The Fates of Twinion: Summary and Rating

 

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

       

The Fates of Twinion

United States

Ybarra Productions (developer); Sierra Online (publisher) 

Released 1993 for DOS

Date Started: 2 November 2025   

Date Ended: 23 January 2026

Total Hours: 49

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

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later) 

         

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

 

***** 

     

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

   

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

      

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

      

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

       

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

    

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

         

One of the two demon chessmasters.

       

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

     

I chose to kill Gambril for some reason.

       

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

      

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

          

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

       

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

           

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

  

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

     

A rare moment of decoration in the environment.

       

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

   

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

        

I've got nowhere to put these points.

      

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

      

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

  

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

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

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

        

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

      

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

         

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

     

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

   

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

 

Upcoming Games: Dark Designs: Passage to Oblivion (1994), Cursed Chambers (1981), The Elder Scrolls: Chapter One - The Arena (1994), Buio! (1984), Yendorian Tales: Book I (1994), Arena of Death (1991)

Almost.

       

It's that time again! Take "upcoming" with a grain of salt as games seem to take longer and longer. I could easily see getting stuck on the Star Trail/Arena pairing for a couple of months.    

    

As a reminder, this discussion is to offer:

     

• Opinions about the game's RPG status. While applying your own definitions to such a discussion is fine, what really helps is if you apply mine. The FAQ (7th question) covers my definition.
• Tips for emulating the game
• Known bugs and pitfalls
• Tips for character creation
• Trivia
• Predictions for my reaction and/or the GIMLET score (without specifics that will spoil the game).
• Sources of information about the game from around the web, particularly obscure ones that I might otherwise miss during my pre-game research.

 

These are the next six titles:

      

• Dark Designs: Passage to Oblivion (1994 | Apple II | Softdisk). As the series transitions from John Carmack to Peter Rokitski, it adopts a new plot, a new party, and a new platform, abandoning the Apple IIGS for the older Apple II. [Ed. I guess this is wrong. Both the original trilogy and the second triology had both Apple II and GS releases.] I liked the previous three games' blend of Wizardry and Phantasie elements. We'll see if the magic continues.

        

They've got curved swords.

      

• Cursed Chambers (1981 | Sharp MZ-80 | Kuma). For the hundredth time, El Explorador de RPG turned up a lost oddity, this one a weird combination of The Wizard's Castle and The Devil's Dungeon. It ought to be quick, at least.

• The Elder Scrolls: Chapter One - The Arena (1994 | DOS | Bethesda). I was doing some research on Bethesda in preparation for this game, and I came across this unintentionally hilarious quote in the company's Wikipedia article: "In 1994, the company released its best-known project at the time, The Elder Scrolls: Arena . . . Several sequels have been released since including The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, which was released in September 1996." I wonder if the page has been updated since then. In any event, I'm really looking forward to this one. I get to see which of my favorite Elder Scrolls elements were there at the beginning, and the folks over at RPG Codex get another excuse to call me a "Bethestard." Everybody wins.

• Buio! (1984 |  ZX Spectrum | Editoriale Video). The first known Italian RPG has what I would have said is a very Italian-sounding name, though it turns out it means "dark." (I thought it was a contraction of buongiorno or something.) I don't know what to expect from this one, as I haven't been able to get it running past the title screen. Hopefully, I'll have fixed that by the time it comes up.

       

Ciao!

         

• Yendorian Tales: Book I (1994 | DOS | SW Games). I have no history with this one. It appears to be an Ultima VI clone.  

• Arena of Death (1991 | Commodore 64 | Hibbs). This is such a simple game that I'll probably BRIEF it or combine it with another review. I doubt I could get 1,000 words out of it. A single character fights a succession of battles in an arena.

      

Imagine this for a couple of hours.

             

I await your thoughts. Please remember to keep the discussion spoiler-free. 

Tower of Alos: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

I have no idea what the "Status" means.

      

Tower of Alos

United Kingdom

Independently developed; published by A&F Software

Released 1982 for BBC Micro

Date Started: 13 January 2026

Date Ended: 20 January 2026

Total Hours: 8

Difficulty: Hard (4.0/5) 
Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)  

       

Tower of Alos ended as it started: a waste of time. There wasn't a single moment in which it was fun. It probably won't even be fun to read this entry.

