Game 586: Pagan: Ultima VIII (1994)

Both the title screen and the box agree: The master name of the game is Pagan.

        

Pagan: Ultima VIII

United States

ORIGIN Systems (developer); Electronic Arts (publisher)
Released 1994 for DOS
Date Started: 24 July 2026

    

I've told this story before, but I basically took a break from almost all gaming starting around 1991; partly because I wanted to actually finish college; partly because I stupidly bought a Mac in 1993, not realizing there were virtually no games for it; partly because Irene and I started dating. All of these things were rectified by 1998: I had graduated; I had a proper Windows machine; and Irene had discovered that you date Plan A and you marry . . . well, a CRPG Addict.

   

On my first trip to CompUSA at the end of this dark period, I bought a Might and Magic compilation and an Ultima compilation. I was so eager to catch up on what I missed in Britannia. At that time, I had never even finished Ultima VI: The False Prophet. I damn near wept at the opening strains on the title screen of Ultima IV. I loved Ultima V just as much as I had a decade earlier. I enjoyed Ultima VI. I gaped at Ultima Underworld. It took me a while to get used to Ultima VII: The Black Gate, but I ultimately made peace with it. I couldn't finish Serpent Isle. And I bounced hard off of Ultima VIII. I didn't get through more than 15 minutes of it. I hated everything about it. Because of it, I never even looked at Ultima IX when it came out. Nearly 30 years later, I don't remember precisely what I balked at, so I'm curious to see whether I have the same reactions this time. I hope not, because I have to finish it.

     

I don't think this guy would have fit through that Blackrock Gate.

       

The cinematic opens where Ultima VII: Part Two - Serpent Isle (1993) left off. You may recall that in that game, the Avatar follows the spirit of the Great Earth Serpent through the Wall of Lights and into the Ethereal Void. There, he watches it take its place between the Order Serpent and the Chaos Serpent, restoring balance to the universe (or, at least, Serpent Isle). But before he can enjoy his victory, the giant red hand of the Guardian emerges from the void and grabs him. The Serpents are apparently powerless to stop this, and they're the gods of an entire world, so it makes one wonder how the Guardian needed a bunch of cultists to build a Black Gate for him to visit Britannia in the previous game.

   

Pagan begins with the guardian's hand thrusting through a pentagram, then opening to reveal the Avatar standing on his palm. "You have been a thorn in my side for far too long, Avatar," the Guardian says in a reverberating bass. "Your two worlds will be crushed, Britannia first, then Earth. I shall parade you before their conquered peoples as the fallen idol of a pathetic ideal." He turns his hand over, dropping the Avatar through the clouds and into the ocean near a volcanic island. "I banish you to the world of Pagan. No one here knows of the Avatar." Nice to get the banallure out of the way in the beginning.

     

Kind of wish I weren't wearing a full suit of armor.

          

Ever since Ultima IV's The History of Britannia as Told by Kyle the Younger, the Ultima series has been famous for its epistolary manuals. I still think the manual for Ultima VII: The Black Gate is the best piece of game documentation that we've seen through 1993, with the story of Britannia told in a beautifully subversive way. It's thus no surprise that Ultima VIII comes with The Chronicle of Pagan as written by "Bentic, a humble scholar and student." I have to admit that I rolled my eyes at it and lost patience a bit as I read it. Is that because it feels like the Origin team was just going through the same old motions, or is it because let my previously-negative view of the game cloud my perceptions? I'm not sure. I'll just say that it feels a bit less inspired than previous Ultima manuals, as if someone was just checking off a box that said: "Write game manual from the perspective of someone in the world."

    

The summary of the backstory is that the first inhabitants of Pagan were known as Zealans, and they worshiped gods called Ancient Ones, including Amoras (goddess of love and joy), Odion (god of strength or something like it), and Apathas (god of logic). I say "including," but that might in fact be the entire pantheon. I'm not sure. The Zealans were united under a war chief named Khumash-Gor, but his empire fell apart after his assassination. Sometime thereafter, residents started hearing whispers in their minds from someone called the Guardian. The Guardian told of the coming of a Destroyer who would, well, destroy the land with earth, water, air, and fire. The Zealans could avoid this fate by turning their worship to those very elements. Some, but not all, of the Zealans joined this new cult, raising an enormous temple. Their faith gave birth to four elemental titans: Lithos, Hydros, Stratos, and Pyros. I'll let you figure out which lord goes with which element.

