Game 584: Dungeon Arcade (1987) and Game 585: Search for the Jewel of Strength (1987)

In the end, the game is true to its name; it's more of an arcade game. 

        

Dungeon Arcade

Israel

Independently developed; published as type-in Atari 800 BASIC code in the December 1987 Antic magazine

Date Started: 22 July 2026

Date Ended: 22 July 2026

Total Hours: 2

Difficulty:  Moderate-Hard (3.5/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)

       

From an Israeli high school student comes this type-in game published as code in Antic magazine. I'd like to be able to call it the first Israeli RPG, but it's not really an RPG, so I guess we have to wait until the 2010s. It is vaguely reminiscent of the Quest games, but not so much that I'm sure developer Nadav Gur was inspired by them.

   

The game takes place in a dungeon of 40 rooms, the player's only goal is to get out with as high a score as possible. There's no character creation, just a name. Each new character starts in a 38 x 22 room (including the borders) with 400 hit points and no items. He must contend with the monster in the room, pick up any treasures, avoid traps, and make his way to the exit. Repeat 39 times or (more likely) until the character dies.

     

A typical room. I have just fired an arrow at a rat, which has temporarily blinked out of existence. A suit of armor and a "Fireball" spell await amidst the traps. The exit is on the south wall.

                  

Along the way, the character can find:

   

• Food, which has an uncertain purpose. It is consumed immediately when found. The game frequently says that you're hungry, very hungry, or starving, but I'm not sure what negative effects this has. You never die from starvation or even lose hit points. Maybe it affects combat strength.

• Healing potions, which restore a paltry amount of health, like around 3d6. They're used immediately.

• Bows and arrows, each one adding to the arrow total. If you have arrows, you can shoot at monsters with the "I" key, always shooting the direction you last moved, as long as you moved east or west.

• "Fireball" spells (only one at a time). Fired with the comma (,). Travels east or west until it hits something, then explodes.

• "Freeze" scrolls (only one at a time). Fired with the "N" key. Shoots east or west until it hits an enemy, then freezes him for a random number of rounds based on his health.

• Armor, which protects the character against hits.

• Shields, which do the same.

           

The character swallows a health potion. A dead "firecreep" lies in the northwest corner. Everything else is a trap.

       

Any of these items can be unceremoniously destroyed as you wander around. "Fireball" scrolls catch fire, armor just falls apart, and so forth. 

  

Each room is selected randomly from about eight templates, all of which have fixed wall patterns. The position of the exit, the number and placement of traps, the type of enemy (there's only ever one per room), and the number and placement of treasures are all randomized. I don't quite understand the traps, which are clearly marked and easy to avoid. About a quarter of the time, you get lucky and the exit is the same wall that you entered, and you can move immediately to the next room.

   

Enemies include giant rats, eagles, minotaurs, jellies, giant scorpions, manticores, hydras, dragons, demons, and "dark ones." Even if the character has spells or arrows, combat almost always eventually devolves into melee combat, which you engage by holding down the joystick button or the "J" key. You and the enemy pound at each other until someone is dead. (When they die, enemies' bodies don't disappear, so if you miss the message that you killed them, you can end up pounding away at their corpses for a while.) Because health potions are so weak, the player really has to rely on those starting 400 hit points for most of the game, taking care not to fight enemies that are likely to do a lot of damage. Sometimes running for the exit, maybe after freezing the enemy, is the best choice.

        

Melee combat with a spider.

          

One annoyance is that enemies can only be fought if they're to the character's east or west. The same restriction applies to casting spells and shooting arrows. The enemy has no such restrictions; enemies can not only attack from the north and south, but they can also move and attack on the diagonal. The player is limited to moving in the cardinal directions.

    

One of the room designs is a shop. Characters gain gold from killing enemies (only in melee combat, though). Some of the ways the character finds money are both puzzling ("It had a check for 126 g.p.") and disgusting ("It had 34 g.p. in its guts!"). Gold can be used at the shops (by bumping the counters) to buy any of the game's items. I used it mostly for healing potions, but it was annoying to get so little health for so much money.

         

"I just don't know why we have so few customers."

          

You also get experience from killing enemies, but I don't think it does anything but add to the final score. At least, that's all the magazine mentions, and I didn't notice combat getting easier as it went up. 

      

The only other notable thing about the game is that it flashes random messages at you as you explore. The magazine says that: "It's up to you to figure out which ones are important and which are just red herrings." I'm pretty sure they're all just red herrings. Here are most of them:

      

• "Put him in the comfy chair."
• "Don't you wish you were home?"
• "Super Software from ANTIC! Yahoo."
• "Buy at Stumpps for best merchandise!"
• "A voice says: I'm so Horny!"
• "A wizard once said: 'Use Typo II.'"
• "You'll never get out of here alive." 
• "Smile, you're almost dead."
• "Make a left turn at Albuquerque." 
• "A voice mutters: Use the force!" 

       

As you can see, there are a fair number of pop culture references in the list, including a Bugs Bunny reference that I think about literally every time I hear something about Albuquerque.

    

If you can make it out of the 40th room, you get a congratulations screen with "fame points" (based on experience), "fortune points" (based on the gold you found, I think even if you spent it), and a textual description of your consequent rank. My winning rank, Average Knight, is the lowest, probably because I won by moving onto the next room as quickly as possible and avoiding most of the battles. From there, the ranks are Hero, Super Hero, Supreme Lord, and True Overlord of Might.

       

The author should have changed the earlier text, too. "You have shown a middling amount of courage, hardly any skill, and no wisdom, but you somehow nevertheless survived . . ."