   

The winning conditions are to:

      

1. Get the character to Level 7.
2. Gather the four magic items. 
3. Clear Temadra's Den (D on the map).
4. Clear the Garrison (* on the map).
5. Clear the Temple of Bragi (# on the map).
6. Clear the Tower of Alos (II on the map).
7. Return to the safe castle.  

       

Finding the magic sword after a wave of orcs.

        

It would be nice if you could do #1 in the process of doing the others, since clearing the various dungeons gives you a ton of experience. I ended the game at Level 9. But the dungeons and towers are so hard that you practically need to be Level 7 to have any hope of clearing them. That means a lot of grinding—and this game grinds worse than any game I have ever played. In battle, there's really only one thing to do: attack one of the enemies that surrounds you by pushing one of the arrow keys. If there are more than four monsters on the map, you can just hold one direction, as when you kill a monster, a replacement will appear in his place. But once you get down to three enemies, you have to watch which direction you're pushing so you don't waste attacks on an empty space. 

   

At the same time, you have to watch your hit points—which of course are not displayed on the main screen. The game warns you when you're about to die by turning the character (and the nearby monsters) red, but that's often too late to do anything about it. Hence, you have to periodically check on your status with the S)tatus command and then periodically use the D)rink command to quaff a potion.

   

The sum of these factors results in a combat system in which there are effectively no choices and yet battle still requires your active attention. You can't automate it; you can't play on autopilot while watching TV. I'm reminded of Penn & Teller's Desert Bus, where there's nothing to do but watch bland scenery, but the bus pulls to the right, so the player has to keep his attention on the game and make occasional corrections. For neither game is it enough to be boring; they force you to engage in the act of boredom. Penn and Teller at least had the excuse of deliberately trolling. What was Tower of Alos's author thinking?

        

Surrounded by ogres. I have no idea why they use the "3/4" symbol or why the main character uses the (British) "pound" symbol.

      

(The author was apparently a man named David Howard. He doesn't appear to have been credited on any other games, and his name is too common to possibly identify him today.)

      

Then we get to the four dungeons. Two of them—Temadra's Den and the Garrison—require you to fight multiple waves of monsters before you can fight the "big boss," which in both cases is a demon. Even at high levels, you burn through your small allotment of potions fast, and you need to have at least one, more likely two, left over at the end for the demon. I did not get a strong handle on when the demon appears. I think there's a small chance at the end of each wave. I think the minimum number of waves of skeletons (Temadra) or orcs (the Garrison) that I fought before encountering the demon was five; the maximum may have been closer to fifteen. Either way, the demon kept killing me, so I had to fight multiple times.

         

Quaffing a healing potion while battling a demonic hashtag.

      

A Ring of Resurrection is found in Temadra's Den, and after you find it, every time you die, the game asks if you want to be resurrected. The answer is no, because you need the ring to win the game. (You can find it again, but it was enough of a pain to find it the first time) Also, resurrection doesn't refresh your healing potion supply, so taking the offer is really just the equivalent of getting one more potion. The Garrison, meanwhile, has a magic sword that increases combat ability. Both magic items fortunately appear after some random number of waves, not necessarily after the demon battles that "clear" the dungeons, so it's somewhat worth attempting these dungeons early, just to see if you can get lucky.

      

Finishing Temadra's Den.

       

Temadra's Den, the Tower of Alos, and the Garrison are all single-screen locations. They're effectively just combat screens that last multiple waves. You can't move around on them. That's not true of the fourth indoor location, the swamp. There are several things to do here:

   

• Grab the magic boat (on the main map) and sail to the island. The magic boat is one of the four magic items.

• Fight a battle with a bunch of ogres (the toughest enemy in the game) on the island.

• Clear a bunch of troglodytes (a single battle) from the Bragi Temple, which gives a blessing. I'm not sure what it does.

      

Gold is not a reward.

       

Unlike the first two dungeon, this one loves to load you up with treasure at the end of each battle. "You gain 6,000 gold pieces!" the game announces, as if that's something positive. The truth is, you find way more than enough gold from random monsters in the wilderness. There's nothing to spend all this excess money on. I had more than 100,000 gold by the end of the game.

      

This is the kind of game that loads you up with gold and then kills you for having too much gold.

      

Even worse, for every 1,000 gold pieces in your possession, your attack skill goes down. Once you have more than about 5,000, you can't even successfully land an attack. So you're constantly having to leave dungeons and truck gold over to the H)oard just so you can successfully fight again. 

