Al-Qadim: Won!

The world isn't actually called "Al-Qadim," is it?

          

When I last wrote, I had discovered that some group called the Nameless Masters (which paradoxically means that they're not "nameless") was behind the Genie's Curse, my family's ruin, and the kidnapping of my fiancée, Princess Kara. My father, once a member, had told me that they had their headquarters on the fog-shrouded island of Al-Naqqil. I guess the fog shrouding it was keeping my ship's captain from plotting a course there.

   

Meanwhile, a grateful cyclops that I rescued from the caliph's dungeon had told me about a magical treasure on the island of Hajar. I had found its location, but I was unable to approach it without the chest disappearing and my getting zapped with lightning bolts.

         

Finally!

      

I never did solve that problem except to brute-force my way through it. It turns out that the chest didn't disappear permanently. If I could survive long enough, it reappeared then disappeared a couple of times before reappearing permanently. So it was just a matter of gulping Potions of Extra Healing every time my health got too low. I must have used a dozen of them. The chest had a scroll with a phrase on it; that's the third one in my inventory. The first two, I was explicitly told to read them when I faced my nemesis.

     

I was out of leads at this point, so I did what I always do in such situations: Make the rounds, talk to everyone again, and try to pick up a new thread. This game makes that easy since the city of Bandar al-Sa'adat is really the only place to go in such situations. While I was re-exploring, I took the opportunity to spend most of my remaining gold on potions, including Giant Strength, Invulnerability, and Extra Healing.  

         

It would be nice if I didn't have to buy them one at a time.

       

I found the next clue in the form of a scroll left lying on the floor of the palace entrance. That was pretty careless—anyone could have picked it up. It was signed simply "O." and it directed me to meet someone in the south banquet hall. "O." was revealed as Obdel, one of the caliph's courtiers. He claimed that Vizier Zummerand was the mastermind behind the plot to discredit my family. "His mind-control magics are responsible for the caliph's recent tyranny!" He suggested that he could help me burgle the vizier's apartment looking for evidence.

    

I don't trust this guy.

         

There was something about the way that he spoke that made me not trust him immediately, so I declined on ethical grounds, but that just caused him to call the guards, claiming I'd threatened him, and my game ended in the dungeons. Thus, I went along with it. He told me where I could find the vizier's journal along with the wealth confiscated from my family, but—and here's a red flag: "Don't waste time looking through the vizier's effects. He often writes fictitious documents proclaiming his innocence for anyone who burgles his room to find." Right.

    

He gave me a teleportation ring, which worked in that room with the strange pattern on the floor. To get to the vizier's chambers, I had to sneak past several guards and I had to stop by the harem. Some of these steps had to be taken in a very precise sequence or else I got caught; for instance, hiding behind a door while the caliph's wife called for the guards, emerging only when she gave a special signal, taking care not to bump a vase on the way. This again had a solid Quest for Glory feel to it.

      

Hiding behind a door while the caliph's wife distracts some guards.

       

Obdel was correct that the vizier had written a lot of things that suggested he was innocent. These included a note that he felt the order imprisoning my family and seizing their property was against the law, a note fearing that the Nameless Masters are getting control of the caliph, and a warning that many of the courtiers had joined the Nameless Masters. "I suspect they have a way to teleport their agents into my private chambers," he wrote presciently.

  

The journal to which Obdel had directed me was, in contrast, comically villainous: "I, the vizier, shall magically control the mind of the weak-willed caliph and hold TOTAL POWER in all of Bandar al-Sa'adat!" But what really clinched it was the vizier's seal at the bottom of this entry. I already knew that the vizier's seal had been forged by someone in the palace, and I later discovered that the bedchamber with the note to "see Shubakan" (the forger) was Obdel's. So while the vizier being the villain would fit with a lot of tropes from past games and literature, I wasn't remotely convinced. 

   

I thus went right to the vizier with this information, but he wouldn't speak to me. "Something important has surfaced. Please come back and see me later." Meanwhile, Obdel had been summoned out of the palace by a note from "The Courier." It instructed Obdel to meet him near the gates. 

       

This also feels very Quest for Glory.

