Sandor II and Daemonsgate: Summaries and Ratings

 

My most recent loss.

        

My current Wordle "win" percentage is 97%. I hope we can all agree that's not some kind of flex. Wordle is an easy game. Occasionally, you get into the kind of trap depicted above, but that certainly doesn't happen often. I thus occasionally indulge the fantasy that if I just win enough games in a row without losing them, the wins will overwhelm the losses to the point that my win percentage rounds to 100%, and then maybe I'll get a personal call from the president of MENSA or something.

    

I realized during my hiatus that I'd been thinking about my statistics in the right-hand column (sorry, mobile users) the same way. These days, it takes about 35 wins to nudge the "won" percentage a point higher, but some part of me has been looking forward to the day when it rounds to 100% or is actually 100% because I've gone back and finished the ones I've lost. Either plan is folly. If I never lost another game, my wins would round to 100% (just for games that have a winning condition) at Game #9950. As for going back and winning the rest, there's no way in hell I'm taking the time to win Moria, let alone Angband and BOSS: Beyond Moria too.

   

In fact, the thought continues, I've been thinking about those statistics all wrong. Higher isn't better. They're already too high. There's no way that 9 out of 10 games deserve to be played all the way to the end. I am old enough to start to make out the reaper's shadow in the distance, and yet I chose to spend the equivalent of seven working weeks on Fate: Gates of Dawn?! When I've never played the original Fallout or Wizardry 8? I should be pumping up those "loss" numbers, not trying to reduce them. I don't want to go back to the way things were during my first year, but I think from now on, until my win/loss ratio gets down to 85/15, the burden of proof is on the game.

   

So let's rip off that Band-Aid and get started. I'm going to soft-pedal the GIMLET for these two games. If you want to see the specific scores, you can go to my ratings spreadsheet; here, I'm just going to discuss the strengths and weaknesses and final score.

         

       

Sandor II: Kotalan und die drei Schwester'n

"Sandor II: Kotalan and the Three Sisters"

Germany

Motelsoft (developer and publisher)

Released 1991 for Atari ST

Date Started: 27 May 2025  

Date Ended: 20 October 2025

Total Hours: 15 (not won)

Difficulty: Moderate (3.0/5)
Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later) 

            

Summary:

 

The third RPG from the German developer Motelsoft, Sandor II puts the player once again in the land of Sandor, where an evil wizard named Kotalan has kidnapped the daughters of King Salinos. A single pre-created character must assemble a party and ride to the rescue. Top-down overland exploration contrasts with first-person dungeon exploration, with themes and mechanics cribbed from several popular American titles. A relatively linear narrative leads the party from city to city, dungeon to dungeon, finding objects necessary for the next step, often by solving some kind of riddle or mechanical puzzle. Combat takes place on a tactical grid, likely inspired by 1980s SSI titles. Sound is scant and annoying, and the graphics and interface are a confusing mess, somehow regressed from the original Sandor.

 

***** 

 

Between the two games I'm wrapping up today, I feel worst about Sandor II. I'm not really "stuck" in it. If my mother's death hadn't forced a hiatus in the middle of the game, I probably could have finished it. My perception is that it's fairly nonlinear geographically but linear narratively, with each dungeon offering a clue or item necessary for the next dungeon, all the way to the presumable end. It was the same approach that the developer used with Magic Tower I: Dark Stone Ritual (1992).

   

Motelsoft is the kind of low-budget developer that its name suggests, but it's competent at analyzing the best elements of beloved commercial RPGs and combining them in interesting ways. I've said before that I think SSI's Shard of Spring (1986) and Demon's Winter (1990), two of the more under-rated games that I've covered, inform the core mechanics of Sandor and its sequel. But there are also elements of Pirates!, Dungeon Master, Phantasie, and probably a few other titles. Like Origin, the company never uses the same interface twice, which I also find admirable, particularly given their prolific output. Sandor II offers decent character development, inventory, puzzles, and backstory.

     

I kept looking for the "Visit the Governor" button.

     

But the game is a slog for three reasons. First, the combat takes far too long for the limited combat mechanics that the player is afforded. I believe Dungeon of Doom (1980) was the first game to use a tactical grid. Other notable appearances are in Tunnels of Doom (1982), Galactic Adventures (1983), Ultimas III-VI, and of course the Gold Box series. I've never articulated this in so many words before, but I've come to believe that a developer shouldn't waste a player's time with a tactical grid unless it offers enough tactics and environmental features to make the battle truly tactical. In other words, if you can't meticulously target the radius of a "Fireball" or make enemies come to you one at a time through a narrow mountain pass, then why don't we all just save time and fight our battles from a menu, thanks.

     

Oddly, the combat interface from the original Sandor was more attractive.

     

Problem #2 is the all-mouse interface, my objection to which many of you do not share or understand, so you're going to have to imagine the complete lethargy that overtakes me when I open the game and start clicking my way around the menus. Even if you regard the mouse as an acceptable tool, you must recognize that some interfaces are not well designed for it. To wit:

   

• Good use of a mouse interface: Exchanging an item of equipment by dragging it from one character and dropping it on another.

