Dark Designs: Passage to Oblivion: Won!

 

Pter Rok: the original J.Lo.

        

Dark Designs: Passage to Oblivion

United States 

Softdisk (developer and publisher)

Released 1994 for Apple II

Date Started: 25 January 2026

Date Ended: 26 February 2026

Total Hours: 14

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

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later) 

        

Summary:

 

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

    

****** 

      

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

    

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

       

A rough map of the game's areas.

          

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

   

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

          

The description is at least accurate.

       

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

      

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

      

Like so.

       

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

 

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

   

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

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

• Have my wizard cast "Magic Missile."

   

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

         

We're definitely using it here.

       

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

       

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

      

Crytus had a lot of secret doors.

       

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

   

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

      

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

       

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

    

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

      

Yum. I love marzipan.

      

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

     

Accessing the sewers.

         

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

       

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

          

Some random notes:

   

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

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

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

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

       

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

      

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

   

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

      

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

      

And my paladin's character sheet.

      

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

       

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

    

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

Star Trail: Anvil Chorus

 

I  guess we're not worthy.

       

After the last entry, commenters alerted me that I was, in fact, in the right Pit and that in order to progress, I had to speak to Inradon Xermosch at the Temple of Ingerimm about DWARVEN PIT three times. He goes on a bit about how the Pit is a site holy to Ingra—who I guess is different from Ingerimm—and that the temple holds the key to keep the residents from temptation, as if any dwarf from the community attempted to loot "Ingra's legendary hoards of gold," he would be "swallowed whole by the mountain." On the third click, he gives us the key.

    

There were some opinions that the game manual alerts you to the need to ask the same person the same subject multiple times. This is what the manual says: "Often, you may progress through several rounds of conversation before the two of you reach mutual accord." This is not quite the same thing as "click the same topic multiple times." What makes it particularly egregious is that NPCs have a way of killing conversation before you've clicked through each topic once, let alone multiple times. If you know you only get five clicks before you're booted out of conversation, are you going to waste two of them on the same topic?

      

This seemed paradoxically too hard and too easy.

       

Incidentally, I didn't even have this meager advice from the manual because the GOG version of the manual jumps from Page 22 to 33. I don't know why I didn't just go right to the Museum of Computer Adventure Gaming History in the first place

   

In any event, instead of continuing to Lowangen, I reload, get the key, and re-enter what every bit of dialogue calls the Dwarven Pit but the game calls the Finsterkopp Pit. (It would be nice if everything didn't have multiple names.) The game notes that the key gets stuck in the lock, so the door locks behind us. If we want to get out, we'll have to find another key.

    

The opening room has a skeleton against the far wall, a door to the west, and a corridor to the east. The skeleton has a leather bag with a bit of script and an empty bottle. We take both. Lilii  Borea, with her skill in "Read/Write" and languages, interprets the script, which offers a poem about Ingerimm, dwarven god of smiths. 

     

I assume it was better in German.

       

I try the door, but no amount of bashing or casting the FORAMEN spell will let us through. I can't use the third option, "pick lock," as I have not found any lockpicks. Were their lockpicks for sale in one of the towns, and I just overlooked them?

      

This would be so much easier if you guys didn't keep losing your cool.

       

The corridor leads to a room with a mural of Ingerimm in one alcove and a brazier in another. The game lets us move the brazier out of place for no reason. Toliman is burned searching through the coals and finding an "asthenil ring." The burn drops his dexterity to 1 for a few hours, which may have something to do with my subsequent trouble picking door locks, even after I found some picks.

    

The dwarven god of the forge looks a lot like Kurt Russell.

      

And that's all I can figure out to do. There are no other passages. I find no secret doors. The door in the entry room remains stubbornly locked. Xamidimura breaks a toe trying to kick it down. I'm just about to reload from outside the dungeon when FORAMEN suddenly works, and I have a new area to explore.

   

Almost immediately, I run into another locked door that's as stubborn as the one I just left. I ignore it and move further into the corridors, remembering only now to put Gnomon, with his superior "Perception" and "Danger Sense," in the lead. We turn a corner and come to another door, which fortunately opens in response to force. In this room, we find in a corner a mattock, three torches, a tinderbox, and—hallelujah—some lockpicks. We also step on a couple of traps—so much for Gnomon's "Danger Sense"—but fortunately they don't do any damage. There are also a couple of braziers, which I leave alone for now.

