Sword Dream: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

 

Note the "winning text" just above the trash can.

        

Sword Dream

And specifically, the "Spirit of Darkness" module 

Sogni & Spade ("Dreams and Swords") in the original Italian version 

Italy

Independently developed; originally published by VideoCOM, later released as shareware

Released 1993 for Macintosh

Date Started: 24 December 2025

Date Ended: 4 January 2026

Total Hours: 14

Difficulty: Hard (4.0/5)
Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)  

     

A kit lives and dies on the strength of its sample scenario. The best sample scenarios make you glad you bought the kit even if you don't intend to construct any adventures of your own. "Rivers of Light," the sample that comes with Stuart Smith's Adventure Construction Set (1984), is a worthy game in its own right. So is "The Heirs to Skull Crag" from Unlimited Adventures (1993). When a sample is boring, poorly balanced, or simply unplayable, it makes you wonder if the kit simply isn't capable of anything better. This was my reaction to The Bard's Tale Construction Set (1991). 

   

So all I can say is that to the extent Sword Dream is a good construction kit, its assets are poorly showcased by "Spirit of Darkness." The default scenario is small, simplistic, confusing, and far too difficult and grindy.

   

I gave you the setup last time: an unidentified evil has settled in the Valley of Dawn, driving out most of the residents. The valley contains a mage's tower and a town (Smalltown), which together offer the usual CRPG services. The one dungeon is a nearby mine. The mine consists of three small levels: upper level, mid-level, and lower level. The upper level has two separate sections, depending on whether the party moves to the mine entrance from the square to its west or from the one to its southwest. The mines are swarming with random encounters:

     

• Upper level: Giant spiders, giant rats, kobolds, goblins
• Mid-level: Goblins, skeletons, giant spiders, giant ants
• Lower level: Skeletons, giant spiders, giant beetles, evil monks

      

Battles on the mid-level had an annoying bar in the middle of the screen.

      

These enemies are ridiculously hard against a Level 1 party, which has no defenses against a giant spider's poison or a giant rat's disease, and which doesn't make enough money to have those conditions healed in town, even if they could make it back to town in time. The only solution to those particular enemies is to flee from them, every time.

   

Regular enemies are hardly any easier. They can kill Level 1 characters with a single lucky blow. If you get wounded, the cleric has one "Cure Graze" spell, and then it's back to the town for any healing beyond that. If resting worked in the dungeon, you could heal 1 hit point per day, but it doesn't work (you're awakened by a noise). If a character dies, you can't afford to raise him. The only completely honest solution is to grind in the doorway to the mines, returning to town frequently to rest and heal. The less honest solution is to reload every time a character takes a major blow.

       

At higher levels, the cleric has a few more spell options.

        

I went with the less honest solution. I explored all three levels, fleeing from every battle that looked too hard, attempting the ones that looked winnable, reloading if I lost more than I gained. When I had done everything but win the game's few fixed battles, I grinded Level 2 like a chump and then tried again. When those battles proved impossible even at Level 2, I hex-edited my characters to Level 3. I wasn't about to grind to Level 3. It would have taken, conservatively, 500 winning battles. I would have been playing the game for more than an entire work week. There are no encounters in the game that provide extra experience boosts.

   

I took the opportunity to enlist a wizard as the sixth character so I could check out a little magic. Just as in Dungeons & Dragons, Level 1 and 2 spells are underwhelming, and the wizard has very little to do once they're cast. Casting spells is needlessly annoying, first with the material reagent requirement ("Magic Missile" requires glass lenses), second with the interface. When you cast a spell, the casting character's "index card" window comes to the forefront. You then have to expand it to see the list of spells, double-click on the right spell, and then click on the appropriate place on the map to target it. Doing this before the timer runs out is difficult, unless you just leave the character's expanded window open all the time.

       

Nailing a kobold with a "Magic Missile."