         

There's no way to save along the way, so you have to win in a single session. It only took me about 30 minutes—which is why I gave it a number and full review instead of BRIEFing it. Plus, if I'm wrong about experience points, it's technically an RPG. It gets an 8 on the GIMLET, with 2s in "Gameplay" and "Economy" and 1s in "Encounters," "Magic and Combat," "Graphics, Sound, and Interface," and "Equipment." For interface, the author tried too hard to get everything into one cluster, so you move with UHKM, fight with J, shoot with I and cast spells with N and [comma]. I get what he was going for, but it would have been better to leave the movement to one hand and the other actions to the other. I suppose if you typed it in yourself, you could change that to your heart's content.

     

The editor has a different definition of "epic-scale" than I do.

         

Developer Nadav Gur went onto a full university education in Israel, moved to the San Francisco Bay area in the early 2000s, and became a technology executive. 

    

I'm starting to wonder if anything that AtariMania calls an RPG that doesn't appear in other game databases is actually an RPG. Let's find out by selecting another game from 1987. 

    

****

      

I guess by 1987, all of the other titles were taken.

     

Search for the Jewel of Strength

United States 

Independently developed; released as freeware

Released 1987 for the Atari 800 

Date Started: 22 July 2026

Date Ended: 22 July 2026

Total Hours: 1

Difficulty:  Very Easy-Easy (1.5/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)

     

"Search for the Jewel of Strength is one of the best games put out by Kevin Haley and Scott Weeks!" the instructions say. That's the kind of statement that makes you sit up straight, particularly since it seems to be the duo's first and only game. They were a sophomore and freshman, respectively, at Clio High School in Michigan. I didn't set out to compare two games written by high-schoolers, but I guess the pairing works well. 

       

"This game involves strategy, fast reflexes, and good puzzle solving skills," they wrote. It's a cute effort, certainly impressive for a free game from high school students, but it involves none of those things, and like Dungeon Arcade, its RPG status hinges on a questionable statistic.

      

The setup: "The Evil Guardian has stolen the Jewel of Strength and has hidden it in a large maze in the countryside." It's up to the character to go get it. He has to travel through a "maze" of eight fixed screens, organized in a single line from west to east, battling monsters, gathering treasure, and assembling the resources necessary to grab the jewel and return to the entrance.

       

I just love the "in the countryside" detail.

         

Each screen has some configuration of walls, a couple of treasure piles (represented as straight vertical lines), and one "oracle" who offers a spectacularly unnecessary hint (sample: "Do you have enough power?"; "Whatever you seek may be closer than you think") for enough gold. Screens respawn when the character leaves and returns.

   

The unnamed character begins (with no creation options) with no items, 10 gold, and 500 "power." The character's hit points are defined as one-tenth his power.  

   

As the character moves through the room, he's attacked randomly and without warning by the various monsters in the game: dwarves, gnomes, lizard men, zombies, and medusas. Each is described briefly in the manual (medusa: "Witch with a head covered with poisonous snakes!"). They have between 40 (dwarf) and 90 (medusa) hit points.

     

One theory is that it's so long, it can wrap around your neck. I don't care for the other theory.

        

The player has a choice with each encounter to fight or run. Running is always successful, but the character loses gold.

  

In battle, numbers flash on the bottom of the screen, too fast to time. The player pushes the joystick button to lock in one of the pairs of numbers, representing the number of hit points that the player and the enemy lose. Whoever has the lower number "wins" the round, but winning and losing rounds doesn't really matter. All that matters is whose total runs out first. All hit points are restored between battles, so the player only has to worry about his total pool for each individual battle.

     

I'm glad I didn't press the button right now.

          

Winning a battle adds between 100 and 300 points to the character's power, and thus between 10 and 30 points to his hit point pool. As you might imagine, after a few battles, the game becomes significantly unbalanced. Once you have 1,000 power or more, you can outlast any enemy. All you have to do is ensure your first few battles are with evenly-matched foes like gnomes and dwarves, and pretty soon you're invincible.

      

She died anyway.

       

Despite its name, I don't think the "power" attribute translates into anything else. If it affects the combat rolls, the influence is very subtle. 

       

The character occasionally trips, falls, and loses 100 to his power, but this is easily restored. The more annoying random event is when the Guardian casts a "Darkness" spell and the player has to navigate in the dark. At those moments, it helps to have taken a strong mental image of the wall pattern. None of the "mazes" are terribly complicated anyway.

        

I want to see this implemented in a modern game. You're walking along and just suddenly . . . face-plant.

        

The instructions mention all kinds of items you can buy in occasional "villages," and I was deep into the game before I realized that a weird wall configuration in a couple of rooms was in fact a village. By bumping into it, the player can purchase these items:

   

• A potion. Raises power.
• A lamp and lamp fuel. Gives some recourse for the aforementioned "Darkness" spell.
• A key. Needed to open the box containing the jewel.
• A sword or an axe. Weapons that supposedly increase combat power, but I didn't see it.
• A shield. Can be used instead of (not in addition to) a weapon to increase defense. By the time I figured out the store thing, I had almost 4,000 power and nothing could touch me, so I didn't try it.
• A tote bag. Also needed for the jewel.
• Medical supplies. Prevents you from losing power when you trip and fall.  

        

Visiting the "village," that wall pattern in the lower left that looks like a booth in a diner.

      

The jewel is on the eight screen, in the southeast corner. To get it, the character must have a key to open its box and a tote bag in which to put it.

     

I hope it isn't my good NPR tote.

