Game 567: Dark Designs: Passage to Oblivion

Softdisk misses out on the opportunity to emphasize the "IV" in "oblivion."

        

Dark Designs: Passage to Oblivion

United States 

Softdisk (developer and publisher)

Released 1994 for Apple II GS, possible Apple II release unconfirmed

Date Started: 25 January 2026

           

The original Dark Designs trilogy (Grelminar's Staff, Closing the Gate, and Retribution), all from 1990-1991, were competently-programmed "afternoon RPGs" that drew inspiration from Wizardry, Might and Magic, and Phantasie. They were published by Softdisk, one of several disk magazines available at the time. When you're getting new games every month for a flat subscription fee, you don't really expect them to be epic, and in that sense, the original trilogy's 4-7 hour playing times and 30-31 ratings on the GIMLET are actually quite good.

     

The first three games are all the more notable for having been written by a young John Carmack. He was long gone from Softdisk by 1994, enjoying the accolade and profits from Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, but he remains credited for the engine. During the three-year gap, Softdisk apparently received hundreds of letters from fans demanding more Dark Designs games. Development was taken on by Peter Rokitski, who had been hired as the magazine's principal programmer after Cormack's departure. He had already resurrected a previous Carmack trilogy, Catacomb (a third-person shooter), with Sylvan Idyll (1992), Ether Quest (1993), and Sand Trap (1994). By the end of the second Dark Designs trilogy, as bulletin boards and the Internet brought the diskmag era to a close, Rokitski was essentially Softdisk's only employee, handling the duties of programmer, editor, quality tester, and assembler.

    

That was us! Only it was "Agamon."

       

The original Dark Designs trilogy concerned an invasion of demons through a planar gate. In Grelminar's Staff, the party searched the ruins of Castle Grelminar for the artifact that would close the gate. In Closing the Gate, they, well, did that. In Retribution!, they pursued the archmage who had opened the gate through a portal and into a hell dimension to get revenge. That archmage was called Agamon in the original series but is for some reason called Agamol here. The author likely got confused between "Agamon" (the wizard) and "Agamal" (the castle where he lived).

      

Ah, the problems faced by fantastical worlds.

        

The sequel series picks up "many years later" in the city of Tarador, where "good Queen Victoria has suddenly begun to act very strangely." She has ignored her duties and has created an army of strange creatures. "Whispers . . . have it that she has been possessed by the spirit of Agamol." The main PC is an adventurer with a friend who works at the royal palace. His friend appears on his doorstep one day, dying, saying that "the only hope for Tarador is the legendary Potion of Salvation." Legend has it that the potion is in Oblivion, "from which no one has returned (alive)." To get there, the party has to arrange passage from a "travel agent," who is demanding 50,000 gold pieces and the Bones of a Saint.

   

Gameplay begins in Tarador with a default party, but of course I dumped them and created my own. Character creation involves rolling five numbers between 3 and 18 and allocating them to strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, and piety. From there, you choose one of four classes: fighter, thief, priest, and wizard. Although the party can hold only four characters, there is room for 15 on the roster. The game instructions suggest that if the combined experience of the characters on the roster exceeds a certain value, prestige or multi-class characters become possible.

        

Creating a new party.

        

New characters start with nothing but staves, and the early game is brutal. It reminds me of the first Might and Magic, where you have to either keep reloading or keep remaking characters as you ever-so-slowly amass experience, gold, and equipment. Random encounters are frequent and deadly; no place is safe, and enemies might attack on any movement, including turning and winning a previous battle. Of particular difficulty is poison, which many enemies can deliver and no Level 1 party can possibly cure. You have to return to the inn frequently to restore hit points, which costs 50 gold every time (fortunately, most battles produce more than that). You can save anywhere, which makes it a little easier than Might and Magic, but character deaths are written to the disk immediately after battle. The game even deletes all your gold as battle begins and doesn't restore it to you until it ends. That way, if you open the disk drive (or kill the emulator) to prevent a character death from saving, the party has no gold when you reload.

      

Carefully exiting the inn.

