Game 569: The Cursed Chambers (1981)

 

I'm glad we eventually settled upon "role-playing game."

          

The Cursed Chambers

United Kingdom

Independently developed and published; later re-published by Kuma

Released 1981 for Sharp MZ-80; re-released in 1983 for Sharp MZ-80, 1984 for Sharp MZ-700 and Tatung Einstein 

Date Started: 2 March 2026

Date Ended: 4 March 2026

Total Hours: 5 

Difficulty: User-definable, but easy-moderate (2.5/5) in general.
Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later) 

       

A few years ago, I told the story of how I and some classmates developed War Plus, a card game based on War. My third-grade teacher banned War because it offers no strategy or decision-making, so it was in no way educational. My friend Hiram and I went home and worked out some new rules that would overcome the teacher's objections. It not only worked, but it spawned a brief craze in which practically every kid in the class came up with his own version.

   

I often think about War Plus when I encounter a game that has made an effort to adorn a much simpler base game. In the case of The Cursed Chambers, that base game is The Wizard's Castle (1980), which itself goes back to Star Trek (1971) by way of Hobbit (1975). Where Star Trek and Hobbit were mainframe games, The Wizard's Castle was widely disseminated as type-in code and thus spawned plenty of "pluses," including The Yendor's Castle (1986), Leygref's Castle (1986), Mission: Mainframe (1987) and Bones (1991). These games all share:

 

• A quest to recover a MacGuffin that has been randomly placed in the dungeon, usually an orb of some kind (the original is the Orb of Zot).   

• A game map consisting of a multi-leveled grid of rooms.

• Random encounters in each of the rooms, including monsters. 

• A small inventory to assist with those encounters.

• A short game time and limited or no saving. The game is meant to be highly random and replayable.

• Small inventories, including usable items. Basic RPG attributes that go up and down frequently.

    

The Cursed Chambers is another such Wizard's Castle Plus, this one earning its "plus" more than most of the others, with the exception of the roguelike-influenced Mission: Mainframe. Compared to most variants of this line, Chambers has a bigger inventory of useful items, more attributes, more complex combat, and a greater variety of special encounters. It is also the only version, and one of the few RPGs, released for two lesser-known platforms available in Europe in the early 1980s: The Sharp MZ series and the Tatung Einstein.

      

An ad for the game in the January 1982 Personal Computer World.

          

The goal in Chambers is to find the Almighty Sphere, hidden somewhere in a one-level dungeon. The dungeon is always 10 squares wide, wrapping, but the y-axis is player-definable, between 15 and 200 rows. Advertisements for the game say that it supports up to 4,000 rooms, but the Tatung Einstein version, at least, won't go that high.

  

In addition to the size of the dungeon, the player specifies a message speed and an overall difficulty of the game from 1 (easy) to 9 (hard). Based on my limited experience, I think the difficulty only affects the ratio of monster squares to other squares. It doesn't seem to affect the damage that monsters do or take, or if it does, the difference between even 1 and 9 is small. I felt that paradoxically I found more gold on higher difficulties, but I'd have to play longer to be sure.

      

Outfitting the character.

          

The player also has the choice of meticulously outfitting his character from a pool of 5000 gold pieces or starting quickly with an "ordinary" character. The ordinary character has 40 in each attribute (strength, IQ, dexterity, food, water, stamina), three flames, five arrows, a mace, a suit of chainmail, a lamp, and 500 gold pieces left over. A player who insists on outfitting his own character does not have enough gold to buy all these things; he's about 1,300 gold pieces short.

       

All the attributes are important. If any of them reaches 0, the character dies. Dexterity affects the likelihood of hitting in combat; strength affects the damage done; IQ affects the power of spells and magic items. Developing these attributes both initially and throughout the game is vital.

        

A mid-game character status.

         

The game always starts at coordinates (3,1) in the dungeon, and the player has to return here to exit with the Almighty Orb. Each round, the player can choose to rest and restore some attributes (with a chance of some misfortune that causes attribute and gold loss), drinking an elixir, checking his statistics, and moving on. Unlike many games in this lineage, Chambers offers no way to call up a map of the dungeon. On the other hand, the game does give your coordinates every time you move, and there are no teleporters to fling you from one place to another as there were in Castle.