   

Yet another door takes a few tries, and a few injuries, to open, and then we immediately hit another one, then a third, which I can't open after multiple tries. For @*#!'s sake, does this game have to have so many locked doors? Maybe we could have, I don't know, a battle or two?

     

I hear you.

      

In another direction, a stairway goes upwards, and the corridor ends in a shaft with iron rungs on the sides. We can climb up or down. I go up first, and we find the top of the shaft blocked with a stone slab, but examining the slab reveals a secret compartment with a healing potion and a double-bearded key. The experience covers us in soot and reduces everyone's charisma by 2 points. This still has not recovered as of the end of this session.

     

Climbing down the shaft deposits us on a different level of the dungeon, which I decide to explore even though I haven't finished the one above. Continuing to follow the right wall, we encounter:

   

• Two more locked doors that respond to forcing them open.

• A hole in the bottom of a wall. We scare some rats away with a torch and scoop some coins and gems out of the hole.

     

Next stop: the Bocca della Verità.

       

• A door that opens to lockpicks. There are two chests behind it. Between them, they have two Girdles of Might, 3 boots, 3 shields, 3 iron shields, a throwing axe, a hatchet, and a skull girdle. The Girdles of Might are particularly powerful, raising strength by 5 points. The skull girdle reduces necrophobia by 4 points. This treasure does not feel "earned."

     

The girdle snaps into place.

      

• In a chest in a hallway, we find cart grease and a crank. Inventory space is starting to become a problem.

• A stairway brings us back to the previous level. You'd think that strength of 18 would be enough to break down doors, but a few of them still give us trouble.

• More braziers in the hallways just injure us when we try to move them and dirty us when we search them. 

• Two more chests behind a locked door. Together they have two more Girdles of Might, a wolf knife, a quarterstaff, two oils, a lantern, a strong healing potion, an Elixir of Strength, an Elixir of Dexterity, 2 Hylailian Fires (I guess you can throw this like a ranged weapon?), a recipe for Vomicum (I don't quite know what it is, but yuck), a recipe for Hylailian Fire, and a document. I don't know whether the elixirs are temporary or permanent. I have no room for most of this stuff, so I have to do some shuffling. Again, some of these items do not feel earned.

       

Sighing and swearing should not be the reaction when an RPG player discovers a chest.

       

• The document has a bunch of words missing vowels. I think it says: "The orc scum is now besieging Lowangen but they have overlooked an exit. Find it and you'll be able to leave the besieged town of war without harm." I don't imagine that this can refer to current events.

      

Let me know if you come up with anything different.

       

• The next room—you have to be @#*#$* kidding—has two more chests: An alchemy set, a crystal ball, a robe, an obsidian dagger, something called "kukris mengbilar," 2 bronze flasks, fire powder, and a document. The second chest has a trap that causes Toliman to lose his lock picks and 4 dexterity points for a few hours. My inventory problem is critical now. I end up tossing a lot of stuff that I could sell for good money.

• The document in that last pair of chests takes me a few minutes. The message is backwards, with breaks in the wrong places: "ONE PIT OF MANY LAYERS DEPTH: THERE LIES THE HATRED OF ORCS AGAINST [garbled; I think it's supposed to be MANKIND] IN WAIT. ANY WHO WANT TO ESCAPE THIS PIT, WILL HAVE TO CONTROL THEMSELVES AND THEIR BODIES WELL. EACH UNNECESSARY SOUND CAN TURN ALL THE GUARDS AGAINST YOU AT ONCE AND SEAL YOUR FATE. BUT WITH TRUE CARE AND STEALTH A SUCCESS WILL BE EASILY ACCOMPLISHED."

           

This took a while because I thought the first word was SHIELD anagrammed and figured the rest of the words were also anagrams.

        

The last room on Level 1 that I finally force open is a large chamber. Each corner has a brazier. There's an altar on the north wall and two nooks in the south wall, one with a relief of Ingerimm's face and one with an anvil. We light the torches around the relief, which causes some rumbling from a level beneath us.

        

Notice, Toliman, that you hold the iron with the tongs and hammer with, well, a hammer.

       

We find nothing to do at the anvil or with any of the braziers. At the altar, Toliman is granted a vision in which he is serving as an apprentice to Ingerimm at a forge. The rest of the party, seeing Toliman in a trance, has options to address him, touch him, take some coins, or tithe some coins. I try addressing him first, which breaks the trance. (I save and reload to try the other options. Touching him also breaks the trance. Taking gold from the altar causes a rumbling below; tithing causes Toliman's vision to repeat.) I wonder how Gnomon feels about an elf getting a vision of Ingerimm.