      

As with the first trilogy, exploration and combat mix Wizardry and Phantasie elements. Instead of a wireframe first-person view or a top-down view, the game offers both, side-by-side. The top-down view shows an 18 x 11 grid, with unvisited squares obscured. A marker indicates special encounters or treasures. You get frequent atmospheric messages as you explore, the text making up to some degree for a lack of graphics.

      

Text offers what graphics cannot.

              

All controls are handled via intuitive keyboard commands. The options are usually on the screen in case you forget. You can bring up an in-game help menu with the ? key in case you forget anything. Until late in this session, I didn't notice that there was a S)earch command for secret doors.

      

But it was pretty obvious that one was here.

         

For combat, I've faced giant spiders, cottonmouth snakes, rats, fighters, wizards, bards, thaumaturges, necromancers, samurai, paladins (!), and ninjas. Gods know why the city is so violent. Battle shows the characters facing each other in ranks. It suggests a tactical map, but the only movement characters and enemies can do is between the front rank and the rear rank. The rank determines whom you can attack and who can attack you.

        

You specify an action for each character—attack, cast a spell, use an item, change weapons, move forward, or move backwards—and then execute. The game threads your actions with the enemies' in initiative order. It's basically Phantasie with the battle screen rotated sideways so the line between the parties is vertical rather than horizontal.

      

Bob has chosen to attack and now must specify the target of his attack.

      

Battle is rewarded with experience, and if the enemies aren't animals, gold and items, which you can then equip or sell at the item shop. My characters slowly amassed better weapons, armor, potions, mana pills, and attribute-boosting rings. 

     

Battle against a larger group. 

     

Running from combat only has about a 50% success rate, and if you fail, the enemy gets a free round of attacks. Every time I met a spider or snake, it was an agonizing decision whether to stay and almost assuredly get poisoned (even if I won) or try to flee. 

      

Eventually, I stabilized my party at Level 3 and started doing more than just shuttling between the inn and the weapon/armor shop. The opening map, the "Old Quarter" of the town, appears to be 32 x 32. You can't leave the map to the north, east, or west, but to the south is a new map, the "Palace Quarter," and gods know how many others from there. Some of the encounters I found in the Old Quarter were:

    

• Ivanna's Inn, where the party can rest and restore spells. The inn has several locked rooms, which my thief opened with a lockpick. Some of them had chests of gold. Some chests are trapped, but I think the only way to remove them is with a spell I don't have yet.

       

0.764% closer to my goal.

        

• Alain's Armor and All. They sell basic weapons and armor, potions (including one-use antidotes for a hefty 250 gold), speed and strength rings, recall scrolls (100% escape from battle), and horns, which I have no idea how to use. They don't seem to work in combat or out of combat. Anyway, since you can find most of these items in battle, the store is more useful for selling than buying, at least after an initial visit.

      

Getting equipped.

       

• Pat's Pub. It costs 20 gold to get in. There's a kitchen in the back with a few storerooms. One hallway has a fixed encounter with three fighters, a hierophant, and an illusionist. Elsewhere, a beautiful belly dancer named Natasha will offer hints if you buy her a drink. From her, I've learned that holy symbols cast the "Bless" spell; "Mark" and "Teleport" will be useful in getting back to Crytus, which is an island of "excarnation"; saints have been interred on Crytus; smugglers use the island in the Meriwyn as a treasure trove; and when you use a travel agent, you are sent immediately. 

     

Could I at least know what kind of drink I'm buying?

      

• Vyzap's Vault of Knowledge. They sell spells. This has been my biggest expense so far. At one point, I was up to nearly half of the 50,000 gold I would need, but I spent it all on spells (including, finally, "Cure Poison"). The store starts with only a couple of selections and then sells more and more as time goes by. I don't know whether the offerings are tied to character levels. So far, there haven't been a lot of great mage spells—no mass-damage, for instance.

• The Bent River occupies some space in the north part of the quarter. The game says we can't swim. I don't know whether there's another way to navigate it.

