Al-Qadim: Bottle Shock

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The big mystery of this game is: What is giving genies the ability to break their bonds and act against the wills of their masters? It happened to Farid al-Mutan in times past, and it happened to my family's genie just recently, resulting in my mother, father, and sister being tossed into the caliph's prison. Meanwhile, the caliph (my future father-in-law) himself is growing increasingly tyrannical, suppressing speech and jailing people for criticizing his policies or even making jokes. (To be fair, neither the game nor the setting have given us any reason to believe that something like the First Amendment exists in Zakhara.) Oh, and my betrothed, Kara, is missing—transported somewhere by my family's genie.

   

Farid has told me that only the Genie Lords will be able to tell me what is happening. I spent the last session trying to find the name of their island, Jaza'ir Jiza. As this session began, I ordered the captain of my ship to take us there.

   

My dinghy came ashore on the north end of a sandy island. I started to move towards the center, but great fists of sand came thrusting out of the ground to block my progress and channel me along a particular path.

     

Apparently you don't want me to go this way.

      

The path ended at a carpet with a female efreeti. I ended up speaking to her second, though. Some guy (a sha'ir, it turns out) was levitating around the area in a cross-legged position, and I snagged him before I lost him. He introduced himself as Azrail Tajrish, Keeper of the Gate of the Four Winds. He expressed pessimism that the genies would be able or willing to help me:

       

The Council of Genies is all very well in theory. Mortals and genies SHOULD have a place where they can peacefully meet and settle their differences. But in reality the genies are unconcerned with the plights of mortals. Dao trade in slaves. Efreet delight in destruction. Marid cannot be bothered over a few thousand humans drowned, here or there. Only the djinn respect the power that humans wield over the lives of genies, pitifully small as it unfortunately may be. 

       

An interesting bit of world-building there. Until now, I didn't know that there were exactly four types of genies, and that djinn wasn't just a homophone but a particular class. In the coming hours, I would meet all four of them:

   

From upper-left to lower-right: a djinni, an efreeti, a dao, and a marid.

    

Each type is associated with a different element, which the images above should make clear, although the association of the dao with earth seems the weakest. Each inhabits a different elemental plane, accessed through portals. The Forgotten Realms Wiki tells me that efreet are lawful evil, dao are neutral evil, djinn are chaotic good, and marid are chaotic neutral. In my conversations with them, I don't know that these alignments really held up. They all seemed arrogant, callous, and unpredictable.

      

My understanding is that djinn, efreet, and marids come from Arabian mythology, although djinn is the master term for all of them and not a separate type. Dao seem to be an invention of Dungeons & Dragons, likely because they needed something for the fourth element. One thing I don't understand from this setting, and couldn't find it in the source book, is what compels genies to serve humans in the first place. How is the bond initiated? Are some genie types more susceptible to this process than others? 

       

I'm ahead of myself, though. First, I had to get past the female efreeti guarding access to the Genie Lords.  This part was annoying as hell because I had to keep going back to the same place: the city of Bandar al-Sa'adat. Each trip involved a walk of a few minutes from the efreeti to my boat, a return to my ship, probably a battle with some pirates or water elementals on the way, another couple-minute walk into the city, and then a reversal of the entire process.

       

Please just let me get to where I'm going.

         

First, she demanded the wisest snake in the world. I knew where to get that: at the store called Reptilian Desires. I had to pay about 60 gems for the damned thing, and when I got back to the efreeti, she just told me it wasn't good enough and ate it. 

     

Wouldn't the wisest snake in the world not get caught in the first place?

       

I had to pester her a couple more times to get the next quest. Her master, Gubishbuskin, apparently thinks this world is too cold. She wanted me to bring the "hottest coal in Zakhara." Again, I knew where to find it: at the coal shop in Bandar al-Sa'adat. I repeated the journey, bought the coal for 50 gems, brought it back, and was told that it wasn't that hot after all. 

    

Now she wanted "the famous veil woven by Idrid." I got lucky on this one, as I mis-remembered Ingrid's Shop of Wonders in Bandar al-Sa'adat as Idrid's Shop of Wonders. But even though it wasn't the same woman, she had the veil. I had to go to the moneychanger and exchange some gold for gems before I could pay her price. If you're wondering what happens if you've already splurged on healing potions with your gold, I imagine that you'd sail back and forth between islands, getting attacked by pirates, killing them and looting their chests, until you had enough.

     

You don't have to sell me on it.

       

That isn't to say that there aren't dead-ends, though. After a save, I tried talking rudely to the efreeti or refusing her tasks. She just shut down and refused to talk to me anymore. I suppose I would have been lost at that point if I didn't have a saved game to reload.

       

I will confess: your plan has succeeded.