• Bad use of a mouse interface: Clicking on "Camp," then clicking on "Give," then clicking on the name of the character giving the item, then clicking on the item, then clicking on the name of the character receiving the item, then clicking "Okay."

   

The final straw is the one I'd rather not admit. I think part of me worries I'll get slapped with a Title VI violation. I'm just sick of stopping to translate. It's a complete momentum-killer. Understand that I'm not blaming the game for being in German. Both the authors and the audience were German. But it does prevent a brisk experience when I constantly have to stop and switch to a translation window. And before I get a bunch of comments suggesting other options, trust me, I've tried them. Anything that presumes to speed up the experience brings an equal number of speed bumps and other problems.

      

Sigh.

     

Issues #2 and #3 come together to create, I suppose, a fourth problem: I just find the game really confusing. I keep missing menu options, misinterpreting riddles, and finding items that don't seem to directly translate, and that I lack the cultural context to evaluate. Look at the riddle discussed here, for instance. It's discouraging to have to constantly stop and get help from German readers. This is all going to come up again, of course, but hopefully when it does, I won't be trying to get momentum after a long hiatus.

     

This screenshot has no particular reason for existing here.

        

In the GIMLET, pretty much every category registers in the 3-4 range except for NPCs (there really aren't any, aside from some "encounters") and graphics, sound, and interface (all poor). I gave a 5 to character creation and development. Everything else is "not bad but not outstanding," the kind of message that the final rating of 33 is intended to send.

   

Motelsoft will have plenty of additional chances, of course. Projekt Terra (1991) is still on my backlist. Escape from Ragor (1994) was selected for my 1994 list. There are 15 other titles, all the way to 2006.

 

****** 

         

      

Daemonsgate

United Kingdom

Imagitec Design (developer and publisher) 

Released 1993 for DOS 

Date Started: 4 August 2025   

Date Ended: 20 October 2025

Total Hours: 26 (not won)

Difficulty: Moderate (3.0/5)
Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later) 

        

Summary:

 

This ambitious title has the player take the role of Gustavus, the guard captain in the city of Tormis, which has inexplicably been surrounded by besieging demons. Gustavus must assemble a party of allies, flee the city, discover the source of the invasion, and end it. The game features a continuously-scrolling, top-down world, much like Interplay's two Lord of the Rings games (and the later Infinity Engine) games, plus real-time-with-pause combat not unlike MicroProse's Darklands. The world of Hestor is a detailed, compelling place, informed by a huge chunk of lore in the manual, a background video, evocative maps, and multiple cinematics. Thousands of NPCs contribute to this lore. Alas, the developer's ambitions are sunk by tedious gameplay, including enormous cities (with no automap), an extremely long main quest, a confusing interface, and a character development system that encourages the player to front-load his grinding and coast through the rest of the game. 

 

**** 

      

Abandoning Daemonsgate is part-choice, part necessity. I can't get the next plot point to trip. Internet sources, including comments on my last entry, say that when I entered Pestur's Gate, someone was supposed to show up and direct me to meet Councilor Pestur in one of the inns. I can't make this happen no matter what, and if I meet Councilor Pestur in the town offices, no keyword I feed him advances the plot. I could reload an earlier save, do the more recent stuff, and try again, but that's where the "part-choice" comes into play.

       

Even as I leave the game, I love details like this.

     

It's so disappointing. As I covered in my first entry, the backstory and materials for Daemonsgate are wonderfully compelling. The interface, which is otherwise a bit of a mess, has some strong features, including an in-game encyclopedia that slowly builds as you talk to people, detailed descriptions of all items, and a party that slowly grows by convincing NPCs to join you. Unfortunately, the development team was too small and their ambitions too large. So many things don't work that I started keeping a long list.

       

• There are dozens of items in stores that seem to serve no purpose, hinting at game mechanics never implemented: lanterns, armorer's tools, fletcher's tools, flint and steel, chalk, and so forth.

• About half the time you try to leave a conversation with someone with the ESC key, the game crashes.

• NPCs often say things that suggest they were meant to be in different buildings or in different towns, or offer dialogue that seems to belong to other NPCs.

       

We are not in a guild.

      

• NPC dialogue has a constantly-growing list of keywords, most of which the NPCs have no reaction to.

• Taking a boat trip resets your preferences for music and sound effects.

• Shops routinely buy and sell something other than their signs indicate.

• Whenever I examine my food inventory, no matter how much food I have, the game says I have 7 days' worth.  

     

Those are some dense fruit loaves.

    

• When you pay for lodgings, you get an object called "Lodgings" in your inventory which sometimes, but not always, goes away when you rest.

• The towns, while evocatively designed and filled with details, are so large that it's nigh-impossible to find anything. 

• The game requires a mouse to select commands from menus. The placement of commands on menus doesn't make any sense, and one menu has only one command. The words are small enough that it's easy to select the wrong ones. There are insufficient keyboard backups.

• Inventory management is a confusing, unintuitive mess.