• The Temple of the Dog offers healing (at a reasonable rate of 1 point per hit point) and services to cure paralysis, stoning, and death—all way too expensive for the party at this point. 

• A warehouse north of the river has an encounter with 11 water spiders, the biggest single party I've faced so far. 

       

I hope you all enjoy being poisoned.

      

• Many houses with multiple rooms and treasure chests.  

            

I still have quite a bit to explore, even on the first map. I keep running into parties that are slightly too high in level for me, even though by the end of this session, my characters were between Levels 5 and 8. As I prepared to wrap up, I tried creating a new character, and suddenly I had a bunch of new options: paladin (fighter-priest), ranger (fighter-wizard), sorcerer (wizard-priest), yakuza (fighter-thief), hierophant (priest-thief), and illusionist (wizard-thief). So now the game has me questioning whether it's possible to win with the bland starting party. Certainly, I don't think there's enough for a thief to do that it's worth having a pure thief. 

       

A bunch of new classes become available. I wonder whether this is all, or whether combinations of three classes become available later.

        

It's clear that Oblivion is going to take longer than any of the previous three Dark Designs games, primarily because of the grind factor, but in that it at least provides an experience closer to the games it's emulating.

    

Time so far: 4 hours 

 

Star Trail: Midnight Mass

 

"Star Trail" is a throwing axe!? "Banallure" strikes again.

                

Of the various experiences common to multiple RPGs, one that I almost never fail to enjoy is arriving at a new city and making the rounds. A new city generally offers some combination of new clues, new equipment, new quests, and the resolution (or at least the next stage) of existing quests. It's a time to rest, heal, and restock. I particularly like games in which resting in a proper bed and/or eating a hot, full meal makes a big difference (e.g., Betrayal at Krondor, Star Trail, Pillars of Eternity). It engages the role-playing imagination more than just camping anywhere and getting all your hit points back. Skyrim is a game that could have done more with all its taverns and beds.

       

My party arrives in Gashok at night, wounded and exhausted from the road, so we immediately seek a place to stay. We find a bar first, called Second Home. "It doesn't seem to be one of the more high-class establishments in town," the game warns. It's all the more surprising, then, when the bartender tells us that they don't serve alcohol. We order a pot of tea and meals, but there are spiders in the food, so our trip isn't off to a good start.

     

It's protein-enhanced.

      

The bartender, Menchegal the Older, has nothing to offer about any subject, including whoever fired a crossbow bolt at us when we arrived. At a table, Eilif Windorn suggests that it was an "accident." We leave the bar having not accomplished much.

         

"We intended to kill you."

       

We keep exploring and find an inn called All Roads run by Elliane Sevenstones. She offers nothing in response to the keywords we ask. We try again with a meal and get a much better one, then splurge on a suite for a day. Commenters were right: the amount of time you choose to sleep is separate from the length of the stay that you pay for. We rest for 8 hours and heal nicely. The next morning, we set about our typical circuit of the town.

   

• From the comments on my last entry, I guess the house frames are not houses under construction but empty market stalls. They're empty here, too, but there's a pile of white ash nearby. When I ask anyone about it, they cancel conversation immediately.

• A woman named Gerlanje runs a potion and herb shop in a tent. We don't buy anything just yet.

• As we walk down the street, some sort of weird procession of moaning people walks by. 

      

This town has problems.

     

• A woman named Praiadne Oldenstein runs an equipment shop. As commenters suggested, I buy a sleeping bag for everyone.

• An NPC named Dietgel Fridgard offers that "the bright things of life" are "often not too far away."

       

Eric Idle, I hope you have a pencil.

      

• Another equipment shop run by Raoul Zumendick. Like everyone else, he clams up immediately when I ask about the ashes.

• Moria the Wise (NPC in a house) suggests I stay off the streets at night. "You'll meet some doubtful guys."

• A Temple of Boron. 

• Urja Naloth (NPC in a house): "If Elvish blood runs through your veins, get out of here. Otherwise, you'll suffer the same fate as our miller, in the south of town." Aha! That crossbow bolt was fired at Toliman. This is a sundown town for elves. This was around the same time that I remembered Toliman is supposed to be my leader in towns.