            

Of course, when I got back to the efreeti, she just torched the veil and laughed. The next thing she wanted was the Bottle of Eternal Emptiness. I had no clue on that one, but since all the other items were found in Bandar al-Sa'adat, I went back there—this is the fourth time, in case you aren't counting—and started asking around. A guy hanging around the closed inn told me I could find it on the Lost Isle of Senat. Since the name of an island is all I need to go there, I returned to the ship and ordered the captain to steer a course.

   

The island turned out to be a hellish place with glowing red sand that continually damaged my health when I walked on it. There were fire elementals floating about, but I mostly ignored them as I raced around the island, swallowing healing potions, trying to find the bottle. It was in a chest in the center of the island. I snagged it, ran back to the ship, and returned to Jaza'ir Jiza.

      

Until you, you know, put something in it.

           

The efreeti refused to believe that it was the bottle. I convinced her to open it and check for herself. Apparently, since the Bottle of Eternal Emptiness contains nothing, its vacuum sucks in everything in the area. A few moments later, the efreeti was trapped and corked in the bottle, and I was free to walk past the entrance she had been guarding. It would have been cool if I could have taken the bottle, but the game wouldn't let me interact with it.

        

Phenomenal cosmic powers . . . itty-bitty living space!

        

Beyond the efreeti was a huge checkerboard with alternating black and white squares. It took me a while to figure out what I was supposed to do with it. The board had four entrances, and I noted that if I walked directly towards the center of the board from any of the entrances, certain squares would light up. If I walked too far, the lights disappeared and I had to start over. I discovered that there was an identical pattern from all of the entrances: Five squares towards the center, then a 90-degree turn to the left, then three squares, then a 90-degree turn to the left, then one square. At that point, depending on what entrance I had come from, I got teleported to one of the four genies' realms.

      

The result of trial and error.

          

There was a lot of backtracking during this section, but I'll skip that and just summarize. Ultimately, I had to reach the efreeti lord Mirza Gubishbuskin, but to reach him, I had to complete a quest chain involving the other genie lords. I guess it started with the marid lord, a giant creature relaxing in a pool with scantily-clad women (or perhaps nymphs) all around him. He told me a long and pointless story about how he once brought a tidal wave to douse an island that Gubishbuskin had set on fire. It transpired that he used to have a slave storyteller named Shahar Izad, but he lost her to the dao lord in a chess game. He put her voice in a jar before she left so the dao lord couldn't benefit from her talents. He wanted her back.

           

The dao lord was a female genie named Beya Hrampulpishkin, the one who tells Gubishbuskin about the Genie's Curse in the backstory. She and her associates were classic Sinbad-looking genies, sitting in earthen tunnels amidst piles of treasure. Shahar Izad was in a nearby cell, able only to pantomime her desire to get out of here. Beya would only release her if I brought her an "airy jewel of pale blue fire."

       

Beya and her servants.

      

I had to visit two djinn sisters to get the jewel. They were stereotypical I-Dream-of-Jeannie genies, floating about in midriff-bearing harem-style costumes. They were named Bubishah and Satarah, and to get anything out of them, I had to keep alternating conversation between them, always addressing them by their names at the outset. This was hard and annoying given that they kept floating around and often got close enough to each other that I wasn't sure which one the game had targeted with the action command. They didn't like it if I addressed them by their sisters' names.

        

At least I can see the differences between these colors.

       

They agreed to give me the jewel if I promised to do anything they wanted. When I did, they commanded that I: "Sail to the furthest reaches of Zakhara, fight impossibly old and strong monsters, face certain death a thousand and one times, recover the world's most fabulous treasure, and yet give all your prizes to us." I had several chances to back out of the deal, but I kept saying no, I'd do it, and they finally just gave me the jewel for being honorable or something.

   

Beya freed Shahar Izad, who followed me back to the marid, who gave me a potion that would make me invulnerable to the flames in the efreet domain. He was delighted to have Shahar Izad back: "She will remain here . . . and tell me delightful stories for a hundred and one years." I pointed out that since he had given her away, he released her from her contract. She said she'd stay and tell him one more story. She of course is a reference to the character most often given as "Scheherazade," the storyteller of One Thousand and One Nights, who postpones her own unjust execution by telling her husband stories with cliffhangers until he finally relents. I worked with a woman named Scheherazade once, and while she was perfectly pleasant, I kind of felt bad for her. There are some names so steeped in lore and expectations that to give them to a child is like setting them up for failure.

          

If marids really are chaotic neutral, this argument isn't likely to stick.

        

In Gubishbuskin's realm, his efreet servants didn't want me to reach him and tried to block me with flames, but the marid's potion kept them from harming me. I made it to Gubishbuskin, the most impressive visually of the genies. I told him my story, and he recounted how he had been freed from Farid's service by an unknown agent. 

      

I just told you that I was from Zaratan.