   

The Tower of Alos has 14 levels, some with orcs, some with skeletons, and some with demons. Fortunately, the game saves your progress up the levels, so each time you leave and return, you're on the maximum level you achieved during the previous visit. The 13th level has a demon with a suit of armor, the fourth magic item. When you reach the top level (14), you've "cleared" the tower. You have to frequently ESC out of the tower, though, because it loads you up with so much gold that you can't hit anything in combat. 

      

Retreating to deposit my gold in the hoard.

      

With all of the items accomplished, the player returns to the "friendly" castle for the winning screen. 

                  

The game is weirdly hard, even at high levels with all the magic items. A lot of luck goes into the demon battles in particular, since demons have 8d8 hit points, which is quite a range. There's also a matter of healing potions. When you take them, you (I think) mostly gain all your hit points back minus 10%. But there's a small chance that the potion will be "bad" and do nothing. There's an equally small chance that it will be a "Strength Potion" that gives you 25 times your level. Thus, a Level 7 character who normally has 70 hit points suddenly finds himself with 175. That will carry you through a demon battle where a regular healing potion won't.

      

Not the most inspiring box cover.

      

But otherwise the game is hard enough that I wasn't above trying to cheat, just to save myself half of those eight hours. Unfortunately, nothing I did worked. I couldn't figure out how to interpret the save game file; the BBC Micro definitely does not use regular hexadecimal encoding. As El Explorador de RPG noted in his review, the only full review of the game that we could find, in the September 1983 Practical Computing, spent most of its column inches talking about ways to reprogram the game, including cheating by editing a line to make the healing potion always become a Strength Potion, and at 250 times the level rather than 25. It took me a long time to figure out the sequence of commands necessary to load, unlock, and edit the BASIC file, but the game just crashed every time I tried to load the edited file.

   

Thus, I toughed it out the long way, cheating only in the near-instant use of saving and reloading thanks to save states, and now I'm 8 hours closer to the grave. Alos earns a 9 on the GIMLET, but it's fundamentally worse than that. I have played many games, particularly in this era, that I felt were boring or too basic. Alos is a rare game that makes me feel like it was actively trying to distract me from more important things in life. It would not have been a good use of 10 quid even in its day.

 

Star Trail: Road Warriors

In real life, maybe wait a few minutes before concluding that there's "no hunter or predator anywhere."

         

Based on comments from the first entry, I decided to start this game with the new characters I previously rolled. Thus, the next step was to see about my equipment and explore the starting town, Kvirasim, which unintentionally rhymes with the name of my Thorwalian and looks like it rhymes with the name of my warrior, Xamidimura, which the game abbreviates.

   

We start our explorations at the Lovely Meadow tavern, which probably offers more options than any other tavern in RPG history. The player first has to decide where to sit (at the bar—always my preference, at an empty table, or at an occupied table), then what to do there, including ordering food, ordering drinks, buying a round for the house, or performing feats of music or acrobatics for money. Add a little more complexity, and you could make an RPG set entirely within a bar.

      

Just like my first visit to a British pub.

      

I can't say I accomplished much. Talking to the bartender, Gilbert of Norburg, brought us to a full dialogue screen, but he had nothing to say about any of the keywords, and he ended the conversation after three of them. Most NPCs do this, making it all the more annoying that "Salamander Stone" and "Salamanderstones" appear as two separate options. We bought a round of drinks, which earned us some temporary good will but no intelligence. Toliman made back some of the money by doing somersaults or whatever. 

   

As we headed back into the world, I noted that the automap automatically labels commercial establishments, although apparently only if you've gone inside or faced the front door or something. Still, it's a nice feature. The player can write his own labels for other locations, including key NPCs. The detail of the automap meant that I didn't feel compelled to make my own map.

       

A shop labeled by the automap.

      

It was dark when we exited the tavern, and most businesses were closed, but I still made a circuit of the town and tried to enter each building. Some notes:

    

• Most houses are occupied by generic NPCs who dismiss you with comments like: "Go visit some inns and taverns and leave me alone!" or "Go look somewhere else." What I like is that the images of these NPCs depict them as confronting the party at the front door. The party is just knocking, not barging into their houses. 

• There were a couple of frames indicating uncompleted houses under construction.

• A harlot propositioned us randomly. We said no. 

• Fladim Peterman: "When Elves and Dwarves are fighting, there will be Orcs delightin.'" Sounds prophetic.