• Heroja Inhar (NPC in house): Gashok used to be quiet, but there have been strange incidents since strangers arrived.

      

Exploring the city.

        

• Another potion and herb shop, run by Ginya Ingborn.

• An old woman approaches us on the street and offers an amulet "which will protect you from evil magic" for 10 ducats. We decline.

• In the southwest corner of town, we find the charred remains of a mill. We spend some time searching the building but find nothing. Lyra figures the fire didn't start inside. 

      

I feel like the game is trying to influence my choice.

      

• Erhild Hesindel (NPC in house): "There are a lot of odd people here at Gashok. Not for long. There's a lot rumored. Watch your step." Well, that's ominous.

• Tronde Ismanson (NPC in house): The herb woman in the market (Gerlanje) is a witch.

     

I mean, yeah, it's a fantasy setting. There are lots of witches.

       

• A Temple of Praios. We ask about elves: "A godforsaken lot; one day, they will disappear from the face of Threa." That doesn't sound very clerical.

• Rogullf the Obese runs an inn called Safe Harbor. He tells us that the mill was owned by someone named Artherion, and he suggests we ask Gerlanje. We rent another room (it's dark already). Around midnight, we're awakened by voices. "Something is going on in the market square." We come across a meeting of figures in tan robes and armbands showing the symbol of the sun. They start a bonfire, which roars for a while before scattering white ash everywhere. That explains the ash that we found earlier. 

       

I don't know what the symbol on their robes is, but it doesn't look like the sun.

       

• We go back to bed and are treated to a cinematic of a man in a black robe creeping into our chambers. We awaken. "I wish to propose a business arrangement," he says. He tells us that the "famous throwing axe," Star Trail, was stolen from the temple of the God of Thieves and is being held in an Orcish fortress. He offers us our choice of temple treasure if we return it. 

       

I could have sworn I paid for individual rooms.

        

• We get more elf racism at the smithy, where Rowena Pauspiarken "won't work for prickears." We temporarily split Toliman off into a new party so that she'll talk to us, but she kicks us out when we ask about the "shrouded figures."

    

This town has a lot of taboo subjects.

       

• A tavern called Night and Day.

• An old woman stumbles into Toliman's arms, then pretends that her blindness has been cured. I suspect she pickpocketed us, but the game doesn't explicitly say so.

     

On the other hand, Toliman does have some healing skills.

       

• Back at Gerlanje's tent, she confirms that Artherion owned the mill and that it burned down. "He left town to the east and now lives in a small wood near town." 

         

People in this game could stand to get better at directions.

     

For the second city in a row, I haven't found a place selling weapons or armor. Commenters suggested that the market buildings occasionally host traveling merchants, so I decide to stick around the area until one appears there. I think maybe I'll look around for Artherion. Unfortunately, the nature of the outdoor map doesn't really let you "stick around in the area." Once you leave town, you can't even change your mind and re-enter; you have to march off in some direction, and even turning around the next point means multiple days on the road. 

   

There's also no going east from Gashok. The best I can do is north, then east, or south, then east. I save the game and try the former. Each night, I have Mahasim hunt for food and water (to avoid spending my rations) and have Lyra hunt for herbs. I don't have any recipes, nor an alchemy set, but herbs are useful on their own. Many are poisons, which can be rubbed on weapons. Some heal; some increase skills. More on this subject later. I also have Lilii perform a "wand ritual" to get her wand to Level 2, which causes it to act as a permanent torch (but saps all her magic points for the time being). A couple of lions attack one night.

         

 I skipped right over Number 1.

       

We eventually find a trail heading east. We're attacked by goblins on the second day, which again saps our hit points and spell points. We barely make any progress day to day as we travel east and then south until we're practically back at Gashok again. Almost everyone takes some damage tumbling down a hill as we try to negotiate a landslide, and everyone loses 2 charisma for a day after we're attacked by some dragonflies. A couple of forest gnomes attack outside Gashok.

        

That was deliberate.

