Al-Qadim: The Genie's Curse: Summary and Rating

 

That horse is false advertising.

            

Al-Qadim: The Genie's Curse

United States 

Cyberlore Studios (developer), Strategic Simulations, Inc. (publisher) 

Released 1994 for DOS

Date Started: 23 June 2026

Date Ended: 24 July 2026

Total Hours: 24

Difficulty:  Easy-Moderate (2.5/5) on default, but user adjustable

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)  

   

Summary:

     

Al-Qadim is an action RPG with minimal RPG elements drawn from the short-lived Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting of the same name. The PC is a young corsair (one of the character "kits" in this setting), engaged to his caliph's daughter, looking at a bright future. But his family is disgraced (and his bride kidnapped) when the family genie goes amok. To restore his family's honor and save his betrothed, he must discover the shadowy cabal that is freeing genies from their oaths.

    

This single-character game has fairly minimal RPG elements and plays more like an action/adventure than an RPG. Character attributes are fixed; inventory is very limited; dialogue options all seem to vector to the same conclusion. The character gains experience and levels up, but leveling doesn't make a palpable difference in battle except that the character gets a couple of additional sword moves. The titled orthographic viewpoint (single axis only) and many of the graphics (as well as the desert setting) are reminiscent of Dark Sun: Shattered Lands (1993), while the plot, Arabian setting, and some of the action sequences evoke Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire (1990). It's a fun game for its length, but not a great RPG experience, and it doesn't feel much like a Dungeons & Dragons title.

   

****

   

Well, I never did hear back from Herb Perez. It's too bad because one of the first things I would have asked is whether Al-Qadim started as a Dungeons & Dragons game or whether they grafted the name onto a product already in development. My guess is probably it did start with D&D in mind, given the histories of the companies and the principal authors, but Al-Qadim seems to have been given more leash than any D&D title I can remember since Hillsfar. Among the oddities:

   

• Leveling only makes the character stronger to the extent that it conveys extra maximum hit points. (The "extra sword moves" are only really valuable to the extent that you stupidly let the character get surrounded by enemies.) 

• Attributes don't matter at all. I don't think the game even knows what they are. I inspected the save game files and while I found values for experience, max hit points, and current hit points, I did not find any of the attributes.

• The corsair class is supposed to be able to dual-wield, use thief skills, and employ numerous non-weapon proficiencies, none of which appear in the game.

     

Why would anyone pay for healing when you can get healed for free on your ship?

      

• The Al-Qadim setting makes extensive use of social status, which is quantified. It isn't even mentioned in the game.

• Experience points are doled out quite liberally for solving puzzles and quest steps; little of the player's experience total comes from enemies. 

• Only a couple of the other Al-Qadim-specific classes make any appearance in the game, principally sha'ir, and they don't behave like sha'ir in the manual. I didn't see any familiars, for instance.

• Zakhara is supposed to be a melting pot of races. While there was a mention of dwarves (in passages that could have easily been CTRL-H'd), I saw no one but humans in my explorations. Admittedly, the graphics perhaps aren't detailed enough to differentiate some of the races.

• Nowhere in the game does it actually confirm where the action takes place. No map appears. You sail from island to island by menu. The official map of Zakhara does have a lot of archipelagos, but none of the names match up (admittedly, many of the islands are unnamed).

        

The "game world" in list form.

         

• "Shards" seem to be purely an invention of the game. 

• What we learn about genies, the way they are called, and what they can do don't quite seem to align with the rules in the Arabian Adventures sourcebook. 

• A "Zaratan," as has been pointed out in the comments, is a giant sea turtle in the sourcebooks.

• Many of the other creatures that you would expect based on the sourcebooks make no appearance. In particular, there isn't a single camel or Arabian horse.

          

The authors made the cyclops Arabian by putting the word "desert" in front of it. Also: what does he narrow?

        

So even though "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 2nd Edition" is displayed prominently on the box, I don't really see it. That isn't necessarily a complaint—I'm hardly a D&D purist—but it does hint at why the RPG elements of this one are so under-baked. If it had started as a Prince of Persia sequel, I'm not sure I'd be surprised. 

        

Curiously, I find myself lamenting the absence of the social status system the most—not because I like such systems, of course, but because from a role-playing perspective, I enjoy defying them. While I was in the middle of Al-Qadim, I wrote a paean to American faith in individualism and individual progress. Such faith is a core part of my own ideology and identity, and thus I always enjoy stories in which an individual comes up against a rigid system and refuses to kowtow to it, leaving pompous nobles to sputter at his insouciance. I understand that Robert Jordan was planning to write a series of novels set after The Wheel of Time in which Mat Cauthon would travel to the Seanchan Empire; that's the kind of story I would have enjoyed.

     

You get some "sassy" options with the caliph, but they don't lead anywhere.