   

We head back to the second level, which I end up exploring twice. The cause of the reload is a riddle. In a large room with a slab in the middle of the floor, we go to open a chest. A little gnome (not a D&D gnome, but a classic fairy-tale gnome) interrupts us, chides us for stealing other people's property, and demands a gift. (We have an option to attack him, but we decline) I give him a ration package. He introduces himself as Mumpitz of Zappendust-Zwackenpurtz, "Mumpsy" for short. He waves a key in front of  us and gives us this riddle: "They bear palms for their attire, and yet they wear no clothes. You can ride on their backs, yet nobody does."

     

I should have just attacked him.

      

The solution has five letters, but I can't make anything out of it. After two wrong guesses, he tells us the answer is MOOSE, puts us to sleep, and we wake up in a hallway without the key. How does MOOSE make any sense as a response to that riddle? "Bear palms"?! Is the idea supposed to be that antlers somehow represent palms? Whether you're talking about the tree or the part of the hand, they don't. So I didn't feel bad reloading and doing it again.

   

More encounters on this level: 

     

• Gnomon finds several disused pairs of compartments in the wall for bolts.

• We enter a room where the wall closes behind us. A crank we found earlier fits in a hole in the wall and opens the way out. The game is perhaps a bit too detailed in its description of how the entire crank assembly works.

     

This is one of three screens describing the mechanism. If Dungeon Master did this, the game would take 600 hours.

       

• A chest with 10 ration packages, 10 water skins, 10 sets of cutlery, 10 sets of tableware, and a drinking horn. I drink from my existing water skins and drop them, then take the rations, drinking horn, and enough water skins to make up what I dropped. Notable about this game: You can take items out of chests but not put them in. Items dropped are lost forever. Both things are true of most games of the era, but a spate of titles like Ultima Underworld, Ambermoon, and Betrayal at Krondor have gotten me used to the opposite.

     

Who would possibly have room for all of this?

     

• A door we can't open despite multiple attempts at everything. It just leads into a one-square room. Probably another chest in there.

• There's a pressure plate and a wall switch in the same corridor, but they don't have any effect on anything that I can see. 

• We pull a chain on a wall in a room and are dropped into a tiny room with a bunch of dwarf skeletons to fight. It's a tough battle because it's impossible to maneuver. I have trouble even clicking on the enemies. We're successful, but all we get from the battle is a bunch of hatchets that we can't carry.

        

You really get to know your enemy in such cramped quarters.

       

• We're left very bruised and bloodied, so I decide to spend a couple dozen hours resting. We're attacked by spiders while resting, and we hear the sound of blows on an anvil somewhere below us.

       

"That's just the hammerer, men. Hammers every Friday and Sunday night exactly at 12:00. Nobody's ever seen him."

      

• This time, we answer the riddle correctly and get the key. The gnome still puts us to sleep. We awaken in different parts of the dungeon and have to spend some time re-uniting the party. 

   

With nothing else to do on Level 2, we take the stairs down to Level 3. Here, the regular wall textures are supplemented with some mining cart tracks on the floors. Encounters:

   

• A rusted mining cart. We have the option to use the cart grease (found earlier) on the wheels. This gets it moving, and Xamidimura has the option to hop in for a ride. She does and swoops down the track, ignoring several opportunities to bail out, until the cart crashes into a wall and sends Xamidimura tumbling, taking significant damage. I have no idea what this accomplished.

     

Whether I jump off or it throws me off, it amounts to the same thing.

      

• Toliman up and decides on his own, with no input from me, to go jumping down an ore chute leading to another room. He lands in a pile of ore. He has the option to take a piece but cannot bear the weight. Luckily, the other room is not too far away, and we're able to reunite without much trouble.

      

Idiot elf.

      

• We encounter a pit. We have the option to jump across, and after selecting someone, we have the option to secure that person with a rope. Gnomon makes it, ties the rope to the other side, and everyone crosses hand-over-hand. A nearby lever closes the pit entirely.

• A chest offers 10 pitons, a rope ladder, a grappling hook, and a rope. Since we already have all those things, we leave them alone. 

• We find an altar with runes that indicate it is dedicated to Tordol, who "founded the pit," plus "the victims of some kind of mining disaster."