       

Soon we're back at the city, having spent a couple of weeks on the road doing nothing more than making a giant loop. After we enter the city, I figure out the problem. Apparently, it makes a difference which signpost you choose when you want to leave the city. I had chosen the one on the north side, so my only option was to go north. Lesson learned. Probably re-learned, because I think it must have been the same way in Blade of Destiny.

   

We head out again on the eastern road, poke around for a bit, fight a battle against a couple of spiders, and eventually find Artherion's cabin. Artherion greets us with an arrow pointed at us. "We're friends!" we announce. He relates how he woke up one night with his mill on fire. When he tried to escape, cloaked figures shoved him back inside his burning property. He frightened them with magic and escaped. He says that Gerlanje is the only decent person in town.

       

Got some bad news for you, Artherion.

       

"The whole trouble started when two men came to Gashok. One of them seems to be the leader." He asks us to kill that man, "so all folks will again be able to live together in peace."

      

Atherion has a harrowing story.

        

We return to town and ask Gerlanje about the strangers. She says that two of them moved to town in the same spring. One of them, Valpor of Kuslik, lives two houses away from Night and Day tavern.

   

As we prepare to head for that location, we see that the market buildings have been converted from wooden frames to tents. Hallelujah. But no sooner have we entered the arms shop than the 19:00 hour rolls around and the market closes. 

    

Goddamn it.

        

Several places could plausibly be "two houses" from Night and Day. We knock on a few and meet Valpor. He claims he's not a murderer, but he tells us of two other strangers:: Erholt of Tiefhusen (northeast of market square) and Deregorn of Thunderbrook (next to the temple of Praios).

  

We make it to Deregorn's house first and fight a six-on-one battle against a "warrior." He dies quickly. Afterwards, we have the opportunity to search his house. We find documents linking Deregorn to an "order" that has eight members in Gashok. I assume this order is the same group of shrouded figures we found in the market at night. Maybe they're performing some kind of ritual that makes everyone else in town hostile? 

        

If it doesn't give names or addresses, in what way is it a "list"?

      

An old man answers our knock at a house northeast of market square. We have several options to accuse him or attack him, but we leave it for now. When we can't find anyone else in the area, we return, and the man thanks us for "sending Deregorn of Thunderbrook to Boron's realm." So I'm not sure whether we found Erholt of Tiefhusen or not, or even whether we needed to.

    

I take a save and the party heads back out on the road to return to Artherion. We defeat some goblins on the way, but Lyra is killed, so I have to reload. We reach Artherion, and I guess we did the right thing, as he thanks us and invites us into his place. Unlike most NPCs I've encountered so far, he has a lot to say, although I don't understand some of it. He thinks the Salamander Stone belongs to Ingerimm, which I thought was originally a corruption of "Ingramosch," the dwarf I'm supposed to take it to, but turns out to be the god of smiths in this universe. He doesn't know where the Dwarven Pit (where we're supposed to search for the stone) is, but he says the dwarves have a bunch of mines around Finsterkamm.

       

You don't need to tell me, buddy. I'm from Maine.

     

He ends the visit by giving us a Sword of Artherion and a Bow of Artherion, both of which I'm going to assume are better than our starting gear. I give the sword to Xamidimura the warrior and the bow to Toliman the elf.

   

I return to Gashok, this time determined to stay until the weapon-seller is in the market, even if I have to rest multiple days away. On our first night in the inn, an angry mob breaks in and hauls us out to the street (this is told in a cinematic), accusing us of murder. When we're able to produce evidence that Deregorn was the "leader of the Anathematizers," they let us go, but with a warning not to show our faces in Gashok again.

      

Okay, you're going on my list.

      

Despite the warning, we don't seem to have any problem resuming our stay at the inn. We note the passing of the days: Windsday, Earthday, Marketday (oddly, the market isn't open), Praiosday. Finally, the market is back. Unfortunately, the weapon/armor shop has no metal armor, but I get leather harnesses for Gnomon and Toliman (who had no armor), replace everyone's shoes with leather boots, replace Gnomon's mace with an axe (his preferred weapon), and get shields for my two warriors.