        

You're a poet, and you were not aware of this fact.

       

• Marje from Thorwal: Bring a net when you go into swamps. "You can catch all sorts of things in swamps."

• There was an inn run by Mariaka Windbreker. I didn't get anything out of her. I was going to stay the night, but the interface suggested that the rest periods were in 24-hour blocks, which would have left me no better than when I started, timewise.

• Daleone Moringdew, the healer, agreed to treat us, but "it'll cost you more if you still want to be treated at this late hour." Fortunately, we didn't need anything.

• Asgrim Kollberg: Suggests we hide out from the evil in the mountains.

• Eida Matjus: "Anyone who's allied with Rondra need fear no Orc in the long run." Rondra is the goddess of battle in Das Schwarze Auge setting.

      

That's quite a difference between the large screen image and the mini-portrait.

     

• Heralja Olafsen: "The Elven king will come to our aid. But will even his power be sufficient against these Orcs?" 

• Rumhild Rohalsdottir: Suggests we prepare for bad weather lest we get diseased by it. 

• Ingram Son of Utzlesch: "It's always better to spend the night in an inn than under the stars." Amen. I haven't been camping for a single night in my adult life and have no interest in doing so.  

    

We had to wait until morning for Jadwina Greenston's general store to open. Each character started the game with a blanket, a waterskin, and two ration packages. Gnomon (dwarf) had a prybar and a hammer. Remembering the "environmental simulation" aspects of the first game, we loaded up with additional rations, waterskins, oil, a key ring, a net, two coils of rope, a rope ladder, a mattock, charcoal, a few torches, a fishing hook, a shovel, a whetstone, writing utensils, and a grappling hook. 

       

Trying to plan for every contingency.

    

If there was an armory in town, I didn't find it. I was a bit disappointed, as I wanted to swap out some of the default weapons to better match the skills I had given each player. But finding no such options, we exited the town, which in this game you do by walking into a signpost.

    

Travel in Blade of Destiny was handled by selecting a destination from a menu, much like Curse of the Azure Bonds. In the sequel, the party moves across the landscape in segments, either by planning a route in advance or by handling it one segment at a time. The manual curiously makes this choice about gender: "Male characters do not need to [plan in advance] because they always insist they know where they're going." I think this is probably just a joke, but in a game that makes distinctions between "warriors" and "she-warriors," you never know. In any event, even though a woman leads my party, I did the stereotypical male thing and chose to do one segment at a time, even though you really don't have any choices: only one road leads out of Kvirasim.

       

Being a man, I simply commence marching.

       

No sooner had I pressed the direction for south than a special encounter came upon me: the sounds of fighting from "somewhere to the left of the road." We chose to investigate, and found a priestess of Rondra beset by five orcs. We had options to intervene (even though she explicitly did not ask for our help) or let her fight alone. We chose the former and soon found ourselves in our first battle.

     

The battle starts well enough.

       

Combat is mostly unchanged since Blade of Destiny. Both games use a turn-based system on a tactical grid, rotated 45 degrees and inclined, a perspective almost unique to British games until Arkania. Characters act in initiative order and can move, guard, attack, cast a spell, and change weapons. One significant improvement between the games is that missile attacks and spells no longer must be targeted along direct lines (which in Blade was impossible if another character stood in between). They work from anywhere.

    

Combat options (from a later battle).

      

I used the occasion to try out a couple of spells, like "Lightning" (which is not the lightning bolt of D&D but rather a blinding spell) and "Iron Rust." But the battle overall went mysteriously horribly. My warrior and Thorwalian, with the highest strength and highest scores in their chosen weapons (which they had equipped) couldn't seem to land an attack to (literally) save their lives. Gnomon the dwarf, meanwhile, did the most damage despite being equipped with an edged weapon (a mace; we'll talk about whether that should be an "edged" weapon later) and not his favored axe. Toliman the elf did respectably with his bow, until an orc decided to make him a target. 

   

Overall, my first battle ended in a full-party death, which is accompanied by a cute poem.

         

That is some nice artwork.

         

On a reload, I decided to see what the computer would do. The game has several different modes of computer-controlled battle. You can put individual party members under the computer's control, deciding as you do so whether they will use magic. You can also have the computer fight the entire battle in front of you, controlling every party member. Finally, you can have the computer engage in a kind of "quick combat" on a summary screen.

       

Options for computer control.