      

This all feels a bit cribbed from Might and Magic II.

          

A civil war began between the Zealans who worshiped the old gods and the new "Pagans." (Seriously, that's even worse than having the world inexplicably named "Pagan.") The Pagans won this war, culminating with Lithos sealing the recalcitrant Zealans in the Lost Vale. That's going to become important later. But no sooner had the Pagans achieved victory than the Destroyer appeared in the sky. "[His] malevolent yellow eyes glared out across the land." He summoned lighting, storms, floods, cyclones, earthquakes, and volcanoes. Eventually, the titans united and destroyed the Destroyer. "The world that remained was pitted and scarred, a vast wasteland with a smattering of island chains." The survivors gathered on the largest island, Morgaelin, to reconstruct their civilization. The clouds the Destroyer summoned never went away, so the world is in perpetual dimness.

     

(I would bet a week's salary that the being we know as the Guardian is not in fact the Guardian of Bentic's history. I'm betting the Guardian was the Destroyer and that he stole the Guardian's identity at some point. That raises the question of the identity of the original Guardian. It has to be someone we know, like Lord British or the Time Lord. Don't spoil it for me either way, please.)

      

This would be a good place for the story to end, but it doesn't. Instead, the titans turned evil, demanded sacrifices, and went to war with each other. The short of it is that four different heroes dealt separately with the four elemental lords, their efforts resulting in the creation of four schools of magic: necromancy (earth), tempestry (water), theurgy (air), and sorcery (fire). There's a lot more in this section, but I'll reference it as I encounter things in-game that make use of the additional lore. The story concludes by saying that we are now in the Fourth Epoch; the elemental lords are "appeased or controlled"; and "people are free to live normal lives."

       

From the manual, the symbols of the elemental lords.

       

At this point, the book has a section on Britannia, featuring stories that supposedly originated with an old woman named Mordra. A check of my notes reveals that Mordra was the healer in Skara Brae before a magical accident killed everyone, Mordra included. In that game, she helped the Avatar with the ritual that destroyed Horance the lich. It's hard to imagine that this is the same Modra since she was a ghost in Ultima VII and thus presumably couldn't have traveled to Pagan to tell a story that includes the events of Ultima VII. The manual suggests that she only knew the events through Ultima VI, so perhaps she visited Pagan, told the history of Britannia, and returned. Or maybe she came from Pagan in the first place. In any event, the whole section is just the obligatory history of the Ultima series from Mondain through Batlin and the Fellowship. I don't know whether it's there to orient new players to the universe or whether it will actually have some relevance to the plot of Pagan.

 

It's worth noting that we've had a couple of references to Pagan before, one in Ultima Underworld II and one in Serpent Isle. The latter was the longer one. The Avatar meets a blind hermit named Morghrim who explains that he is from Pagan, and that the Guardian invaded his world and burned Elerion, the great world tree. This event is not referenced in Pagan's backstory. Perhaps there will be a reference to it later, but it would be entirely on-brand for Origin to retcon lore written only one year previously. 

            

Our previous experience with someone from Pagan.

         

Let's move on to the game itself. Character creation is nothing more than giving a name. There is no option to select any Avatar except the blond male one, which is a major step backwards, although clearly this guy's been the canonical Avatar for a few games now. 

   

The game begins with the Avatar waking up on an unfamiliar shore, in a fisherman's camp, a crackling fire having dried his wet clothes. The fisherman, Devon, addresses the Avatar by name (I went with "Gideon," my standby) and sheepishly admits that he went through the Avatar's logbook, which I didn't even know I was keeping. He explains that he pulled the Avatar up in one of his nets. "You are welcome to stay with me for as long as you need," he says, "until you wish to head to the city." As he turns away, he mentions a crowd gathering on the city docks. "That can only mean trouble." He also has a few things to say about Lithos and Hydros, but they mostly repeat what's in the manual, which I'll cover later.

     

My first dialogue options.

        

The interface isn't quite as different from Ultima VII as I thought I remembered. It uses the same northwest-facing oblique view, though rotated a bit more on both axes to give greater depth to the perspective. Most of the same keys work: Z for stats and wearable items, I for backpack, C to enter combat, and so forth. What does not work is any movement with the arrow keys. It has to be done entirely with the mouse, which is extremely unwelcome. The right mouse button causes the Avatar to mince along, walk, or run, depending on the distance of the cursor from the figure. The left mouse button is used to grab things, use things, and talk to people. Both mouse buttons together jump.