   

(The Wizard's Castle has frequent environmental messages that appear as the player moves from room to room: "You stepped on a frog"; "You smell monster frying"; "You hear a scream"; "You see a bat." Chambers has these, too, but oddly they only come up when you use the U)pdate command to check your inventory and statistics.)

            

Starting statistics for an ordinary adventurer. I wouldn't have known I slipped on a frog if I hadn't checked.

       

The dungeon wraps east/west but not north/south, so the player that insists on playing with a 200-row dungeon may face a long trek from the starting square to the Almighty Orb. Each room that he enters may have one of several encounters:

   

• A monster. More on them in a minute.

• A random amount of gold.

• A gemstone worth a lot of gold. You can sell them to traders, and that gold is key to character development.

• A magical treasure: luckstone, ring, wand, or cross. The character can only carry one of these (each) at a time.

• Food, which might be poisoned.

     

Lesson learned: When exploring a dungeon full of monsters, bring your food with you.

     

• A random number of spells between 1 and 3.

• A random number of flares between 1 and 3.

• An elixir. Quaffing it immediately raises a chosen attribute to 100. 

• A treasure chest. There's about a 50/50 chance whether it has a positive result (potions that raise attributes, gold, a wizard who gratefully gives you gold for freeing him) or a negative one (a trap, a vampire whose surprise attack incurs a loss of gold and attributes). Two chests in every dungeon have an elf sword and elf plate armor, the best items in the game.

      

This sequence of events borders on slapstick.

       

• An almighty wizard. He tells you how many enemies you've killed and how many moves you've made. If you have more than 15,000 gold, he offers to sell you the location of the Almighty Orb for that much. This is a poor investment for a small dungeon but perhaps a necessary one for a large dungeon.

• A trader. He sells the same stuff that you can buy at the outset of the game, but for a lot more money. 

• A stream that you have to negotiate. Failing a dexterity check may cause you to lose attributes.

• A wall that forces the character to move one square to the south if he does not have the orb, to the north if he does.

• A pit that the character falls into. An orc shows up with a ladder, which he offers for all the character's equipment. Fortunately, there are few of these—maybe only one per dungeon. 

         

A partial map of one instance of the game. These encounters are randomized with each new game.

         

The lamp, which has 100 uses, can tell you what you'll find in each cardinal direction. Once you deal with whatever is in a particular square, it remains empty for the rest of the game. There are no wandering enemies.

     

Getting a hint for an adjacent room.

        

As for monsters, I discovered 14 types: devils, dragons, fiends, goblins, hobgoblins, horned devils, kobolds, medusas, minotaurs, orcs, rats, salamanders, serpents, and trolls. El Explorador de RPG, in his coverage of the game, says there are 20. The player has a variety of options for dealing with them, including the use of magic items (wand, luckstone, ring, and cross), use (generic attack) spells, shooting with regular or magic arrows, bribing, attacking with a weapon, fleeing, and using a "flame" to assess the monster's strengths and weaknesses when it comes to the right body part to attack.

        

This cracked me up.

        

For physical attacks, the player specifies the enemy's head, body, or arms. Each enemy has one sturdy part and one weak part. Success in all actions depends on attributes—IQ for magic items and spells, dexterity and strength for melee attacks. Some enemies cannot be hit or damaged at all without sufficient statistics. After the character makes an attack each round, the enemy gets to counter-attack, and I never once saw the enemy miss. The attribute damaged depends on what body part the enemy hits—IQ for the head, strength for the body, and dexterity for the arms and legs. Damage is reduced by good armor. Weapons can break during battle, forcing the player to flee and find a trader to purchase a new one.

         

Fighting a/an fiend. 

       

Werewolves and vampires die immediately when presented with a cross. If other enemies were particularly weak to certain items or attacks, I didn't play long enough to figure it out. Certain enemies are immune to certain items or attacks, including horned devils, who are immune to all items.

          

That's quite a hoard.

         

If you die, you get a second chance: The "almighty power of Myriah" causes you to be resurrected with 50 of each attribute, a dagger, and leather armor.  