• Character development is entirely player-driven through training and practice sessions in camp. The player is highly motivated to just get it all out of the way early in the game.

• It is too easy to acquire the best inventory or near-best inventory early in the game.

• The above two factors trivialize the combat system. 

• You can avoid combats anyway by entering and then escaping. Even fixed enemies disappear when you do this. I suspect that this can break the game in places.

      

At 26 hours, I was probably only a third of the way through the game. Judging by a couple of resources, I would have spent at least a few weeks (real time) running around the continent, finding the five temples in the five "Skull Mountains" and activating the "Matrix Configuration," which would trap any further demon arrivals in Elsopea. Finding each temple involves a host of sub-quests, doing favors for local rulers. 

     

I think I found the right inn.

      

Returning to where we last saw Alathon, we would have discovered that he had moved on, prompting a long chase and several more sub-quests, culminating in the discovery that Alathon was dead. His spirit, trapped in a bottle, would have told us that to close the titular gate, we would need a Lore Master (Alathon himself) and a powerful Daemonologist. We would have picked up the Daemonologist in Dryleaf after doing a favor for him.

   

The next phase would have led us to the tomb of Karadith, a hero from the game's lore, and the recovery of his sword, the only weapon capable of slaying the daemon leader Alkat. Finally, we would have returned to the city of Tan-Eldorith, gone through the gate to the demon world, and destroyed it from that side (here's a video of that). We would have gone to Alkat's citadel, killed a bunch of sub-bosses to get various keys. ("This last level is VERY BADLY DESIGNED!" says a walkthrough that mysteriously ends abruptly with that sentence.) We would have confronted and killed Alkat, triggering the endgame cinematic. Even though we would have destroyed the gate, Alkat's death would have "torn a hole in the void," sending us to a mysterious place, and setting up the backstory for Daemonsgate II.

       

Confronting a demon earlier in the game.

             

The GIMLET comes to a 38, which in earlier years would top my "recommended" threshold, but which by 1993 is either on the line or just below it. This score is bolstered by its strongest category, particularly the game world (8), with which I find no fault except a lack of change based on player agency. NPCs and equipment both get a strong 6; the rest of the scores are 2 or 3, lowered by factors like the ones I described above: no character creation, a weak development system, confusing combat, no magic beyond creating things in camp, a poor interface, and tedious gameplay. 

 

Alas, poor reviews killed any chance for that sequel. In an April 1994 Computer Gaming World review that I could have written myself, Bernie Yee says that the game is "composed of good elements, but in their overly ambitious attempt to create a huge and complex world, the designers failed to integrate the good parts into a great whole." He laments the lack of any kind of automap, which a game with cities this size really needed; he calls the graphics "mundane" and "uninvolving"; and like me had problems with the interface. 

     

The knowledge base, offered by many games in the current era, was one of the game's best innovations.

        

MobyGames's round-up of reviews shows a median in the 60s, the lowest a crazy 15% from the Czech magazine Score: "Daemonsgate is rubbish. Its poor presentation and poor execution are perhaps surpassed only by its impossible story and lackluster gameplay." The best score, at 94%, came from the January 1994 Electronic Games: "A role-player's dream . . . complex and masterfully done." The author would disagree with the multiple items on my list: "The only thing really missing from the game is a good auto-mapping function." The German ASM, in June 1994, provides the average take: "While the story behind the game is certainly interesting, by the time you've encountered the first scrap of truly relevant action, you've already lost interest three times over."

     

The game's lead designer was Nigel Kershaw, whose only previous experience had been a board game called King's Table: The Legend of Ragnarok (1993). Daemonsgate may not have been successful, but it didn't seem to affect his career: he has remained in the gaming industry for the subsequent 32 years, most recently at the Liverpool-based Wushu Studios. This was his first and last RPG, however. (It was also Imagitec's last RPG; its subsequent offerings were almost all action and racing games.) I made tentative contact with him over the summer and really hoped to get some more background from him, but he stopped responding to my messages. Perhaps he didn't care for my first few articles.

    

As I suspected, that hurt a bit, but perhaps with these two games behind us, I can get some momentum and wrap up 1993 before we wrap up 2025. 

 

Game 560: Excelsior, Phase One: Lysandia (1993)

 

Welcome back, True Believers.

       

Excelsior Phase One: Lysandia

United States

Castle Software (developer); published as shareware
Released 1993 for DOS, 2000 for Windows

Date Started: 17 October 2025

      

Excelsior is a superior Ultima clone, so superior in its opening stages, at least, that I hesitate to even use the word "clone," which seems pejorative. But it is clearly inspired by Ultima, down to the tiled iconographic perspective, the use of most of the keyboard for the game's commands, and the detailed "handbook" that gives the player a tourist's view of the game world. 