         

Running, jumping, suicide.

        

The ESC key brings up the game options, including "Read Diary" and "Write Diary," which turn out to be the game's clumsy way of saving and reloading. I thought they might activate an actual diary at first.

   

The Avatar is depicted wearing a full set of armor (boots, helmet gauntlets) and either an ankh pendant or an ankh emblazoned on his tunic. In fact, a trip to the equipment screen shows that he doesn't have anything. (He must have ditched it so he didn't drown.) He starts the game with 15 strength, 15 intelligence, 15 dexterity, and 30 hits and mana.

    

The Avatar fights the power.

        

While meddling with the jump and movement controls, I soon discover that despite a lack of armor, the Avatar sinks like a stone when he enters water—that's instant death. I also manage to kill myself by wandering into Devon's fire. The game is a bit insidious when it comes to character death. It makes you wait. There's a pause of about 10 seconds between the death and the appearance of a gravestone and the ability to reload. I've often asked for this kind of thing, to make death and reloading a little less cheap.

         

How does anyone here know what "the Avatar" is?

     

At this point, I should mention that I'm playing the game version purchased from GOG, which combines features from several previous releases and patches, including the extra audio that came on the 1994 CD-ROM release, the later 1994 "Pagan Speech Pack," and a 1995 patch that trivialized the game's famous jumping puzzles, although the original version was apparently so annoying and buggy that no one minded the reduction in challenge. I was still hoping to at least experience the original version anyway, but I'm having trouble discerning which of the versions available online are "original." In the meantime, I'll just play this one and maybe compare it later.

   

I think I'm a minority on this, but I don't like the graphics. I particularly don't like the black outline around the Avatar, the NPCs, and most of the interactable objects. The figures strike me as a bit too . . . I'm having trouble finding the right words here. "Soft." "Rounded." "Blended." Note how in the graphic below, you can't really distinguish the character's boots, or whether the ankh is a pendant or something embroidered on his chest. They would have looked good in 1994, sure, but these days, I'd rather something actually detailed or completely abstract, rather than this weird, ungainly doll wandering across a matte painting.

      

The Avatar stands there and takes my insults.

            

As for that background, yikes. It feels like a huge step back from Ultima VII. The shoreline here looks nothing remotely like a real shoreline. The patterns of the rocks and forest floor are just blobs of color. I'd rather the grasses and ruddy forest floors of its predecessor. 

    

Getting back to the game, I head west and then north, where I find a dock with a couple of barrels and my first items: a dagger, a keyring, some wine, several mushrooms, and a scroll written to "Most Honorable Lady Mordea," warning that the Skull of Quakes "has been removed from the upper catacombs."

       

Five minutes into the game, and I already can't find anything in my backpack. The interior space is even smaller than in Ultima VII.

      

Up on the dock itself is the "trouble" that Devon was talking about. A bunch of people stand around a man kneeling in front of an executioner's block. From subsequent conversation, he is named Toran, and he's been accused of "blasphemy against our Lady Mordea and sentenced to death by beheading." (Lady Mordea is the ruler of Tenebrae and a Tempest.) Toran expresses confidence that he will meet Lithos honorably, but Mordea tells him that his body will be cast into the sea, so in death he will be ruled by Hydros rather than Lithos. "This is forbidden, lady," a guard named Tarna notes. "The Ritual of Interment is sacred." Mordea tells him to shut up and then tells the executioner to get on with it. In a gruesome animation, the executioner chops off Toran's head, which rolls off the dock and into the sea and is promptly consumed by a sea monster.

     

The grisly scene. Are those carved skulls all along the edges of the dock? That's morbid.

       

Mordea and her entourage walk off the dock. Tarna the Guard demands to know who I am and what I'm doing there. I decide to be ornery and tell him that it's none of his business. "You are sadly mistaken," he says. "For every moment you spend in Tenebrae, what you are doing and where you are doing it is exactly my business." He gives me two more opportunities to explain myself, but I refuse both times, so he attacks me. I haven't even equipped my dagger yet, and even with it, I don't think I'd be any match for this guard with his bardiche. I'm soon dead.

      

This guy should work for ICE.

