed SQUARE to the misty figure (I verified that CUBE also works) and got the second piece.

     

This was the third dungeon:

        

More of an octagon than a sphere.

     

It looks like it could fit (and probably does, programmatically) into the "brackets" of the dungeon I explored last time. It is obviously not a circle, but it's as close as you can get on a piece of graph paper, so when I met a face in the wall who asked me the shape of his dungeon, I said CIRCLE and got the final object, a sphere. SPHERE also works for the riddle.

  

I want to praise the game for offering logical alternatives to the puzzles. For the most part, I didn't have to struggle with the text parser during the game. I was briefly worried about how I would follow the instructions to combine the three objects to create the teleporter, but when I brought up the prompt, all I had to type was COMBINE, and the game figured it out for me.

      

I don't know why I put a picture of doom birds here. I just felt they needed to be seen.

       

On the negative side, you can't give any of those riddle answers by typing, for instance, SAY "SPHERE" or ANSWER "SPHERE." You just type the answer literally. Later on was a puzzle in which I had to wear an ugly mask, but the game didn't recognize WEAR UGLY MASK, just WEAR MASK. So there are times in which the parser is trouble-free and times in which it isn't.

   

There was a silly puzzle—a harbinger of things to come, frankly, although we've seen the antecedents—in the spherical dungeon. There was one place where I saw a crack in the floor. Examining the crack, I saw a key stuck within it. I couldn't get it out with any commands I could think of, despite my party having hammers and poles and ropes and hooks and spells and any number of other things that you'd think would be able to extract a key from a crack in the floor.

      

I figured magic beans would be the solution to everything.

    

The game clearly wanted me to solve the puzzle with the only resource in the dungeon: a shop called Moe's Magic Shop. It sold an old shoe, a magic hat, a red herring, magic beans, and a magic wand. I wasn't exactly rolling in silver at the time; I had to grind to even afford one or two of the items. I tried the magic beans first: I somehow got the idea that if I planted them in the crack, they'd grow and the resulting plant would widen the crack, or the key would come bursting out on the top of a vine or something. It didn't work. I tried the wand next, thinking maybe it would levitate the key. No luck.

   

I couldn't figure out how any of the other items would help, but I tried the hat. When I examined it, the game told me that a rabbit was hiding inside, waiting to be plucked out. I did that, and it bounced around the room before pulling the key out of the crack. The game did not specify what happened to the rabbit after that. I rather felt responsible for it.

   

I combined the shapes, took them to the location of the star on the ground, and said SPELLBINDER (one of the proposed names of the game). There was a flash, and the party was teleported to a new outdoor area with a 3 x 3 configuration. In addition to its own patch of ground with a star, it had a temple and a dungeon. Getting back to Baddel was a simple matter of repeating the magic word on the star.

    

Moving to a new land.

         

The purpose of the dungeon was to find weapons that would actually harm the enemies in the Rogue Alliance dungeon. These weapons turned out to be eight Dragons' Teeth, usable by all of the characters. I don't know if they're the best weapons in the game, but if not, they were close enough that it wasn't worth swapping other weapons in and out once I had them (not even the machine gun, which performed remarkably poorly and didn't work on magical creatures). To get to them, I first had to make my way down several levels, so we'll start with the encounters on Level 1:

   

• Level 1 had Sherlock's Shield Shop, which sold the best shield in the game: a wooden shield. Yes, the shield hierarchy in this game goes: buckler, round shield, square shield, wooden shield.

     

What are the other shields made of?

      

• Lots of secret doors, one-way doors, teleporters.

• A bronze door had a doormat that said "Welcome." The door was locked. Under it was a silver key, which didn't open the door. When I had mapped everything and couldn't figure out a way forward, I had to find, download, and consult the hint guide. The answer was to KNOCK. You can see how that was both obvious and not obvious.

• On the other side of the bronze door was a metal door. It opened with a lever 11 squares away, but it didn't remain open long enough to reach it after pulling the lever. This was another party-splitting situation.

• A message on a door: "Watch for felines and canines!" Inside the room were "cats" and "dogs" as objects that we could pick up. 

   

Let's scoop a few up and put them in our packs. How could that go wrong?

     

Shortly after we arrived on Level 2, there was a message that said: "Scholars theorize there may be multiple universes." This was a clue to the level's gimmick, which is that three or four locations had teleport squares that swapped us between two different versions of the same level. The two levels are almost identical but have slight differences in wall, door, and trap locations. Most importantly, the ladder going up in the original "universe" becomes a ladder going down in the mirror. Until I realized what was happening, I drove myself mad while "correcting" my map. There's no indication when you switch, so I'm still not sure I mapped both halves accurately or that I explored every square in both. The whole thing was fiendish and frustrating but also quite clever. I think it was a mistake to offer the hint. Without it, I would have struggled longer and been both extra annoyed and extra impressed.