    

The backstory (perhaps only a framing story; time will tell) casts the player as a "Fixer," an agent of the Council of World Watchers, sent to various planets as necessary to "correct any deviation in the cosmic fabric of planetary history." You have already served the Council for two eons. Your latest assignment is to the planet of Lysandia, where some unspecified evil is growing. "The populace is losing their will to advance, and progress is stagnant." The mission requires you to adopt the guise of a local, and thus the character creation process is couched as the Fixer selecting the body he or she will inhabit for the duration of the mission.

      

Part of the backstory.

     

As for that process, it's far more extensive than any Ultima, and I really hope the game makes use of its complexity. Every character starts with 15 points allocated to strength, dexterity, and intelligence and 5 allocated to luck, charm, and piety. After giving the character a name, the player next selects the race, which modifies the statistics. There are 13 race options: human, elf, dwarf, gnome, halfling, imp, troll, half-orc, half-elf, half-gnome, giant, golem, and glynn, the latter being a kind of angelic being with yellow skin. The effects on attributes are predictable: elves get lowered 1 point in strength, and raised 2 in dexterity and luck; trolls get 3 points of strength, -4 to intelligence, and -3 to charm; and so forth.

    

Sex is next. Males get +1 strength and -1 dexterity, women the opposite. "Sexless" is an option for imps, golems, and glynns, given their magical nature. The player then allocates a pool of 30 points to the three primary attributes and a pool of 5 points to the secondary ones. 

         

The final steps of character creation.

      

There are 13 classes available: warrior, archer, swordsman, ranger, militiaman, mage, cleric, paladin, scholar, bard, rogue, pirate, and assassin. These classes have various attribute minimums, not covered in the book, so it takes some experimentation to allocate the right number of points to meet the requirements. I wanted to make a sexless golem paladin, which is possible with 30 strength, 25 intelligence, and 8 piety. Yes, yes, hah, hah, paladins are always "sexless." 

   

The final step to character creation is assigning two skills from a list of 12: bandage, survival, scribe, lockpicking, seamanship, dark eyes, fencing, marksmanship, swimming, music, fist-fighting, and magic. Sometimes, a class gives you a skill already. My paladin had "Magic." I chose "Dark Eyes" and "Survival."

      

A final selection is the character's alignment, which is not absolute but set on a scale from "evil" to "good." I made my paladin modestly "good," but more on this in a bit. 

      

My starting character. Well, close to it, anyway.

      

Gameplay begins on an outdoor map, with the character standing between a city to the west and a castle surrounded by a moat to the east. The tiles are small, allowing for 26 x 18 of them to appear in the view window. My character starts with 60 hit points, 3 magic points, 250 food, and 100 gold pieces.

         

A new world awaits.

       

As I begin any Ultima clone, I tend to run through the same investigative questions.

    

How's the interface? 

   

Answer: in the best Ultima tradition. One command per keystroke: A)ttack, B)oard (a ship), C)ast, D)rop, E)nter, and so forth. Most of them are so obvious that I rarely need to look at the list of commands that can be called up with H)elp. Movement is with the arrow keys or numberpad, the latter allowing you to move diagonally.

    

Without any trouble, I head east to the castle, enter, and begin looking at things and talking with NPCs.

 

Is it going to offer NPC dialogue or just NPC monologues? 

    

In other words, for NPC interaction, is it going to clone Ultima I-III or Ultima IV and V? The answer, alas, is the former. NPCs mostly give generic lines.

   

But the game doesn't limit NPC monologues to one sentence. They frequently deliver entire paragraphs that the player must scroll, and every so often deliver messages so long that a black screen opens up to contain it all. There aren't many NPCs in the castle's single large level. Here's what they offer:

   

• Guards: "Enjoy your stay, and obey the law!"

• Clerics: "Come join my search for a higher being." 

      

That would be me.

       

• Warriors: "There is no more noble calling than that of a warrior." 

• Swordsmen: "There's no finer weapon than a well-made blade." 

• Andrew the Deft: "Know me as Andrew the Deft, friend." 

• Damian: The Ceremonial Man at Arms. Offers to train me in swordsmanship for 50 gold pieces. That answers one of my questions, at least: skills that you don't take during character creation can be purchased later. 

    

I later forget to return here. I guess I need to start making a list.

      

For services, the castle has a tavern where you can buy food, a bank where you can deposit and withdraw money, and a panel of six guildmasters who oversee the "leveling up" process when you gain enough experience. More on that later.

      

How do secret doors work?  

       

All games, whether iconographic or first-person, tend to offer four answers to this question.

   

1. There are no secret doors.
2. You have to search for them. Success may be certain or dependent on a character skill.
3. You just walk right into them; "secret" doors are in fact illusory walls.
4. You have to solve some kind of puzzle. 

      

Seemed like the obvious place to look.

       

Excelsior uses the #2 approach, with no skill involved. The places that the player must search are pretty obvious. You may have noticed that unlike many Ultima clones, the game does not occlude things that the character would not be able to see from the current position. That plus the fairly large view window means that "secret" areas are sometimes visible in their entirety. Almost right away, I find a secret larder off the tavern. That leads to the next question.

 

Is this the sort of game where you can just take things, or is that wrong?