       

Here's a rundown of the three levels:

 

Upper level - Main section 

 

• Exhausted gold veins.
• An old man who hands out lanterns. 
• A message in blood: "Saint Cuthbert shall free us from the Spirit of Darkness."
• A couple of gems.
• A passage blocked with a landslide, seemingly on purpose.
• A ladder to the mid-level.

   

Upper level - Alternate section 

   

• A storage area with nothing in it.
• A kitchen area with a dagger. 
• A corridor with a trap that a rogue can identify and disarm (this happens automatically). 
• An illusory wall leading into an ancient temple with the statue of a saint.

       

Finding an illusory wall.

       

• A fixed battle against three skeletons in the temple's chapel. Killing them nets a suit of plate mail, a shield, a long sword, a bow, and arrows. This was the only one of the three fixed battles that I was able to win on Level 1.

     

The first of three fixed battles in the game.

         

Mid-level

 

• Exhausted gold veins. 
• A square where the game says we found a knife, but we didn't get a knife.
• A square that teleports the party back to the upper level, but in a wall space.

     

This feels like it should have hurt more.

       

• A little poem written on the wall before the fixed encounter below: "Unbeliever, go back and shiver. Go ahead if you dare to meet Saint Kildere. Saint Charlemagnette's might you'll meet on your right. Saint Cuthbert, male and proud, to the left singing aloud." Going forward at this location reveals the encounter below. Going left brings you around to the same encounter, though you just have to defeat one of them. Going right takes you to the aforementioned teleporter. I wonder if there are some bugs here, and the left and right options were meant to lead to different encounters.

• A small room with a fixed encounter with 9 skeletons. This battle is so weird that at first I thought it was bugged. The battle map is turned upside down so that the party cannot flee without going past the skeletons. Some of the skeletons start in what ought to be inaccessible wall space. About 50% of the party's attacks do no damage, instead producing the message, "The weapon rebounds!" Once all but one skeleton is dead, you get that message for every attack, and the skeleton will not die. The manual says that the message is indicative of enemies that must be killed with magic, but I don't think the game gives you any magic weapons. You have to kill him with spells. It's a good thing I trained up that wizard. (Throwing holy water at him may work, too). I killed him with three castings of "Magic Missile." 

       

I was very confused by this encounter.

      

• A ladder to the lower level. 

    

Lower-level 

   

The lower level has only one fixed encounter, with two evil monks. As the battle begins, the game explains that: "The Dark Monks are an evil faith, and are known to worship Mistress Death." I couldn't defeat them until I cheated up to Level 3. Killing them nets 400 gold pieces, a gem, and a lantern.

      

I love how they were doing nothing more nefarious than mining gold.

        

That's it. I don't know whether "winning" means defeating all of the fixed encounters or just the one encounter with nine skeletons, which is the last one that I did. Either way, when I returned to the Valley of Dawn, I got the victory message:

      

A hooray for you! Today is a great day for the inhabitants of the valley. The spirit of darkness was defeated, hope restored, and the pass can be walked again by honest men. The mayor of Smalltown is here with most of the citizens, and a feast will be held in your honor.

     

The pass leading out of the valley is now open. I stepped on it, and the party got 500 gold pieces. A few more steps, and I was prompted for the scenario file that the party was departing to. It's one of the oddities of the kit that character files cannot be saved separately. Instead, characters are transferred between scenarios when you literally walk out of one and into the other.

        

This came out of nowhere.

           

Until I won that final battle, I was so sure that I must be missing something that I used the "Search" command on literally every square of the dungeon. It never once produced anything. 

    

The question for us now is: Is the kit capable of a better game? Probably a little. It would be interesting to try a higher-level scenario with the full complement of wizard and priest spells. I like tactical grids, but they're always boring at early levels. On the other hand, the documentation doesn't give any indication that the game is capable of NPC dialogue, puzzles, interactive encounters, side quests, or the rewarding of characters based on anything other than combat or treasure. The inventory system is simplistic, lacking rings, helms, boots, belts, etc. In sum, it seems capable of creating only very basic games, and the only thing that recommends it is that I don't think there was anything else like it for the Macintosh. On my GIMLET, it scores a 25, with mostly 2s and 3s across the board. It does all the things that an RPG should do, but without quite enough depth.