        

I followed Obdel there and hid behind a wagon while Obdel met with the mysterious Courier. The Courier asked if I had "taken the bait." They insulted me for a while before the Courier mentioned having to go to (groan) Al'Katraz Island. From further conversation, it appeared that the vizier was blocking the Nameless Masters' attempts to control the caliph's mind with magic, which is why they wanted him out of the way.

       

The Courier left and Obdel headed back to the palace. I caught up with him and demanded answers. After some threats, Obdel confessed that he served the Nameless Masters and the Courier was a guard at the island. He screamed and was teleported away. I raced out the city gates to catch the Courier, and I found him hanging around the coast. He, too, vanished when I got rough with him.

        

I love that second dialogue option.

       

Back on the palace, this time the vizier would see me. I related to him what I had discovered. He was angry that I had entered his chambers but grateful for the information. He encouraged me to hurry on with my quest before my family was executed.

          

Focus on the ends, not the means.

        

That meant going to Al'Katraz. I was going to object to the punny use of the name, but I guess the name of the real place goes back to Arabic via Spanish. The game's version of the island had a dungeon prison. On the surface lived two clans, the Ganlat and the Razif, in the third year of a blood feud that had decimated both clans. It was clear to me that it had been started by the Nameless Masters. Both sides were so sick of the war that they leapt at my suggestions to bring it to an end. After some back-and-forth, I brought the two leaders together to a peace conference and they told me how to get into the dungeon.

        

"Except three years of continual war."

       

This was one of the few places in which I saved the game and tried a different option. The player can choose to support one side and accept its mission to wipe out the other; he can also just kill everyone. This, in fact, is the easiest path, since in this one part of the game, walking up to a non-hostile creature and hitting ENTER doesn't start conversation; it attacks them. I had to reload a few times when I accidentally started combat with a bunch of guards.

   

The dungeon was fun. Like the one beneath the caliph's palace, it had originally been designed to hold monsters, but it was now being used by the Nameless Masters to hold their captives. The monster section was completely optional but a fun place to get some additional experience. As I entered the dungeon, I took stock of my shards and found that I had one "Magic Missile," three "Fire Arrow," two "Sunscorch," two "Sunfire," two "Sun Dazzle," two "Water Blast," and a "Lightning." I vowed not to use my sling again until I'd burned through all of these shards, which each had between 5 and 25 charges. They lasted most of the rest of the game. Of them, "Sun Dazzle" was easily the most valuable. It blinds targets, causing them to stop attacking and wander around randomly.

        

I did find mostly death there.

I couldn't time a lot of action shots, but here's a good one of me destroying someone with a spell.

       

The first part of the dungeon was full of mercenaries working for the Nameless Masters. I cut through them with glee. There were a couple of major discoveries. First, some paperwork indicated that the prison was just a temporary holding area for prisoners who would later be taken to another place to have their "life energies" drained.

      

You people need to learn how to use a cipher.

              

Second, my brother was one of the prisoners! I rescued him from his squalid cell and fortified him with a healing potion. The Nameless Masters had somehow stolen his voice so he couldn't summon the genie. When I asked how we could get his voice back, he wrote in the dirt: "Aballat Isle."

  

There were almost a dozen more prisoners to free; each earned me 600 experience points. I always love moments in games when I free prisoners.

     

I wouldn't be so sure.

      

Having Tarik in tow caused some interface problems in the rest of the dungeon, where the game thought I was trying to talk to him when instead I was trying to fight. There really was no good reason to map both actions to a single button. I eventually had to get him trapped behind some furniture so I could finish exploring without him.

    

The monster part of the dungeon had ammuts, giant spiders, giant bats, mummies, and ettins, some of these appearing in the game for the first time.

            

I died taking this screenshot.

        

A battle with a couple of ettins was the most difficult fight in the game. They weren't just powerful; they were fast. I couldn't do my usual trick of keeping out of their reach while pelting them with spells or sling stones. I won it only with "Sun Dazzle" and potions of both Giant Strength and Invulnerability. There were lots of treasure chests and even more shards.

      

Back in the ship, my brother in tow, we set sail for the Island of Aballat. It had a single complex with a few battles. Various bottles and vases were scattered all over the island, each holding some aspect of a victim of the Nameless Masters (e.g., one man's mind, another's heartbeat, a child's laugh, a father's tears, a woman's singing voice, a warrior's honor). As I opened these bottles, I freed the essences to return to their original hosts. Some were guarded by minions of the Nameless Masters, some of them under compulsion. My brother's voice was in one of the jars.