    

It's amazing how relevant that question remains into the modern age. During the period where this blog was dormant, and I should have been playing old RPGs if I was going to play any RPGs at all, I admit I downloaded Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon (short review: like the "Scrollslike" approach; annoyed by the authors' irreverent, nonsensical use of Arthurian characters and themes). Almost right away, you're confronted with the question of whether it's okay to take this head of cabbage from the kitchen. You often don't know that a game has some kind of crime and bounty system until you screw around and find out.

         

No one seems to be bothered.

          

In this case, I grab sacks of food, hold my breath, and wait for the guards to snap to attention and start streaming towards me. They don't, so I guess I'm okay. The guards' lack of response automatically answers one of my follow-up questions: "Are any of the things I'm not supposed to steal technically key plot items that I'm required to steal, thus subsequently requiring me to slaughter dozens of castle guards?" You never forget your first RPG.

 

I also naturally check my alignment after the little heist, but it doesn't seem to have budged on the scale. 

      

What kind of king do we have here? 

     

That's another question that coincidentally echoes in Tainted Grail. If this is a boring Ultima clone, the king will be a benevolent Lord British-like character who sets me off on the main quest. Here, King Valkery seems more of an affable tyrant. He greets me with a "Welcome, commoner!" but says he's too busy considering a 30% tax increase to talk to me.

     

At least I didn't get a big exposition dump about virtue.

      

It's the king's mage who sets off the main quest. He has one of those multi-screen dialogues. As I (the character) speak to him, I recognize him as one of the Elder Fixers on the Great Council. He's the one who sent a warning about the problems the world is facing. He doesn't tell me much about said problems, but instead suggests that I find three mystical amulets which will help develop my attributes. He names three towns where I can find the amulets or at least leads on the amulets: North Blagsell, Roaldia, and Embiscule.

       

Part of a long encounter with the king's mage.

        

What sort of equipment system does the game offer?

    

The answer: much closer to Ultima V than the earlier games in the series. You can dual-wield weapons, for one thing. Instead of just one item of "armor," you can equip a helmet, gloves, shields, boots, and a torso item. On the negative side, there are no statistics available; you just have to assume that items that cost more are better.

    

I find a dagger and wooden shield in a secret area of the castle, but I naturally want better stuff, so I head out of the castle and west to the town of Oooblyae. The town has a tavern, a provisioner (torches, shovels, lanterns), a weapon shop, an armor shop, a spell shop, and a healer. I buy cloth armor and a shortsword.

        

Selections in the armor shop.

       

For NPCs in Oooblyae, one of them repeats that there's an amulet for each major attribute. Another tells me that there's a cartographer who can "aid me in locating a multitude of different places" in Castle Infinitum to the southwest. A third is proud of her pet duck that she's trained, and indeed you can visit the duck in a small pond in the town's center.

 

In an Ultima game, that would be a mantra.

       

What kind of combat system are we looking at?

        

This question has nothing to do with the duck. I could have segued that better. As you explore the land, enemies spawn randomly across the landscape and then head directly for the character. At Level 1, these enemies include gremlins, goblins, and kobolds. 

       

Things get out of hand.

      

Combat mostly uses the early Ultima approach. There's no separate screen. You just hit A)ttack or C)ast (if you have an offensive spell) and specify the direction. After combat, though, we find a more Ultima V approach in that enemies can drop multiple things, and just about anything otherwise found in the game—gold, food, weapons, armor, torches, and so forth—might be part of the NPC loot.

    

Combat is a lot harder than I would have expected. Multiple enemies can spawn at once and surround you. You miss a lot at Level 1, and they hit hard. I was killed in my first couple of battles with goblins. You can try to "escape" into a town, but the enemies remain on the map waiting for you when you emerge. That leads to the next question:

   

How can I reliably heal myself?

    

This is again a question that transcends Ultima clones specifically. The new player is always looking for a sense of what the damage/heal cycle is going to be. At one end of the spectrum, there are games that essentially restore you to full health after each battle, so that you only ever have to worry about one battle at a time. At the other extreme are games for which it is impossible to heal without some kind of resource, making the accumulation of battles as important as the individual battle.

   

The player usually seeks some kind of infinite resource that "breaks" this cycle. For instance, there are many games in which health regeneration does not happen automatically, but spell point restoration does (again, we see a parallel with Tainted Grail), so as long as you have a healing spell, you have an infinite resource. If health and mana regeneration both rely on food, potions, or other resources, the game becomes a lot harder. 

    

I can't have too many rounds like this.

     

Excelsior was very difficult in its early stages. There is no infinite resource. Health does not regenerate automatically. Healers and inns cost more money than the player makes from even several battles. For a while, I couldn't get out of a downward spiral in which I kept losing hit points in battle and hardly making enough money to compensate.

   

Fortunately, the game has a healing spell, and magic points do regenerate automatically (and quickly), but it costs 50 gold pieces for a spellbook and another 25 for the spell. I eventually got to a point where I was trapped in Oooblyae because I was down to 5 hit points; there were three enemies waiting for me outside; and I had no money. Unable to recover from this, I had to re-start the game and make the spell my priority.

