Game 218: Dark Designs III: Retribution! (1991)

Most sites give the subtitle without the exclamation point, but my usage is always governed by the title screen.

   

Dark Designs III: Retribution!

United States

John Carmack (developer); Softdisk Publishing (publisher)

Released 1991 for Apple II

Date Started: 12 April 2016
Date Ended: 14 April 2016

Total Hours: 7

Reload Count: 10

Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)

Final Rating: 31

Ranking at Time of Posting: 126/217 (58%)

Ranking at Game #452: 291/452 (64%)

The first two Dark Designs games were far from the highest-rated on my blog--they hit 30 and 31, respectively--but they were satisfying for what they tried to accomplish. I run into so many games, particularly independent ones, that over-promise and under-deliver; that claim to be highly original when in fact they're highly derivative; that think they're epic when in fact they're short and lame. As a young developer, John Carmack suffered none of these problems. He knew he was offering distillations of Ultima in Shadowforge and Wraith: The Devil's Demise, and that he was offering a combination of Phantasie and Wizardry in the Dark Designs series, but he wrote all of his games in such a way that everyone's fine with that. They were tightly-programmed, packed with content, and knew to stop before they got boring. If they lack in some RPG areas, so what? They came on diskmags. You got a new one every month. You weren't expecting Ultima VII.

1991 was a major transition year for Carmack and his new partner, John Romero. At the age of 20, Carmack had gotten a job two years prior at Softdisk, largely on the strength of his Dark Designs series. But he and the other developers grew to despise the sweatshop-like atmosphere of Softdisk and the monthly programming demands. He and Romero began moonlighting by selling their own games--principally the Commander Keen series--as shareware on bulletin board services. When Softdisk found out about these games, and that the pair had been using the company's computers to write them, both threats of a lawsuit and offers of a contract followed. The messy result was that Carmack and Romero left the company but agreed to continue to produce one game every 2 months for Softdisk's magazines. Thus, a couple years later, after the team had changed the gaming world forever with Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM, you see them credited on the occasional diskmag title like Cyberchess and Dangerous Dave Goes Nutz! (For the information in this paragraph, I am heavily indebted to David Kushner's excellent Masters of Doom.) [Ed. from 10 September 2020: It turns out that almost nothing in this paragraph is true. Carmack and Romero liked working at Softdisk, and their parting was entirely amicable. See the bottom of this entry for more.]
   

This is my first Apple IIGS game. Getting the emulator to work was no easy task. I've never used the computer before, and I was surprised to see how much it looks like early Macs.

   

I can't find a publication date on this issue of Softdisk G-S (#17)--the files on the disk are curiously reluctant to give a specific date--but judging by the creation and modification dates, it looks like Dark Designs was programmed in 1990 and thus not one of the games that Carmack wrote for the company later in 1991 to avoid getting sued. Owing to the promo for Part III at the end of Part II, the series had always been intended as a trilogy, even though Dark Designs II: Closing the Gate could have easily ended the story. The story itself is pretty basic. A wizard named Agamon opened up a portal to a hell dimension and started summoning horrid creatures to invade the borderlands. In Dark Designs I: Grelminar's Staff, the party explored the ruins of a castle to find an artifact capable of closing the gate. In Dark Designs II: Closing the Gate, they journeyed to Mount Delkeina and shut down the portal. Now in Retribution!, they plan to exact vengeance against Agamon for opening the portal in the first place. I love that the titular retribution is the party's and not Agamon's.

The game supports importing the victorious party from the previous game, but I had played the regular Apple II version (III was developed only for the GS), and I wasn't sure if the characters would transfer. Rather than screw around with it, I just created a new party. This turned out to offer a better gameplay experience, as a party already loaded up with high-end magic items and experience levels faces a less interesting challenge than a party that has to fight and scrimp for each magic weapon and spell. My new party started two character levels below my winning party from the last game. [Edit: I was wrong about this; the had a regular Apple II release. It just isn't currently available online.]

Creating a new character by assigning 5 randomly-rolled attributes to the locations I choose.