      

The computer prioritized different spells, including "Evil Eye" (turning one of the orcs to my side) and "Fulminctus" (an attack spell). It seemed to have more luck with melee attacks, so I'm not sure what I was doing wrong there. But Gnomon was still killed, a fact I didn't notice until after I had spent a good 20 minutes manually leveling my first two characters' skills. I killed everything and started over.

   

On the third attempt, I used the "computer combat" option, and it delivered a victory with no party members lost, although my warrior was at death's door. The only lesson I can take from that is that in the aggregate, my party should have done well, but my particular tactics just sucked. I'll try to get better. I've used auto-combat occasionally in Gold Box games when the outcome was inevitable, but using it too often feels like abdicating a responsibility. I might as well just let the computer play the whole game. (The issue becomes confusing with games that have scripts, like the Infinity Engine titles, but that's a problem for Future CRPG Addict.)

      

The "computer combat" option.

      

We tended to the priestess after the battle. Some god or supernatural entity spoke through her, noting that we had proved our courage but had little experience. "You would be going to your death," it said, "But we cannot allow this to happen to such upstanding heroes." The spirit then "loaned" some of its experience to us, enough to raise us to Level 3.  

     

Some gold would have been nice, too.

        

It would have been nice to save after the computer-controlled "victory" and then try it a few additional times the long way, but Star Trail follows its predecessor's policy of immediately leveling-up characters who have earned enough experience in the preceding combat. This means if you bollix something during the allocation of skill or spell points (which isn't hard to do when leveling six characters in a row), you either have to suck it up or kill the game and fight the battle again. I didn't feel like going through the leveling process twice, so I sucked it up and accepted the victory. It took me almost an hour to then allocate all the spell and skill points across six characters for two levels each.

      

That seems low, but I'm not going to fight the entire battle again just to get a better roll.

      

We kept marching south after the encounter. I was prompted to camp three times in a row, each time restoring a few hit points and spell points. The morning of the fourth day, we encountered a man laden with all kinds of weapons. His name was Iwain Basiliskslayer. He had a few things to say about elves (they've been driven into the Salamander Stones by orcs) and dwarves (they have little influence on the north), but nothing that explained his load of weapons.

         

I expected more from this encounter, especially given his name.

      

After the encounter, the game said we'd reached the next crossroads. The road continued southwest towards the city of Gashok, but there was a path to the south heading towards a river, which I took. A number of messages popped up indicating that my characters ate and drank; I guess if you don't feed them manually, they'll handle it automatically eventually. I was alarmed to find that our water skins were mostly empty already. I guess maybe I needed more than two each.

  

I played with some of the camp options, which include hunting (Toliman found some water and game) and foraging (Lyra found a few herbs). Lilii Borea treated Xamindimura's wounds. 

      

Isn't that cute?

     

The next day, we continued to follow the river. The game noted that we filled our waterskins, which is a nice touch of realism. Then, we were attacked by a dozen goblins, and I had my second chance at battle. This time, I experimented a bit more with spells. "Acceleratus" turns out to be a nice buffing spell, and "Evil Eye" (charm) works better here than it ever did in a Gold Box game. "Fulminictus," a damaging spell, is so effective that it's hard not to cast it exclusively, though it takes a lot of spell points. Anyway, goblins are a lot easier than orcs, and it wasn't long before I was mopping up the dregs. It felt good to win a battle legitimately. They dropped a bunch of sabres. I didn't lose many hit points, though almost all my magic was gone.

     

Towards the end of the goblin battle.

     

I continued following the river even though the map suggested it was going to dead-end in the mountains, and I might have to trek all the way back. Fortunately, an unmarked western path took us towards the road again.

   

After a few more days of rest—over a week on the road at this point—we came across a bear cub playing in a field. We had options to kill it for food, capture it to sell in town, or leave it alone. I left it alone. I wonder if these little encounters are location-specific or drawn from a random pool.

       

Which of you sociopaths would choose the first two options?

       

Toliman contracted a disease at some point (I didn't notice), but Lyra was able to heal it. Gnomon caught another disease getting his feet wet while crossing a brook, but Lyra was able to heal that, too. By now, I had rested about six nights since the goblin fight, and the characters were still recovering hit points and spell points from that fight. I'd better learn potions, and fast. 

       

A couple of my characters are a bit cuddlier than I would have desired. I guess we'll say that's Toliman and Lilii?