      

I guess I already have to explain stuff from the chronicle. At the beginning of the Third Epoch, Lithos wouldn't cut it out with the earthquakes. So a hero named Moriens went to bargain with him. Lithos agreed to stop the quakes if the people of Pagan would serve him in death. Ever since then, when Pagans die, their bodies go to Lithos, and they serve him as undead workers indefinitely. That must be the worst bargain ever struck. I'd rather die in an earthquake than spend eternity serving an insane earth god.

       

Maybe it's just their bodies that serve him. That would make more sense.

       

Meanwhile, Hydros (also known as the Lurker) was still battering the land with storms, one of which killed the beloved of a necromancer named Kalen. Lithos told Kalen about Blackrock, which Kalen used to trap Hydros in her temple. He planned to kill her, but she agreed to give magical powers to him and the subsequent line of tempestry practitioners if he'd let her live.

   

On a reload, I go east from Devon's camp instead of west. There are some mushrooms that look like I should be able to pick them up, but I can't. I kill a couple of spiders and small enemies called skellots with my fists; these are not among the creatures described in the manual.

      

My first taste of combat.

      

I soon come across a high, impassable wall. A pile of bones at the base has a fire gem within them. I follow the wall a distance to the northwest until a large portcullis appears with a winch at its base. Another guard with a bardiche demands that I explain my presence. This time, I introduce  myself (I don't have any option to do otherwise), and he gruffly notes that Mordea is in a bad mood today and suggests I "see for myself" at the dock. Trying to manipulate the winch gets me nowhere. 

     

Why is "Get that polearm out of my face" not an option?

         

I wander around some more but find nothing, and it becomes clear that the only way to proceed is to go to the docks. I watch the execution again and this time answer the guard's questions. I tell him my name, that I come from another world (he doesn't like that), and that my business in Tenebrae is to find a way to return home. He tells me I can go about my business. He says he's going to escort Toran's grieving widow from the docks, but he doesn't do that. He just wanders around while the woman remains kneeling by Toran's corpse.

      

Frankly, my dear . . .

        

There is no sense of any passage of time so far, partly explained by the backstory, although the graphics don't suggest perpetual darkness so much as perpetual cloudiness. Despite the presence of food items, the Avatar doesn't seem to get hungry. I don't necessarily mind these deletions from the previous Ultimas, but they are emblematic of the many mechanics that Origin simplified for this release.

   

The city gate is now open, so I stride into Tenebrae. The manual calls it "The City of Eternal Twilight," the only city that still exists on Morgaelin and perhaps in the entire world. The Great Palace is Mordea's seat of power.

    

Even though I haven't made much progress, I'll wrap up here and explore Tenebrae next time.

   

Time so far: 1 hour 

    

****

    

Next entry in this series

    

For further reading:

  

• My Index of Games Played by Lineage has the Ultima series and its clones.  

  08/04/2026

The Odyssey: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

In the end, it wasn't much of an "odyssey."

       

The Odyssey

United States

Independently developed and published as shareware
Released 1993 for the Macintosh
Date Started: 20 July 2026

Date Ended: 3 August 2026

Total Hours: 25

Difficulty:  Hard (4.0/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)

    

Summary:

   

The Odyssey looks like an Ultima clone with its iconographic interface and keyword-based NPC dialogue, but it plays like a Dungeon Master clone with its numerous mechanical puzzles and difficult combats. The combination creates a fairly unique shareware game. The game uses ancient Greek themes to tell the story of a lone guard who must defeat the chaos master besieging the city of Athenia. The total physical space through which the player must venture is far smaller than most titles of even the early 1980s, but because every room is a deathtrap that must be approached cautiously and repeatedly, it takes far longer than you would expect. There are few normal RPG battles here; almost every encounter requires some combination of skill, magical items, terrain exploits, and luck. Overcoming its challenges is usually satisfying, though a few areas are annoying or unfair. I would recommend it for players interested in something different and challenging, but not those looking for a traditional RPG experience.

        

***

    

The Odyssey is the sort of game that you'd only get from a lone author. No established game developer, working with profit in mind, would make a game so challenging. This reality has both good and bad outcomes. On the positive side, there is a hard edge that lasts from beginning to end. The player has to exploit inventory and mechanics (all the things I talked about last time) in the most optimal ways to make the most incremental advances. Overcoming each obstacle is personally satisfying. On the negative side, the game could have used some serious playtesting and feedback. "Are you sure you want to make the player click on this many wall tiles?" I would have asked.