   

Getting into battle too early in the game is a recipe for disaster. It saps attributes, takes forever, and results in gold rewards too paltry to make up for what you lost. I believe the key to victory is using the lamp to avoid early-game combats, stock up on items and treasures, and only start fighting when you've bought enough potions from a trader to raise your attributes to near-100, and ideally when you've found the elf sword and elf armor. Even then, games on easier difficulties offer plenty of gold in non-combat squares that you could avoid all enemies, get your attributes boosted to 100, and only fight the necessary enemies at the end of the game.

      

The Almighty Orb, wherever the game places it, is surrounded in all four cardinal directions with horned devil, some of the strongest characters in the game. They only respond to magic arrows and physical attacks, and you can't hope to hurt them without dexterity and strength over 50. If you defeat one, you can move past him and grab the orb.

        

"The rain is Tess, the fire's Joe . . ."

     

Once you make it back to (3,1), there's a final battle with the Devil of Doomriyah (who must have some etymological connection to the goddess Myriah; the game does not explore this). Most of the options disappear for this battle; the player can only use a weapon. He's about as difficult as the horned devils. 

   

I won the game on difficulty Level 3 with a small dungeon of 20 rows. It would be quite a feat to win at Level 9 with 200 rows, particularly since the game doesn't allow you to save. I wouldn't start that game during a Maine winter. 

         

My final statistics. A dead vampire crashes my parade.

            

I feel about The Cursed Chambers pretty much the way I feel about The Wizard's Castle: It pleasantly occupies a couple of hours and offers a vague fantasy theme, but while it might technically meet my definitions of an RPG, it doesn't offer most of what I'm looking for in the genre. It gets an 18 on the GIMLET, about the same as I've given every Wizard's Castle variant; the "pluses" that they offer don't translate to a lot on a 10-point category scale. 

    

Cursed Chambers' author was John Wolstencroft, who had a near-monopoly of fantasy-themed output for these minor platforms, most elaborations of public domain or type-in games for other computers. He wrote two Crystal Cave Adventure-like text adventures for the same machines; Quest or Fantasy Quest (1981) and Castle Quest (1983). Jason Dyer covered the former on his blog over five years ago. He also wrote Zrim (1981) essentially a copy of The Devil's Dungeon (1978). I was planning to play it as a companion to this entry, but I couldn't get it to run. El Explorador de RPG's coverage shows that, like its source, it doesn't quite meet my definitions of an RPG, so I guess I'll let it go.

 

Star Trail: Plunder and Lightning

 

The party has displeased the gods.

       

I've started a number of newer RPGs or quasi-RPGs over the last couple of years, all for the Xbox (I don't spend time playing PC RPGs that aren't for this blog), including both Pillars of Eternity games, Avowed, Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, and The Outer Worlds. The part I enjoy least are the first few hours, when you're still learning the game's conventions. I'm not talking about its controls, which are usually easy to figure out, but rather more subtle aspects of gameplay. 

 

One of these days, I'll try to organize a comprehensive list, but here are some of the things on my mind as the game begins:

 

• Do health and mana restore automatically, or do you need resources to restore them? How precious are those resources?

• How do you distinguish important NPCs from generic background characters?

• Is this the sort of game where every item has potential value, or are there too many items in the world to possibly grab them all? Is it the sort of game where a thorough player can find every bit of treasure, or would that be insane?

• Is this the sort of game where when you see a valuable item, you take it, or does it have an ownership/theft system? If the latter, what are the consequences for violating it?

       

Just a break in the rhetoric to note that by the end of this session, I did have the Salamander Stone.

       

• What kind of karma meter does the game have? What are its consequences?

• Does the game have fixed classes, or does the player build a character through skill selection? Which skills are most valuable? By the end of the game, will the player have amassed almost every skill, or only a small percent? Does the game offer a way to dump selected skills and start over? 

• Do dialogue options have plot consequences or are they just a means of gathering information?

• Will NPCs keep saying the same thing every time I talk to them, or do I only get one shot at each conversation? 

• How much freedom does the player have to explore the world, outside the current questline? 

• How much control does the player have over the inventories and actions of NPC followers?