       

You could not pay me to work underground for any amount of money.

        

• A room full of graves, each with war axes on top of them. We leave them alone.

• Another room with two chests. They contain: coins, a kukris dagger, a whetstone, two knives, a dagger, a heavy dagger, and a sickle. We manage to make room for the coins and kukris dagger. 

• At an anvil, Toliman grabs a pair of tongs and starts hammering away with them (?), apparently having a flashback to his vision. Gnomon grabs the tongs from him and tosses them.

       

You didn't really learn much about smithing from that vision, did you?

     

• In a corner, we find some utensils and a large ball and chain. I figure the ball and chain must either be a quest item or a practical joke. I hope it's the latter, as I have nowhere near enough capacity for it.

• We run into a corner that still smells like a latrine "even though this place must be out of use for decades by now." That reminds me of an account I read of excavations of an ancient community in Israel (I wish I could remember where) in which archaeologists reported that the earth under the privy still had its characteristic odor despite the facility having been abandoned for thousands of years.

      

I don't particularly like reading about latrines, but I appreciate the realism.

       

• We spend a bunch of time clearing debris in a corridor, only to have it end in a dead-end.

• We find a single skeleton in a nook. It animates and attacks us. After an easy victory, we find a scrap of vellum with some words. The fragmented text talks of a coin of stone, Ingerimm's forge, some kind of portal, and a companion named Madevik who was buried in a rockslide.

      

Doesn't look so lively here.

     

In another area that requires a lot of digging, we find some red jewelry, a copper key, and an asthenil dagger. It takes so long to dig through this area that we run out of water. I head back to the previous level and grab those extra few water skins. On the plus side, Gnomon gains some experience from these excavations and levels up. 

           

Too many "yeses" ended up starving us.

     

I like all the miscellaneous encounters, I guess. I'd like them more if there had been a couple proper shops in the town and I could have cleared some inventory space first. I'm surprised at the lack of combats. I can't remember back to Blade of Destiny well enough to say if combat rarity was a feature of that game, but I don't remember commenting on it if it was.. 

 

Miscellaneous notes:

       

• What is the purpose of the two creatures in the upper-right and lower-left corners of the interface? In Might and Magic, they signal secret doors and traps. Here, I've never seen them move. Are they activated by spells? 

• I'm not sure how the game decides which character performs certain actions. Sometimes, it's the leader, which I understand. But why did it decide that Xamidimura would ride the mining cart, or that Toliman would get the vision of Ingerimm? 

    

Next time, we'll see if we can finish this dungeon. 

    

Time so far: 19 hours 

Guest Post: Game 568: Les Six Lys (1984)

 

      

Les Six Lys

"The Six Lilies" 

AKA Jeu des 6 Lys or Le Jeu des Six Lys, either way meaning "Game of Six Lilies"

France
Infogrames (developer and publisher)
Released in October 1984 for Alice 32K and Alice 90

Date Started: 10 February 2026 (CRPG Addict Only)

Date Ended: 12 February 2026 (CRPG Addict Only)

Total Hours: 3 (both of us)

Difficulty: Easy (2.0/5) once you get the hang of it
Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later) 

     

Guest Blogger: The Wargaming Scribe is a Frenchman in his 40s who covers the history of computer wargames on his own blog.

       

*****

    

Chet (CRPG Addict) here. I'm taking a break from blogging for a couple of weeks, but before I went on break, I prepared this guest entry from the Wargaming Scribe for publication. He did a good job, saving me from having to do a lot of translation (less from the game than from its background and the background of the system). His review stands as the bulk of the entry. But . . . well, see for yourself at the end. 

     

CRPG Addict Rule Number 12 is: "It's never a good sign when the game box and the title screen don't agree on the name of the game." Such is the case here, where the box gives the name as Jeu de 6 Lys ("Game of 6 Lilies"), the manual calls it Le Jeu des Six Lys, and the title screen just calls it Les Six Lys. Either way, my policy is to favor the title screen in cases of such ambiguity, so Les Six Lys it is. It is possible that this title, pronounced in French, is the most grating, fingernails-on-a-chalkboard title in CRPG history.

    

The Scribe's entry starts below the break. I'll be back at the end. 

       

Meanwhile, the box shows six fleurs-de-lys, which I don't think is the same thing as a "lys."

