Dark Designs: Passage to Oblivion: Won!

 

Pter Rok: the original J.Lo.

        

Dark Designs: Passage to Oblivion

United States 

Softdisk (developer and publisher)

Released 1994 for Apple II

Date Started: 25 January 2026

Date Ended: 26 February 2026

Total Hours: 14

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

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later) 

        

Summary:

 

The first game in the second Dark Designs trilogy, this one was written without the original author (John Carmack) but using his engine and mechanics, a kind of fusion of themes from Wizardry and Phantasie. A generation after the original trilogy, evil once again threatens the land, and it's up to some scrappy adventurers to start at Level 1 and work their way up to defeating it. The entire series was released on monthly subscription disks, so no one was expecting the quality of commercial titles. Nonetheless, all of the games in the series almost make it. Oblivion has fewer features than the first three titles but nonetheless preserves enough of the base mechanics to offer a passable experience with core RPG mechanics. It also has some fun with prestige classes, as outlined in my second entry.

    

****** 

      

Let's recap: Queen Victoria of Tarador has been acting strangely. She's possibly possessed by the spirit of Agamol, the villain from the first Dark Designs trilogy. Someone needs to go to Oblivion, find the Potion of Salvation, and administer it to the queen. The only way to get to Oblivion is to pay a "travel agent" 50,000 gold pieces and the Bones of a Saint.

    

The game ends up consisting of six maps. They have 32 squares along each axis, but every map is at least slightly truncated. There are places in the Old Quarter and New Quarter that the characters cannot reach because of water. The Palace Quarter consists only of about half a dozen rows along the north and west edges of the map; guards block access to the actual palace. The Sewers use less than half of the available space. I assume some of these areas that you cannot explore in Passage to Oblivion will become available in future titles.

       

A rough map of the game's areas.

          

I spent most of the first two entries just building the characters while exploring the city maps. As I ended the last entry, I was just on the cusp of paying the travel agent 10,000 gold to visit Crytus, a burial isle, where I could presumably find the Bones of a Saint. I had dipped down into the sewers briefly but found the battles with acid blobs a bit too hard.

   

Crytus ends up being two maps, both using enough of their space to make a rough "circle" (i.e., not using the four corners of the square map). The arrival map, the Endless Spiral, is true to its name. It consists of a long corridor spiraling slowly into the map's center, where there's a cluster of rooms, and then back out again. After reaching the central point, the player starts to encounter occasional stairways down to the lower level, Crytus, but to different parts of the level, some interconnected by secret doors, some not. The stairway that the player really needs—the one that allows him to get the Bones of a Saint—does not occur until the very end of the interminable spiral.

          

The description is at least accurate.

       

The sheer load of battles in these areas, both fixed and unfixed, meant that I had to visit three times. You can imagine how annoyed I was at having to traverse that damned spiral more than once. It occurred to me after finishing the game that maybe there were secret doors in the spiral, allowing for some kind of shortcut, but my tendency was only to search for secret doors when I had no other options. 

      

In keeping with the theme of the "island," most of the battles consisted of undead enemies, like ghosts, skeletons, and ghouls, some of which can only be damaged by magic weapons or spells. My priest's "Turn Undead" invariably killed all of them, but at 11 points per casting, I didn't want to use it on the smaller parties. There were also a lot of human spellcasters, like necromancers, priests, and thaumaturges.

      

Like so.

       

The secret to long-term exploration in this game is mana pills. You basically want to fill every available inventory slot with them. The more you have, the more generous you can be with mass-damage spells in combat and healing spells after combat. At 1,000 gold pieces each, they're not cheap, but you can occasionally find them on the corpses of spellcasting enemies. Still, no matter how many I bought, I never had enough.

 

Combat never got any more interesting. I fell into an early pattern that lasted until the end of the game:

   

• Have the two front characters attack the same enemy, prioritizing the most dangerous, if he has more than 20 hit points. Attack two separate enemies otherwise.

• Move my priest forward in the first round so he can share some of the damage. In subsequent rounds, have him attack if no one has lost more than 10 hit points, have him cast "Cure Light Wounds" otherwise.

• Have my wizard cast "Magic Missile."

   

The only exceptions were if there were more than four non-undead enemies, I would have the wizard cast "Flame Strike" during the first round, and if there were more than four undead enemies, I had the priest cast "Turn Undead" in the first round.

         

We're definitely using it here.

       

More than 90% of the spell points used by the priest went into "Cure Light Wounds," and more than 90% of the spell points used by the wizard went into "Magic Missile." Their effects scale with the caster's level, but they never cost more than one spell point each (for those classes). Even if every character had only one hit point, it wouldn't take more than eight castings of "Cure Light Wounds" (and thus eight spell points) to fully heal the party. Thus, there would be no reason to cast "Cure Serious Wounds" (14 spell points), "Cureall" (21 spell points), or "Cure Party" (24 spell points) except as an emergency in combat. Damage spells have a similar cost/benefit problem.

