Game 561: Daymare 2 (1993)

 

The title screen doesn't inspire much confidence.

       

Daymare 2

United States

Independently developed and published

Released 1993 for DOS

Date Started: 24 October 2025  

Date Ended: 27 October 2025

Total Hours: 7 

Difficulty: Moderate (2.5/5)
Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later) 

    

Jim Todd's The Mystic Well (1990), called Daymare in its 1992 DOS incarnation, was a workaday single-character Dungeon Master clone with no complex puzzles. It was mostly about mapping and fighting, although it did some interesting things with character classes that made it at least mildly replayable. The sequel, Daymare 2, offers a similar experience, with no classes and no class-specific levels.

    

The accompanying document outlines a bare-bones plot: "In a land far away, a powerful wizard enchanted his life force into a golden skull and proclaimed himself to be a god. Your job is to defeat him and banish him from your waking nightmares." A golden skull was the final enemy of the previous game, so this sounds less like a sequel than a remake. "I promise a better plot in Daymare 3," Todd says in the document.

      

Despite the name change, the game has plenty of mystic wells.

    

The game begins with a quick character creation process. Fifty total points are distributed among strength, agility, reason, and vigor so that each attribute is between 6 and 20. You can re-roll as much as you'd like, either to favor one or two attributes over the others or to achieve a roughly-balanced distribution. There are no other selections, not even a character name.

     

The brief character creation process.

     

There are a few welcome upgrades to the interface, starting with numberpad support for movement, including both turning and strafing. The lower-right and lower-left, which were blank spaces in the original interface, now have an automap and a comically-large version of the character's active weapon. Meters track health, stamina, hunger, and thirst, and statistics track protection against physical damage, fire, electricity, and poison, as well as weight and the amount of damage last inflicted on a monster, supposedly to help you gauge the utility of different weapons. It only stays up for a second, then reverts to 0.

 

I soon discover that the positive interface changes are balanced with a loss of any interesting puzzles and mechanics. There are illusory walls and a few pits, but none of the first game's hidden buttons, pressure plates, traps, sliders, and teleporters. It's also a smaller game, eight levels instead of 10, and the 32 x 32 dimensions a third smaller than the original game's 78 x 18. It takes me only about a third of the time to finish. 

     

All the game's doors simply open with buttons on the doors themselves. Three open with keys.

     

Gameplay starts like the original, with the character facing a well. There are wells strewn throughout the game, each one at least restoring the character's thirst meter, some restoring health and fatigue, and all providing experience for treasure (coins, gems, jewelry, ore) thrown into them.

 

The character begins with a t-shirt, blue jeans, a backpack, and a dagger. Dungeon shoes and a Scroll of Curing are found in the opening area. Doors lead east and west.      

       

The first enemies attack as I explore. There are blobs with faces, little stalks coming out of the ground that remind me of the corpsers from Ultima VII, wild dogs, and some kind of hostile plant. Killing them involves little more than repeatedly clicking the attack button. There's no cool-down period, but attacks do deplete stamina, so you have to sit still periodically to restore it. Health also restores on its own, albeit slowly. I spend a lot of time hunkered in safe areas.

     

An early enemy.

     

I find a shield, coins, some spell scrolls, various berries, and a couple of water flasks. Leather pants and a leather vest replace my starting clothes. The flasks are useful because they can be refilled at the fountain. The water meter depletes fast, so I imagine I'll want several in my backpack before any deep-dungeon dive. The game subtracts a point of agility once you cross an encumbrance threshold equal to your strength. This seems inevitable, as even without my pack, my gear weighs 12 pounds. After a while, I start over with a new character, favoring strength, when it becomes clear that I'm having trouble with the spell system.

      

Some of the game's many foes.

       

Spells have a lot of utility even for characters who are primarily fighters. The system, clearly inspired by Dungeon Master, has you string together combinations of one-to-four runes from a panel of 12 in the lower-right corner. You find these combinations on scrolls scattered throughout the game. I think the first spell I found was "Enchant Vial," and I never figured out what it did. "Combat Shield," "Energy Blast," and "Mend Wound," a light healing spell, also came along on the main level or the one just below it. I found the runes hard to memorize and easy to mis-click. It would be nice if the last spell that you prepared remained active until you wanted to change to something else, but instead, you have to click the runes every time you want to cast.

     

Here's another spell whose use remained a mystery.

     

There are a few illusory walls leading to secret areas, one with a message that confirms the use of treasure at the well. Another gives me a shuriken, an infinite-use ranged weapon, but it does so poorly, and enemies move to attack so fast, that I soon abandon it. A door to the north is locked, with a message in front of it that says, "Sorry, I lost the key." 

       

A useful message. If only the documentation hadn't already given this away. There's no explanation who "Algol" is.

     

The only way to go from the main level is to a lower level. Multiple stairways descend to different sections, some unconnected from the others. (I think; I didn't test every wall for illusory doors.) Armadillos and giant worms attack here, still relatively easy. I find my first long sword, a compass (useless with the automap), combat shoes, and rings that add to my defensive scores.  