     

My party leader at the end of this session.

         

After that, I guess it's time to move on. I'm not sure we really solved the city's problems, but I can't figure anything else to do. I have two major quests now: find the Salamander Stone in the Dwarven Pit, and find Star Trail (I still haven't come to terms with that yet) from an orc fortress. I have no real leads on either location except a vague hint that there are dwarves around Finsterkamm. I check the game map, and Finsterkamm turns out to be an enormous mountain range stretching across half the map, from the southwest to the northeast. Not only is it going to be a huge pain to search, but it's also pretty far away from Kvirasim, where I was told that the Dwarven Pits were "not too far" to the south.

     

Miscellaneous notes:

   

• When I created the characters, I could have sworn I made Mahasim as a Thorwallian, but he's a warrior instead. I guess it probably doesn't matter.

• When characters change their footwear, the game marks the occasion with a little animation. It doesn't do this for any other change of equipment. That's . . . weird. 

       

Those are some nice calves.

       

• As commenters in my last entry pointed out, if you take off a character's pants, it has some consequences. It doesn't seem to affect interactions in shops or with scripted NPCs, but there's an escalating series of random encounters. First, someone simply points it out and calls you a "sicko." Then, some creep molests the party member in question. Finally, the townspeople start attacking the party (including those that are fully dressed), doing roughly 1-10 hit points of damage each time. That third encounter keeps repeating until you get dressed.

      

Wow, they hate nudists even worse than elves.

      

• Am I crazy, or is there no way, when buying items, to specify which character is receiving the items? They just seem to always go to the character who has the first available room.

• I'm a bit confused about whether it's important for certain characters to carry certain items. For instance, is it enough that the party possesses six sleeping bags, or does each character need to have the sleeping bag in his inventory? If I send Gnomon out to look for food, does he need the fishing hook in his inventory if he hopes to employ it?

• I do wish the authors had enlisted the help of better translators. The misplaced open quotation bothers me a lot more than one would think, as do the over-use of ellipses and misplaced commas. There are many times, particularly in what is supposed to be PC dialogue options, where the writing is bizarre or amateur. The developers did a decent job creating a realistic world in which the player must carefully watch conditions and manage resources; it's jarring to be taken out of it with juvenile or slangy responses.

        

I don't want to say any of those things.

      

I head out to start doing some open exploration, but in my first battle, I realize that Toliman is out of arrows, so I need to reload back in Gashok and get some more. I guess I'll wrap up here. I have two primary questions at this stage, and I almost hesitate to write them down, as I want to find the answers for myself, but I suppose I can just not read comments for a few days. The two questions are:

   

• Does the game reward open exploration? Will I find interesting encounters and side quests if I just wander the roads?

• Should I already know where to go next from in-game resources?

     

Hopefully, by the next entry, I'll have my own answers.

   

Time so far: 10 hours 

The Fates of Twinion: Summary and Rating

 

The game said this every time I leveled up after Level 19.

       

The Fates of Twinion

United States

Ybarra Productions (developer); Sierra Online (publisher) 

Released 1993 for DOS

Date Started: 2 November 2025   

Date Ended: 23 January 2026

Total Hours: 49

Difficulty: Moderate-Hard (3.5/5) 
Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later) 

         

Like its predecessor, The Shadow of Yserbius, The Fates of Twinion is an offline version of an online game that makes few concessions to its offline nature. It's relatively clear that the developers meant for it to serve as an appetizer for online play, not as a meaningful solo experience. Although it offers some clever puzzles and navigational challenges, the relentless nature of combat (enemy parties respawn instantly) and the limited character development make gameplay a slog.

 

***** 

     

I stuck with it as long as I could. I mapped a few more levels, fought some dragons, solved a couple more quests. But The Fates of Twinion is like the World War I of games. It takes hours to gain inches, and because of relentless respawning, sometimes it feels like you've never gained anything. Eventually, the crazy navigation challenges (there's a level where literally every open space closes behind you) and nonstop combat just overwhelmed me, and I decided that my time would be better spent elsewhere.

