Tower of Alos: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

I have no idea what the "Status" means.

      

Tower of Alos

United Kingdom

Independently developed; published by A&F Software

Released 1982 for BBC Micro

Date Started: 13 January 2026

Date Ended: 20 January 2026

Total Hours: 8

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

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)  

       

Tower of Alos ended as it started: a waste of time. There wasn't a single moment in which it was fun. It probably won't even be fun to read this entry.

   

The winning conditions are to:

      

1. Get the character to Level 7.
2. Gather the four magic items. 
3. Clear Temadra's Den (D on the map).
4. Clear the Garrison (* on the map).
5. Clear the Temple of Bragi (# on the map).
6. Clear the Tower of Alos (II on the map).
7. Return to the safe castle.  

       

Finding the magic sword after a wave of orcs.

        

It would be nice if you could do #1 in the process of doing the others, since clearing the various dungeons gives you a ton of experience. I ended the game at Level 9. But the dungeons and towers are so hard that you practically need to be Level 7 to have any hope of clearing them. That means a lot of grinding—and this game grinds worse than any game I have ever played. In battle, there's really only one thing to do: attack one of the enemies that surrounds you by pushing one of the arrow keys. If there are more than four monsters on the map, you can just hold one direction, as when you kill a monster, a replacement will appear in his place. But once you get down to three enemies, you have to watch which direction you're pushing so you don't waste attacks on an empty space. 

   

At the same time, you have to watch your hit points—which of course are not displayed on the main screen. The game warns you when you're about to die by turning the character (and the nearby monsters) red, but that's often too late to do anything about it. Hence, you have to periodically check on your status with the S)tatus command and then periodically use the D)rink command to quaff a potion.

   

The sum of these factors results in a combat system in which there are effectively no choices and yet battle still requires your active attention. You can't automate it; you can't play on autopilot while watching TV. I'm reminded of Penn & Teller's Desert Bus, where there's nothing to do but watch bland scenery, but the bus pulls to the right, so the player has to keep his attention on the game and make occasional corrections. For neither game is it enough to be boring; they force you to engage in the act of boredom. Penn and Teller at least had the excuse of deliberately trolling. What was Tower of Alos's author thinking?

        

Surrounded by ogres. I have no idea why they use the "3/4" symbol or why the main character uses the (British) "pound" symbol.

      

(The author was apparently a man named David Howard. He doesn't appear to have been credited on any other games, and his name is too common to possibly identify him today.)

      

Then we get to the four dungeons. Two of them—Temadra's Den and the Garrison—require you to fight multiple waves of monsters before you can fight the "big boss," which in both cases is a demon. Even at high levels, you burn through your small allotment of potions fast, and you need to have at least one, more likely two, left over at the end for the demon. I did not get a strong handle on when the demon appears. I think there's a small chance at the end of each wave. I think the minimum number of waves of skeletons (Temadra) or orcs (the Garrison) that I fought before encountering the demon was five; the maximum may have been closer to fifteen. Either way, the demon kept killing me, so I had to fight multiple times.

         

Quaffing a healing potion while battling a demonic hashtag.

      

A Ring of Resurrection is found in Temadra's Den, and after you find it, every time you die, the game asks if you want to be resurrected. The answer is no, because you need the ring to win the game. (You can find it again, but it was enough of a pain to find it the first time) Also, resurrection doesn't refresh your healing potion supply, so taking the offer is really just the equivalent of getting one more potion. The Garrison, meanwhile, has a magic sword that increases combat ability. Both magic items fortunately appear after some random number of waves, not necessarily after the demon battles that "clear" the dungeons, so it's somewhat worth attempting these dungeons early, just to see if you can get lucky.

      

Finishing Temadra's Den.

       

Temadra's Den, the Tower of Alos, and the Garrison are all single-screen locations. They're effectively just combat screens that last multiple waves. You can't move around on them. That's not true of the fourth indoor location, the swamp. There are several things to do here:

   

• Grab the magic boat (on the main map) and sail to the island. The magic boat is one of the four magic items.

• Fight a battle with a bunch of ogres (the toughest enemy in the game) on the island.

• Clear a bunch of troglodytes (a single battle) from the Bragi Temple, which gives a blessing. I'm not sure what it does.

      

Gold is not a reward.

       

Unlike the first two dungeon, this one loves to load you up with treasure at the end of each battle. "You gain 6,000 gold pieces!" the game announces, as if that's something positive. The truth is, you find way more than enough gold from random monsters in the wilderness. There's nothing to spend all this excess money on. I had more than 100,000 gold by the end of the game.

      

This is the kind of game that loads you up with gold and then kills you for having too much gold.

      

Even worse, for every 1,000 gold pieces in your possession, your attack skill goes down. Once you have more than about 5,000, you can't even successfully land an attack. So you're constantly having to leave dungeons and truck gold over to the H)oard just so you can successfully fight again. 

   

The Tower of Alos has 14 levels, some with orcs, some with skeletons, and some with demons. Fortunately, the game saves your progress up the levels, so each time you leave and return, you're on the maximum level you achieved during the previous visit. The 13th level has a demon with a suit of armor, the fourth magic item. When you reach the top level (14), you've "cleared" the tower. You have to frequently ESC out of the tower, though, because it loads you up with so much gold that you can't hit anything in combat. 

      

Retreating to deposit my gold in the hoard.

      

With all of the items accomplished, the player returns to the "friendly" castle for the winning screen. 

                  

The game is weirdly hard, even at high levels with all the magic items. A lot of luck goes into the demon battles in particular, since demons have 8d8 hit points, which is quite a range. There's also a matter of healing potions. When you take them, you (I think) mostly gain all your hit points back minus 10%. But there's a small chance that the potion will be "bad" and do nothing. There's an equally small chance that it will be a "Strength Potion" that gives you 25 times your level. Thus, a Level 7 character who normally has 70 hit points suddenly finds himself with 175. That will carry you through a demon battle where a regular healing potion won't.

      

Not the most inspiring box cover.

      

But otherwise the game is hard enough that I wasn't above trying to cheat, just to save myself half of those eight hours. Unfortunately, nothing I did worked. I couldn't figure out how to interpret the save game file; the BBC Micro definitely does not use regular hexadecimal encoding. As El Explorador de RPG noted in his review, the only full review of the game that we could find, in the September 1983 Practical Computing, spent most of its column inches talking about ways to reprogram the game, including cheating by editing a line to make the healing potion always become a Strength Potion, and at 250 times the level rather than 25. It took me a long time to figure out the sequence of commands necessary to load, unlock, and edit the BASIC file, but the game just crashed every time I tried to load the edited file.

   

Thus, I toughed it out the long way, cheating only in the near-instant use of saving and reloading thanks to save states, and now I'm 8 hours closer to the grave. Alos earns a 9 on the GIMLET, but it's fundamentally worse than that. I have played many games, particularly in this era, that I felt were boring or too basic. Alos is a rare game that makes me feel like it was actively trying to distract me from more important things in life. It would not have been a good use of 10 quid even in its day.