       

After that, it's a matter of making one's way back to the entrance, fleeing from most enemies. There, the Evil Guardian confronts you: "So, you have recovered the jewel and have killed all my servants, I see . . . But now you have to deal with me!"

   

The Guardian has 180 hit points, but by this point in the game, the battle is no harder than the regular enemies. Once the Guardian is dead, the player gets a "You have saved your kingdom!" message, a score, and then it's all over. I didn't include a graphic here of the Guardian because there isn't one; the fight takes place on a blank screen.

     

But the kingdom was not saved for me.

       

So it's not going to unseat Dungeon Master for "Game of the Year," but let's give these teenagers credit for a few things:

   

• The in-game documentation is exhaustive.
• The authors wrote little poems for each enemy to recite when approaching the character.
• The game looks and feels like no other RPG that I have any experience with.

         

The lizard man needs to work on his meter.

       

Moreover, the game comes with a "maze utility" that the player can use to create his own eight-screen maze. Alas, it crashes when I try to use it, and I can't imagine why I ever would have used it in the first place, but kudos for building it. 

     

Can't say I didn't try.

        

I rate Search for the Jewel of Strength as a 12 on the GIMLET, but it's another sequence of 0s, 1s, and a couple of 2s ("Economy," "Quests"), so I wouldn't call it that much better than Arcade.

   

I mentioned that this was the only game (in any extant database) from Kevin Haley and Scott Weeks. This is true, but it's not the only game from Kevin Haley alone. He branded himself "HaleySoft" and continued to make games throughout high school and well into college, including Galactic Conflict (1988), The Hidden Treasure (1988), and The Wrath of Doom (1989, updated as late as 1995). Both Treasure and Doom are listed as RPGs, and I checked them out briefly. They're definitely more advanced than Jewel. Treasure appears to be an RPG/graphical adventure hybrid about the search for stolen gold. I can't get Doom to run yet, but it seems to be a multi-character game.

       

A shot from Hidden Treasure. This author really has a thing about the countryside.

             

Well, it was fun checking what was happening in 1980s secondary education, and these two titles did an admirable job of delaying my entry into Pagan, but I suppose there's no more putting it off.

      

08/08/2026 

The Odyssey: Tales from the Crypt

Almost every time I enter a new room.

        

I had hoped to wrap it up in one more entry, but wow, this game is something else. It's one of the few RPGs I've ever played that really don't give you any normal battles. You've got to constantly dive into your bag of tricks to find the right combination of them to defeat each cluster of enemies and puzzles. Then, after you spend an hour figuring out how to clear a 5 x 5 room, you open a door, immediately get filled with arrows, and the entire process repeats.

   

When I started this session, I had reason to believe that I had over-stated the game's difficulty in my last entry. This is because I realized that I had missed a large introductory area. I was meant to be Level 5 when exploring the level described last time, and I was only Level 3. But even after I explored that introductory area and got up to Level 5, things really didn't get any easier. Leveling in this game really only matters for the extra 10 pounds of encumbrance that each level gets you. It might help a little in combat, but so few of the game's encounters come down to straight-up combat.

   

To back up a bit, during the game's introduction, the Seer says that the character's quest will take him through four major areas:

   

• "A dank noisome sewer, clanking with the action of ancient machinery . . . a madman hurling huge forces of thunder, cackling wildly."

• "A still older crypt, taken over by the forces of chaos."

• "A great tomb, built to house the bodies of the forgotten lovers who once lived and moved in the legends of men, Antiphos and Juliet."

• "A great cavern . . . now occupied by a presence who obeys no natural law. His name is Nok Hurthtu."

    

I thought I had been in the sewers last time, but I had prematurely gone a level lower, into the crypts. The problem, as commenter Dwayne pointed out, is that the door that goes directly from the town to the crypts was clearly meant to be unlocked from the other side, after the player has passed through the sewers. But it's unlocked from the town side at the beginning of the game. Meanwhile, I had a key in my inventory that I must have tried on the door before trying to open it. Since the door subsequently opened, I assumed the key had unlocked it and dropped the key. But that key actually went to the door to the sewers.

     

Oh, yeah, this is much more of a "sewer."

        

Before I narrate my adventures, it's worth taking a quick catalog of the "bag of tricks" I referred to above. There are two types: personal (character inventory) and navigational/environmental. Quickly:

    

Personal Assets:

 

• Melee weapons: So far, these have been daggers and a sword. They serve the same purpose that they serve in other RPGs, but sometimes the player has to expend some effort getting to a point in which he can effectively use a melee weapon against an enemy; for example, some enemies might initially be impossible to approach because of terrain or their own missile weapons.

• Missile weapons: These include throwing daggers, rocks, spears, a sling, and a bow and arrows. The bow and arrows weren't much use to me, as I burned out the two miner's helmets quickly and thus needed to carry a torch, which prevents the use of a two-handed weapon.

• Oil flasks: To throw at enemies and fill the room with fire. Oddly, the enemies have to be visible and activated for this to work.

• Potions of Invisibility: The real workhorse of the game. I use them to scout new areas, to get close to enemies that would otherwise kill me from afar, and to avoid unkillable enemies. Alas, any use of a weapon or Oil Flask dispels it. The potions also vary considerably in how long they last, from around 5 to 25 turns.

• Potion of Athletics:  Turns you into a speedster, able to run rings around enemies and dodge missile weapons in flight (basically, you get 5 turns for the enemy's one turn). Only lasts for a few rounds, though.

• Potion of Heroism. Increases attack power temporarily. 