         

I asked who was behind it. "It is the Nameless Masters who released me from my servitude," he said. "And they are the new masters of your family's genie." I pressed him on who the Nameless Masters are. "Why, an alliance of powerful sha'irs, of course." Well, that's a bit disappointing. He was surprised that I'd never heard of them: "Why, your own father is one of the Nameless Masters, son of Al-Hazard!" As I sat there stunned, he gave me a Moonstone Shard that added another bonus to my sword.

    

In my last entry, I made a joke about how cool it would be if it turned out my father really had commanded the genie to destroy the Wassab ship, but I really didn't expect it to play out this way.

         

I just want to say that this is a really nice graphic of a palace door.

        

For the fifth time this session, I disembarked on Bandar al-Sa'adat and made my way to the caliph's palace. There, the guard wouldn't let me access the dungeon without the caliph's permission; the guards wouldn't let me talk to the caliph without the vizier's permission; and the vizier said the caliph was too busy to meet with me.

      

Why can't I just attack all these people?

       

With no other leads, I decided to head back to Farid and see if he had nothing new. But on my way out of the palace, I was approached by a  man who said that the head chef had prepared a banquet in my honor for saving the caliph. I went to the "kitchen" (really just a stove in the hallway) and spoke with Sumia, the head chef. After dinner, she told me there was a secret stairway to the dungeon from the kitchen. "It leads to the old dungeon, which was designed long ago to imprison marauding monsters." The man who runs the Office of Trade has the key. Overall, her dialogue pointed to a little conspiracy at work against the caliph; if she isn't the one who tried to forge the vizier's seal, she's probably working with the one who did.

   

This was confirmed when I reached the Office of Trade, and the proprietor said I would need to speak with Omar the Baker. "We have changed our codes. Do not mention the wine cellar, but instead tell him that you want the Key of Bone." I assumed correctly that Omar the Baker was the guy selling sweetcakes in the market. He gave me the key.

       

When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty.

        

Back in the palace, Sumia told me more about the old dungeon and the passageway to it, "left behind by the dwarves that built the palace and the old dungeon." This is the first time in this game that I've heard about any of the classic D&D races like dwarves and elves, and it threw me for a second. The dungeon that I've already visited, the new dungeon, was built specifically for the caliph's political enemies. Her organization, the Brotherhood of Freedom, built the secret passage from the old dungeon to the new one.

    

A few steps later, I was through a secret door and in the so-called old dungeon, yet another puzzle maze that involved a lot of pushing and pulling rocks to clear passages. The monsters that the caliph chose to "imprison" are curious. They consisted of a bunch of giant spiders (why?), a lot of undead (or were they originally alive?), and one cyclops.

   

The cyclops spoke with me. I had a chance to kill him, but I didn't. He introduced himself as Pangar-bek and asked what I wanted. I said I wanted to search his cell. He said he'd let me if I helped him escape from the palace. When I expressed my skepticism that a cyclops could just waltz through the palace, he found an old rug and covered himself.

      

I'm sure that will do the trick.

            

I got caught a couple of times, which led to a "game over" screen in the dungeon. But after a few reloads, I learned how to avoid the guard patrols and lead Pangar-bek to the exit. Once we got out of the palace, I insisted on leading him through town to the main exit. "Please do not harm any humans as the blood would be on my hands," I said as we parted. He promised to stay away from humans, and he told me of an island called Hajar where the Nameless Masters store great treasure.

       

I think you can take the carpet off now.

       

Back in the dungeon, the cyclops's cell had a note with the key to moving forward. The dwarven builders had hidden levers in the walls activated by pressure plates on the floor. To activate them, I had to:

   

• Drag a stone over the closest pressure plate.
• Find a nearby wall "made of porous, lichen-friendly stone."
• Hit the wall eight times, "once for each triumphant dwarven king."
• Pull the lever that then appeared.

   

The hardest part—yet another colorblindness issue—was identifying the right sections of wall. I guess to most people, they really stand out, but I could barely tell the difference. (Because I get these suggestions every time I mention colorblindness, I have already set Windows 11 to account for Deuteranomaly, and I already have the Enchroma glasses. They don't really help.)

       

It's just north of me. Note the ugly circular table weighing down the pressure plate to my left.

        

The lower part of the level had six more cells activated by wall switches, each disgorging some monster. There was an ettin, a mage, several zombies, earth elementals, fire elementals, and acid slimes. (I don't really understand this dungeon—was someone coming down here and feeding these captives?) Combat has become fairly trivial, although the ettin was tough. Some of the cells had treasure, and one of them had the pathway to the newer dungeon.

       

One of the uglier enemies in the game.

      

Once there, I had to avoid guards and automatons on the way to see my father. I stupidly went to the location of my father's old cell before remembering that I had bribed someone to move him to somewhere else. I didn't know where, so I had to explore the entire dungeon.  

      

Nice of them to put the scales of justice in the floor periodically. Just as a reminder.