   
The graphics and sound have been updated since Closing the Gate, but otherwise not much has changed. The series offers a fairly bare-bones RPG experience: Four characters can be created from fighter, mage, and priest classes. Each has a small set of attributes--strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, and piety--gains experience from combat, and gains levels. Equipment consists of weapons and shields or two-handed weapons, armor, rings, and the occasional potion or pill.
   

Outfitting the new character.

  
Characters explore castles and dungeons in 3-D mode but with a Phantasie-style automap that annotates key encounters. There are both fixed and random combats that take place on a separate screen. Although you see character and monster icons, they're really just there to depict party members' distance from enemies and thus who can strike in melee range. You can't really move about the map, and the game thus does not accomplish much more than the menu-driven combats of Wizardry.
  

"You know....again."

   
All games start the party in a menu town. Returning to town is generally the only way to replenish spell points. The games' approach to magic is somewhat limiting. Even my high-level characters only had around 30 spell points, and their most effective spells cost around 10 points each. Spellcasters can thus only cast a few spells before needing to return to the town to restore. This game did offer occasional "mana pills" as post-combat rewards. I don't remember these from the previous game, and they were very helpful in extending the life of my expeditions. Also helpful were two new wizard spells--"Mark" and "Teleport"--which allow you to save your position in the dungeon and return to it. Unlike all the other spells, I couldn't buy them in the town. I had to find them in the dungeon. Once I did, it made the process of returning to town to replenish a little too trivial, thus removing a lot of the challenge of the game.
 

The many options at the town level. It's silly to pay to heal a character since you can just cast healing spells, then come back here to recharge spell points.

   
The game world for Retribution! is about the same size as the others. You start on the main level of the evil wizard's castle. A variety of stairs take you three levels down and one level up. On the second floor is a magic portal that you need an "ebonstone" from the crypts to activate. The portal takes you to the Netherworld. Another portal from there goes to the Treacherous Pit Hall, and a final portal from the hall goes to "Agamal" where the wizard Agamon lives. Exploring the entire game takes only a few hours; a player with prior experience, knowing the location of the ebonstone and the path through the Pit Hall, could beeline for Agamon and reach him in 15-20 minutes.

    
As I noted, the graphics and sound have been updated from the previous game. The graphics still aren't fantastic, but they're serviceable. The sound upgrades were a lot of fun, reminiscent of Sword of Fargoal. Combat is accompanied by whooshes, clangs, and grunts. A victory cord plays when you win. A voice says "thank you" when you sell and buy items, and "aha!" when you find treasure. Altogether, it's better than a lot of commercial titles on the market in 1991.

There are no NPCs in the game, no special encounters, no puzzles, and very little mention of the story between the start and end titles. The series does, however, offer a lot of "flavor text" as you explore. Each room or corridor has a name, and many have a couple of sentences about what the area holds. It's not quite as good as having special encounters and puzzles, but it's better than a bunch of featureless corridors. Retribution! does things a bit differently from the previous two installments: you no longer have to walk on each square to reveal it and get this special text. Instead, squares are revealed as they enter your line-of-sight, and the flavor text applies to the entire room or corridor.
    

I admit I never really thought of demons as being hygienic this way.

I'm skeptical about "plunderment" as a word. So is Google, judging by the squiggly line.

"Chet was shaving his head drunk again."

   
Priests get a new mass-damage spell called, fittingly, "Retribution." There are a few new items of equipment, but not a lot. It was good that I had to re-save for items like vampiric swords, magic shields, and electro-blades, because otherwise my starting party would have probably ended the game with 75% of its original equipment. I think I probably said it in an earlier post, but I like the game's approach to magic weapons. Each has an effect that might activate with each successful hit. For instance, the "electro-blade" casts an additional "lightning bolt" spell on about 25% of successful attacks. It feels like such a bonus when that happens.
   

Some equipment about midway through the game.

  
The sense of character development is more muted in this installment. In Grelminar's Staff, my characters went from Levels 1 to 10. In Closing the Gate, they went from 10 to 13. Here, the new party started at 11 and only made it to 13 before the end of the game. If they'd come in at 13, I'm not sure they'd have leveled at all.

Retribution! is reasonably hard throughout, although not overly so, especially if you ensure that your priest always has 7 spell points available to cast "Word of Recall" and zip the party back to the town. (Enemy priests amusingly have access to this spell, but it sends the party back to town instead of the caster.) You learn through trial and error which enemies you can defeat in melee combat and which you need to just blast with high-end spells like "Retribution" and "Flame Strike." 