           

This could be a lot of people in this game.

      

I thought one of the jars may have held the caliph's mind, so I returned to Bandar al-Sa'adat to see if anything had changed. I couldn't even get into the palace, alas. It was "magically sealed by the order of the caliph."

  

Meanwhile, with his voice back, Tarik could tell me his story: During his trip to Sorcerer's Isle, he was kidnapped in the night by mysterious figures who stole his voice. They manipulated it to summon Muliban, then spoke some kind of incantation to enslave the genie. He remembered the words spoken, and I told him what our father had told me: that he could break the spell by saying the incantation in reverse.

         

I'd have to spend the next 40 minutes writing down the original incantation and teaching myself how to say it in reverse.

      

Tarik summoned Muliban and broke the enchantment. Muliban was pleased. The game hadn't really given me any indication of his character, whether he resented his bondage to my family and was happy to betray them, or whether he considered us (at worst) benevolent masters. I guess the answer is the latter. He called us his friends and apologized for betraying us. He explained that Sorcerer's Isle had a giant Moonstone beneath its sands, and the Nameless Masters, once my father was out of the way, forced Muliban to teleport it to their headquarters.

    

I asked about Princess Kara. "The last I saw of her, she was trapped behind a portal that was draining her life," he said. "If she still lives, she is no longer the princess you remember." That's grim.

         

Why? Couldn't you just wish them all away? I'm confused about the power of genies.

        

Given that the Nameless Masters could simply speak their spell and control Muliban again, he refused to engage them directly. Instead, he recommended that he and Tarik go to Bandar al-Sa'adat to rescue our family while I went to Al-Naqqil to confront the Nameless Masters. Muliban said he could blow away the fog hiding their island.

     

I sailed to Al-Naqqil and entered the Nameless Masters' fortress. I had to run around killing mages and collecting their magic necklaces, which were necessary to later enter a portal. The battles were tough, but by now I had dozens of Potions of Extra Healing (and found more in the fortress) and could just gulp them when my health was low. 

     

It's not clear what "success" means for this group.

       

Scrolls and journals in the fortress revealed that the Nameless Masters' magic requires "human life-force as its catalyst." They originally used their own, but it caused them to "degrade into monstrous forms," lose their minds, and even grow translucent. Hence, they started kidnapping others to drain their life forces instead, keeping them in magical stasis powered by gems. Taking control of the caliph provided them with a constant stream of political prisoners. They believed the power of the giant Moonstone would help restore their bodies and minds.

      

Fighting a translucent image of a mage.

      

A few times in the fortress, I thought I was stuck, but I kept finding secret doors. Eventually, I found a teleporter that brought me to a dark dimension full of platforms interconnected by magic walkways. Oddly, it seemed to be the same dimension accessible from the hold of my ship. I don't know what to make of that.

   

Many of the platforms had blue force fields on the north edge and gems in the center. If I smashed the gems, it dropped the force fields and released the captives. Some were monsters and immediately attacked me. These included a cyclops, an ogrima, a pirate, and a mummy. Some of these creatures turned into humans after I killed them, thanking me for saving them.

      

I'm not the one who imprisoned you. I freed you.

      

Killing an ogrima somehow freed the spirit of my ship's captain. Before long, I reached the end of a platform and was teleported to my ship. The golden statue was replaced with a djinn, who promised he'd stay with me in reward for freeing him. I had the option to sail anywhere, I suppose so I could get more potions and magic items if necessary, but I told him to return me to the void. 

      

The captain in his real form.

        

There was a weird encounter with my "twin," a creature created by magic. He died a lot faster than I would have. You have to read the manual to understand this encounter. The twin was a "markeen":

       

A lesser genie cursed at birth to be the spitting image of a human baby. The markeen then grows of age as the human does, continuing to be an identical twin. However, the genie is not spiritually linked to the human and can die earlier or later. The markeen is not necessarily evil and will rarely encounter its human double. Other genies look down upon the markeen, often exiling them to a life of seclusion.

I feel like there's a whole story we're not getting here. What was he doing before the Nameless Masters caught him? Why was he created?

            

I found the giant Moonstone at one point and didn't think to do anything with it.  