         

I found him in the eastern section. He reluctantly admitted to once being a member of the Nameless Masters.

         

We were a force of good against the evil that ran rampant in this land . . . But the power we controlled was too much for some of our members. They wanted to use the magic for their own gain. I objected and left the group . . . Perhaps they are behind this. I do not know. They weave their magic through special words . . . The only way to cancel one of their spells is to speak it in reverse.

        

Sounds like the game has a different conception of "sha'ir" than the sourcebooks.

        

Finally, he told me where the Nameless Masters now live: the fog-shrouded island of Al-Naqqil.  

   

I earned enough experience points to reach Level 7 from this conversation. I avoided the guards, made my way back to the palace, and returned the key to Sumia.

       

Hadn't thought about that, but cool.

        

Back on the ship, I was surprised to see that Al-Naqqil wasn't a travel option. So for now I decided to try Hajar, the island that the cyclops had told me about. The island was small, with a bunch of scattered piles of gold and a few cyclopes guarding them. Those thorn-shooting bushes were also there, but it turns out that I'm immune to their attacks now. I don't know why. My level? My Ring of Protection +3?

   

A short maze of columns led to a clearing with a large treasure chest in the middle. But approaching the chest causes it to disappear, and lighting bolts shoot out of the columns and kill me. I'm still trying to solve this problem as I wrap up this session.

      

Either I'm missing something or this is one big practical joke.

            

Nothing has really changed in my overall impression of the game. The plot is good; the dialogue is well-written; there are some light role-playing options; some of the puzzles are fun. It continues to evoke a lot of the humor and tropes of the Quest for Glory series, particularly Trial by Fire and Wages of War, and I suspect the developers were exposed to them. Combat and character development remain underwhelming, and it's edging towards lasting too long. One more session would be good.

   

Time played: 18 hours 

   

****

     

Previous entry in this series 

   

Next entry in this series

  07/20/2026 

  

The Search for Freedom: Won!

 

Whew! About time, too.

      

Guest post by AlphabeticalAnonymous: 

 

In the previous post, I made a serious effort to push through and finish the game. The game manual promises "two outdoor areas, each 32 squares by 32 squares" and the previous 58 hours of gameplay sufficed only to explore the first of those. Luckily, I had some hope that as in other games (e.g., Ambermoon) the final world wouldn’t take nearly as long to complete as the game’s primary world. This dream was given form and in this post I finally finished, but it took a long time to get there.
     
We begin the session having passed through the portal into Aegea, the Netherworld, the Land of the Dead, the Mad Plain—where Kamazol the evil Lich rules and is building his army to invade our planet, Earth, when its moons align. The geography and color palette of this new world are both different from Earth: "the sky is a pinkish hue," water is red, swamps are brown, and deserts are blue (?). 

     

Atlas of Aegea. We exit the portal in the bottom right.

    

We explore the land, generally fleeing from encounters more because of my impatience rather than any challenge, and we find a town to the northwest. As groovy music plays in the background, a sign welcomes us to "Nwotehtyms," which is just the name of the adventure’s first town in reverse. Although the land is ostensibly ruled by Kamazol, there are only a few fixed combats in the town (with killer poodles, guards, witches, and demons). Although we beat them all, the last of these pose a rare challenge: when their crude AI decides to, they can cast the "Gotterdamerung" spell to do 30-60 damage to all my characters, and they can even cast "Invincibility" (from physical attacks) on each other. Witches can also cast "Earthquake," essentially a weaker version of "Gotterdamerung," when the mood takes them. Otherwise the town is very much like any other. It has a standard temple (run by dead clerics), a normal pub and diner, a bank, a magic shop, an inn, stores, and even a training center where we can level up.
    

Would you trust the healing services of a dead cleric?

      
We find two skeletons in town that are interesting for very different reasons. For the first, the game merely tells us that "a skeleton hangs from shackles on the wall—you can't tell if it's dead or undead, but it makes no movement." The ominous part is that this square is not marked (s)pecial on the automap or with the "Vision" spell. I had been using the map to avoid any parts of dungeons that lacked special squares, but if the game allows hidden special encounters then that means we will have to meticulously explore everything after all. The second skeleton, named Dufrey, provides perhaps the longest single text dump in the entire game aside from the introduction. It provides Dufrey some interesting backstory but nothing really relevant. The game makes us automatically release him; he gives us a few tips and bonuses; and before he leaves, he promises to meet us "in the throne room of Kamazol himself." As you’ll see below, he had to be awfully patient to do so.
      