I described the basic outline of the dungeon levels above. Things don't get very interesting until the Netherworld, where you find a shop that sells a few high-end items, including an expensive magic sword called "Black Razor" that casts a bonus "Magic Missile" with every hit, a Ring of Might that simultaneously increases strength, dexterity, and constitution, and some mana pills.
   

You don't have to be insulting about it.

   
After that is the Treacherous Pit Maze, where the game continually forgets the automap, so you have to map things yourself if you want to make sure you explore each area.

I did, of course. There's a locked door in the lower-left that I couldn't figure out how to open.

   
The final level, Agamal, takes you through a series of combats with dragons and demons before you finally encounter Agamon in the final chamber.
    

A typical battle on the final level.

Wandering through Agamon's halls.

    

Here, I have to confess I cheated a bit to win. Agamon is completely immune to regular attacks and spells, so nothing I did could hurt him.
  

For some reason, Agamon is represented as a little pile of goo.

   
I spent almost 2 of the game's 7 hours retracing my steps searching for secret doors. The process is annoying because you can't just walk into the wall. You have to hit "(S)earch" and wait about 5 seconds for the status bar to finish. Anyway, I gave up after I'd searched only a few of the maps. I did find a few extra secret areas this way, but nothing that would help me defeat Agamon.
  

This gets boring fast.

   
In desperation, I opened the game file in Notepad to see if the text held any clues. It appears that, somewhere, I was supposed to encounter "two glowing figures" who "stand before you with pleased expressions." They say something like, "you have proved yourself mighty adventurers," but they warn that only a sword called "Truth" can kill Agamon. They give the sword to the party. This encounter might take place at the Netherworld store, perhaps once the party has attained a particular experience level. I didn't feel like grinding more, nor did I feel like exhaustively searching every wall in the game for a missed secret door, so I took a lame way out and downloaded the Dark Designs character editor that Softdisk published in 1993. I gave one of my fighters the sword Truth. A little cheesy, yes, but I feel like I experienced 99% of the game and there's only so much time that you're going to devote to a game of such limited possibilities.

The sword killed Agamon in one blow and apparently beheaded him, since the game made a point that I took his head.
  

"You can take it." "No, you."

   
I returned to town and got the victory screen below. My party became unavailable for further play but was saved for future Dark Designs games.
   

The game doesn't offer difficulty levels, so I have no idea what "this will be a neat ending at master" means.

    
It rates a 31 in the GIMLET, just about the same as the previous two. In some ways, neither of the second two games has been quite as good as the first, where the sense of character development was much stronger and there was at least one side-quest involving an imprisoned demon. Retribution! does a little better in the "economy" category since the ability to buy mana pills offers a valuable money sink that the previous games didn't have, and it gets an extra point for its improved sound.

I conclude with the same sentiment as I offered with the previous games: it would have been fun to get Retribution! with my monthly diskmag, and it would have reliably passed half a dozen hours. But we've had three of nearly the same game by now, and I hope the developers did something different with the second trilogy, all three of which were released in 1994. Judging by the screenshots, however, I don't have my hopes up.

I always like it when I can cover a game in a single post. Let's see if I can do the same thing with Fate: Gates of Dawn.

Game 152: Dark Designs II: Closing the Gate (1990)

Dark Designs II: Closing the Gate

Softdisk Publishing (developer and publisher)

John D. Carmack (designer)

Released 1990 for Apple II, 1991 for DOS

Date Started: 3 July 2014
Date Ended: 4 July 2014

Total Hours: 4

Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)
Final Rating: 30
Ranking at Time of Posting: 78/150 (52%)

Dark Designs II is less a sequel to Dark Designs I: Grelminar's Staff and more a second half. Since the first game took me only 5 hours and one posting, it would have made sense if I'd just played this one immediately and rated them both as a unit. They use the exact same engine and mechanics, and I recommend reviewing my post on the first game before reading this one.