       

I had been hoping to find the so-called "Dwarven Pit" during my explorations; it's still possible it's in those mountains. There was an eastern path I didn't take. But by now, I was anxious just to get to the next town, rest up, and hopefully find some weapons and armor. By taking the river route, I think I missed some towns on the main road. The next big town on the map, at a major crossroads, was Gashok. 

   

A wounded antelope came bounding from the trees and collapsed dead in front of us. Thinking waste not, want not, we gutted it. This put us in battle with three forest lions. I blinded them with "Lightning" and did my best. I got through it, but my warrior fell unconscious and contracted some disease, and my druid suffered significant hit point loss. My spell points, never recovered from the last battle, were almost gone. Xamindimura lost 2 strength points from the disease, which I trust isn't permanent. The next night, Lyra was able to heal the disease (rabies). I hope we threw away that antelope meat.

       

Could armored warriors prevail against lions? Discuss.

       

A few more nights of this, and we finally reached Gashok, where we were "greeted" by a crossbow bolt, fired from an ambush, that halved Toliman's hit points. But overall, I was happy to be on safe ground again.

      

It's almost like we admire the guy who fired it.

     

This session reminded me that traveling between cities in the Arkania series is a frightful undertaking in which all kinds of horrible things can happen, and you'd better be prepared. I think I did all right with my equipment purchases overall, but I needed to bring greater quantities of food and water, and I need to learn about herbs and potions sooner rather than later.

   

Hopefully, someone in this town will know about that Dwarven Pit.

   

Time so far: 6 hours 

     

Game 566: Tower of Alos (1982)

A pointless game begins.

        

Tower of Alos

United Kingdom

Independently developed; published by A&F Software

Released 1982 for BBC Micro

Date Started: 13 January 2026

      

Tower of Alos is yet another example of the tedium that early CRPG players were willing to put themselves through just to get the faintest hint they were inhabiting a world similar to Middle Earth. If you don't get a tingle at just seeing the word "orc," this is not the game for you. And it's plagiarized, too—from The Valley (1982), a game that also fits my opening description but at least has the excuse of being a type-in game published in a magazine. The Valley had more features than Alos, though, meaning Alos was simplified. Imagine being the kind of developer who has to simplify a type-in game.

     

The Valley originally appeared as code for the Commodore PET in the April 1982 issue of Computing Today. It was advanced for a type-in game, offering multiple character types, multiple dungeons, a long backstory, and winning conditions. The magazine updated it for the TRS-80 and Sharp MZ the following month, and other variations followed over the next year. Meanwhile, Computing Today's publisher, Argus Specialist Publications, issued disk-based releases for multiple platforms in 1982 and 1983. (Thanks to El Explorador de RPG for much of this background research.) Clearly, ASP owned the rights to the game. It was created by their own employees: Henry Budgett, Peter Freebrey, Peter Green, and Ron Harris, themselves inspired by another early UK RPG: Halls of Death (1981).

      

The world map as a new game begins.

     

These rights did not stop Manchester-based A&F Software from publishing its own adaptation (Alos) for the BBC Micro within a couple of months. Games for this minor platform are only recently being discovered and cataloged (mostly by frequent CRPG Addict contributor Dungy), and I now have a handful on my backlist. Other "adaptations" of The Valley include Kayde Software's The Kayde Valley (1982) and Numenor's The Amulet (1983).

     

The basic features of these games include:

   

• A single-screen game world with at least one "safe" location.
• Multiple indoor locations.
• A multi-stage quest that involves exploring each of these indoor areas.
• Random encounters as you move across the screen. 
• Very limited RPG mechanics 

          

One of the indoor locations.

      

Other copies of The Valley mostly kept the action in a valley, Alos moves it to a large, wooded area, though it still references "the valley" in the backstory. It was once ruled by "a fair but not-perfect king" named Alos. He built three strongholds and gave one to a dragon named Temadra ("your mother"!?), one to his brother, and one to his soldiers. Finally, he built the titular tower, 13 levels high. Soon, his experimentation with black magic corrupted his nature and led to an invasion of "an army of evil beings."

     

Some time later, it is up to a hero to reclaim the land. To do this, he will need to get to character Level 7, clear Temadra's Den, clear the Temple of Bragi, clear the Tower of Alos, collect four magic items along the way, and finally return to the "safe castle" (the one Alos gave to his brother).

         

The in-game backstory.