   

When I last left off, I was exploring a couple of Level 8 maps, "Dragon's Ire" and "Dragon's Flame." A commenter alerted me that to get into the central room in the former, I would need the Lava Glove from like 40 hours ago. I'm sure that was clued, but I didn't take notes in an organized enough manner to remember it. Anyway, the glove did open the right doors. It also signaled which lava squares were illusory.

      

I'm still not trusting something called a "lava glove."

      

On the other side of those doors was an intriguing chessboard puzzle. The goal was to reach the demons controlling the game from two southern squares, but the rules of the game—set out in various wall clues—prevent you from just walking to them. Every square on the chessboard has either a knight, a rook, or a bishop. Some of them are human, some Night Elves, some golems. I think any square can have any piece, but as you encounter them, you rotate through them in that order. After you kill each enemy, you take on the movement pattern of the enemy you just killed. Thus, after you kill a rook, you can move "normally," one square in any cardinal direction. Kill a bishop, and your next move is diagonally. Kill a knight, and you jump two squares in one direction and one in another. The problem is, the controls don't actually change, so you have to learn through trial and error that, for instance, moving west after killing a bishop will actually move you southwest, or that moving east after killing knight will actually move you one square east and two squares south. I'm honestly not even sure that's consistent. I felt my way through the area with a lot of trial and error. Oh, and for some reason, I had to make my way to the demons twice. The first time, they swatted me away, saying I wasn't strong enough.

       

Having just killed a knight, my next move forward is going to put me in one of those black squares in front of the water.

    

Killing the two demons nets the player lots of experience, but as I found during this final session, gaining levels in the latter third of the game is only good for raising maximum hit points. You stop gaining attribute points around Level 21, and you stop gaining skill and spell points shortly after that. By then, you've already maximized all your skills and spells anyway. 

         

One of the two demon chessmasters.

       

Killing the demons also allows easy access to teleporters that reach the two feuding dragons in "Dragon's Flame." Each wants you to kill the other. I don't think it matters which dragon you agree to help. It's not like one is evil and the other is good. Their names are Gambril and Osterog. Before you can take on the one you intend to kill, you have to get a blessing from a wizard on the level, then enter a particular teleporter to keep the blessing. The game isn't really explicit about this. I had to get help from a walkthrough. It's a very nicely detailed walkthrough, with maps showing exactly where to walk from stage to stage. It was written by someone named Ragnar, who I imagine is the same Ragnar from Sweden who used to appear on this blog but mysteriously stopped commenting in 2015.

     

I chose to kill Gambril for some reason.

       

I'm not sure that the dragon quest is strictly necessary, as you don't gain anything that is required on future levels. I mostly got items my character couldn't use and experience he didn't need.

      

I stupidly chose to carry all these items for the next few hours, but I never found any wizards to show them to.

          

The game lost me on the two maps of Level 9: "Hocus Pocus" and "Hopeless Hallways," particularly the latter. I like mapping, but my enjoyment of the process vanishes when I encounter too many things that I simply can't map. I like to be able to look at my maps and figure out how to get from one place to another. This is impossible when wall patterns change, doors constantly lock and unlock, pits turn from illusory to real and back again, and so forth. And of course, while I'm trying to figure this all out, there are unskippable combats every few steps. Enough was enough.

       

The fact that the wizard village was called "Hocus Pocus" might also have had something to do with it.

           

Judging by Ragnar's walkthrough, I ended my experience having seen 22 maps across 9 levels. The game as a whole has 33 maps over 12 levels. You might think it was a shame for me to give up so close, but it appears to me that they get more complex as they go along. For instance, the four maps of Level 11 ("Celestial Boundary," "Spheres Asunder," "Trials," and "Tribulations") take up 14 pages of the walkthrough. Plus, there's the whole "Sunk Coast Fallacy." Look it up.