The basic plot is that a "mysterious warlord" is threatening the kingdom. In a volcano called Delkeina, he's opened a portal to another plane and is summoning demons, devils, "chaos avatars," liches, and worse. In the first game, the party explored the ruins of a castle to find a magic staff with the ability to close planar portals. Now, with the staff in hand, they're assaulting Mount Delkeina itself, battling their way through hordes of summoned monsters to their source.

The game supports importing the party from I or creating a new one. Imported characters start at a significant advantage, with all their levels, spells, and equipment from the first game. All of my imported characters were Level 10 (and almost midway to Level 11), whereas created characters start at Level 9. Imported characters will never have to use the second game's equipment store, spell store, or healer (since the priest probably comes with "Cure All").

The main menu. You have to return here throughout the game to recharge spell points.

The party explores a mountain lair of five twisting levels, with corridors and rooms revealed as you explore them. As with Dark Designs I, a strength of the game is the way it organizes its dungeons into logical, named rooms, with a little bit of accompanying flavor text, and groups of enemies that make sense in context. Some of the rooms have amusing designations, like "AGGRESSORS' SWIMMING POOL," "A USED-TO-BE SEALED DEMON LORD ROOM," and "ICE DEMONS' FROLICKING ROOM." The center of each level is the volcanic core, and you can easily go stumbling over the edge to your doom if you don't pay attention.

I always admire games that enliven drab graphics with evocative descriptions. A few other shots:

 

 

Combat remains unchanged--somewhere between Wizardry and Phantasie. Although you see characters on a tactical map, you can't actually maneuver them around it. The only thing that matters is which "rank" the characters and enemies are in, because it determines who can fight in melee combat. The two front characters start in melee range; the two rear ones have to spend a round moving (F)orward. Each character selects a combat action--attack, cast, use item, change weapons, move forward, or move backwards--in turn, and then all execute at once in order of speed.

Entering combat options. My characters are on the right; the enemies are on the left. They're all in the front rank, so I can target any of them. I think maybe this was the last combat of the game.

The sequel offers no new spells, nor any missile weapons. "Found" equipment is rarer than in the first game, and throughout the entire game, I only swapped out weapons or armor a few times. Gold is plentiful but essentially unnecessary except for resurrections, which are so expensive that you really can't afford them more than a couple of times, making most deaths an occasion for reloading. Oddly, where every chest in the first game offered exactly 96 gold pieces, the chests here all offer exactly 24.

Uh . . . no one?

Also like Wizardry, the only way to recharge spell points is to return to the "store" area outside the dungeon. Thus, the typical dynamic is to explore the map as long as you can, until you run low on spell points and hit points, then make a beeline for the exit (or, if you saved enough priest points, you can cast "Word of Recall"), recharge, cast healing spells, recharge again, and then re-enter the dungeon. If the game had only allowed saving in the town, it would have some of the tactical tension of Wizardry, too, but alas you can save anywhere, removing the delicious fear that comes with over-extending yourself during your explorations.

My crippled party limps back to the surface.

What makes Dark Designs II a little more annoying than its predecessor is that spells are far more necessary. The enemies are a lot harder, necessitating lots of healing and mass damage spells. Unfortunately, your spellcasters get paltry spell points. I started this game with 26 wizard points and 33 priest points, and I maxed at 28 and 39. Any spell worth casting is between 6 and 8 spell points, meaning I can cast maybe 4 or 5 spells before I need to head for the exit and recharge. My party combination of two fighters, a priest, and a mage made sense for the first game, but it would make  more sense to ditch one of the fighters for another spellcaster in this one.

One of the things I like about the game is that enemies have the same spells as the party. This is rare for the era, although generally a staple of Dungeons & Dragons-derived games. Nothing is more annoying--but in an almost delightful way--to get a chaos avatar down from 100 hit points to 5 only to have him cast "Cure All" on himself. One of the oddities is that enemy spellcasters also have "Word of Recall," but instead of transporting them out of the dungeon and to the town, it transports the party! This can be alternately beneficial and annoying depending on how close you were to needing a return anyway.

The game shares a problem that I identified with Wizardry II, where you hardly gain any levels in the sequel. I gained 10 levels in the first game and only 3 here. That created a much more limited sense of character development.

Lesson learned: always follow the sign.