    

Setting the theme for the level to come.

     

Encounters on Level 2:

   

• A sign alerted us we were entering the "home of Gertrude the Witch." Gertrude was running around, trying to avoid a mouse. "Help me!" she screamed. We dropped the cat we picked up on the previous level, and it chased the mouse away. In turn, she took off her ugly mask and gave it to us. We never found a use for the dog and carried it until the end of the game, poor thing.

     

I feel like we should have also been able to address the mouse with one of our many weapons or spells.

     

• We soon encountered a mirror. If I didn't know that all dungeon puzzles are self-contained, and if the game had offered us anything other than the ugly mask, I wouldn't have solved this one. But lacking anything else to do, I typed WEAR MASK. "In the presence of such ugliness, the mirror explodes into a million pieces," the game said. Behind it was a concealed door. When we entered the room, some voice said, "You now possess the covered title of 'the Operator.'" 

• A message on a wall said: "Yarg this, M!"

   

Getting "operator" status allowed Cadoc to operate the elevator found on the third level. A thief had told us about this elevator. The floor it takes you to depends on the number of people in the party. Each resulting floor was a small 8 x 8, and the only thing to do on any of the floors was to find the Dragon's Tooth. But enemy encounters were really amped up on these levels, and I had a few characters die. Fortunately, I had a Sword of Life, which resurrects dead characters, and fortunately, none of them were turned to ash.

      

Is the button just extra blue, or is it attractively blue?

       

It was during these encounters that I started to get seriously annoyed about one aspect of the game: offensive spells hardly ever work. My sorcerer by now had "Fireball," "Frost Byte," "Flames," "Mass Paralysis," "Lightning Bolt," "Snail Spell" (slow), and "Insanity." My priests had "Confuse," "Blind," "Poison," "Earth Attack," and "Shock." This is my estimate from many, many trials as to the results of any of these spells:

 

• 40% of the time, no enemy is affected.
• 30% of the time, one or more enemies is affected but not killed.
• 20% of the time, one or two enemies are killed.
• 10% of the time, the spell is fabulously effective and half the enemy contingent is killed.

     

Always the message you want to see when using one of only two high-level spell slots.

     

With only a few slots per level, it's pretty annoying to waste one on any of the first three outcomes. Because of this—and perhaps this was deliberate—I found myself using defensive and buffing spells a lot more than in the typical game. The sorcerer's "Mass Invisibility," "Party Protection," "Spell Diversion," "Defensive Field," "Valhalla Power," and "Valhalla Spirit" are all fabulously effective, for instance. I found that for most of the game, a combination of "Defensive Field" and "Party Protection" made the party basically immune. (If that seems overpowered, keep in mind that I never had more than 3 castings of those spells in dungeons with dozens of encounters.) Priests had "Tower of Protection," "Chameleon," and of course various healing spells. 

         

Some of the sorcerer's higher-level spells.

     

To explore the eight levels and get the eight Dragons' Teeth, I had to spin characters off into a separate party, then send the original party down the elevator. We could explore Level 11 with all eight characters, then Level 10 with 7, Level 9 with six, and so forth, until Cadoc was eventually exploring Level 4 all by himself. Fortunately, the size of enemy parties reduced with the characters, and even though the levels offered some navigational challenges (one-way doors, pits, teleporters), they didn't take long. Three things occurred to me afterwards:

   

• I didn't actually have to explore the levels with fewer characters. I just had to shuttle them down the elevator a few at a time.

• I could have made it even easier by having every character get designated "The Operator," not just Cadoc.

• Probably not every character needed a Dragon's Tooth in the first place.

   

But I didn't think about any of those things at the time. I slowly assembled the weapons and returned to the surface. At this moment, just before we tackled the final dungeon, was the only time in the game I felt I had plenty of money.

   

I grinded a bit before hitting the Rogue Alliance, but I never got any of my characters above Level 11 and never reached Level 7 spells for any of my spellcasters. My thief never got the "sneak attack" the manual promised, or if he did, it was just calculated into his regular attack statistic and thus was never obvious. [Ed. As a commenter pointed out, a "Sneak Attack" action is clearly visible in one of my screenshots. All I can say is that it was never there when I was specifically looking for it. I don't know what circumstances make it appear.]  The friar is a completely wasted class because his vaunted unarmed attacks don't work on enemies that require magical weapons, and almost every enemy in the second half of the game does. So he ends up being a lesser fighter who gets one "Heal" spell.

    

The final dungeon.