       

That is a very small sample of questions whose answers only slowly become apparent, sometimes not until well into the game. Many of the most amusing moments in my personal RPG history have occurred when I thought I was playing one type of game and it turned out I was playing another. Imagine bringing the morality of Ultima IV when it comes to opening a town's treasure chests to, say, Phantasy Star. Imagine coming off of Bethesda's Dishonored, where loot is so limited that you actually get a score after each mission with the percentage that you managed to find, and then trying to scoop up every item that you see in Skyrim. Imagine trying to just tromp off in your own direction during the opening chapters of Kingdom Come.

      

Because your goddamned manual tells me to.

         

In most of the period that his blog has covered, the need to answer these questions has been less acute. Very few games of this era have offered complex enough systems for role-playing, economies, NPCs, crime-and-punishment, and other such themes. But some of them are getting close, and Star Trail is definitely one of them. In recent entries, continuing into this one, we've learned that this is the sort of game where you sometimes need to talk to NPCs multiple times about the same subject. We've also learned that it's the sort of game where having a large inventory of utility items matters, and in which you don't necessarily want to loot everything that you see.

   

You can say that the manual warned me about this or that, or that NPCs warned me about this or that, but that's disingenuous. Manuals are full of what we call dicta in the legal profession. They often give weight to mechanics that barely exist in the game itself or fail to mention important elements. The same manual that obliquely warns the player to click multiple times on the same keyword also emphasizes things that play little role in the game. NPCs are no better. Some of their words may seem prophetic in hindsight, but there is no RPG player that, lacking such hindsight or a hint, operationalizes everything he's told by an NPC.

      

Have I shown the full-party death screen before? If not, here it is.

       

So, yes, I guess I shouldn't have taken so much loot from the dungeon. In my defense a) it feels abandoned; b) I've been trained by 30 years of RPGs that when you find a chest in a dungeon, you open it; c) some amount of looting in the dungeon is 100% required to finish it. Also in my defense—I went back to check the screenshots on this—what Inradon Xermosch specifically says is that no one should "be tempted to desecrate the halls of the Supreme and Most Ancient of Gods by stealing from Ingra's legendary hoards of gold." He doesn't say not to steal anything, just gold. I didn't take the gold.

      

Okay, I did, but just to see what would happen. I reloaded.

      

As this session began, we were about halfway through the Dwarven Pit. We arrived on maybe the fourth or fifth level. In the first room, we found a structure surrounding a well or pool. The structure had four alcoves with gargoyles in them, and as we approached, the gargoyles came to life.

   

It took me four tries to win this battle with no party deaths. The first time, we were at half-strength, and death was inevitable. (I appreciate that the game lets you reload from within the middle of combat.) Even at full-strength, they were obnoxiously hard. When I finally won, the party was in such bad shape that I needed to rest for about 48 hours. Other than experience, I don't think the battle earned us anything. 

    

Almost immediately thereafter, I ran into the level's second tough battle, against six undead dwarves wearing tattered leather clothes (this leather becomes important). After a couple of losses, I managed to win mostly by casting "Lightning" over and over. The spell, which blinds its target and makes him unable to attack or parry, seems to work against everybody. All three of my spellcasters can cast it. If there's a more useful spell in the game, I haven't mastered it yet.

       

My go-to strategy works again.

          

I still feel like I need some more experience with the battle system before I offer a detailed analysis. For now, I'll say:

   

• I generally like the number of tactics available, and the ability to do ranged things on the diagonal is a major improvement from Blade of Destiny.

• The axonometric view still makes it hard to see what's happening behind the figures, and it can make it hard to position characters in the right square. I wish there were functions to rotate and zoom, though I realize that's asking a lot from a 1994 game.

     

Try to parse anything going on in that cluster.

        

• I don't understand how the game determines the starting positions of characters and enemies. I wish there were more control over it.

• I wish there were a combined move/attack function. Clicking on an enemy ought to simply move the character next to him and attack with the primary weapon.

            

Auto-combat sometimes produces mysteriously horrific results, even with easy enemies.