    

I killed a greater ghul, and it turned into Princess Kara, weakened and dying. She told me how Muliban kidnapped her, and I explained what had happened up to this point. She kissed me and told me to finish the quest.

    

Thrashing you with a sword probably didn't help your condition.

          

The final battle was with a Nameless Master in an indecipherable bestial form, half-invisible. I think he was probably Draken, referred to in a scroll in the fortress: "Draken is too horrible to look at. He roams the dark dimension where no one need gaze on him." I guessed he was my "nemesis," although the game didn't set this up very well. I had three scrolls I was supposed to read in the presence of my nemesis, so I read them one by one. The first two damaged him but the third strengthened him! I lost track of which was which, so I don't know who screwed me. Or maybe I was supposed to read the third backwards? Whatever the case, he still died quickly. 

      

The underwhelming final boss.

        

The denouement began as soon as I had killed him. Muliban appeared to tell me that my family was safe and that he had deposited all the freed prisoners on my ship for my captain to take to their home islands. He then healed Princess Kara ("I do not wish to make this a habit, you understand, but occasionally, genies can perform favors"). He reported that the caliph was free from the Nameless Masters' influence and the vizier was slapping some sense into him.

        

I mean, if it would make you feel better, I could just have Tarik order you to do it.

         

Muliban teleported us to Bandar al-Sa'adat, where Kara was reunited with her father. He announced that we would be married that very day. The caliph apologized to my family, and my father forgave him. The game ended with a few shots of my wedding to Princess Kara and with promises that my quest was not over; that I would face further adventures "that will forever change the world of Al-Qadim." 

      

This would have been an awesome place for a twist in which my father decapitated the caliph and announced that he was taking the Nameless Masters' power for himself.

A wedding photo. Nice shoes, hero.

        

Miscellaneous notes:

   

• I ended the game at Level 7, about 15,000 experience points short of Level 8. I appreciate that the highest level isn't easily achievable.

      

I could have fought more random battles with pirates.

       

• Here's something I wrote in my notes: "Final things didn't respond to ENTER, were timed." I have no idea what that's talking about.

• I never used a single Oil of [Fire/Earth/Air/Water] Elemental Invulnerability. The elementals were some of the easiest enemies in the game; I don't know why there were special potions to protect against them. As far as I can tell, Potions of Invulnerability do nothing. What the game really needed was Potions of Speed. 

    

My inventory at the end. That's a lot of unused potions.

       

• I ended with the equivalent of about 10,000 gold pieces. I could have bought 50 more Potions of Extra Healing with that.  

• I didn't discover until late in the game that in addition to smashing chairs, tables, and other furniture, the character can slash banners by standing in front of them and hitting ENTER. This accomplishes nothing but to make you feel good. 

      

I slightly inconvenience the Nameless Masters.

       

• I ended the game with a +2 sword, a +2 sling, and a +3 Ring of Protection. I don't know whether there were opportunities I missed to enhance these further. 

       

My final statistics.

       

I don't know whether I have enough material for a separate "Summary and Rating" posting, but I've been trying to reach out to lead designer Herb Perez, and I want to give him a couple more days to respond. So we'll finish up in a couple of days. There was no great twist in the plot, but it did come to a relatively satisfying conclusion.

   

Final time: 24 hours 

   

***

   

Previous entry in this series

 

Next entry in this series 

07/25/2026 

The Search for Freedom: Summary and Rating

    

       

The Search for Freedom

Canada
Independently developed and published as shareware

Released 1994 for DOS 

Date Started: 19 September 2025

Date Ended: 16 January 2026

Total Hours: 72

Difficulty:  Easy-Moderate (2.5/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later) 

     

Guest Post by AlphabeticalAnonymous. 

 

Summary:
       

A high school senior’s self-created homage to CRPG classics like The Bard’s Tale and the SSI Gold Box games, The Search for Freedom follows a party of six adventurers as they set out to save the world from the threat of invasion by an evil lich banished centuries ago to the netherworld. The game provides a standard first-person, turn-based, multi-character CRPG experience as the party clears dungeons, explores new towns, constructs the ultimate weapon, and travels to the netherworld for their date with destiny. However, the adequate premise is marred by a linear quest line, limited graphics, and a game that drags on much longer than it should.