       

As I head into the GIMLET, my feelings about the game are relatively neutral. It was easy to play and write about; it moved along at a good clip; and it offered a more complex plot than the typical RPG. On the other hand, it didn't really have any of the things I like about RPGs, so it felt like I was doing something that was modestly fun but otherwise unrelated to this blog. I would expect the GIMLET to hover just at or below the "recommended" level (say, 35-40), but with such low scores in the core RPG categories (2, 5, and 6) that it doesn't really qualify for that label. Let's see: 

         

Category	Assets	Liabilities	Score
1. Game World	Setting in Arabian mythology is rare among RPGs.  Strong story. Character's place in the world is clear. NPCs generally react to plot developments.	Not a lot of lore to the setting explained in the game. Some major elements left enigmatic, such as the basic nature of the human-genie relationship.  Game world is small and limited.	5
2. Character Creation and Development	Standard experience and leveling. Some levels come with a new sword move.	Only character creation choice is the name. Attributes not used. Character does not get intrinsically much more powerful.	2
3. NPCs	Large number of NPCs, many with strong personalities. Talking with them advances the plot and fills in the lore. Full-sentence dialogue options with some minor role-playing choices.	Dialogue options are mostly illusory.	6
4. Encounters and Foes	A few original monsters. D&D bestiary is always well-varied. Light navigation puzzles and a few role-playing encounters.  Can encounter as many enemies as you want via traveling.	Game does not incorporate most special attacks/defenses. Puzzles are mostly facile and role-playing encounters are rare.	5
5. Magic and Combat	A couple of combat options: sling, sword (with different attacks), shards.	Not nearly enough options. Battle is not tactical; just a lot of running around.	2
6. Equipment	Sword, sling, Ring of Protection all get some enhancements. Potions and shards.	Very under-developed. No armor, wearables, choice of weapons. Many of the potions don't seem to really work.	2
7. Economy	It exists, and there's a gambling game. Potions and shards are a money sink.	No complexity. Far too generous. Only really need it to buy quest items.	3
8. Quests	Clear, multi-stage main quest. Some side quests and side-areas. A couple of places where the player has multiple ways to approach a quest or quest-stage.	Quest path is generally linear and does not offer many choices. No ending choices or alternate outcomes.	4
9. Graphics, Sound, and Interface	Nice graphics. Not "immersive" but definitely pleasant. Adequate sound effects. Support for keyboard, mouse, and joystick.	Mapping both attacking and other actions to the same key was a bad decision. Menu does not adequately differentiate selected and unselected options.  Sound effects relatively rare. No background sounds.	4
10. Gameplay	Good length. Flexible difficulty.	Very linear. Not much replayability.	5
Other/Total			38

       

Longtime readers will know that I don't include music in category #9, and I usually play the game (as I did here) with the music turned off. However, I took the time to listen to the soundtrack later, and there are some unbelievably good compositions on it. I don't know a lot about eastern music (other than the double-harmonic scale, quarter tones, etc.), so I can't tell you what references it makes or what traditions it evokes, but it's complex and subtle, with beautiful MIDI work that really draws out the individual instrumentation. You can listen to it here; I particularly recommend Track 6, with its complex drum rhythms. Credits go to Eric Heberling, Rob Wallace, and Nada Lewis; Heberling also did The Elder Scrolls: Arena from the same year and is currently working on The Wayward Realms, a forthcoming game from Arena's developers.

       

"Al-Qadim whisks away traditional role playing on its magic carpet" is how Petra Schlunk's August 1994 Computer Gaming World review begins, which is an accurate sentiment. The review echoes everything I've said about de-emphasizing exploration, character creation and development, equipment, and combat tactics in the name of more streamlined action gameplay. She liked the originality of the setting, as I did. "Some might appreciate the attempt to lighten up role-playing," she concludes. "But many hard-core fans won't be amused." She lumps the music in with sound, though, in saying that they "could be a bit more robust." I think that's fair for sound effects but not the music.

       

I don't think much of "a complex, pre-generated character," and "tightly-woven storyline" just signals there are no player choices. But they're right about "grand cinematic musical themes."

          

I looked over Wikipedia's and MobyGames's summary of other reviews, which average around a B-/C+, but the general theme is that it's an inoffensive enough action game but not much of a CRPG. I gather it generated the same type of discussion as the simplification of character attributes and the move towards more action-oriented combat in Skyrim or Fallout 4. Some reviews worried that the game was a harbinger of the future, and they already started to lament the loss of more traditional titles, both RPG in general and D&D in particular. Many who think that RPGs hit a major slump in the mid-1990s (I don't have an opinion on this yet) will find common ground in these reviews. But, honestly, it's a bit obnoxious to blame an individual game for an industry-wide trend. Al-Qadim did well with its own intentions.

          

Despite it selling nearly 100,000 copies, my sense is that Al-Qadim didn't leave much of a legacy. Any influence it had is impossible to detect among hundreds of console games that were already offering the same approach to gameplay. I don't think there was an explosion in Arabian fantasy among CRPGs in the later 1990s. It certainly didn't do anything to prop up the Al-Qadim tabletop setting, which aside from one 1998 offering published its last module the same year. 

    

SSI will continue to squeeze everything it can out of the D&D license for a couple more years, and I will dutifully play all of them. We may see an SSI/Cyberlore partnership again as early as 1995, with World of Aden: Entomorph; otherwise, Cyberlore will go off in its own direction, specializing in fantasy strategy and simulation games before getting out of the business in 2005. 

    

I'm a bit annoyed that we never had any resolution on the duck.

  

****

   

Previous entry in this series

     

For further reading: 

 

My index of games played by lineage has all other Dungeons & Dragons titles.

The Internet Archive has the Al-Qadim: Arabian Adventures source book. 

 07/30/2026