      

The full crypt map. I did not map the other levels.

              

When I wrapped up last time, I still had about five rooms of the crypt and the entirety of the caverns to go. I'm not going to cover it blow-by-blow, but here are some highlights:

   

• One crypt room had an interior room with a ton of treasure, including two Scepters of Lordly Might (raising me to Level 7), two Scepters of Friendship, and a magic helmet that cast a permanent "Light" spell. That last item was perhaps the best inventory item in the game. I always love it when the developer decides that he's tortured the player enough with a particular logistical issue and eventually rewards him with an "out." Examples from other games include "Create Food" spells, fast-travel devices (earned ones, not those available at the outset), key rings, and Bags of Holding.

     

Some nice treasures behind this unkillable enemy.

         

• However, there was also an unkillable sphinx in this room, and a big part of this section was figuring out how to lure the sphinx out of the room and to a place where I could dodge around him and run back to what he was guarding. He was fast enough that I couldn't do it through normal movement. A Potion of Athletics was the answer—but I had to go back through the area where I left him several times, and ensuring that I didn't walk into his melee range was a problem for much of the rest of the game. He eventually disappeared, I think because I lured him into the lava maze, where he either died or got stuck.

• The northeast room had spider webs spelling out DOOM. Nearby, a sphinx asked: "What do the spiders weave?" This was the easiest riddle in the game.

• The final area of the crypt was a large "outdoor" room with a river running through it. Wild boars spawned in the trees, and a triton threw deadly spears from the river. While figuring out how to deal with them, I had to find two invisible wall switches to activate a bridge over the river. 

       

The triton cannot see me in this wooded square.

           

From this point through the rest of the game, escaping each area required me to find one or more hidden switches or secret doors in the wall tiles, sometimes even in the force field tiles. I watched someone else do it on video after I'd won. He seemed to be able to tell the differences visually. I never could. I just clicked on each tile with the eyeball until it told me something different about that tile.

       

Damn it, I actually see it now. There's a tiny white dot in the middle of the special wall tile. I never noticed it in the live game.

          

A key that I found somewhere toward the endgame opened the fourth crypt in the four-crypt room. There, I found a letter from Julia to her friend Cleo, talking about how much she loved Antiphos (not the current King Antiphos—an older, now dead, Antiphos). The ghost of Antiphos was at first glad to hear it and then cursed me with a pathos that you rarely see in CRPGs.

      

Ah, fool! You have not helped me! Ah, I will never escape my despair! Ah, what I have lost! Gods take pity on me, and cut off my wretched existence! Let me be blind to the horrible pain! [Looking at the statue.] Ah, her serene smile! It mocks me! Ah, her stone eyes! Where is the real woman?

       

Fortunately, the spirit of Julia showed up to escort him to the afterlife. Antiphos left me his armor (at 50 pounds, a mixed blessing), and Julia left a key to the caverns. 

   

The first enemy in the caverns was an unkillable minotaur. I had to trip a pressure plate to open a lava square in the middle of the room, then lead the minotaur into the lava. 

      

What is that key made of?

           

In a network of caverns, I found Xallas, whose disappearance from Athenia I learned about early in the game. She said Nok Hurthtu had been trying to get her to betray the city somehow, and that she was slowly turning into a monster like the other denizens of the area. These other denizens included a triton, a minotaur, and a medusa—all of whom had apparently once been humans. They weren't too far gone to talk.

     

"Thank you, Medusa." -- No other RPG protagonist before or since.

         

To free her, I had to find out her nickname from her parents. Even then, she wanted me to try to get her companions to return to the surface with her. The triton and medusa protested they were too far gone. The minotaur, who actually was too far gone, decided that Xallas was betraying Nok Hurthtu and that he needed to attack her. Since he was unkillable, I had to enlist the medusa's help. This took a couple of reloads, as the minotaur kept getting to Xallas (which ended the game immediately) before I could bring the medusa to protect her. Eventually, the minotaur was killed, and Xallas followed me to the surface via a convenient ladder that went directly to town (through a door that only opened from this side). That made returning to town from this part of the dungeon much easier.

 

What would that song even be? "Step up, everyone, and place your bets / Hear about how Theocritus ignored his debts . . ."