          

****** 

 

The CRPG Addict has always had issues with early French RPGs, which generally don't follow any known convention and are usually not good enough to warrant the extra effort of learning a bizarre ruleset—in French. Today's game adds insult to the injury of being French: it is a game specific to a minor French computer, the Matra Alice, which does not have any other RPGs to its pedigree. I am therefore very happy to take this load off the Addict's broad shoulders.
      
The Alice computers are the result of an unlikely joint-venture between Matra (known for making missiles) and Hachette (known for publishing books and magazines), two companies that sought to enter the computer market in 1983. As they arrived late and had no prior experience in the industry, the first Alice was a clone of the Tandy MC-10, which relied on heavy marketing and a very engaging look to hide the fact that it was almost obsolete at release (only 4K of memory!). An October 1984 attempt to improve the offer with the Alice 32K (a misleading name: 32 stands for 16K RAM +16K ROM) and the Alice 90 (40K RAM) did not save the brand, as by then France was moving to the Amstrad CPC and its vast library of games. In January 1986, Matra discontinued the Alice, having sold (according to them) 35,000 units. By then, only about 50 games had been released for the Alice, and very few of them were exclusive to the platform. Les Six Lys is one of these rare exclusives.

   

The three Alice models and their signature red color. Note the odd shape of the Alice 90 at the bottom-right.

     
The weird but derivative plot of Lys fits in a single paragraph of the manual: The country of the six lilies lived happily, until "an unknown hand" broke the stem of one of the lilies. The five other lilies, upset, put Princess Alicea in a deep slumber until a replacement lily was to be delivered to them. The hero, Gael the Brave, took it upon himself to steal the lily guarded by the Dragon—and that's the last time you will hear about 5 of the 6 eponymous lilies and that unknown hand.

      
The character creation is simple: the game rolls four sets of 3 stats and asks you to pick one. Choosing is rarely hard: constitution is really HP, force [strength] is combat capacity, and intelligence is used to identify items.

     

Half of the choices are not Pareto-optimal.

      

After I select the objectively best set of stats, I am launched into the game. Now, most RPGs would let you learn the ropes before challenging you with the first tough combat. Well, this one opens with a "momivore" attacking me. It quickly drains my hit points while being virtually immune to my attacks. That's how I lose my first character.

       

Wounded by a momivore, whatever that is, immediately after launching the game.

     
On my second attempt, I immediately escape North, which is done by simply typing "N." [Ed. All commands in the game are one or two characters followed by ENTER. If you are attacking a monster or picking up an item, you add the monster number or item number after the command; for instance, PR1 to pick up Item#1 or AT1 to attack monster #1.] Enemies don't block your movements and don't follow you, either, so I am safe from the momivore. I find myself in a room with a skeleton and a "hipopo", but also some writing (ecrit) and chicken (poulet) on the ground. Luckily, around half of the monsters in this game don't attack you on sight. I regret to report that it is to their detriment, because you will have to attack them: each enemy killed increases your strength and heals you somewhat. The other sources of strength, constitution and intelligence are the various potions, chalices, chickens, and scrolls spread around. Some are good, some are bad, and the latter can be detected by the CO)nnaître ("know") command. It always succeeds, but costs intelligence.
      

I have just identified the writing, and the game tells me that it is a "letter for fools," so presumably something that will make me lose intelligence. Hard pass.

       

Neither the enemies nor the items are reshuffled when you launch a new game, so the Les Six Lys plays like Desktop Dungeons: you have to comb the map and kill the monsters in a specific order that builds strength and preserves constitution. Unfortunately, unlike Desktop Dungeons, you don't know the strength of the enemies before fighting them, so a lot of trial and death is necessary. My second, third, fourth and fifth deaths all happened because I attacked monsters out of order.

      

Fighting a helpless sankou ("no-neck") with the sword (épée) it had left lying around.

        

Ultimately, I find opening moves that I like: move East in a dead-end called VESTRIA where there is a sword that can be equipped (+5 strength) and a weak monster called "sankou" that can be killed easily, then turn back, race past the momivore, past the skeleton and the hipopo, past a "kokinel" and a "cameleo," until I reach a room with a potion of health and a helmet (+2 strength). After that, I return to the entrance, killing the kokinel, cameleo, hipopo and skeleton in that order, which gives me enough strength to easily defeat the momivore. I continue this systematic and optimized approach until I manage to easily beat the strongest monster of the early game: a "migalus" found in a room called ALCHIMIE. At this point, I have 94 strength, 42 intelligence (I didn’t spend any as I wrote down which items I could consume and which ones were cursed), and 97 constitution. I have a general idea of the size of the game due to an accidental glance at a player-made map on the Alice website, so I reckon I have a good chance to finish the game in one go. I stop mapping the game and attempt a straight shot to victory.