• Wizard Eye Potion: Lets you explore the dungeon without walking there. You can view things but not pick them up or operate them. Expensive as hell. 

     

A Wizard Eye Potion shows me a secret part of the dungeon. I still don't know how to get in here.

        

• Wands: Supposedly stun enemies in combat. At first, I thought they didn't work (against me, either), but now I just think "stun" means something different in this game than in others. It's more a reduction in ability than complete paralysis. Either way, the wands don't solve as many problems as the other items on this list, so I've typically just been selling them for gold. 

• Scepter of Teleportation: Instantly teleports you back to town. Too expensive to use as a convenience, but helpful in a couple of tight situations.

• Scepter of Friendship. Turns enemies into allies. Sometimes it means they attack other enemies, sometimes not. You have to goad them a bit by attacking the other enemy in their presence or luring the other enemy to them. Dispelled by attacking the same enemy, but otherwise doesn't seem to ever wear off.

• Magic Monster Treat: Lures bestial monsters to wherever you throw it. 

        

You find a lot of these items in the dungeon, but all but the weapons can also be purchased from Mr. Jones. You just have to be careful because the game has limited money in it. You're also limited by encumbrance, of course.

     

Environmental/Navigational Assets: 

    

• The "run" command, which gives you three moves to every enemy's two movements. It's sometimes enough to dodge missiles in flight. I still find it hard to time.

• The "wait" command, which burns half a turn every time you use it. Can be useful in conjunction with "run," but again tough to time.

• The "scroll view" command, which allows you to scroll the window a bit and see things off-screen without moving the character.

• Lava, which kills most enemies as quickly as it kills you. Some enemies are so dumb they'll walk into it while trying to reach the character in a straight line.

     

Note the meat left behind by rats who tried to reach me on a direct path.

       

• Buttons, plates, and switches that open and close sections of wall, allowing the player to rearrange the environment to hide or expose enemies.

• Enemies with missile weapons, who can sometimes be tricked into shooting at each other, either by the player carefully timing his movements or the use of the Scepter of Friendship. 

• Cannons and other fixed missiles, which generally destroy even enemies that cannot be hit with normal weapons. Again, subject to effective player movement, leading enemies into the danger.

    

The great thing about this long list is that most rooms could be approached with multiple combinations of these assets. Take the opening section of the sewers. The Seer warns that the sewers are occupied by a "madman hurling huge forces," and sure enough, the moment the character steps away from the ladder, he gets blasted (and killed) with energy from an off-screen source.

     

In this particular case, the madman can apparently see invisibility, so the Potion of Invisibility does not help. The solution I used (which took a bit of trial, error, and reloading) involved tripping a series of switches to change the wall configuration in a way that hid me from the madman. I then sneaked around to his back side and engaged him in melee combat before he could use his spells. But I think I also could have reached him with a Potion of Athletics or maybe hit him with missile weapons between his shots.

   

The madman dropped a sling, a Scepter of Lordly Might (the only way in the game to level up), and three keys, all of which were consumed by doors in the remainder of the sewers. 

     

The madman's inventory.

          

One of the madman's keys led to ladders up and down. The "up" ladder brought me back to town through a door that had been locked from the other side. Once I had opened it, the only door I hadn't opened in town was the closet in Sarah's house. 

    

Moving downward, I encountered a room with a cannon in the corner, a switch on the wall, and a pressure plate in the center. A locked door led onward. An undead warrior was roaming around, but he's one of the few enemies that the character can just kill in regular combat. A skeleton (unliving) was weighing down the pressure plate. Removing the skeleton caused a wall to open the east, disgorging a fire crab, who hurls balls of fire and cannot be hit by the player at all. Meanwhile, the switch on the wall caused the cannon to start firing east at regular intervals. As you might imagine, the solution was to lure the fire crab into the path of cannon fire. Once killed, he dropped the key to the locked door.

         

The setup.

    

In the next room, I encountered a triton in a pool of water. I met several tritons this session. They seem to never run out of spears, and the spears can be sold, so it's one way to make money if you're able to keep dodging them. I killed him after a few spears, but there were more infinite weapons later. 

    

The rest of the sewers were uncharacteristically easy. A room of three banshees offered another Scepter of Lordly Might, and once I hit Level 5, the banshees were unable to touch me. Another room had specters and cannons, but I was able to kill the specters without even needing the cannons. A minotaur looked hard but was relatively simple and dropped a shield (which is no use as long as I need a torch). There was a pressure plate puzzle with no logic that I was able to discern; I just ran over them until the nearby door opened.

   

Eventually, a door opened to a hallway with a bunch of treasure—several potions, wands, extra weapons, and so forth. I was in the middle of picking them up when I realized I had actually wandered into my own item stash via a previously-locked door. Thus, the sewers were over.

    

Wow! Look at all this treas- . . . wait.

     

From this point, the game was completely linear. The crypt, much of which I had already explored, simply offered one challenging room after another. I had described the next one last time: four goblins arrayed on both sides of a room filled with water. If I showed my face at all, I got turned into a pincushion. Some experimentation with the Potion of Invisibility showed me that if I threw a spear onto the pressure plate on the far side of the water, it opened a path to the southern door. The door was locked, though, and I suspected one of the goblins had the key.

     

Activating the pressure plate without exposing myself to the goblins.

      

I suspect I could have beaten this room with a Potion of Athletics, running fast enough to avoid the arrows, which would have hit the goblins on the other side. Instead, I used two Potions of Invisibility to sneak up to the nearest goblins on each side and charmed them both with the Scepter of Friendship. Once I turned visible, the goblins killed each other, leaving me to kill the last one.