     

Gameplay starts at this "safe castle," once the player inputs a name. You start with 20 hit points and no other resources, although you're assumed to be carrying a sword.

  

There isn't much to the game after that. The Valley had half a dozen or more things that could happen to the character as he explored the map. Alos reduces it all to combat, then makes combat more annoying by having the game take you to a separate screen. This is not the "tactical" screen of later games that use separate combat interfaces but rather a poor facsimile of it. It begins by showing your enemies (e.g., 4 orcs, 5 ogres, 6 kobolds) scattered across the region, which briefly tricks the player into thinking he's going to be moving around the "map" to engage them. The player icon doesn't move on this map at all, however. As many as four of the available enemies immediately surround the player while any excess wait in the wings. 

     

As combat starts, it looks as though the enemies are scattered across the map.

        

The player's only "choices" during combat are 1) whether to participate, and 2) once it starts, which direction to attack. You pound the directional arrow in one direction until that enemy is dead, then switch to a different direction, timing your keystrokes so that you don't end up with too many attacks in one direction in the buffer. There was no reason not to just do all of this on the main screen like The Valley did. The Valley also had spells.

      

But before you can react, they've surrounded you.

     

You can check your statistics during battle with the "S" key, and you can drink a potion with the "D" key. If you find yourself losing, you can just hit ESC to save the game, and when you reload, you won't be in combat anymore. 

     

You get a few dozen experience points per enemy killed, plus gold. Leveling comes first at 2,000 experience points, then 4,000, the amount needed roughly doubling with each level. New levels give you an extra 10 hit points (from a starting value of 20) and more attack power. 

           

Once you have enough gold, you can head for the village, marked with a "V." No need to find a route through the trees; none of the environmental symbols are obstacles. The town sells exactly one thing: healing potions. A Level 1 character can possess up to 10. For every level gained, the potion maximum reduces by one.

       

Buying the only thing you can buy.

            

If you don't need any potions, you want to periodically deposit your gold in the hoard, shown on the map as an "H." Once you cross 1,000 gold pieces, you start losing combat effectiveness. 

       

The instructions outline seven conditions for winning the game:

   

• Get to character Level 7.
• Clear Temadra's Den (D on the map).
• Clear the Garrison (* on the map).
• Clear the Temple of Bragi (# on the map).
• Clear the Tower of Alos (II on the map).
• Collect four magic items (one in each of the previous locations).
• Return to the safe castle. 

 

The game lets you save and reload anywhere, which is great because the early game is nearly impossible for the player. Each enemy party consists of between 1 and 10 kobolds, orcs, dwarves, gnolls, or ogres armed with fists, axes, or pikes. It takes several deaths to learn what types of battles you can survive. A level 1 character might be able to defeat up to four kobolds armed with fists, three orcs armed with axes, and so forth. Any gnolls or ogres armed with anything are probably too much. By the time I was level 5, I could defeat maybe five dwarves with axes, but large parties of gnolls or ogres still killed me unless I wasted a lot of potions.

       

This will be okay.

       

But if random battles on the surface are tough, the indoor locations are damned near impossible. In each of them, you face successive waves of 10 monsters, including some not found on the surface (skeletons, lizard men, troglodytes). With a full stock of healing potions, I've been able to survive five or six waves of orcs or skeletons, but they just keep coming. It feels like I'm going to have to grind all the way to Level 7 on the surface before clearing any of the indoor locations is truly viable. That's about 45,000 experience points more than I have, at a couple hundred experience points per battle.

      

Not much choice at this point.

         

Thus, this Dark Age knock-off, which by all rights ought to take only one entry, has to be stretched into two. I'll catch up on the Fallout TV series while grinding.

    

My Googling for information about this game turned up some interesting background on the source of the title. Tower of Alos is the title of a 1950 Basque novel by Jon Etxaide, based on an old legend that I found recounted in several 1800s sources. In the legend, the lord of the tower of Alos, Beltran, goes away to fight a war, leaving behind his second wife (his first died in childbirth) and his young daughter. While he's away, apparently for many years, his wife gives birth to a son who clearly was not sired by Beltran. Eventually, Beltran fakes his death and has his "body" returned home. As his family stands around it on the funeral bier, the bastard boy attempts to murder the legitimate daughter. Beltram jumps to life, prevents the murder, and kills the boy. I don't know what moral we're supposed to take from that, but it's at least more interesting than this game.

       

Time so far: 3 hours