     

The Rogue Alliance was relatively quick. Its dungeon was a single level with five fixed combats, well over half the fixed combats in the entire game. Fixed combats stay cleared, so I was able to return to town for healing after each one or two. 

   

There weren't many puzzles in the dungeon, just a lot of pits, a key teleporter, and a lever that opened a secret door. There was one area in which an ogre refused to allow more than one character to pass at a time, so I had to break up the party and ferry everyone through one-by-one.

      

Couldn't I just kill him? That's what I usually do to ogres.

     

A closet near the end had a sign that read, "The Hero's Closet." Inside were a suit of plate mail, a shield, and a great hammer, but I wasn't about to equip unidentified gear, so if those are legitimate items, I never used them. 

    

Hey! You're a poet, but you're probably not aware of that fact!

     

The final battle was with 11 destroyers, 22 centurions (in two groups of 11), 5 shamans, and 5 warlocks. It's the only battle in the game for which multiple enemy portraits appear on the screen at once. I won the first time, but it took me three tries to get through it with no character deaths. The toughest part was surviving the first round. With 43 enemies, they were bound to get a lot of the initial attacks even if initiative was rolled randomly. Once Sarogoth was able to cast one of his three key defensive spells ("Party Protection," "Mass Invisibility," and "Defensive Aura"), things got a lot easier, and by the end of Round 3, when he had cast all of them, we were practically invincible.

   

Enemies are immune to all weapons but Dragons' Teeth in this dungeon, I think. They are not completely immune to spells, but I found that offensive spells succeeded even less here than in previous dungeons, where they hardly ever succeeded at all. So I used my spellcasters exclusively for healing and buffing. Because of the room configuration, everyone could attack. It took maybe 10-12 rounds to clear them all.

     

The New Avengers.

      

When we were victorious, a screen came up that said: "Congratulations! You've defeated the Rogue Alliance!' Then the screen switched to a study with a book on a pedestal. The view zoomed in on the pedestal and showed the image at the top of this screen.

       

Thanks! I'd feel even better if there had been any information in-game that they were doing anything to bother anyone.

      

Later, I found that if I reloaded the saved game, the party could continue playing. I found a cache of eight blue ribbons in the final room; they don't seem to do anything, but you can pin them on the characters.

     

A few other notes:

   

• The Rogue Alliance battle was sensibly the most rewarding in the game, in terms of both experience and gold. Experience ranged from 1164 (Presstra, who mostly healed) to 1382 (Bilge, who did a lot of killing in "berserk" mode). Everyone got 66 silver coins. 

      

This, in contrast, was the second-most rewarding battle.

      

• I never found uses for a lot of stuff I picked up late in the game, including a brick, a silver key, a couple of gold keys, a green key, and a looking glass. I guess they were mostly spell objects instead of puzzle objects.

• The hint book tells what a lot of the items in the game do (e.g., Knife of Life, Staff of Flame, Atom Wand, Arctic Pole). Most of them cast spells in addition to serving as +1 weapons. However, I found plenty of items that the book doesn't list, including most of the wearable items (copper earrings, gold ring, silver tiara, blueberry beret).

     

That isn't terribly helpful.

    

• I never got a handle on how to tell what weapons are better than others except to judge by the sale cost.

• Experience isn't shared in the game. If 8 characters would have normally received 200 experience each for a battle, but 7 of them die, the last character still just gets 200. For that reason, it wouldn't avail the player to explore with fewer than 8 characters. If I had to do it again, I'd get rid of the friar, let the thief take the fourth combat spot, and have two priests and two sorcerers in the back. 

• I'm glad I didn't need the hint book for more, because it's not very helpful. None of the encounters, teleporters, secret doors, or traps are annotated on the maps. For the final dungeon, it provides a map but says: "No hints are offered." Did the authors forget the title of their book?

• Abacos did a great job with a StrategyWiki entry on Realms, but unfortunately his maps rely on an interpretation of color that doesn't work well for me. Abacos, if you're reading, I don't know if your hint to the KNOCK puzzle would have helped me. "Just act as if the door was a normal home door" only works if you assume it's someone else's home.

• With all of these "darkness" titles, I apparently forgot what game I was playing several times. About a quarter of my screenshots have the prefix "pid" (which I've been using for Pathways) in front of them, and a few of them had "pod" (I guess I was thinking of Pools?). I don't seem to have misspelled rogue despite multiple uses, though.

        

This is already pretty long, but I want to move on, so let's get through the GIMLET. I expect it to come out slightly north of Wizardry and The Bard's Tale for its greater complexity, but not as good as Might and Magic.