Nwotehtyms offers a few other interesting encounters. There’s a glass orb that I realize we never did anything with, located in a locked case in the center of the "nwot erauqs." We fight and handily best a giant, undead dragon for reasons I neglected to record; everyone gets 3,333 experience and the party recovers 29,000 gold. By now the economy is well and truly broken, and our gold remains maxed out at or near 99,999 for the rest of the game. "A mighty-looking skeleton" calling himself The SwordMaster gives us a quick fetch quest and then improves our to-hit and lockpicking (?!) skills. I suppose that makes three interesting skeletons in town, for those who are counting. A clue helps us recover some +2 plate armor hidden in the "slimy swamp" in the northeast; this is the best armor in the game, as far as I can tell. At this point, we have to find the Temple of Seth (the god of death) to reforge the sword, Soulseeker, and then find Kamazol in his lair.

 

What was this all about?

    

The Temple of Seth is in the middle of a bridge, over a lake. Level 1 is a mortuary, which our "Vision" reveals is filled with around 50 two-square crypts. Each crypt contains a special square. Although we initially try to bypass them by descending as quickly as possible to Level 2 (altar room and chapel), it turns out that some of the crypts contain information we need to advance. The mortuary really provides the perfect antidote to the hugely overpowered "Vision" spell because we have to explore every single room. Most provide pointless and offer trivial combats with undead, but a few others provide what we need to make it through Level 2 below.

    

I think there was only one mimic in the entire game.

      

There, we find a room with a series of increasingly strident warning signs. After ignoring them all, we are told that we have defiled the god Seth’s Holy Room. "The mighty god attacks the party, in one of his many possible forms!" He has 999 HP and 8 armor points, great initiative, and he paralyzes when he hits. He gets all of the party members pretty low, but in the end he can only hit once per turn. We win and earn 16,666 experience per character, enough for everyone to level up at least once.
        

I guess we've now killed a god. In some games this would be the climax of the story, but here it was a mildly interesting but unnecessary optional combat.
     
Elsewhere we meet a "small, cute fuzzy creature" who increases our wisdom and intelligence (unnecessary at this point, since we’ve already maxed out the relevant party members’ statistics). More curious is this character:

"Corpus supremus maxima?" he asks us. Is that even valid Latin?

     

Luckily, the game doesn’t actually expect the player to know Latin. Elsewhere, the dungeon gives us the words "ixnay ooglevay," which in Pig Latin translate into "Nix Voogle." It means nothing to me, but the pig grabs all three pieces of Soulseeker and streaks off like greased lightning. We chase him through several rooms, including this puzzle suggesting someone with pre-calculus on the brain:
     

If you emulate a Pentium, the correct answer is 1.00000003. 

     

Eventually, we catch the pig (who also speaks English) and can either kill it or (as we choose) listen to its advice on how to make it through the rest of the level. This brings us to the Altar Room of Seth, where Soulseeker must be reforged. We can't approach the altar, because it is protected by a force field—not a magical field (nor the Netzian field, known to Earth science), but an honest-to-goodness technological force field. Two control panels are defended by dark clerics with assorted minions. After destroying the panels (which we are made to understand are definitely technological), we can approach a giant statue of Seth with three vacant eye sockets. We fill these with our three glowing spheres, place the pieces of Soulseeker on the altar, fight the statue (which has of course come to life) and voila: 

       

Room?

      
The temple clear, we head back up to the surface. Unfortunately, I’m not paying close enough attention: I forget to heal the party until it's too late, and then suffer a full-party death to a group of greater demons and witches. To add insult to injury, I lose both my clerics to another such party after reloading. We make it back to town, where we dump our spoils and level everyone up to Level 12 (the highest available is 13). At this point, most stat increases hardly seem to make a difference, and we already have our full complement of spells.
        
We set out to find and finish Kamazol once and for all. We encounter the Alphan Toll Bridge where we are told that "the toll is your life force. Will you pay the toll?" This is a false choice, as are too many in this game: declining just puts us back off of the bridge. We therefore agree, only to find that both of our clerics are knocked unconscious and the bridge disappears behind us. We try to soldier on and enter Kamazol's Den, but the remaining characters are rapidly picked off one-by-one by enemy critical-hits. I worry that perhaps clerics are always knocked out at the bridge to prevent healing, but happily we had just had a bad roll of the dice. On a reload, neither of the clerics are knocked out and everyone just loses a few hit points.
     
Kamazol’s Den consists of five levels with fairly straightforward maps and two main puzzles, as the strains of Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in D-Minor" repeat in the background. I have to consult the hint guide included with the game on several points to advance, but in any case the first puzzle involves a series of keys: ivory, ruby, emerald, crystal, and so on, which open important doors or critical objects. The critical objects form the second puzzle: a series of colored shapes that we have to collect. These include a yellow hexagon, a red pentagon, a green circle, a silver square, and a pink triangle.
     

Let me know the truth, let me kno-ow the truth.