       

I've experimented with auto-combat a few times. It's good when the party's success is 100% assured. But it doesn't make the best use of spells, in particular the aforementioned "Lightning." When victory is assured, I sometimes switch to the first type of computer control, where you actually see the characters and enemies acting on the battlefield. This can be turned off in an emergency. The few times I've tried the summary auto-combat, it's produced weird results with no explanation, such as my strongest party members mysteriously dead while my weaker ones are still alive, or one out of three spellcasters coming out with an empty mana bar while the other two never cast anything.

    

The battle with the undead dwarves gave us a Stone Medallion that turned out to be important. I think it was this level that had a giant wheel that we turned and produced "a gurgling sound" in the distance. I was never sure what this accomplished.

      

I assume this did something.

       

The next level had some rivulets of water. When I stumbled into one, the game said that the characters washed off the soot that they had acquired back on Level 1, restoring their charisma.

   

The next stairway went up rather than down, and we found ourselves in a new area of the earlier level. It had a walkway surrounding a deep pit, with stairways down. On the floor of the pit was a stone slab. The game gave me the option to try to lift it and then had the characters struggle in vain for three iterations of "do you want to try lifting the stone slab again?" before finally offering me the ability to use the crowbar I was carrying for just such a purpose.

   

If it's "no trouble," why not just offer me the crowbar option in the first place?

       

On the next level, we found another chest-that-I-was-not-supposed-to-loot, this one containing 3 Girdles of Might and a set of parchments that were key to solving an upcoming riddle, so I'm glad I looted it anyway. At this point, every single member of the party had a Girdle of Might, with one to spare.

   

I didn't record in which chests I found which parchments, but the totality of them suggested that Ingerimm had six apprentices, and those apprentices wore special leather boots, gloves, and jerkins. It was thus little surprise when I found a chest containing seven pairs of each. It had a plaque on the front that read: "Take the God's as long as you need it, though don't use it any longer than need demands."

        

Part of the clue that, I guess, I wasn't supposed to read.

       

Getting my party members clad in the attire took forever. I had to drop so much stuff that I nearly cried, including all my spare water skins (fortunately, the level had a fountain). The issue wasn't so much taking the leather pieces—I could have done that one at a time—so much as preserving my existing armor, pants, and boots for when I returned the leather pieces to the chest. (The game offers no option to temporarily drop items or store them in chests.) I thus had to clear at least 18 spaces. In the end, I think it was mostly unnecessary. The final area had no battles, so I could have split off one character and sent him ahead.

   

In fact, the game seemed to be hinting at that. After we donned the gear, we went down a corridor with a bunch of glowing floor plates, and a bunch of my characters peeled away from the party, not wanting to continue. I forced them back into formation.

     

I'm not sure I care what Gnomon prefers.

      

The corridor ended at a wall with a circular symbol. One of the bits of parchment had suggested that we hold up a torch to the symbol, and it was at this point that I discovered that I didn't have any torches. I had dropped them all after Lilii enchanted her wand to serve in the place of a torch.

        

I'm curious how anyone else solved this puzzle without opening any chests. Please comment.

       

Fortunately, I remembered a place on Level 1 where some torches and other gear were stashed in a corner, so I went back up there, grabbed one, and returned.

   

Holding the torch up to the symbol opened the way into a forge. We woke up a golem who asked for a "pledge." I assumed he was talking about the Stone Medallion, and I was right. A cinematic showed the golem tossing the medallion into a pool of lava and then operating the forge for a while. In the meantime, we could converse with him, and he had a bit to say about the Salamander Stone.

     

Part of the cinematic showing the golem forging a weapon that I didn't get to keep.

       

When he finished his work, he presented us with a magical sword made out of "asthenil." I was happy for about 30 seconds, and then it became clear that the game expected me to trade the sword for the Salamander Stone. Bastards.

    

I did the honorable thing. Not that it mattered.

     

A chest next to the one with the Salamander Stone was "filled almost to the brim with jewelry, gems, and coins." I had the option to take it or add some of my own coins to the collection. I did neither in the "real" game. On a reload, I looted the chest and got 5,000 gold pieces as well as a bunch of gems and jewels, but the doorway leading out of the area closed and wouldn't open again. Since the party shares all wealth, I think maybe you could steal the money by sending a single character into the area, looting the chest, and letting him die, but for role-playing reasons, I didn't try.