    

****
     
These are the times that try men’s souls. Here in the United States, people are celebrating the country’s 250th anniversary. Technically, it’s just the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, but this remains a visionary and inspiring document even a quarter-millennium after its writing. Whatever else you think of Americans then or today, their effort unquestionably involved people in search of a freedom of their own. Consider the injustices of Britain’s King George III that the document condemns: refusing his assent to wholesome laws; obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; obstructing the administration of justice; sending swarms of officers to harass the populace; kept standing armies among the people without legal authority; cutting off international trade; and transporting accused people overseas. And now we have another tyrant perpetrating many of these same injustices: I’m speaking, of course, of Kamazol, the main antagonist of this game. Our indomitable band frees not just the entire world from Kamazol’s bony clutches; we also free the land of the dead from his baleful influence. As soon as he and his supporters are defeated the world is a better place: new infrastructure projects spring up as bridges are built from one continent to the next; everyday people happily smile at each other in the streets; children are free to ask us for our autographs. Life is good.

 

I'll admit; this was a nice touch.

     

Almost exactly 85 years before I write this, Franklin Roosevelt spoke of four fundamental freedoms: of speech, of worship, from want, and from fear. In The Search for Freedom, there’s not much want: all the general stores, magic shoppes, and armories are well-stocked. Freedom of speech doesn’t seem particularly limited, since as far as I can tell we never meet an NPC who refuses to speak to us for fear of repercussions. There’s not much worship going on that I can see: clerics continue their usual business in their temples, and the only deity explicitly mentioned is Seth, the three-eyed god of death and evil, who our party kills in the afterlife. I wouldn’t claim that the people of this game’s world have nothing to fear but fear itself; yet you could do worse for a personification of Fear than an evil, undead lich sorcerer from the land of the dead.

I’m no CRPG addict, but I’ve played some of the highlights on this blog (Pool of Radiance, Ambermoon, Dark Sun, Betrayal at Krondor) as well as a few of the real dogs (Dragon Warrior, MegaTraveller 2). The Search for Freedom contains many of the essential CRPG fundamentals: leveling up is always satisfying; there’s a decent amount of equipment; it has a wide range of magical spells; combat occurs with a wide variety of enemies on a tactical grid; the overworld offers multiple towns and dungeons, each with their own ambiance and unique encounters, and opportunities to grind for experience or money when necessary. Nonetheless, it didn’t scratch all the same itches that some of these better games did. 

Certainly, the game is too long. Caveat emptor: the manual warns of this, listing "a minimum of 60 hours to complete successfully." It took me 72, and I fled rather than engage in the game’s many, many potential combats. Had I fought them all, it might easily have taken 80–100 hours, and I certainly would have hit the game’s level cap of 13 (all my characters were Level 12 before the final battle). But when I say "too long," I of course really mean that it lacked sufficient depth for its breadth. The overworld is small (just two 32 x 32 areas, split into multiple continents), and it, the towns, and the dungeons all still somehow feel too empty. The game is mostly linear, with later areas gated off until you advance and then little chance of returning to areas you explored before. 
      

The losing screen, if the party somehow manages to use up the allocated 1,000 days. I don't think this quite counts as a viable, separate ending to the game.

      

The magic system feels unbalanced, though that’s hardly unique to this game. As with many other CRPGs, I ended it feeling that I had left most of the spells entirely unused. Spells for light are essential, and "Magic Lantern" (which also shows hidden doors) is probably too cheap. After that, I never had to worry about finding hidden doors again. Also too cheap for its utility is "Vision," which reveals a floor’s entire map including all special squares (but sans hidden doors). By the end, the game showed it was possible to have encounters on unmarked special squares; much more use of this (or just having all encounters unmarked) would have made mapping somewhat more interesting. And some sort of pre-combat "buffing" spells in the style of D&D’s "Bless," "Prayer," and so forth would have been welcome (if ultimately unnecessary given the overall difficulty).

As for combat (a critical component for any CRPG), the opportunity for fancy tactics certainly seems to be there. The Gold Box influence is unmistakable, though slightly different in the details. Yet for some reason combat quickly became unbearably tedious: the only real strategy for 95% of all combats was to allow enemies to approach, then engage in melee combat in pairs to allow multiple backstab attempts (any character can backstab, which does double damage and has a higher chance to hit). There are a few in-combat buffing spells available but none seemed worth using. One could use more combat spells at the expense of resting more to recover magic points, but that would mean more combats that interrupt the resting periods. Thus I almost always defaulted to melee weapons for all characters. Finally, the enemy AI was poor. Even pathfinding was a challenge for enemies. Enemy spellcasters don't check for line-of-sight before casting, and they often pick obviously pointless spells. 