     

Highlights from the next rooms:

          

All of the narration below takes place in this area.

      

• A room with a line of six pressure plates alongside a lake of lava. I had to throw rocks onto the plates in a precise order to create a path across the lava. A scroll I found previously indicated that the sphinx knew the order, and inspecting the sphinx allowed me to hear him mumbling it. 

        

I don't think the sign was necessary.

      

• A very large room with a river running through it. In the far corner, an invisible "terrible unseen force" fired cannonballs at me (don't ask me how; there was no cannon). Rats swarmed the room and attacked when they could get near me. I was able to run and dodge my way to the unseen force and kill it, ending the cannonballs, but it turns out that rats never stop spawning in this room. Since I had to pass through here frequently (going back and forth to the surface to restock on torches), I was always having to fight rats. The good news is that they're a persistent source of food. There was a closet in this room, the entrance obscured by cobwebs, and I didn't discover it until the next session. 

• The next room was an enormous 22 x 18 space with four tombs in it. I found a key (and two gold coins) in the northwest tomb; the key opened the northeast tomb, where an invincible tomb guardian killed me in one hit. I had to use a Potion of Invisibility to get past him and find the key to the southeast tomb, then close the door behind me to keep the guardian trapped in the tomb. A key in the southeast tomb opened the way onward. I never found a key to the southwest tomb.

     

The only screenshot I took of this room was entering it. Note the description.

       

• The level's southeast room was presented as the shore of an underground sea. A ship was moored here, a gangplank extending to the shore, but there was a locked door at the end of the gangplank. Meanwhile, two tritons hovered in the waters around the gangplank and drilled spears into my chest the moment I entered the room. Killing them again involved the Potion of Invisibility/Scepter of Friendship combination, which I started to worry I was over-relying on.

• Meanwhile, the ship was occupied by none other than Xenophos, husband of Sarah, hero of the Karthian Wars. He was wandering the ship, but he wouldn't let me aboard, so I had to talk to him from several spaces away. He explained that he was such an awesome naval captain that Neptune himself became jealous of Xenophos's command of the seas. The sea god therefore sucked Xenophos's ship into the underworld. All of Xenophos's crew died trying to escape. When reminded of his wife, Xenophos thought of her fondly but said: "We are too old now. What use could we have for each other? After all these years." However, he gave me a key to the closet in Sarah's house and asked me to retrieve some magic armor he left there. When I went back to the house, I had no opportunity to tell Sarah that I'd met her husband, at least not with any keyword I could think of.

      

Xenophos was a bit paranoid.

        

• Xenophos's armor weighed 50 pounds—my exact carrying capacity. I'm sure that wasn't a coincidence. I had to drop everything and walk all the way back through the dungeon to Xenophos's ship, fighting rats with my hands, in the pitch black. Thankfully, I had made a map. When I got there, I couldn't talk to him to tell him that I had the armor because I couldn't see him; you can't talk to someone you cannot see. I thus had to drop the armor on the gangplank, walk back to the town, grab my other stuff (including torches), and walk back to Xenophos's ship again. Very annoying. Then Xenophos wouldn't recognize his armor on the ground, but I couldn't pick it up without dropping the torch. Eventually, I realized I had to begin conversation with Xenophos while holding the torch, then, while conversation was still active, drop the torch and pick up the armor. He took it at last and gave me the key to his ship. It had a bow, arrows, a Potion of Athletics, and the key to get out of this area.

     

Handing Xenophos his armor in the dark.

     

• The next room had a large area completely encircled by a force field, except for a single entrance square, but that square was lava. In fact, the center of the force field area had a maze of lava. There was no way I could survive walking on it. Fortunately, I knew how to solve this because earlier in the crypt, I'd found a Potion of Wizard Eye surrounded by the same sort of force field. It was next to a sign that said, "Save this potion for your next trial by lighting and fire." The Wizard Eye allowed me to follow the maze without stepping into it, all the way to a sign that read: "The key is 'Umbilical.'" I needed this password to get past a ghost guarding the exit to this room. Unfortunately, should you play this game for yourself, knowing that won't help you. This isn't an answer that you type in, and the character only speaks it if he's seen it.

     

The end of the maze. The Wizard Eye can go through walls but not force fields.

      

• Next room: A sign in the northeast corner that read: "I am one of the four brothers. Every room has a family like ours. Each brother has two half-brothers and one step-brother. Find my step-brother." I still don't understand what it was saying. The room did have four demons in it, all of whom nailed me with throwing daggers when I entered. They were only partly visible, blinking in and out of existence, and I soon realized that they couldn't be hit by any weapons. What I had to do was run through the room and get them to hit each other with their knives until three of them were dead. When that happened, the fourth stopped throwing daggers, maybe because he ran out. I had to do this several times because there were two locked doors leading out of the room, and two of the demons had keys. I had to ensure that the right demons were killed.

          

Tricking the demons into throwing their knives at each other.

       

Miscellaneous notes:

   

• Different torches have both different durations and different light levels. 

• I really like the detailed descriptions that you get when looking at an enemy or NPC. 

     

The game's description of a giant bat.

       

• I'm pretty sure the crypt is going to turn out to be 60 x 60 tiles. I don't think the sewers were bigger than 20 x 20.

• In the account above, I elided frequent trips back to the surface to restock on torches and food. The problem is that Mr. Jones only sells one torch and two pieces of meat per day, so you can't "stock up" unless you're willing to rest for a week or so, doing nothing but visit the store every day. 