   

Back outside the forge, we returned the leathers and then made our way back to the surface. I didn't find the alternate exit that some commenters mentioned, but I needed to return the key to Xermosch anyway. When we emerged in the dwarven town, we found a very different situation than when we entered. Dwarves refused us entry to their houses and shops and openly threatened us on the street. Xermosch wouldn't come to the door and told me to "put the key on the hook." Clearly, even though it was necessary to take some items from some chests, I must have taken at least one item from a chest I wasn't supposed to loot. I hope it doesn't have any long-term consequences.

       

I got this message several times, but no one actually attacked me.

      

We hustled out of town and hit the road for Lowangen. Almost immediately, we ran into the priestess who we saved from orcs at the beginning of the game. She praised our progress but warned us that there were more challenging tasks ahead. She told us we could keep the experience and levels we had been granted previously—I didn't even know that was a question—but said that we'd eventually have to do things that "the goddess" wouldn't approve of, apparently in the name of ends that the goddess would approve of.

       

Your goddess needs a philosophy 101 course.

      

The next few days were fraught. We completely ran out of food on our third day out of the dwarven town, so we had to rely on nightly hunting, which I often had to try three or four times. Something kept sniffing around our backpacks in the middle of the night. Someone seemed to be stalking us on the road. Characters got diseased several times for no apparent reason. As we passed a crag, a mysterious stranger yelled at us to "take it to Lowangen!" A couple of parties of orcs attacked us.

        

This happened several times.

      

A large dwarf named Hagebar, son of Haralda, accosted us as we rounded a bend. He warned us that an Orcish army was camped on the east bank of the Svellt River, just outside Lowangen.

      

Eventually, we reached the (menu) town of Yrramis, on the Svellt River, south of Lowangen. It had a Temple of Tsa and an inn. The innkeeper, Haldara Alberg (probably Hagebar's mother, though a slightly different spelling), told us that Lowangen was completely besieged by orcs. We stayed a couple of nights in a suite, ate a couple of decent meals, and moved on.

     

"Young Svellt" sounds like a teen magazine.

                   

Miscellaneous notes:

   

• I want to emphasize again how good the automap is. It annotates doors, chests, stairways, and special encounters more clearly than any previous automap I can remember. It also lets you fast-travel on the surface. You'd think after all that praise, I'd have a picture of the automap to show you, but I forgot to take one, and my party is now in the wilderness. Next time.

• Commenters wanted me to mention the journal. I agree that it's cool. It records texts and major milestones so that the player doesn't have to. The player can enter his own notes in the journal, but the utility is limited since the game doesn't index the terms in custom entries.

      

I apparently did anyway.

       

• Gnomon, the dwarf, reached Level 3 at the end of the last session. No one joined him during this session.

• I thought Lyra was insulting the other party members every time I asked her to treat their diseases, but apparently there is a disease called "Numbskull." I don't know why they keep getting it.  

         

"Stop calling me that!"

         

I crossed the Svellt, hoping to travel up the west side before entering the city, but I don't know if it's going to be possible. The map shows Lowangen mostly on the east side of the river. We'll see. I'm anxious to be rid of this Salamander Stone and to see what the next phase of the game will bring.

    

Time so far: 23 hours 

Dark Designs: Passage to Oblivion: Won!

 

Pter Rok: the original J.Lo.

        

Dark Designs: Passage to Oblivion

United States 

Softdisk (developer and publisher)

Released 1994 for Apple II

Date Started: 25 January 2026

Date Ended: 26 February 2026

Total Hours: 14

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

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later) 

        

Summary:

 

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

    

****** 

      

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

    

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

       

A rough map of the game's areas.

          

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

   

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

          

The description is at least accurate.

       

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

      

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

      

Like so.

       

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

 

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

   

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

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

• Have my wizard cast "Magic Missile."

   

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

         

We're definitely using it here.

       

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

       

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

      

Crytus had a lot of secret doors.

       

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

   

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

      

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

       

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

    

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

      

Yum. I love marzipan.

      

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

     

Accessing the sewers.

         

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

       

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

          

Some random notes:

   

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

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

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

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

       

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

      

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

   

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

      

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

      

And my paladin's character sheet.

      

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

       

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

    

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