      

Along the way are a number of fixed encounters, some more narratively compelling than others. We meet a Grim Reaper-like figure who reduces all characters’ dexterity by one in order to let us pass. Tossing a coin into a fountain gives us a magic lamp with a genie who gives us one wish: to increase a vital stat by up to three points, heal the entire party, restore all magic points, give everyone 10,000 experience points, or fill our pockets with gold. The first is all but pointless after so much leveling up; the second similarly so as long as one has a cleric (we have two); the third can be alleviated simply by resting for a few hours; and gold is pointless at this stage in the game. We meet and defeat Kamazol’s pet, Shugreth the giant pink slug.

       

At first I thought the slug was shouting for help, which confused me.

      

The final (stone) key unlocks a door in Kamazol’s Laboratory. There we find a blue potion, which is the key to ensuring that a killed lich doesn't return to life (or to undeath). But most unusual of all has to be the Hades Health Spa. After telling an imp that we need to bathe (a word spelled out in the dungeon’s very walls), they give us a spa membership card. Inside we find:

     

• A weight room, where all characters can increase their Strength by two.
• A (or the?) SwordMaster, who can allow us to level up or even purchase spellbooks if we still need them.
• A casino with several games; we can only play the slot machine, which gives us the stone key mentioned above.
• A Sauna: we have to leave all equipment to enter, and then fight some Wights bare-handed.
• A whirlpool tub, which gives +20 HP to all characters and in which we find the silver square. 

        

This was just weird.

    

After this, we have to laboriously work our way all the way from Level 5 back up to Level 1 before quickly descending a set of dedicated stairs down to the bottom floor again. There, we find five candles arranged in a circle around a central pillar of light. Instructions given throughout the upper floors tell us that we have to arrange the shapes at the candles, in order of the number of sides. How many sides does a circle have? We initially assume two (the inside and the outside), but that doesn’t work. We assume some number greater than six, and:
   

Surprised, aren't you? I knew you would be.

      

He asks why I summoned him, to which the only correct answer is LOGARITHMS. In the dark times before Chegg and AI cheating tools, I suppose only the Devil himself could help with math homework. He opens a previously hidden door, gives us costumes to disguise ourselves, and leaves. Based on what I can see of the map, I know we’re close now, and it’s only Day 79. Over 900 days until Kamazol and his army can enter the portal. We have this in the bag!

We step into the newly-opened corridor, and an unavoidable trap of magic gas puts us to sleep until day 994. Yes, we sleep undiscovered and undisturbed for two and a half years. The seasons come and go; Kamazol (not to mention our families) must have forgotten about us entirely as they went about their business, until we suddenly wake up to complete our quest.
      
We enter the throne room and see Kamazol on his throne. He runs away and we have to fight six etherial [sic] guardians, each of whom can one-hit kill our party members. To my surprise, Dufrey the skeleton shows up to help in this and all subsequent combats. He must have been cooling his heels in Kamazol’s halls for 30 months, waiting for us to show. If we hadn’t, I like to think that he would have tried to save the world on his own. Two chimeras guard two final keys, and then we finally face Kamazol for the last time.
     

It's nice to see a boss villain "nervous" for once. They're usually so cocky.

   

He casts "Gotterdamerung," does 400-800 damage per party member, and we all die.

I reload and we fight again. We last a bit longer, until he casts the same spell and slaughters us all. Another reload, and the third battle ends the same as the others. Kamazol has 999 hit points and 8 armor points (the same as Seth, the dark god) and is also attended by six shadow guards with 280 hit points apiece. Dufrey gamely tries to help out, doing 10-20 damage per turn on his own as the rest of us hack somewhat more effectively. Alas, there’s no more strategy than any other combat: we just try to surround the enemies, set up for backstabs, and hold out. Our patience is rewarded, and the fourth time is the charm. Any weapon can hurt Kamazol but once he’s down to one hit point, only Soulseeker, wielded by the doughty Teddy thief Ruxpin, can deliver the killing blow. We sprinkle the blue potion and his body dissolves into ash: "He is now dead for good. You hope."
    

Freeing all the animal friends of By Golly Gulch.

   

In what I have to admit is an interesting twist, that’s not quite the end of the story. We’re stuck in the land of the dead, the portal home doesn’t open for another five days, and an entire army of darkness is assembling to begin the conquest of Earth. We have to wait for five days by (L)ooking around. As the army tramps into the room, the portal opens and we dive into it (we have no choice; the game compels us). It stays open for only a half-hour, so we have to move smartly to make it out of Limbo and back to Earth in time. We fight several battles with undead scouts and clerics, a battle with Kamazol’s general and his evil champions, a battle with more undead, and yet more undead. Sensing that the end is near, we stop being so parsimonious with our magic points and let loose. In all the battles, "Earthquake" (from the clerics) and "Gotterdammerung" (from the mages) quickly clear the field. Dufrey continues to help us with all the battles.