      

In general, I'm enjoying the game a lot—albeit mostly for things that have nothing to do with its questionable RPG status. It is a little bit tiresome to enter each room and immediately get killed, then have to go through the same process of using a Potion of Invisibility to scout the room and work out a plan. But it sure is satisfying to solve each room and open the next door.  

     

Time so far: 15 hours
   

****

   

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08/05/2026 

Game 583: Escape from Ragor (1994)

Motelsoft co-owner Harald Breitmaier is given exclusive credit for this title.

      

Escape from Ragor

Germany

Motelsoft (developer and publisher)

Released 1994 for DOS 

Date Started: 11 July 2026

Date Ended: 14 July 2026

Total Hours: 8

Difficulty:  Easy (2.0/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)

        

This is the same game we've seen from Motelsoft before, in the form of Arcan (1993) and Walls of Illusion (1993): A Dungeon Master-inspired dungeon crawler with lots of mechanical puzzles. When I played Illusion, I remarked that the RPG elements, which are already flimsy in many Dungeon Master clones, seemed like afterthoughts. Ragor goes even further in that direction by giving the player control of only one character, and with significant limitations in equipment and combat options.

      

The only "character creation."

           

Ragor is the industrious developer's first RPG for DOS; all its previous efforts had focused on the Atari ST. Perhaps that's why they stripped so many elements. To start, the only character creation decision is whether to take a male or female character. (I rarely choose a female protagonist, and I didn't like the look of the guy, so I went with her here.) The character is presumed to be trapped somehow in the dungeon of Ragor, ruled by someone named Megrim, and he or she must escape. "Megrim" was a character race in both Seven Horror's (1988) and Sandor (1989), but notes in the dungeon make it clear that it's a personal name here.

      

The opening. A pit lies ahead, a message to the left, an item to the right.

        

Let's deal with the RPG parts first, since it won't take very long. The character has no wearable inventory and only two weapon slots, one in each hand. I have no idea whether a second weapon in the off-hand made any difference. I'm not even sure which slot is the primary hand. The manual warns the player that weapons are so inferior to spells in this game that when you click the only "attack" button, the game assumes you want to cast a spell as long as you have any magic points. Weapons only come into play when mana runs out.

       

The character/inventory screen. You'll notice two "hand" slots but no armor or other wearable items. The main inventory has 19 additional slots, but the chest (right) has hundreds of slots. You never really need to put down anything you find. The spell is set to "Ice Ball."

        

There are, meanwhile, only three spells found in the game. Early, the player finds a basic fire spell, followed a few hours later by a basic frost spell, followed a few hours later by an advanced fire spell. That's it. As I said, there's only one "attack" button, which automatically fires the selected spell if the character has enough mana points and uses the equipped weapon otherwise. The best weapon (the sword, which you get for about 30 seconds) does about 1-10 damage, whereas the spells do roughly 1-30, 1-60, and 1-120 damage, so getting to the point that you're actually using a weapon is bad planning. It happens extremely rarely, particularly since if the character rests more than six or so squares from the nearest enemy, he or she restores all health and magic points. So even the most difficult battles involve the player attacking until health or mana get too low, rushing off in any direction with at least half a dozen tiles, resting, and then re-entering combat. 

         

Destroying a monster. The number at the top of the screen is how much damage I'm doing to him. I like the way they explode.

          

Enemies are unnamed and mostly minor annoyances. They all have ranged attacks. They have no facing direction other than forward, so they can't be combat-waltzed as in most Dungeon Master clones. The attacking and running away trick works for most of them, although there are a few battles in cramped quarters in which the player has to rely on potions. The character gains experience and levels from kills, but enemies mostly keep pace with the character's level. Wherever you are in the game, killing an enemy basically involves 30 seconds of furious mouse-clicking.

     

Attacking a rare pack of foes. Fortunately, these late-game enemies are curiously easy.

       

The other major simplification involves the control system. Every part of the game is controlled by the mouse, with the sole exception of four occasions in which the player has to enter the answer to a riddle with the keyboard. I thus had to spend 8 hours clicking around with the GTFO panel, which isn't exactly huge. It's very easy to turn when you intend to move or strafe, and to move when you intend to attack (attacking is the little gem in the center of the panel). There is music in the game, but no sound effects whatsoever.

     

The dungeon is around 10 or 12 levels of 30 x 30 each, although not all the space is used on all levels. Like Arcana and Illusion, Ragor is no level-by-level dungeon crawl. The character starts somewhere in the middle and must immediately drop through a pit to a lower level, and for the first quarter or so of the game spends a lot of time negotiating a maze of chutes and ladders, often returning to the starting area via a new wall section that opens from the other side. Eventually, the game stabilizes a bit, with the character going all the way to the bottom and then working his or her way up to the top levels using the level space that wasn't previously explored. The whole thing is very linear; rarely does the player have more than one major direction to go.

     

All or at least most of the enemies in the game.

        

The game features one of the most detailed automaps we've seen in RPG history, recording just about all of the dungeon's features. It is so detailed, in fact, that it spoils many of the game's challenges. There is no need to hunt for buttons, test for secret doors, or worry that you've missed a treasure; the map tracks all of that for you. If you press a button that opens up a new area, you can see it on the automap even if it's far away from you.

       

I agonized about whether to create my own maps, a process that I enjoy and often use to annotate puzzles that are still in need of a solution. Eventually, I decided it would be a waste of time, which I think turned out to be a good call. 

     

The automap clearly shows explored and unexplored squares, illusory walls, ladders, pressure plates, pits, levers, buttons, and keyholes.