   

• 2 points for the game world. This is the biggest lost opportunity. The game has no backstory, and the player is told nothing about the world. There is no unifying quest, and the final quest to defeat the Rogue' Alliance is introduced obliquely. I don't know why the authors weren't more interested in creating a cohesive game world than introducing goofy puzzles and anachronisms. (If I were writing an RPG, I'd spent at least half the time on world-building, and I'd probably find it the most enjoyable part of the process.) I do like that the quests are small and local in nature—there's no world-ending threat here—but I would have liked to at least known the name of the world I'm adventuring in, or the name of the "king" who occasionally gets mentioned.

      

So I guess we're not even trying anymore.

       

• 5 points for character creation and development. I like the number of classes and the way that party composition creates different challenges. It doesn't, on the other hand, affect any role-playing opportunities. Development occurs at sensible intervals and does legitimately make the party feel more powerful, with extra spell slots, attacks, and occasional special abilities for some of the classes.

• 2 points for NPCs. I'll give these points for the occasional people who populate the towns, forests, and dungeons, and who occasionally offer hints in response to TALK, but these are more encounters (next category) than NPCs.

• 5 points for encounters and foes. The bestiary is half-original, half derived from Dungeons and Dragons, and enemies have a satisfying number of special attacks and powers. Non-combat encounters are relatively frequent, with puzzles ranging from sensible and satisfying to goofy and annoying (the last act of the game tipping heavily towards the latter). I like the idea of a text parser in this sort of game to make more interesting puzzles, but I think the authors could have used it better. Same with the party-splitting options. It was an interesting choice to have so few fixed encounters and so many random ones.

     

One of the rogue alliance battles.

      

• 5 points for magic and combat. The game does quite well here, offering most of the options and tactics of Wizardry, minus the ability to target specific enemy parties (which lost it a point). Spell conservation takes on the same level of importance, although as above, I felt the spell balance was a bit off in the offensive category. 

• 4 points for equipment. I think there were a lot of missed opportunities here. There was no reason to be so stingy in the variety of weapons and armor offered in the game. I appreciate that there were so many usable items; there were a few times that an extra torch, healing scroll, or rainbow potion made all the difference. But I'm the kind of guy who likes more clarity in weapon statistics.

      

Cadoc's ending inventory.

     

• 6 points for the economy. I certainly can't complain that it was worthless; I was grinding for money for food well into the last quarter of the game. Other than food and healing, there isn't much to spend money on, however, and a score higher than this requires a bit more complexity to the system.

• 3 points for quests. I covered those earlier. Only one of them had any player choice or role-playing opportunities.

• 3 points for graphics, sound, and interface. It gets most of this for the graphics, which (as we've discussed) I find goofy but endearing. Some of the outdoor scenes look nice. Sound is rare and piercing and best turned off. I didn't have a lot of problems with the keyboard interface, but it didn't allow a lot of shortcuts, either. I didn't like the configuration of movement keys (though I recognize the Apple II didn't have many better options), and the process of equipping items was a pain.

    

I tried but failed to get a full-screen shot of this guy.

      

• 5 points for gameplay. Though quite linear and not really replayable (except to try different classes), it had the right difficulty and mostly the right length. 

       

That gives us a final score of 40, which, as I suspected, is favorable in comparison to Wizardry (37), The Bard's Tale (37), and Phantasie (39), though it can't touch Might and Magic (60). It is solidly in my "recommended" zone, particularly for its year, and it definitely deserves to be remembered better than it is.

            

The title only makes sense if you regard the "realms" as the dungeons, so it's amusing that the box cover takes place under a bright blue sky.

       

It's too bad that the lack of a backstory, the silly plot elements, and a few mechanical issues keep Realms of Darkness from true greatness. Authors Gary Scott Smith and Alex Duong Nghiem seem to have specialized in this kind of irreverence, however, as their next game was Tangled Tales, which I covered 12 years ago (it got a 38). As Abacos has documented, it's really a sequel to Realms of Darkness, featuring many of the same characters, but it doubles down on absurdity. I realize many people like that sort of thing, but I'm not particularly interested in farce in my RPGs.

     

The authors got Origin to publish Tangled Tales. Nghiem bowed out of game design shortly thereafter, but Smith took contract jobs (generally porting) from Origin and was ultimately offered a full-time job. He stayed all the way through Ultima IX: Ascension. He co-designed the Runes of Virtue series with David ("Dr. Cat") Shapiro and has programming credits on many other Ultima titles. After Origin closed, he bounced around a bit and ended up at Kingsisle Entertainment, where he remains today, working on the company's MMO, Wizard 101 (first released in 2008).

    

This was easily the best game that I've played since my second pass through the 1980s, so thank you to everyone who helped me overcome the emulation problems so I could document it properly. Let's see if we can find some light on the horizon.