But despite these negatives, let’s be clear: the games I listed above (both good and bad) were all created by teams of professionals, often with lavish budgets for both development and marketing. The Search for Freedom was written by a high school senior and released as shareware. So, let's compare it to its peers. This blog's Master List doesn't explicitly list games as shareware, but 11 games in 1992-1993 are listed as having both independent developers and independent publishers. Shadowkeep 1 is missing, and neither Fantasy Worlds of Tamrak nor Dismal Passages are really CRPGs at all. Angband v2.4 is a standard roguelike and Magus a graphical one. Of the rest, Defender of Boston is surely the most memorable (the others are Shape Shifter, Daymare 2, and Ultizurk I, II, and the Great Ultizurkian Underland). Setting aside Angband (arguably a fundamentally different type of "independent" game) and the non-CRPGs, they ranged in length from 4-22 hours and in GIMLET rating from 17-41 (Defender of Boston comes in at the top in both categories).

Let’s see how The Search for Freedom compares:

1. Game World. The setting and quest are generic fantasy: save the world from an evil magician. Bits of history and lore are hinted at, but not tightly incorporated into much of the game's action. For example, in the first half the Viper Alliance helps the party but we’re never sure why or who they are, and they never show up again. In a few places the party's actions affect the game world, but usually only in small ways. Score: 3.
      

A few unexplained anachronisms didn't help with the immersion.

    

2. Character Creation and Development. The creation process is standard, but at least as detailed as for the Gold Box, Dark Sun, and similar titles. Characters primarily develop through combat but occasionally receive stat bonuses from quests, and the leveling-up process was almost always satisfying (up until near the end). The game only recognizes different classes in one or two spots, and all characters are assumed to be male. Score: 6.

3. NPC Interaction. Not a strong area for the game. There are technically a few NPCs with whom you can talk, and those conversations advance the plot or provide background. Unfortunately "info dumps" is nearer the mark than "conversations," as there are no dialog options. Again, only a small number of opportunities for genuine role-playing decisions and at most one mildly-memorable NPC (Dufrey). Score: 4.

4. Encounters & Foes. More for foes than encounters. Plenty of standard monsters but certainly unique ones too: the first pennagalaans and xanthropobls in this blog, among others. Detailed stats are available for them via the "Identify Monsters" spell, but it's not really necessary because so many behave the same: run toward the party, and/or cast random spells. There are both random (combat) encounters that can never be cleared and fixed encounters of various types that only occur once. Score: 4.
     

The ability to fight more than two types of enemies at a time would have also created greater variety in the gameplay.

     
5. Magic & Combat. I discussed this above. The combat options really come down to going for melee backstabs versus using a range of damage-inducing magic spells. Some sort of wands or other enchanted objects could have added extra variety here. Not as satisfying as I feel it could have been. I never felt that I understood how turn order was decided each round, and bows were never effective at any point in the game. Score: 4.

6. Equipment. The game features 12 types of weapons and 6 armor or shields, all with multiple levels of enchantment (e.g., silver, +1, +2). Damage and defense values are easily interpreted and items (even highly enchanted ones) can be found as spoils of combat. No descriptions or customization. Score: 5.

7. Economy. In the first 60-70% of the game, every coin counted . . . until I suddenly had 99999 gold and nothing to spend it on. More interesting items to buy, or fewer rewards in the later game, would have helped here. Score: 4.

    

Can a skeleton look mighty? Discuss.

     

8. Quests. Another weak one. There is a generic main quest, which you can win or lose. There's perhaps one real side quest, given by the SwordMaster in the last town of the game. Score: 3.

9. Graphics, Sound, and Interface. The drawn art is endearing, the icons fine, and most of the game is spent looking at featureless dungeon walls. The sound effects are a valiant home-wrought effort for 1994 and are ultimately on par with the graphics. The music is not necessarily bad (we heard "Greensleeves," Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor," Beethoven's 5th Symphony, Tchaikovsky's "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy") but is far too repetitive. I'll never be able to listen to "Ghost Riders in the Sky" (the combat track) in the same way again. The controls are keyboard-only and just fine. Score: 3.