Despite these drawbacks, it took me less time to explore the mountain than the first game's castle. Unlike the castle, the mountain didn't require full exploration to find a series of keys necessary to unlock the doors to the next levels. There was one such door here, but for the most part, exploration was open, and I reached the endgame before I'd revealed every corner of the dungeon. I didn't find a single secret door, despite searching for them in places where secret areas seemed obvious. My party went through a series of abandoned rooms, monster barracks, laboratories, and so forth before finding a key necessary to unlock a door to a forgotten chapel. Inside, I battled some undead for a "Holy Sword," then met an ancient spirit, upset that this "once sacred mountain" had been turned into a "stronghold of evil." He automatically teleported me to the titular gate.

At the gate, there was some confusion because the game never actually shows the gate or tells you that you're standing in its square. I initially moved past its room into the next one, where I found a never-ending series of combats against various creatures. It turned out I just needed to use the staff somewhere in the general "chaos gate" room.

Using it causes the gate to collapse on itself, which of course causes the entire mountain to come crashing down. The game gives you about three moves to get out of there before it happens, so you have to hope your priest has enough spell points for "Word of Recall"; otherwise, you get a message that everyone died but "at least you closed the gate."

Closing the gate!

If you make it out, the end game message indicates that without his chaos-supplemented armies, the Warlord's forces are destroyed by the combined might of the kingdoms. But the Warlord himself remains free, and the game promises an encounter with him in Dark Designs III: Retribution.

Until reading that endgame screen, I had no idea that there was a third Dark Designs. MobyGames doesn't have it. I've added it to my 1991 list.

Oddly, after winning, the game freezes the party members and refuses to let you continue to play them. You can generate and play with new characters, but the level maps remain saved, so the new party encounters only random monsters and can't "win" the game again. (How they're able to explore the dungeon despite its destruction is left unexplained.)

Although I rated the first game a bit low (31), I was generally positive in my review. The two games aren't epic RPGs; they're little diskmag games, two among many cranked out by staff developers operating on monthly deadlines. You have to admire them for not trying to be more than they are. They're tightly-programmed and plotted, pitched at just about the right difficulty level, compact, and winnable in an afternoon.

You can read my first review for the GIMLET. In this one, I'd subtract a point for more limited character development, one point for a somewhat useless economy (unless you really want to save for resurrections), and one point for less equipment than the first game. I'd add two points to gameplay for being a little more challenging and a little less linear. The final score of 30 ends up being essentially the same as the original. I still wish the developers had thrown in a few NPCs and maybe a non-combat encounter or two, either of which would have pushed the series into "recommended" territory.

Based on screenshots, the third installment seems to have some improvements to the graphics and game engine, so I look forward to it. For now, back we go to Fallthru.

***

Looking ahead, Corporation is supposed to be my next 1990 offering, but I've investigated it, and while it has attributes and skills for the various character options, I'm not sure if they improve during gameplay. That's a key component of my decision on whether it's truly an RPG. It would be nice if it wasn't, because so far I hate the controls.

Game 133: Dark Designs I: Grelminar's Staff (1990)

 

Dark Designs I: Grelminar's Staff

United States

Softdisk Publishing (developer and publisher)

Released 1990 for Apple II, 1991 for DOS

Date Started: 15 January 2014
Date Ended: 15 January 2014

Total Hours: 5

Difficulty: Easy (2/5)
Final Rating: 31
Ranking at Time of Posting: 80/142 (56%)

Ranking at Game #456: 286/456 (63%)

Dark Designs is an unpretentious, short, somewhat satisfying little diskmag game that distills the most common RPG themes into a nice package. It doesn't break any new ground, but I don't think that was its goal.

Both this game and its sequel appeared the same year in two different disk magazines published by Softdisk Publishing: Softdisk for the Apple II and Big Blue Disk for DOS. The games were created by two young Softdisk employees, John D. Carmack and John Romero, who within a year would leave Softdisk to establish their own company, id Software, and become famous for a little game called DOOM. Before they became known for marines in space, though, they flirted briefly with fantasy games; Dark Designs is set in the same world as Catacomb, the duo's fantasy action series.