       

The basement gives way to a second underground level, this one with bats and trolls. These are the first really tough enemies, and even though I've hit Level 10 by this point, I start having to wait to rest more. My leather items slowly get replaced with iron. I find a Key of Iron just as I also find the stairs to a third dungeon level, this one a catacomb full of piles of bones and living skeletons and mummies. There are also these green blobs (I remember them from the first game) that cannot be killed with normal weapons. They cast a poison field attack that is hard to dodge. Ghosts are similarly immune to normal attacks and hit hard. I eventually find a "Fireball" spell and use it to wipe out most of them, but slowly and with a lot of reloads. (Fortunately, saving and reloading is so fast it's nearly instantaneous.) "Fireball" remains my primary offensive spell for the rest of the game, as the rune sequence is easy to memorize and click.

      

Fighting mummies in the catacombs.

        

I haven't been mapping the game, instead relying on the automap. I miss mapping a bit, and my choice not to do it here means that I probably miss a lot of secret areas.  

       

Opening a door to a surprise.

      

The iron key opens the way to the castle, where I'm greeted by giants. I don't really keep track of the two castle levels closely, but enemies include red blobs, red skeletons, priest-looking guys, and hooded men in red pajamas. One of the levels has a dragon's lair where I find what I think is the game's best weapon, the Starblade. It works against creatures that can only be damaged by magic, and I stop using my stamina for offensive spells. I soon find a "Healing" spell that heals all hit points, so that becomes my primary spell for the rest of the game. I also cast "Nutrition" a few times to restore my hunger bar and "Deflection" against a few spell-based enemies. 

       

Finding the best weapon in the game.

      

There are no real puzzles during this journey, just a lot of battle (enemies respawn rapidly, unlike the first game), leveling up, and the acquisition of valuable inventory. My iron items are replaced with elven ones. Warrior characters can assemble a suit of Khan's armor (also present in the first game) and can find Khan's skeleton at the site of the last piece, outside the door to the golden skull. There is no mention in the game or backstory as to who Khan is. There are alternate items for characters who want to specialize in spells.

     

Finding Khan's bones near a well in the final area. A robot looks on. By now, I'm wearing a full set of Khan's equipment.

        

The second castle level culminates in a portal that takes me to a swamplike environment, where enemies include giant bugs and ghosts. The map is strewn with ore to feed to the final well.

      

Fighting a ghost in the swamp area. The final tower is in the distance.

     

The last level is found in a tower in the swampy area. Robots, red dragons, beholders, and vampires are among the enemies. Long before I fully map the level, I find the entrance to the room containing the golden skull. He is hard, but easier here than in The Mystic Well, where he attacked in an area full of other enemies and teleporters. In this one, he's alone in a big room near a well that restores stamina, so I can retreat and heal as much as I want and keep "Deflection" going.

    

The Golden Skull hits me with a spell.

         

I eventually kill him and, after a few beats, get the message below. The game lets me keep playing at this point.

 

I would have felt rewarded with a few more asterisks.

     

There are a few mysteries that I'd try to solve if I liked the game more:

   

• I never found a use for the spells "Enchant Vial," "Adaption," "and "Homing Sphere." I can't tell from their names what they're supposed to do, even.

• One spell, scrawled on the wall of a secret area behind an encounter with a ghost, teleports the player back to the starting square. I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't turned to look at that wall. Did I miss any other messages scrawled on walls?

     

I don't know what the spell has to do with the message.

     

• In the swampy area is a document that reads: "Ha. What a fool." I have no idea what it's referring to.

• Mysterious items that I never found a use for: Klein Box, Magical Tome, Scrying Mirror, Torch (all areas are lit). "Mana Cubes" were mysterious until I tried eating them; I think the author intended "manna" (the food) rather than "mana."

• One of the castle levels has a room full of books titled "Interesting Book." I couldn't find anything to do with them.

 

What makes it interesting?

       

Playing the game was a passable experience. Its lack of sound and its simplistic gameplay made it easy to listen to an audiobook while I was playing. I give it a 23 on the GIMLET. Its best score is in "Equipment"; its worst is in "NPCs" (0) and "Game World" (1, and that's generous). This rates it 3 points lower than The Mystic Well, which had more interesting puzzles and did more with the character classes. This one has a better interface, however.

      

The game's death screen.

      

Both Daymare titles are the product of Oregon-based Jim Todd, who used "Jing Gameware" as his imprint for The Mystic Well but just offers his name here. He distributed it as freeware but happily accepted donations.

   

On his web site, where you can download all his games, he says that he gave up game-making because he had problems with "the different varieties of DOS and mouse drivers prevalent in the PC community" in the 1990s. I remember well. It surprises me that with so many different configurations and builds any PC game reliably worked. Now that PCs have become stable and he's retired, he says, he's working on games again. Unfortunately, they all seem to be tied in some nebulous way to cryptocurrency; for instance, a MMO dungeon crawler that he's currently working on, Nythyria, "includes an in-game cosmetic (making it a commodity) called Glitter that is pegged to Bitcoin Cash." I don't imagine there's a lot of overlap between my blog readers and gamers who would find that description attractive.