     

How does the magic system work? 

    

Even Ultima has so many answers to this question that there's no common style across the series. The first two Ultimas made spells inventory items that you bought and used individually. Ultima III introduced the "pool of mana" approach, and the rest of the games built on that by adding first the need for reagents (Ultima IV), then the need to know the syllables associated with each spell (Ultima V), and then the need to purchase the spell first (Ultima VI and beyond).

     

Excelsior's approach is to make you buy a spellbook to hold all your spells, then buy each spell once. After that, you can cast your spells infinite times. The game gives each spell a two-letter code that you type when casting it, but it's not quite the same as the Ultima syllable system. "Anti-Pain" (AP) costs just a couple of mana points, so even though I started the game with only three, I could cast it, walk around, cast it again, and ultimately get back to full health as long as I could get to the safety of a town.

         

I buy my first spell.

         

But Excelsior has a wrinkle that I've only really seen in one other game that I can recall: Thalion's Dragonflight (1990). Each spell is given an alignment, and the spell costs less the closer the character is to its alignment. Moreover, as you cast spells, your alignment slowly shifts towards the alignment of the spells you're casting. In my case, "Anti-Pain" is on the "good" side of the scale, but only a few ticks above neutral. Thus, as I healed myself, I gradually became more "evil." I'm not sure how much sense that makes philosophically.

        

All I wanted to do is stop the bleeding.

        

Anyway, "Anti-Pain" still didn't protect me much on long journeys between cities, so I decided to spend a little time grinding around Oooblyae, at least until I had the best equipment the city had to offer.

   

How does character development work?

    

Same as Ultima III and beyond: experience and leveling. The Guildmasters take the place of Lord British as the principal agent of leveling. Gaining a level conveys more hit points and magic points; spells become more powerful; and there's a hint that glowing orbs found in each castle (behind a maze of secret doors, in the case of the Orb of Strength in Castle Excelsior) will increase attributes once the character has the associated amulet. You may recall that Ultima V had glowing balls in the dungeons that served a similar purpose.

       

These guys remind me of the "review board" of Skara Brae (cf. The Bard's Tale).

        

For now, the increased magic points and hit points were enough to make me feel a bit safer, and I was happy to see that the number of hit points cured by "Anti-Pain" also increased. 

    

Enemies scale to meet the character's level. At Level 2, I started encountering hobgoblins, gnolls, and mummies. So far, none of them seem to have any special attacks or inflict status effects. After some experimentation, I decide that having two weapons (providing two attacks per round) is more valuable than the additional defensive value of a wooden shield.

      

Not yet, anyway.

           

As I stabilize at Level 3 and prepare to set out around the land, I have two final questions:

   

How big a problem is food going to be?

    

Not much of a problem at all, it seems. It depletes slowly and is replenished cheaply. You often find a few dozen meals on slain enemies. As Hour 3 approaches, I'm still working off the initial allotment. No prolonged period stealing fish and chips for this fixer.

 

How am I going to navigate?    

    

Poorly, perhaps. The game did not come with a world map, and so far, there's no hint of any coordinate system. I feel like any top-down game ought to offer one or the other, ideally both. For now, I don't think I'll map, but I may have to do so if the world is large or complicated.

       

Perhaps there isn't just one world.

       

I would normally follow the coast in a clockwise or counterclockwise pattern, but an NPC mentioned a cartographer in Castle Infinitum. If the game does have a coordinate system, it's probably to be found there. Off we go into another world.

   

Time so far: 3 hours 

"Bard's Tale" Developer Fighting Aggressive Cancer

Happy fall, everyone. While you're waiting for my blog to return on 20 October, please consider donating to the "GoFundMe" for Rebecca Ann ("Burger") Heineman, who is fighting a sudden and aggressive cancer whose treatments are only partly covered by insurance. 

 

Ms. Heineman was an early programmer for Interplay and worked on The Bard's Tale (1984), Borrowed Time (1986), Tass Times in Tonetown (1986), The Bard's Tale III (1988), and Dragon Wars (1990). She has remained in the gaming industry right into the modern era, her most recent game (according to MobyGames's ludography) the PC and Mac ports of Nightdive's Killing Time: Resurrected (2024). 

Daemonsgate: The Legend of Yelda

The next phase of the quest.

    

I start this session in the ruined city of Tan-Eldorith, looking for the research notes belonging to Dorovan, the sorcerer who opened the titular daemonsgate. He was trying to figure out how to teleport across distances, but his experiments were sabotaged by the Pilots' Guild, which wanted to maintain their monopoly on teleportation-based travel. Said sabotage caused demons to flood into the world and destroy the cities of Elsopea, including the Pilots' Guild, so I hope they feel it was worth it.

      

As I load, the party is outside the city. I must have escaped to rest after the last session; it's not like there are any inns in the demon-infested ruins. Every time I re-enter, I have to fight several battles with demon guards. They look enormous and intimidating when I approach them, but they're not too hard in battle. However, all battles sap fatigue, and if the battles go poorly, I might start getting messages that the party is tired and needs to rest almost immediately, requiring me to head back outside again.