The game takes place in "the borderlands," which are threatened by a "mysterious warlord" who is amassing an army in the mountains of the north. His army is supplemented by demons, devils, and "chaos avatars" coming from a planar gate in a mountain called Delkeina. Because "the major nations are squabbling amongst themselves and refuse to acknowledge this threat," it's up to a group of adventurers to deal with the warlord. In the first installment, the party must explore the ruins of the castle of the great wizard Grelminar, hoping to find a magic staff that has the power to close planar portals. I haven't read the story for the second game yet, but its subtitle, Closing the Gate, makes its contribution to the story fairly clear.

Exploring the first level of the castle. I've just walked into a new room and am about to fight a battle.

You control up to four characters, who explore a five-level castle near a menu town called Tabrobale. Characters can be fighters, priests, or wizards, and they have a common set of attributes: strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, and piety. The game offers a novel character creation process by which you roll five random attributes and then manually assign them to your chosen statistics.

Assigning statistics during character creation.

The interface is like a combination of Wizardry and Phantasie: a first-person view on the left, and a slowly revealed automap on the right. As you explore, you engage in a variety of both fixed and random combats, navigate locked doors by finding the appropriate keys, and open treasure chests (which always, for some reason, have exactly 96 gold pieces).

The game world is well-constructed, consisting of a castle with two basement levels and three upper levels. You start on the main floor, and a logical progression, given the keys you find, is main floor, second floor, basement, sub-basement, third floor. You have to return to the main floor and the town frequently, as it's the only way to regenerate spell points. The game does a good job with little descriptions of every room and hallway, and the castle feels like a real place.

Succinct, evocative text appears as you go from room to room.

Every level has several secret areas, revealed by facing a wall and searching for hidden doors. On the main castle level, they're easy to find because there's no unused space, but on other levels you really have to search every wall. Oddly, secret areas don't necessarily contain any treasure or special items. They might just have an extra combat or some flavor text.

This secret area had both.

Combat in the game follows a Wizardry model. Every round, characters have the ability to attack, cast a spell, use an item, exchange weapons, and move forward or backward in their ranks (by default, the first two characters always start in the first rank; the second two are in the rear). If attacking or casting, you specify the enemy you want to target by letter, or the character by number. You line up all your attacks and then hit the SPACE bar to see the results.

Priests and wizards each have only eight spells, available as soon as you can afford to buy the spellbooks. Each costs between 1 and 8 spell points, and you only get about 4 spell points per level. Most of the tactical and strategic effort in the game comes from making decisions about spells: whether to cast mass-damage spells that hurt everyone moderately, or target a devastating spell on a single enemy; whether to spend a lot of points on a high level spell and have to return to the town to recharge, or hold off and try to get more time out of the current expedition; whether to focus on defensive spells like "speed" and "strength" to bolster fighters, or offensive spells like "lightning bolt" and "fireball."

My wizard spends 7 spell points casting one of the game's more powerful mass damage spells. The little icons show which combat ranks on their side (left) and your side (right) are in striking distance of each other..

Enemies consist of standard D&D-derived monsters--orcs, trolls, gargoyles, zombies, liches, etc.--and the combats are extremely well-balanced with the character levels. Cleared areas of the dungeon remain clear of fixed encounters, though there is a small possibility of random encounters on any level, so you can spin in place and grind if you feel like you need an extra level or two. Leveling up occurs automatically as soon as you have enough experience, and I found that leveling was relatively swift throughout the game. In five hours, my characters got to Level 10. An 11th probably would have been a stretch.

The more challenging enemies--liches, demons, some mages--might require several reloads to defeat depending on luck. Enemies have the same spells you do, and they use them more intelligently than foes in a lot of games. It's not uncommon to spend a few rounds bashing down a demon's hit points only to have him cast a "cure all" spell and get fully healed. Others are capable of multiple attacks per round; for instance, a manticore can use his claws, his bite, and his tail spikes. Some are capable of petrification but, thankfully, there's no poison in the game. Unconscious characters can be revived with a "Death's Door" spell. Dead characters have to be brought to the temple, where resurrection costs a bundle.

There was a reload not long after this point in the battle.