We make it out of the portal and jump 100 feet down to the ground without suffering injury, but the portal is still open for 10 more minutes. We fight three more successive waves of undead, and with magic points running low we have to resort to melee tactics again. It’s only then that the portal closes and all the undead are sucked back through it (I forgot to mention that we had destroyed the device that would have let them stay on Earth permanently). A last enemy rips Soulseeker off of our belt and it flies away with him . . . but then the portal spits Soulseeker back out again, because it staying in Aegea would violate "the higher powers of physics." A note with an illegible signature vows vengeance, but our party disregards it even when it disappears in a puff of magic to the sound of ominous laughter. 
    

Home at last; followed by undead; sucked back to Aegea; home at last.

     

We won, and the world is free at last. The party is right next to Smythetown, right where we started from. There, roaming villagers say, "Thank you ever so much for saving us," and children ask for our autographs. As they should. I’ll have the final rating and a summary in the final posting, yet to come. 
       
Time played: 72 hours. 8 party deaths, 8 reloads, 7 crashes, 10 hints.

    

****

   

Previous entry in this series

   

Next entry in this series 

07/18/2026 

Game 581: Dragon Quest (1982)

Or "Seahorse Quest."

        

Dragon Quest

United Kingdom

Bug-Byte Software (developer and publisher)

Released 1982 for BBC Micro 

Date Started: 3 July 2026

Date Ended: 3 July 2026

Total Hours: 3

Difficulty:  Easy (2.0/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later) 

      

It's been tough to identify the first British CRPG given that so many of the early efforts from the country are best described as "proto-RPGs." They have some RPG elements like exploration, inventory, and battle, but they tend to lack character development, whether traditional experience and leveling or some kind of skill-based system.

   

With Dragon Quest (obviously no relation to the more famous Japanese title), we have a game drawn more solidly from Dungeons & Dragons tradition than any British game before it, or for years after it. It has attributes, experience, and the concept of levels—but you never actually level. Or, more accurately, you win the game by achieving Level 2.

       

The dumb, slow type.

          

The backstory asks you to enter the dungeon, kill a dragon who has been terrorizing the local populace, and escape. Character creation rolls a standard set of D&D attributes on a typical scale of 3-18 (no percentile strength). You can re-roll as often as you want. I always got the same sets of values in the same order, so the game must start with the same seed (although in the past we've learned that such problems are often caused by emulator issues). When the player is satisfied, he chooses between (W)arrior and (M)agician, with consequent restrictions on the items that he can use. (Magicians are limited to daggers and no armor; warriors can't use the spells.) El Explorador de RPG discovered that the game also allows you to select (T)hief and (C)leric; the author must have planned for these options before abandoning them. The game treats you as if you chose "Warrior" if you pick either of these.

   

The character is then given a random amount of money and allowed to purchase from a list of 16 items, including three expensive single-use spells ("Protect," "Healing," and "Sleep"), various weapons and armor, torches, lanterns, and rations (which heal). El Explorador's inspection of the code shows that while armor does matter for protective value, the choice of weapon has no bearing on success; the game only checks whether you have one, not what it is. High dexterity or charisma (!) add to the attack bonus. The only attribute visible during the game itself is what the game calls "strength" but is really hit points rather than the strength from the character creation screen. Again, I owe El Explorador for analyzing the math on the strength total: It starts at 1d4 for magicians and 1d8 for warriors, with bonuses and penalties for high or low constitution, wisdom (magicians), and strength (warriors).

     

The store. The flasks of oil are worth it.

      

Once you're done shopping, you're thrust into an irregularly-shaped dungeon of about 200 rooms. It has a fixed layout, including the same monsters and items in the rooms every time. Each room has a name (e.g., "Narrow Corridor"; "Dusty Chamber; " "Rubbly Room"), and—provided you turn on a light source—you're given a quasi-first-person view, if your character was looking at an angle from the ceiling. You can return to the shop at any time, which is a good idea if your health is too low.

     

Commands in the dungeon include (M)ove (followed by a direction), (T)ake, DRINK, EAT, ON and OFF (for torches and lamps), LOOK, READ a spell scroll, set an enemy on FIRE with a flask of oil, and FLY if you have the broom. You can (L)isten for enemies in any of the movable directions.

     

Getting a money bag. I can go north or east—assuming I came in from the west.

      

Each room can have a monster or treasure or both. Treasures include magic weapons (which provide no bonus but produce their own light, saving your inventory space for other things), spell scrolls, gold, potions, and a few special items. These include a flaming sword (which does provide an attack bonus, but only with another weapon), a flying broom that lets you jump to another part of the dungeon, and a mirror which seems to do nothing at all.

   

This is the full monster list: giant centipedes, lone orcs, stirges, gelatinous cubes, huge spiders, bugbears, "minotors," troglodytes, displacer beasts, grey oozes, black puddings, and cockatrices. There are also two brass dragons in the dungeon, although the quest only requires you to kill one. If any of these creatures have special attacks or defenses—or indeed even vary in difficulty—I didn't experience it. There's text in the file about the dragon breathing fire, but that didn't occur in any of my battles against them.