    

The large city is surrounded by a high (intact) wall, and the only way to penetrate is through a destroyed gate to the south. Like most cities in the game, it is annoyingly large. I mean, I can't fault it for realism. Imagine being told that you need to collect some "research notes" from an unnamed building in Manhattan. It would take a long time to search them all. It just doesn't necessarily make for a fun game.

           

        

Most of the buildings here are obviously destroyed from the outside. The intact ones are ransacked on the inside or have their doors fused shut. Some buildings have been converted to barracks and are full of beds, but we cannot rest there. Demon patrols are everywhere. It gets old constantly leaving the city to rest, so I end up saving near the middle of the city, exploring, and reloading when I don't find anything.

    

Eventually, in the northwest quadrant (but not the corner), I find a building that was "once the center for the study of the magikal arts," but now "home to foul daemons and other filth." Inside are a number of pentagrams drawn on the ground, a couple of them occupied by huge demons. After killing one of them, something like a book is revealed beneath where he stood, and I snap it up: Dorovan's Notes.

         

This guy is standing on the quest item. He was easier than he looks.

       

I spent a lot of time looking for the Pilots' Guild building that will supposedly let me teleport out of here, but I don't find anything. I'd love to know where it was supposed to be—maybe in a different Elsopean city? The closest thing I find is a central building with a "plinth upon which the city's energy gem sat," but I don't find the gem, and there's no obvious sign of a teleportation mechanism.

          

Kudos for the grammatically accurate sentence.

        

Thus, I reluctantly leave the city and settle in for the long track back to the northern end of the map. It takes about 45 minutes of real time to walk all the way up there, crossing rivers, camping when we get tired, fighting random battles, meeting random NPCs, and so forth. We enter Dryleaf, go to the tavern, pay Captain East to take us to Joruli Point, enter that city, find the place where Alathon was staying . . . only to be handed a note by a maid. Alathon has moved on to Trade Town, the city north of Dryleaf.

        

Growling at having wasted 300 gold in passage for this information, we return to the mainland and walk north to Trade Town. Alathon is in the bar, and it takes me a while to figure out how to hand him the notes. It's the same set of commands as if you want to trade items among party members; as long as you're standing near NPCs, you get their portraits in the interface after you cycle through all the party.

           

Giving an item to an NPC.

       

"This is a good start," Alathon says, dashing my hopes of a quick game. "But I will need time to peruse the notes, time that the civilized kingdom does not have." He goes on to suggest that while he tries to figure out how to close the gate, we at least stop more daemons from joining the existing horde. The Kzzir, the ancient lizard-like people who were the first inhabitants of Hestor, built a barrier during their time that confined the daemons to Elsopea. If I want to activate it, I need to find the old Kzzir city of Yelda.

    

I'm not sure that your reaction sufficiently acknowledges that we just traversed the entire continent and back.

        

True to its name, Trade Town has a bunch of shops. There, I soon discover that most of the stuff I looted from the daemons in Elsopea has no value. No one wants to buy Doomblades, Daemon Axes, or Darkness Amulets. But I did make enough gold during my travels to upgrade everyone's armor to plate (the best I've found so far). I also sell about half of the reagents I've accumulated because I haven't found any recipes that use them. The manual only lists three potion recipes, and none of them use the reagents (e.g., blackroot, blackheart, lightning seed, diamond dust) that I've been finding.

     

The obvious place to go to learn about the location of Yelda is back to Joruli Point. I resist the idea for a while because I just came from there, but when I can't find any responses to "Yelda" in Trade Town or Dryleaf, I once again pay for passage. It pays off. Several scholars have something to say about it, though most of them just think that it's a legend. They tell me that Roberto Zildir, a scholar in Vorsai, has studied the Kzzir and might know something about the city. 

   

What do you suppose has to happen for someone to get the nickname "fiveshanks"?

            

We head south to Vorsai, which we visited before, and find our way to the Library of Vorsai, supposedly founded by Zildir. We don't find Zildir, and no one seems to know anything about him, but a scholar named Udo in the library tells us that a book called Examinations of Old Races gave hints as to the location of Yelda. They don't have a copy in the library, but there may be one in the private collection of Ludovic Gruber. I previously visited Gruber's house and stole a book about daemonology. There were hints that Gruber had gotten himself killed trying to summon a daemon.

        

No one is home in Gruber's manor, and there are no books, but there is a trap door that I don't remember from my last visit. It leads to a basement laboratory with smashed bottles everywhere and a summoning circle on the floor.

      

              

We soon run into a "lab daemon" who attacks us alone. I assume it's going to be an easy battle, but it turns out that none of our weapons can wound it, so we have to flee. This—as is one of the oddities of the game—makes the enemy completely disappear, allowing us to enter the door he was presumably guarding. 

        

Notice that the game itself can't decide between "demon" and "daemon," so don't get on my case.