       

There were a lot of chests on the two levels of Crytus. Almost all of them were trapped, and their traps defied my yakuza's abilities all the way to the end. I had to switch his ring slot from a Strength Ring to a Speed Ring, sacrificing combat effectiveness, before I could open anything.

      

Crytus had a lot of secret doors.

       

The chests offered a lot of gold but not much in the way of equipment. Equipment rewards in this game in general are light. For armor, I never found anything better than the regular armor (leather, plate, full plate) that I initially purchased. Shields never progressed beyond spiked shields. For weapons, I found:

   

• A Staff of Sleep in the Endless Spiral.
• Two Silver Swords, one from an early battle in the Old Quarter, and one from a battle in the sewers.
• A Dagger of Fear. I forgot where.
• Two Aegis Maces, one in Crytus and one in the sewers.

      

Since I gave it to my wizard, I'm pretty sure I never used it.

       

Thus, most of my power increases were from leveling up and acquisition of (expensive) spells. The characters were between Levels 14 and 17 at the end.

    

After hours of exploration, I finally found the Bones of a Saint in an unmarked square. "Unmarked" means the automap didn't show the usual symbol that means "something to find," the way it does for traps, stairs, and very rare special encounters. Fortunately, the area was labeled "Tomb of the Saint," so  I was careful to step on every square.

      

Yum. I love marzipan.

      

At this point, I didn't know it, but I could have won the game in moments. Instead, I took some time to explore the sewers. There are three entrances from the New Quarter. The third is on an island that you can reach by walking through shallow water. But the sewers are unimportant. They have a lot of gnolls and giant ants, and a couple of extra magical weapons.

     

Accessing the sewers.

         

I thought that once I paid the travel agent for the titular passage to Oblivion, we'd actually have to explore Oblivion, or at least, you know, the passage to it. I arrived at the travel agent's office loaded with mana pills. But choosing the "Passage  to Oblivion" option led immediately to the end of the game. You explore Oblivion in Dark Designs: Search for [the Potion of] Salvation, which means that title qualifies as "banallure," but it gets even better: I had assumed that the travel agents would be opening some kind of mystic portal, but the "passage" is just a ride on a ferry, and "Oblivion" is just the next town along the river! Double "banallure!"

       

I guess "Paradise" becomes available in the last game.

          

Some random notes:

   

• In addition to Strength Rings and Speed Rings, I found Opal Rings and Ruby Rings, but these didn't seem to have any effect on my statistics. I assumed they were just for selling, but I kept one copy of each until the end of the game just in case.

• Something kept destroying my shields. I'm not sure which enemy it was—I mostly rapidly clicked through combat because it would have been torturous otherwise.  

• I kept my wizard equipped with a Speed Ring so she'd go early in combat. That would have been nice for my priest, too, but his dexterity was so low that even with a Speed Ring, he tended to go last in combat. 

• Although he had a reasonable number of spell points by the end of the game, I mostly forgot that my paladin could cast spells. Replacing my thief with a yakuza (fighter/thief) was definitely worth it, though. 

       

My thief's inventory at the end of the game.

      

It's worth talking about some of the features of the first three Dark Designs games that we don't see here:

   

• Nicer looking maps and textures.
• A greater variety of special encounters and NPCs (this game only has one NPC, the barmaid)
• More boss battles
• Shops that sold high-end items
• Some light puzzles

      

Winning the game took 10 hours longer than the shortest game in the original trilogy and four hours longer than the longest. Thus, in Oblivion, players have to invest more time (mostly in combat) while receiving less interesting combat. The only positive thing that Oblivion adds to the series is the availability of prestige classes, but since these don't become available until the player has leveled up several characters, they're also a function of time.

      

And my paladin's character sheet.

      

For these reasons, Oblivion gets a lower score than the 30/31 I gave to each game in the previous trilogy. I award it a 26. It must be said that it's still not a bad rating for a diskmag title; even with its length and flaws, I'd rather play it than most other diskmag games of the period. Any game that gets its highest ratings in character creation and development, magic and combat, equipment, and economy (3s and 4s here) at least understands what it means to be an RPG.

       

At the same time, I don't plan to play Dark Designs: Search for Salvation or Dark Designs VI: Restoration (the only one with a number in its title), both also from 1994, unless they come up as random rolls in later years. Neither game has any YouTube video available, but judging by limited screenshots, it looks like Restoration does use the same maps as Passage to Oblivion.

    

The Dark Design games are, notably, the last Apple II titles (even including the GS) that I have on my list until deliberately-retro titles appear in the 2010s (starting with Leadlight in 2010). True excellence was unlikely from a disk magazine serving a platform well past its glory years, but Peter ("Pet Rock") Rokitski deserves some credit for sending the platform off with, at least, some modest dignity.