              

Dungeon Master clones live and die by their navigational puzzles, and honestly, they're not very impressive here. You've seen them all before: buttons, switches, pressure plates, pits (both visible and hidden), teleporters, illusory walls, invisible walls, switches for keys and coins, and so forth. Rarely are the puzzles more complicated than finding a key in one place to open a door in another, or pulling a lever to open a nearby wall. In Dungeon Master and its best derivatives, you don't necessarily activate every switch you see because it might cause something to happen that you're not ready for. Or it might do something subtle, and you need to finish mapping the rest of the level before you'll be able to detect its effect. There's none of that angst here. You see a button, you press it.

     

Using a key to turn off a force field.

       

A gem goes in this lion's mouth.

That button might be hard to detect if it didn't show up on the automap.

A pressure plate activates a trap.

        

The few stand-outs wouldn't be stand-outs by most standards, but they livened things up here. There are a couple of levers that have complex effects, such as rotating which secret door is open among a group of four. There are a couple levels that make extensive use of spinners, always annoying but even more so when you can't quickly correct with a keypad. There are some pressure plates that launch you forward in your facing direction, so if you want to go through an adjacent wall, you have to sidle into them. (In what game did I first encounter these? I remember feeling that it violated a ton of rules. I was really offended by it.) There are a couple "conveyor belts"—sequences of pressure plates that move you along a particular path, and you have to carefully time your exit.

      

Lever puzzles sometimes introduce additional complexities.

        

I did not find any "walking dead" moments or dead-ends, which is to the game's credit. In a game as fond of pits, one-way ladders, teleporters, and snaking up and down levels as this one, it must be hard not to occasionally trap the player. 

   

There were three absolute nightmare puzzles involving futuristic-looking panels. They require the player to insert colored diodes in a sequence. To figure out which colors to use, you have to interpret the colors of flashing lights. Or something. Irene figured it out, but I didn't understand her explanation. All I know is that if you put in the wrong colors, the machine blows up in your face for significant damage.

     

I never really understood this puzzle.

        

There are four places in the game in which the player meets a "Guardian of the Passageways" and must type a word to lower a force field. The first time, the guardian just asks for a "magic word." I tried several things like BITTE ("please") to no avail. I never found the answer to this one, and it bothered me for the rest of the game that there might be something vital on the other side of that field.

         

I even tried OPEN SESAME. I don't think I tried ALAKAZAM.

       

The other three are all in a row, and they're accompanied by message squares which provide a little riddles:

   

• It brings death to many a tree. It helps humans in their time of need. If you want to have it, you must tell me its name. 

• What is being sought here isn't difficult. After all, without this thing, there are no more new knights. 

• Sharp is the thing, and small to boot; it rests quietly upon the belt. Its name is sought here—you rogues, tell it to me.

            

I got the first one (AXT) without much trouble and found an axe in the room beyond. That made the other two (SCHWERT und DOLCH) even easier to figure out. The middle puzzle got me the only sword in the game (previous weapons had been dagger, club, and axe). Even though weapons play essentially no role in combat, I was pleased with the upgrade. But almost immediately afterwards were a series of slots on the walls that demanded the axe, sword, and dagger, busting me back down to a spare axe.

     

One final riddle that I liked said: "One person hauls it off to the pub; another piles it up in their socks. Some hide it at home, while others throw it out the window." The only thing that made sense to me was money, which I had in the form of a single silver coin. But there was no way to type the answer to this riddle, and no nearby slot for the coin. Eventually, I realized the solution was to literally throw the coin out the nearest window.

      

This was clever.

       

Other than the title, the text is entirely in German, which for me made its verbose attempts to introduce some kind of clumsy plot rather annoying. In the first room is a message from your captor:

     

I, Megrim, Ruler of Ragor, am truly no monster. You may go wherever you wish. But as long as you remain within my walls, we play the Game of Games. WITH YOU! By *my* very special rules, of course! The game is called . . . Don't Lose Your Head. And the best part is: the one who loses will never remember it. HA HA HA!

      

If Megrim sounds like a bit of a dick, he certainly is. Later, you get this message in front of a pit:

      

I, Megrim, ruler of Ragor, wish to show you how generous I can be. Everything you need to leave my walls lies ready down here! A master key. A very good weapon. 2,500 gold pieces. An exciting partner—just for you alone! Trust me. Take the leap, and you will have reached the goal of all earthly happiness.

     

There is nothing but snakes on that lower level. 

         

Sigh. Back to Google Translate.

       

Other messages come up frequently as you explore, most offering unnecessary hints ("TRAPPED! WHO HASN'T WALKED THROUGH WALLS?") or unnecessary encouragement ("The courageous person lets nothing stop them. DON'T STOP!") "Beware of pitfalls" appears right before a room with illusory pits. "Step back safely to reach your new goal" appears near a teleporter that lets you bypass a lot of traps. I got annoyed that the game kept making me translate messages that were duplicative at best, spoilers at worst. The messages dwindle by the halfway point of the game, however, and are entirely gone by the end.

   

Meanwhile, a mysterious female NPC shows up a few times in the early levels. She emphasizes: "Forget about conventional weapons like daggers and swords. In Ragor, they are nothing more than fancy ornaments—otherwise useless against the creatures that dwell here!" The second time I met her, she exhorted me to: "Climb up and get the Blue Stone. It is the only effective remedy against Megrim and his daughter! But then come back quickly, because the creatures up there are still a bit too much for you to handle!" A sequence of ladders took me all the way to the top of the dungeon, but through very small spaces; I would later revisit those levels in more detail and fill in the rest of them. Anyway, I found the blue stone, but I never knew what it did for me.