        

There, on the floor, we find the book we came seeking. It has a different title, The Eldar Races, but it's clearly the same book. The author, Helmut Cooltag, says that he discovered Yelda on a visit to The Stumps. The Stumps is a region of hills south of The Wall and east of Dryleaf. There's a city there called Cooltag's Rest that seems like as good a place as any to start.

    

Cooltag's Rest is a town centered around a gold mine. I've been here before, chasing rumors of a demon in the mine. I thought it was a side quest at the time, but it soon becomes clear that it's part of the main quest. The town is, as always, too large and difficult to explore. Nonetheless, I again have to hand it to the author for his world-building. This is believably a mining town. There are barracks for miners and their families. There are cart tracks crisscrossing the town, and buildings explicitly dedicated for mining equipment, storage of mining carts, repair of mining carts, and storage of gold dust. I didn't mention it before, but there was a similar situation in Dryleaf, which is supposed to be a logging town, and has rivers with logs floating along (well, not "floating" because there's no animation, but you get the idea). If only there were more to do in these places.

      

The author thought of everything.

         

Everyone in Cooltag's Rest is talking about the closure of the mine, which apparently happened after the miners broke through to the third level and unleashed something horrid. The only other gossip is that the mine foreman, Johan Schultzmonger, is having an affair with Francisca Whiplash, a local prostitute. As for Helmut Cooltag, he was lost in the mine while "on the verge of a great discovery." 

    

I find Johan Schultzmonger in his office where he insists that he can't give me the key to the mine and that Francisca Whiplash and he are: "Aah, business associates. Yes, associates." Nonetheless, I must have rattled him, because when we end the conversation, he slips me the key.

        

You probably should have negotiated terms first, man.

       

We spend about half an hour wandering three unnecessarily large levels, connected by an elevator that does not scream "elevator" at first glance. There is absolutely nothing to do on these levels except follow track after track and hit dead end after dead end. There aren't even any nuggets to pick up.

     

This is the supposed elevator.

       

Finally, we find an illusory wall on Level 3. Just on the other side, we destroy a couple groups of stone guardians. The walls in this section are lined with what looks like computer equipment, but it's hard to tell. Past a few more battles, we find a heavy door. "The hinges on this heavy door have seized up," the game says. "Also the cistern that counterweighed the opening mechanism is empty." Attempting to pick the door just breaks my thieves' tools.

          

I'm having trouble picturing the mechanism here.

        

We had seen and ignored some lubricant and lead weights in the mining supply buildings, so I have to head all the way back there, grab some of both, and return. The two items do the job, and the door opens.

    

The ancient library beyond has one book on the floor, the diary of Helmut Cooltag, who was trapped here and decided to translate as many of the books as possible before he ran out of supplies or the stone guardians killed him. The book mentions the barrier that Alathon talked about. Known as the "Matrix Configuration," the barrier involved a beam of energy connected through five temples built into something called "Skull Mountains." They have to be activated in a certain order, and the first is on the island of Scaeth. I check the map, and Scaeith, or "Sgaith" as the map has it, is an island off the coast to the northeast. The closest mainland cities are Helm and Pestur's Wake.

      

I think The Matrix: Configuration was one of the sequels.

           

Desperately hoping I've hit 2,500 words by now, I do a check and find that I'm 700 short. Sighing, I retrace my steps out of the mines and head east. You understand that as I travel across the world, I'm eliding every night spent in camp, trying to rest, having to fight random battles (which at this point pose no threat at all; my characters basically kill enemies the moment they come in contact with them), and reloading after the game crashes, which it does just about every time I forget to exit an NPC screen via the "Control" menu rather than hitting ESC (which works reliably on every other screen). 

 

I intend to try Helm first, but for some reason, the game has me keep running into dozens of identical-looking NPCs in the wilderness. I try asking one about SCAETH, and he suggests that the way to get there is from Pestur's Wake. I thus head for the more northern city.

       

A random wilderness NPC.

        

You're sick of me saying this, but again Pestur's Wake is an obscenely large city with multiple walled keeps surrounded by pointless expanses of pavement and grassland. A large open-air market has a bunch of merchants who seem to sell one thing each. It takes us forever to find an inn that we desperately need, and once we find it, we discover that for some reason the "Buy/Sell" menu won't activate, so we can't stay there. 

      

Again, some fun world-building that's mostly wasted.

        

There are a number of shops, a mercenary guild, and a town hall. In the latter, we find Councilor Pestur, the ruler of the town, but he has nothing to offer. NPCs keep telling me that Scaeth is to the east but not how to get there. Practically every other NPC in town, when asked about themselves, says, "I am the master of this guild." I tell you, I'm not a fan of the proliferation of quest markers in modern games, but this is an RPG that needs them.

        

We are not in a guild. Maybe in this city, every person is her own guild?

             

Anyway, word count or no, I'm out of things to talk about. I can't find any leads in Pestur's Gate, so I'll try Helm next, unless I just abandon the game. I've already verified that the Internet does not need me to document its ending, and it's just starting to feel like a real slog.

       

Time so far: 25 hours