The game unfortunately falls short of "hidden gem" territory. There are no NPCs or special encounters in the game. Just a few people to talk with, or a few decisions to make, would have made a big difference. It's also a little too easy. If the developers had only allowed saving in the town, it would have imparted some of the tension of Wizardry or Might & Magic, where you wonder if you should kick down one more door or head back to town to heal and save. The ability to save anywhere removes a lot of this challenge.

A rare full-party death.

Winning the game means finding Grelminar's staff on the third floor of the castle, defeating its guardians, and returning to Tabrobale. This, in turn, means finding the right succession of keys. There are some memorable and difficult encounters along the way:
 

• A battle with a medusa. My characters were able to resist her gaze and kill her, after which they got her skull as a special object. It was capable of stoning any enemies I faced, but with the disadvantage that I didn't get experience points from those battles. I only used it once, to kill a golem that seemed immune to my physical attacks.

The golem appears to be headless, so I'm not sure how he's looking at the medusa skull.

• In the sub-basement, an unholy chapel where I interrupted a gathering of evil mages and priests, killed the lot of them, and got the key I needed for the third floor.

  

• A final fight with two ice demons and a three-headed hydra. If all of them cast a mass damage spell in the first round, you're toast.

Fortunately, my own mass damage spells help a lot.

When you return to town with the staff, you're given a congratulatory message, and the four characters are "locked" so you can't play them any more until the sequel. The game says you can create new characters and continue to explore, but the castle map doesn't reset, so any new characters can only fight random combats.

There's one optional area in the game. On the main floor of the castle is a gazebo with a locked door. You don't find the key to open it until late in the game. By the time you find the key, you've learned (from a message on a wall) that Grelminar imprisoned a demon in the gazebo. There's a strong suggestion not to go inside.
 

 
But a brave and high-level party can prevail in the combat. The demon is just an ice demon--the same as the two that you fight in the last battle--and the only thing that makes him difficult is that he has several flame devil allies. After a few unlucky battles, I was able to defeat them with repeated castings of "banishment," which does serious damage to otherworldly creatures.

A very difficult, but optional, battle.

I could have gotten two postings out of the game, but I decided to win it in one session. It took about five hours. For a GIMLET, I give it:

• 4 points for the game world. It tells a decent back story and creates a sensibly-structured, well-described castle.

• 4 points for character creation and development. There aren't many options during creation, but development is rapid and rewarding. Unfortunately, the encounters play the same no matter what choices you make.

Studying my character sheet while in a hallway. I need a little less than 5,000 experience points to make the next level.

• 0 points for NPCs, an oversight in this game.

• 4 points for encounters and foes. There's a good selection of enemies, well-balanced to the party, who behave differently depending on type. I also liked the opportunity for random encounters, but the game doesn't overwhelm you with them. Unfortunately, it lacks any non-combat role-playing encounters.

• 3 points for magic and combat. Unfortunately, there aren't quite enough options, or enough spells, for the combat to be truly tactical.

The game's eight wizard spells don't give you much to work with.

• 4 points for equipment. You have weapons, shields, armor, and rings to equip, found both in the shop and fixed locations in the game world. There aren't very many equipment upgrades throughout the game, though every class gets at least one magic weapon. The magic weapons are fun in that every round, there's a chance that some special attack will activate and do significantly more damage to your enemy.

This one was my favorite.

• 4 points for economy. You get gold from combat and chests, and for most of the game, there are magic items or spells that you're saving to purchase. When you have all the special items, there are healing potions and "recall" scrolls (whisk you back to town) to spend money on. It was only in the last 15 minutes that I felt I had too much money to spend.

Buying equipment in the menu town.

• 2 points for a decent main quest, but no choices or side-quests.

• 3 points for graphics, sound, and interface. Neither graphics nor sound are of particularly high quality. The keyboard interface is okay, but I found combat commands needlessly complicated, and it was far too easy to accidentally move (B)ack in the ranks when I meant to attack enemy B. Other similar glitches precluded smooth playing.

• 3 points for gameplay that's pitched at the right length, but is also very linear, too easy, and with limited replayability.

The final score of 31 is pretty good for a diskmag game. It's a little below what I'd put on anyone's "must play" list, but it's certainly good enough to pass an afternoon, and I look forward to seeing what improvements the developers made in Dark Designs II, which I'll play in a few months. If more games only lasted one day, I might get through 1990 in a single year.