     

I would be remiss if I didn't cover a few interesting features that partly redeem the kit:

   

• It supports voice-based controls using Apple's PlainTalk software. I don't think I've seen such an option in any previous CRPG.

• When a character picks up two of the same item with a limited number of uses, the game offers to "merge" them into a single item. For instance, a lantern with 60 minutes of light and a lantern with 30 minutes of light becomes a single lantern with 90 minutes of light.

       

I guess it makes sense. You're just pouring oil from one to the other.

       

• If you missed the addendum to my last entry, all of the compositions are original to the game except "Jingle Bells," which was indeed checking the current date and substituting for normal exploration music. 

• Inspecting each item gives you a detailed set of facts and statistics. 

      

Checking out a suit of plate mail.

        

• I appreciated the somewhat limited textual narration of the corridors and rooms. It was well-written, with no major translation issues, and did a good job evoking a Dungeons & Dragons module. I would have liked to see more of this narration to truly flesh out the world. I think the game could have earned a 5 for "Game World" this way. 

• I also like the idea of a "Place" menu that lets you make common transactions within a business without having to go and find a specific counter or NPC. Daemonsgate operated this way as well. 

         

In an email to me, Accomazzi acknowledged the debt to D&D, which he mirrored in the name of the original Italian version of the kit, Sogni & Spade ("Dreams and Swords"). He says that he did play Pool of Radiance, but "did not particularly love it." He did love Ultima III-VI and "appreciated Wizardry." Ironically, I find Sword Dream closest to Pool of Radiance among these titles, though I see how the tactical combat might have been inspired by Ultima instead. 

 

The original Sword Dream went through several releases between 1993 and 1995, and new scenarios became available on a web site donated by a U.S. fan. These additional scenarios include "Return to Dawn Valley," "Secret of Greywood" (also spelled "Graywood" in some documentation; also sometimes "Darkwood"), "Quest for a Paladin," and "Nile Trial," all but the last created by the original team. ("Paladin" at least had input from the original team, though the primary author was Nicolas Meyer, a Swiss fan who helped with the French translation of the kit.) I haven't been able to find any of them, alas.

     

Sword Dream 3D. It manages to look a bit like Ishar.

            

In 1997, the team released Sword Dream 3D, an update to the kit that changes the main interface from 2D to 3D. Original team members Luca Accomazzi (design) and Eugenio Spagnolini (graphics) were joined by Alessandro Raccuglia (3D graphics). The new engine is supposedly backwards-compatible with scenarios created for earlier versions, although the 3D version comes with a new default scenario: "Heroes of the Black Tower." Accomazzi has made the kit and the scenarios available on his GitHub page, but the compiled version is available only as a CD-ROM disk image, and I'm having the worst time getting it to work with Basilisk II. (I'm aware that there are folders on his page for some of the scenarios that I said I could not find, but they are empty or have 0KB files in them. I have written to Mr. Accomazzi to see if he still has them.) In any event, I would regard the 3D version as enough of a change to be a fundamentally different game, and I've listed it separately on my master game list.

     

Accomazzi, already a columnist for the Italian MacWorld, continued to be Italy's resident Mac (and general Internet) guru for the next two decades, with publications like Da Terenzio a Internet: La Tecnologia Raccontata a un Profano (2005), iPhone e iPad Sotto il Cofano: Per Tutti i Dispositivi iOS (2010), Mac OS X: Sotto il Cofano (2010), OS X 10.9 Mavericks: Guida All'uso (2013), and Cuore di Mela (2016). He currently runs his own company, Accomazzi.net, specializing in Internet-based security and e-commerce solutions. Spagnolini entered the gaming industry, worked 13 years for the Walt Disney Company, and is now the CEO and founder of Gamyth, a startup working on its first persistent-world RPG, Narramor.

    

Except for what I decided to do with The Fates of Twinion, this entry brings us to the end of 1993, so we'll have the traditional transition before moving on.