      

My map of the game with the names of the rooms and the number indicating what's edible/readable. No reason to indicate what isn't. The orangey color indicates locations where enemies attack immediately.

                 
There isn’t much more to say about the game. I attack every monster I meet, half of them old types I already know, half of them new to me. I always win, but initially it grinds away my constitution, until I eventually become so strong that I kill most enemies before they get to damage me—and so my constitution stabilizes. I also realize that potions with different effects have different colors, and therefore I can drink red potions safely, but never green ones. Unfortunately, there is no such trick for the other item types. After some exploration, the dungeon branches west and east. I explore the Eastern wing and find a special-looking location defended by a monkey and . . . a hermit crab? Both are easily killed, but I commit the location (PERDIRE) to memory.

   

I refuse to have "killed by an ouistito [a marmoset] in a 1984 game" stain my gaming record.

       

Having explored the Eastern wing, I move to the western wing of the dungeon (castle? I am not sure). Enemies in the area are tougher, and I stop attacking passive enemies when I reach 200 strength (and 34 Constitution), relying on food and potions to heal. Eventually, I find the Dragon, along with a passive “robo.” The lily is near!
         

This robot is one-of-a-kind in the dungeon, so I don't know whether it is strong or weak.

          
I kill the dragon after a combat that’s longer than usual, but not particularly hard. I receive a substantial bonus in strength, and then move on to the room it was guarding. In it, I find . . . a delicious chicken and a poisoned potion. Dang.

    

The vibe. Gael then slaughtered the mushro for strength and constitution.

        

Backtracking to another corridor, I find a second dragon, alone this time. It’s an easy victory given my new strength.
      

Just for science, I try moving past the dragon, but I'm blocked. I reckon it is the only enemy blocking you this way, though I haven't tested this with the other dragon.

          

This was the correct dragon, and behind it I find the lily and a unique monster called Nono. I surmise that the cute passive monster in the final room is a trap and so I ignore it. I simply pick up the lily and leave the room.
       

"Nono" is the name you could give to a dog in France, so either it's a trap or the developer added his pet to the game—or maybe both.

      
With the lily in hand, I return to the special PERDIRE room, which immediately ends the game.
      

"Gale the Brave, you prevailed. Alicea lives again, and thanks you for it." It sounds odd in French as well.

      

Les Six Lys is first mentioned in French magazines in October 1984, exactly when the Alice was launched, making it one of the first French “CRPGs,” coming to my knowledge fourth after Citadelle (January 1984), Argolath (May 1984), and Tyrann (July 1984). Unlike those other RPGs, which as flawed as they were felt like full-fledged RPGs, Les Six Lys seems to have subverted the Addict’s definition of a CRPG by offering the minimum possible content while still technically respecting the checklist: 

            

• “Throughout the game, the character becomes stronger and it’s not only maximum health.” Well, the game has strength and intelligence, too!

• “The player has some control on his development.” The player can choose which monster to attack and what to eat, drink, and read.

• “The player has an inventory of equipment he can equip or drop.” There is an inventory of equipment, with the entire equipment list consisting of a) the sword and b) the helmet.

The game also has a few bugs, like ghost items you cannot interact with (the game thinks they are simply not there) and one ghost monster (happily enough a passive one). 
        

The map of the game found on the Alice abandonware site. The lily is not in the LYS room but rather in the PUELLA room at the bottom left. Given that PUELLA means "young lady" in Latin, I suspect the princess was initially there.

      
If I tried to rate the game on the GIMLET scale, it would be a series of 0s and 1s, mostly 0s. I guess it could receive a 1 in “character development” and  “encounters”? Even for 1984, it must have been a doozy. However, this was not an issue for Infogrames, with its CEO Bruno Bonnel explaining the context surrounding the game in Une Histoire des Jeux Vidéos en France (2020): 

        

I absolutely needed to do sales. I am at Matra, in front of the head of marketing who is about to launch the Alice. He asks me whether we have a game for him. I tell him we are preparing one. Behind him, there is a vase with six lilies, so I say: “It’s the game of six lilies.” He asks me what it is. I answer: “It’s confidential but, well, I can tell you. It’s a formidable adventure game with a princess, a dragon . . .” whatever I can think of. He tells me that if we do it, he will buy 20,000 copies that he will put in the box with the Alice . . . It was five or six francs a tape, so it would be around 100,000 Francs. Such a sum would cover two months’ expenses. It was simply awesome . . . I leave, and I am so taken by the daily grind that I forget about it. Three months later, the Matra factory calls: they are waiting for the master in two days, and I have no idea what they were talking about . . . We wrote, coded, and produced it in three days for the Alice 4K.