         

Xallas's parents were of course delighted to see her. Her father gave me a Scepter of Lordly Might and an old scroll that the Seer translated for me: "What is order but the perfect arrangement of disparate elements into a preconceived pattern? Thus the key to the destruction of Chaos lies in the 'ideal.'" Something about that last word in quotes seemed like a clue.

       

I still don't know whether this game is supposed to be taking place in actual ancient Greece.

       

Back in the dungeon, a large cavern network required me to find multiple hidden switches. While searching, I found a Bow of Apollo and two sets of Arrows of Apollo, a powerful missile weapon that I never used. Even better was a cache of treasure that included magic armor, a magic two-handed sword, and winged sandals that increased my movement speed and let me move across shallow water. That would have been awesome except the creatures in the rest of the game were balanced for a character who had all of these items.

    

The cache also had a Horned Amulet. Nearby, I encountered an unkillable Beast Master, in charge of three lions, who told me that the Horned Amulet was the only thing that Nok Hurthtu feared. Unfortunately, he wouldn't give me the key I needed to move onward unless I gave the amulet to him. I tried literally everything to kill him but nothing would even damage him. Eventually, I made a backup of the save file and gave him the amulet. Annoyingly, he didn't stop trying to kill me even after I had acceded to his request. Like the early sphinx, I had to keep leading him to remote places and ditch him.

      

I wonder if one of the lions is named Ruh.

        

A puzzle that followed was the most maddening one in the game. A sign indicated that I should throw a spear onto a hidden pressure plate in a square beyond the sign. I didn't have a spear at this point, so I had to trudge back up to the crypts to find one. When I returned, every time I threw the spear, it hit the sign on the way to the pressure plate and was destroyed. After this happened about 15 times in a row and I couldn't find any other solution, I looked at the one video series on YouTube, created seven years ago by Alex Diener. It basically showed that I had to just keep trying until I got a luckier roll and the spear survived. It happened on maybe my twenty-third try.

     

These are the moments I live for.

       

Eventually, I found my way to an enormous cavern with chaos spreading from the center like the void squares in Ultima VI. Nok Hurthtu, sitting in the center, looked like . . . I don't know . . . a funnel cloud? He hurled explosions at me that were too fast to dodge, even with a Potion of Athletics. Potions of Invisibility fooled him, though, and I ended up having to return to the surface to buy several of them. In the far corner of the room, a "cannonader" fired arrows at me even if I was invisible. Numerous force field barriers were strewn around the room, and the entire northern wall was blocked by force fields.

   

It took me hours to get through this room. I had to make my way to the cannonader while invisible, healing myself when I got hit with one of his arrows, and then kill him and get behind a barrier before one of Hurthtu's missiles reached me. Then I had to figure out what to do next. I was used to searching wall tiles for hidden switches at this point, but it took a while to occur to me that I might need to search all of the force field tiles, too. One of them showed a "strange energy disturbance," and I was able to open it to get to the room to the north of this area.

    

Any tile can have a secret, I guess.

        

That room contained a Temple of Athena. Before I could speak to the goddess, a statue forced me to answer a riddle: "What is AIHTRTRBE?" The answer was BIRTH RATE. Fortunately, commenter half had given me a hint a long time ago that let me solve it. I still don't know what it has to do with . . . anything, really.

     

Or, what this town is going to have to increase after losing most of its men to the demon horde.

       

The Beast Master had followed me into the temple area, so I was delighted when I spoke to Athena and told her about the amulet, and she said she'd kill him for me. This still took some effort for two reasons; first, the game is bugged so that Athena following the character causes the game to crash. And when this game crashes, it crashes bad. It brings down the entire OS. I had to force-quit the emulator each time. Eventually, I had to save after every successful move.

   

Second, when it comes time to kill the Beast Master, no matter how far away he is when the character asks Athena to do the deed, the Beast Master rushes in, closes the distance, and kills the character before Athena can act. I had to maneuver her into the right hallway configuration so that he was blocked from reaching me.

     

The Beast Master has a worthy ending.

       

The Beast Master finally died, and I retrieved the amulet. It said I could equip it in either hand and that I would need a major power source to use it. I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out what could serve as the power source. Nok Hurthtu at least stopped throwing his fireballs as long as I held it. I couldn't figure out what to do for a while, but I tried talking to Nok and got a text input box. I figured this was the time to say IDEAL. This somehow caused a key to fly from his robe, cross the void, and land in my hand.