     

A woman tries to be helpful.

       

The woman appears one more time as the player starts the final ascent from the bottom level to the top. She gives a key to an area that has food, water, and potion fountains (places to refill potions). Then she disappears with no clue as to who she was.

     

As for Megrim's "daughter," introduced out of nowhere, I guess maybe she's the final enemy: an indistinguishable form in a dark cloak. The player meets her on an upper level of the dungeon on which the auto map mysteriously doesn't work. It's not very big, though. She has thousands of hit points and takes forever to kill; maybe she would have been impossible without that blue stone. Fortunately, as with every other enemy, you can just run half a dozen squares away and rest, even in the middle of battle. Even though I employed every "power orb" I found in the game against her, doing about 5,000 points of damage right at the beginning of the battle, it still took me another 10 minutes and multiple rests to kill her.

        

Blasting the daughter with a power orb.

      

Killing her brought up the final screen: "You have successfully defeated Megrim's daughter. You have taken the FIRST STEP towards FREEDOM; now, the CONTINUATION awaits YOU." It promises the follow-up game as Escape Megrims Rache or maybe Escape: Megrims Rache; when it came out later that year, it was just Escape from Ragor II: Megrims Rache ("Megrim's Revenge").

      

Hey, where did that guy come from?

        

Miscellaneous notes:

   

• The README file jokingly suggests that the motel in the company's name is the "Norman Bates Motel."

• The game has a food/water system but both are so plentiful that it only occasionally plays a role. Sleeping to restore health and mana does not make any extra time pass for hunger/thirst purposes.

• One of the foods that you find is a kraftei, which I can tell translates literally as something like "power egg." It indeed looks like an egg. I was a bit startled when Google translated it to "rocket-powered aircraft." I understand why now, but I still thought it was funny. 

• Speaking of translation, I found a few bags of whatever this is. I couldn't figure it out from the word, and I never tried to use it.

      

Something about a little sack?

       

• You find a lot of potions, plus a number of places in which potions can be refilled. Antidote potions are crucial, as there are several places where you're unavoidably poisoned, and you can't rest while poisoned. Healing and mana potions are useful, sure, but it's so easy to just sleep in between every combat that I mostly did that. Oh, and here's another colorblindness complaint (I know you never get sick of those): the color of the healing potions is indistinguishable to me from the color of the background behind the potion jars; this means I can't tell the difference between healing potions and empty jars unless I look really hard and notice that I can't see the tile texture behind the full jars.

       

A "potion fountain."

        

• Some of the item graphics were clearly stolen from Eye of the Beholder. The axe, for instance. 

• My character reached Level 12 by the end of the game. Since enemies do not respawn, I don't think it would have been possible to go any higher. 

    

My final character sheet.

       

The game took about eight hours, and I could have gotten several entries out of it, but I don't think I would have had much to talk about. Since AlphabeticaAnonymous's work on The Search for Freedom gave me enough breathing room to get ahead of the game, I decided to finish it in one entry. I give it a 16 on the GIMLET, the worst score I've given to a Motelsoft game, three points lower than Walls of Illusion and seven points lower than Arcan. If the company keeps going in this direction, they'll eliminate equipment and enemies completely for the next outing and just offer a first-person game in which you run around pressing buttons. I ended up giving nothing for the interface, its excellent automap balanced by the tragic horror of a mouse-only control system.

   

I didn't put Escape from Ragor II on my 1994 playlist, but I fired it up for a few minutes just now. It appears essentially unchanged from its predecessor, but there's an opening narration that gives a more detailed backstory and answers some lingering questions from Ragor. It says that the PC is a vassal of Prince Markus III. She has just finished delivering a message from Markus to the Count of Huckenberg. "Since the prince had permitted [her] to take a leisurely pace on [her] return journey," she decided to see the sights. Asking around town, she was directed to an abandoned castle which was supposed to have the coolest stuff in it. Arriving, she found that it was not abandoned. Armed men seized her and hauled her before Megrim, the castle's ruler. Megrim ignored her pleas and threw her in the dungeon. "If you manage to find your way out of this castle, you may go wherever you please! But beware: we are going to play a game with you. A game unlike any you have ever played before." The narration also says that Megrim's daughter was named Bramenia and that the woman who helps the character (and appears early in the sequel to provide some hints) is named Lara. There's still no word on who Lara is in relation to Megrim or why she is helping, but perhaps that's explained later.

       

A shot from the sequel. There were no doors like this in Ragor.

            

For some reason, Motelsoft changed its name to "Nine Red Shoes" for the sequel and for their two RPGs in 1995: Dark Side of the Sun and its sequel. They were back to "Motelsoft" for Dark Side of the Sun III (1996) and from then on. The Dark Side series, which includes Trauma (1996), all seem to be Dungeon Master clones that use some variation of the interface seen in Ragor. It looks like it might be as late as Darkstone: Necromina (1998) before we see something truly original from them again, barring any surprises in the 1995-1996 games.

    

****

   

For further reading:

    

• My page of "Index of Games Played by Lineage" has all of the Dungeon Master clones so far.
• Motelsoft's Official Page for Escape from Ragor and its sequel.
• My coverage of previous Motelsoft titles:
• Seven Horror's (1988) 
• Sandor (1989) 
• Sandor II: Kotalan und die drei Schwester'n (1991) 
• Magic Tower I: Dark Stone Ritual (1992) 
• Arcan (1993), the starting point of going all-in on Dungeon Master clones. 
• Walls of Illusion (1993) 

 

08/07/2026