        

Fighting one of the dragons. Neither of us can seem to hit the other.

        

If both a monster and a treasure are in the same room, the game says that the monster is "guarding" the treasure. You can still often snatch it up and escape without a battle.

   

Combat is usually initiated by the player, sometimes the monster. It occurs in rounds, with the player choosing to (S)trike or (R)un each round and then finding the result as well as the monster's counterattack. Each successful hit by a monster, whatever the type, reduces the character's strength by 1, so if death comes, the player should have seen it coming.

 

One fun alternative to starting combat with the (F)ight command is to light your enemies on FIRE with a flask of oil. This often immediately kills the enemy.  

       

An oil flask makes short work of a gelatinous cube. Which kind of makes sense.

       

I thought I would enjoy the process of exploration and mapping, but a few factors make it a nuisance:

   

• Your view of the dungeon room doesn't give you any directionality. You have to keep track of which direction you entered from to interpret the directions you can leave.

• Some of the door openings are actually teleporters that take you to a random part of the dungeon. You don't know this has happened until your map stops lining up, unless you try to turn around and go back after every step you take.

• Even when you don't get teleported, sometimes the map doesn't line up because the rooms take up more than one "square." Some take up two squares in a row horizontally or vertically; some take up three in an "L" shape. You really can't tell until your map goes wonky, and even then, it's pretty tough to untangle. 

          

Part of my dungeon map. I didn't finish it.

      

But while the game may be hard to map, it's relatively easy to win, mostly because few battles are necessary. You can run through the dungeon picking up gold and special items, then go back to the store for healing rations and (if you're a magician) spells. Both dragons are relatively close to the entrance—nine moves for one and a dozen for the other. Once you've killed at least one dragon, you just have to amass a combined 1,000 points in gold and enemy kills. As long as you monitor your health and don't engage when it's low, you probably won't die.

       

Unless you drink a potion.

      

One exception to the above statement has to do with potions. It's another annoying mechanic. There are about half a dozen of them in the dungeon, and what they do is the result of a random roll when you try to drink them (not when you pick them up). They can heal, turn you invisible, change you into a "gaseous form" and move you to a different part of the dungeon, or increase your strength. They can also be potions of these things and fail to work. And finally, they can be poison and kill you instantly. Overall, it's not worth the risk. Iron rations are a surer thing.

   

The denouement is disappointing. Once you have at least one dragon kill and 1,000 points, you leave the dungeon and the game says: "You have qualified." It then freezes on that screen. "Qualified." What a superlative! Qualified for what, you may ask? The manual promises that after you complete the main quest, "the ability to move onto Level 2 will appear." It did not appear for me. Level 2, meanwhile, is "available from any good software retailers." Issues of Personal Computing Today in 1983 were indeed offering it for sale, but if it ever existed, it's been lost.

        

On to the semifinals?

       

The manual doesn't offer any credit for the game except the letters "P. T. O.," which I suppose might be initials. Liverpool-based Bug-Byte was founded in 1979 by Tony Baden and Tony Milner, and the company cranked out dozens of titles, almost all action games, for the ZX81, ZX Spectrum, Acorn Atom, BBC Micro, Commodore VIC-20, and Commodore 64. A lot of their published games were arcade conversions of titles like Pac-Man, Galaga, and Space Invaders. Perhaps their most well-known games were Matt Smith's Manic Miner (1983), an influential platformer, and Trevor Hall's Twin Kingdom Valley (1983), a graphical adventure. Dragon Quest is the only title that anyone categorizes as an RPG. The company went bankrupt in 1985, and its name and logo were purchased by Argus Press for its low-budget releases, which lasted through 1989.

    

Like many titles of this period, the cover is more exciting than the game.

         

I can't help but wonder if the game might have had some influence on Dragonsbane (1983), from Quicksilva, which was coincidentally also later purchased by Argus Press. I had a two-hour Zoom call with the authors of Dragonsbane last year (I never got around to editing it for publication) and they didn't mention the earlier game, but there are clear similarities in the action, the items you can find in the dungeon, and the look and shape of the game map. Dragonsbane is a more advanced game in most other ways, although it doesn't have a character creation process. It also randomizes its content while in Dragon Quest, the dungeon is fixed. 

     

I give the game a 15 on the GIMLET, with its best score (3) in "Economy," no score for "NPCs," and 1s and 2s in everything else. At least it shows some awareness of Dungeons & Dragons conventions, which is rare for this particular year and country.

   

****

   

For further reading:

• El Explorador de RPGs coverage of the game, including a full map.
• Dragonsbane (1983), the one game that I think may have been influenced by this one.  

 07/03/2026