     

This was a little cheesy.

       

The key "unlocked" another of those hidden wall tiles in the southeast corner, near where I killed the cannonader, which somehow activated a "strange whorl of energy" in one of the force field squares. That force field apparently served as my power source. When I clicked on it, a fireball appeared and streaked to Nok Hurthtu, killing him in the resulting explosion. 

     

A ball of energy kills the bad guy.

        

The game immediately brought me to King Antiphos's throne room, where he dubbed me Hero of Athenia and then threw a feast. I was hoping I might get to marry Xallas or even the medusa, but I guess fame is my only reward.

     

That really limits sequel possibilities.

          

That one definitely felt good to win. Overall, I had the same feeling playing it as I did playing the original Dungeon Master: I didn't think it was a great RPG, but I still enjoyed the puzzles. I don't know whether Dungeon Master had any influence on author David Larkin (he didn't mention it during our brief correspondence), but it evokes some of the same themes in an iconographic interface.

    

Here's the GIMLET:

       

Category	Assets	Liabilities	Score
1. Game World	A fun backstory using themes from classical mythology. PC's mission and place in the world are clear from the outset.	Fairly small, not well fleshed-out. No sense of larger world. No evolution of the world based on character progress.  Storytelling a bit lazy. A magic evil-killing amulet introduced at the last minute?	4
2. Character Creation and Development	Leveling up brings some rewards.	No character creation except a name. Leveling is based on finding scepters and not based on acquiring experience other ways.  Character never seems to be more powerful. Enemies always wipe the floor with him.	2
3. NPCs	Fair number of NPCs in town with personalities and sub-quests. Keyword-based dialogue.	No dialogue options; the game puts all words in PC's mouth. Keyword dialogue rarely invoked; each NPC only responds to a couple of words. Not much NPC interaction after opening chapter.	4
4. Encounters and Foes	Puzzles are the game's raison d'etre, and many of them are challenging and satisfying.	Many of the puzzles are also very frustrating. Monsters tend to come in two varieties: those that are hard to kill, and those that cannot be killed.	5
5. Magic and Combat	Combat is quite tactical, going beyond literal combat tactics and incorporating elements such as visibility, movement, terrain, and use of equipment.	Exhausting. Few straight-up battles. Almost every foe is a unique puzzle.   No magic except items.	4
6. Equipment	Head, body, two hands, and legs slots. Several upgrades throughout the game. Nice, detailed item descriptions. A number of usable items that are vital to survival.	Traditional RPG equipment doesn't matter much for success in the game. Items are all in fixed locations.	5
7. Economy	Strong throughout the game. An extra Wand of Friendship or Potion of Invisibility always helps in a pinch. Can also sell excess items.	Only one store, with hard limits on the number of necessary items that you can buy per day. Only ways to grind for cash deliver paltry cash.	5
8. Quests	Clear, multi-stage main quest.	What seem like side quests all collapse into main quest. No player choices. No roleplaying.	3
9. Graphics, Sound, and Interface	Iconographic graphics are fine. Unobjectionable sound effects.  Keyboard movement mostly works.	Would be nice if keyboard commands didn't require COMMAND key. Nothing particularly outstanding about graphics or sound. Icons are of that "cutesy" Mac type that I don't like.	3
10. Gameplay	Reasonable length. Hard difficulty, but that's really the point of this game.	Very linear. Despite author's intentions, game does get a bit too difficult and annoying at times.     Not much replayability.	4
Other/Total			39

    

Overall, The Odyssey is a strong, well-made independent game that satisfies its intentions well. I would not recommend it for players looking for a traditional RPG experience.

   

The Odyssey does deserve to be a bit better-remembered than it is. Aside from a Macintosh Repository entry, that YouTube series, and a few discussions on Usenet, there isn't much available online. I wasn't able to find any contemporary reviews. David Larkin asked $25.00 for the game at the time; registration came with a (probably much-needed) cluebook, but in recent correspondence, Larkin said that he no longer accepts payment or offers the cluebook. I don't believe he worked on any other games.

        

****

   

Previous entry in this series

   

For further reading:

   

• Ultima IV, the game that most inspired this one graphically (and in some mechanics, like secret doors and NPC dialogue).
• Dungeon Master, the game that seems to have most inspired this one mechanically.  

 08/12/2026

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 eighth 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