       
This cool story is to be taken with a pinch of salt, because it gets better with every retelling: in La Saga des Jeux Vidéos (2008), the discussion had happened in a restaurant and Infogrames was the one supposed to duplicate 20,000 tapes (cue “in the middle of the night before the due date, most of Infogrames employees were still duplicating the tapes”). In any case, Les Six Lys does not work on the Alice 4K and Bonnel has mixed up the Alice 32K with the Alice 90. Nothing in the archives I read indicates that the game was sold bundled with a computer either, though I can’t rule it out totally.

However, there is something found in both narrations that I absolutely believe: the fact that the game was made in either 2 or 3 days! Lys definitely plays like a game hacked together in a hurry to meet a deadline. This is probably the reason for which it is so different from the other early French RPGs. These are weird, confusing, and often downright frustrating, but they ooze love for the genre, whereas the Les Six Lys is simply a stale cash-grab. 

    

*****

    

And I (the CRPG Addict) return. Here's the fly in the ointment: As the Scribe correctly analyzes, Les Six Lys meets my definition of an RPG. And while I've had guest BRIEFs and guest special topic entries, I've never let a guest blogger fully cover a game that was validly on my list. So I figured I had to check out the game for myself and prove that I'd played it with my own name on the winning screen. Sighing, I fired it up.

   

I couldn't get the graphics to work right no matter what I did. The backgrounds never fully rendered. Each screen just had a couple of blocks on the right-hand side.

 

I think Scribe undersold the game's bugs. I feel like I was told that a monster didn't exist (in response to AT) or that an item didn't exist (in response to PR or AV) about a third of the time. And the game got its numbers confused a lot. I'd go to pick up a helm (#2) and somehow end up picking up the sword (#2). The same thing happened a couple of times with dropping items.

      

The game insists that the chicken does not exist.

       

Following the Scribe's directions and map, it only took me about 30 minutes to win. The most annoying part was that the French keyboard changes the positions of "A" and "Q" (among other things), so I was always typing QT1 when I meant AT1. Also, the game reads a BACKSPACE as breaking the program. Fortunately, the DCAlice emulator has a very quick save state option.

   

I otherwise found the experience identical to what the Scribe reported. You definitely have to hit the screens in the right order. I triumphantly reached the final screen, only to realize that the game never asked me for a name. It forces you to play a character named "Gael." (How I Met Your Mother fans, have at it.) So all that work was for nothing. The best I can show to prove my own victory is a screenshot of my character holding the lily with different statistics than Scribe had at the same place.

 

Voilà.

         

Just for fun, a full list of the game's enemies: arienis (looks like a two-headed skeleton), camelo (2), canivore (2), chauveri, dragon (2), garde ("guard"), globo (looks like a snake), grenoui ("frog"?), hipopo (2), kokinel (2, some kind of bird), lonkou (a humanoid), migalus (2, looks like a spider), milpat (2, clearly short for mille-pattes or "millipede"), momivore (2), nabotin (Google translates this as "dwarf"; now I want to know the difference between it and nain), naja (2, some kind of snake), nono, ouistito (3, "marmoset"), paladi, poulpi (2, "octopus"), rablato, robo (robot), sankou (2), skelet (2, "skeleton"), tarentul (2, "tarantula"), tetardu ("tadpole"), tetbas (2), vampyr ("vampire"), vermina ("vermine").

 

I certainly agree with Scribe on the rating: I only give it a 6 on the GIMLET, with 1s for the backstory, character creation, combat, equipment, quest, and "gameplay," mostly for being short. At least the rating is thematically consistent.

    

I'm glad I played myself for only one reason: Les Six Lys is clearly a precursor to the same interface used by Infogrames' Mandragore (1985) and Oméga: Planète Invisible (1985). You have the same lists of items and enemies/NPCs, the same two-letter commands, with numbers specifying the object or enemy to be targeted, and some of the same graphics. So this diversion was interesting if, for no other reason, to see the weird prototype of those later weird games.