  

The walkthrough indicates that the player will confront five Dralkarian Gods, each after obtaining a magic item that proves the player worthy of challenging the god. Each drops a magical ring, which must be given to Queen Aeowyn to control the Portal of Time. But after you do, Queen Aeowyn betrays you. She simply wants control of the Portal for herself, so she can become immortal and conquer the universe. The player has to escape her initial attack, then return and defeat her at the entrance to the Portal. The final battle is with Aeowyn herself and a bunch of lich allies. After that, if the player still wants to keep playing, he can explore an area called Chronozar's Demesne, where if successful he finds a Jester's Cap that raises all attributes and a literal Easter Egg. 

     

A rare moment of decoration in the environment.

       

The factor that I find most tedious in Fates is the immediate respawning of enemies. If you go one direction and then decide you have to turn around, you have to re-fight every enemy in the backpath. It was completely unnecessary. Allowing the player to clear a level, at least temporarily, would enhance his motivation to stay on the level instead of teleporting back to town every time his potion stock gets low. It would make trying to solve the many navigation puzzles far less tedious. 

   

The second major problem is the lack of meaningful character development, in both skills and equipment. It isn't absent; my character definitely grew measurably more powerful with each level, and it was fun to repeatedly find myself trouncing enemies that used to toss me bodily from the dungeon. But completely maxing your statistics and having nowhere to put new skills or spell points is no fun.

        

I've got nowhere to put these points.

      

There's also fairly limited character development by equipment. The game gives the character slots for a helm, armor, weapon, amulet, and ring, but throughout the game I only got upgrades to these slots every few hours. Moreover, it's not always clear when something is an "upgrade." You can guess based on the sale price for some of them. It would be nice if there were more purchasable upgrades, too, as I ended the game with over a million gold pieces.

      

Combat remained rather boring throughout, although I did have to change my strategies slightly every few hours. By the end of the game, my default strategy boiled down to:

  

• For most combats, just barrel through them with physical attack and heal afterwards with spells and potions (which I always kept a large stock of).

• If the combat is more difficult than that and if it involves multiple enemy parties, use one of the charming items/spells (Sovereign Scroll, Zeus Scroll, Chimes of Whatever) and let them fight themselves while going back to the first strategy.

• If the combat is more difficult than that and it involves only a single enemy (e.g., some of the demon and dragon battles), cast "Petrify" until the enemy is frozen and then finish him off with melee attacks. 

        

You can tell it worked the third time because he stopped attacking.

      

For all of that, I thought I liked Twinion a bit better than Yserbius, mostly because the maps offered more complexity and challenge. Thus, I was surprised when I ran through the GIMLET and I calculated Twinion at 31 against Yserbius's 37. It's perhaps the greatest inconsistency that I've ever seen at the end of such a comparison. While I'm glad to see I valued Twinion a bit higher (5 vs. 4) in the "Encounters" category, which I often boost for good puzzles, I wonder why I was so deluded about the relative merits of Yserbius's backstory and NPCs. If I made a mistake, I think it's definitely in having rated Yserbius too high.

         

Never walk alone . . . unless you're playing offline.

     

Sierra released the offline versions of Yserbius and Twinion so close together (I don't think that Twinion even had its own box) that Computer Gaming World covered them both together in a review by Bernie Yee in February 1994. I quoted that review in my Yserbius summary, and the same quotes apply: "Hollow version of its online self"; unfavorable comparisons to better games of the period, like Lands of Lore, Ultima Underworld, and Betrayal at Krondor. I wish that Yee had made more of a distinction between the two games, although I suppose in the grand scheme of things, they're basically identical. The problem with both Yserbius and Twinion is that they offer unbearably quaint, early 1980s Wizardry- and Bard's Tale-style gameplay in an era that had moved well beyond those templates while at the same time regressing them to single-player mode, which removes most of the tactics and strategy that I play games like Wizardry to enjoy.

   

Rather than repeat material about the fate of Yserbius and Twinion, and their modern resurrection as MedievaLands, I'll refer you to the final paragraphs of my last Yserbius entry. It's too bad that 1993 couldn't have gone out with more of a bang, but if I had continued this game, I would have been playing it into April. It's time to move wholly into 1994.