10. Gameplay. A highly linear game with too little content for its size. What would have been an enjoyable 20-hour diversion lasts 60–70 hours instead. The game would be only slightly replayable with a different party, and it's tough to imagine wanting to. Score: 2.
     
I'm forced to subtract one point for the crashes I experienced, as well as a few other bugs (e.g., "Cure Serious Wounds" always cost me zero magic points when used in town). That gives a total of 38. It feels a tad high, falling as it does right around the "recommended" threshold for its era, but maybe that’s right. If you love granular character development and repeated, mildly-tactical monster-bashing with a reasonable array of weapons and spells to choose from, this could be the game for you. It ranks higher than all but Defender of Boston in the independent games I listed above; what sets The Search for Freedom apart from all those others is its length, almost twice as long as the next-nearest contender. Regardless, the shareware portion alone (the first 30% or so, by playtime) could have been a welcome diversion in the mid-nineties, and even today the fully-registered edition will certainly give you your money’s worth in terms of hours of game time per dollar.

    

[Chet here. This is the first time I've let someone else create a GIMLET, and I read it with interest. AlphabeticalAnonymous did a great job applying the considerations that I would have applied, although having read his previous entries in detail, I think I would have been slightly less generous in a few categories and likely landed at 33 or 34. The difference isn't enough that I want to make any changes, though.]
       
The Search for Freedom was the second and last game written by Dr. Howard Feldman in Canada. We heard about his first attempt, Quest of Kings (1990), on this site already. The Search for Freedom represents a clear advancement over that initial work, and Feldman was still finishing high school at the same time he finished this game. Though these were his only two CRPGs, he remains committed to the topic through his continued stewardship of the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History (MOCAGH). He describes MOCAGH as "an attempt to gather together every release of every adventure and RPG game ever produced, at least up until around the year 2000, and provide the complete contents of the game packages as high quality scans and PDFs." Fans of either genre should definitely check it out (and consider sending a donation).
      

Just a small subset of the MOCAGH's full collection.

       

I took the chance to ask Dr. Feldman a few questions about his game; an edited transcript is below.

Q: Please tell a bit about the history of designing and building The Search for Freedom.
     

A: I'd originally planned to do the Quest for Kings follow up on the C64, and made a start, but shortly after this I got my first PC, a 486-33 around 1993, so I switched to that. I'd learned Pascal in high school, so that was the language of choice for this project. I'd played a lot of RPGs by that point and thought I'd take the features I liked from the different series and combine them all into a single game. So the combat system I tried to mimic the gold box series, the puzzles I emulated The Bard's Tale, and so on.

Q: Were you influenced at all by console RPGs, such as Dragon Warrior (now called Dragon Quest)?

A: I did not play console RPGs other than maybe NES Zelda 1 and 2. I would say the main influences were Ultima I-V, The Bard's Tale I-III, the SSI Gold Box series, and SSI's Shard of Spring and Phantasie series.

Q: Who did the art and sound effects, and what tools did they use?

    
A: The art, if you can call it that, is all by myself. For a lot of the images, I copied existing pictures from D&D or Fighting Fantasy manuals but everything was drawn using a paint program. I think it might have been called NeoPaint but I'm not sure. I also read Michael Abrash's Zen of Graphics Programming, which taught me some tricks about the different graphics card video modes and vsync, and how to do double buffering on only the top half of the screen because there was not enough video RAM to do it for the full screen! The voices are all me, except any female voices I got my mom to do. Other sound effects I either made myself or "borrowed" from existing sources.

      
Q: What musical numbers are included? I recognized Bach, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and a few others—including "Ghost Riders in the Sky."

     
A: The music is all in .CMF format (Creative Music File) and was just stuff I had lying around. I tried to use classical pieces where possible since they were the easiest to come by, being royalty free and all. Aside from the ones you identified, I think there's "Night on Bald Mountain" and maybe "In the Hall of the Mountain King."

Q: Do you still have the game's source code, and do you have any plans for someday releasing it as free/open source?

    
A: Yes it is all in TurboPascal 7.0 or 8.0, I still have it. I suppose I could release it now without fear of taking away from my profits. Not sure anyone still uses Pascal though. 
     
Q: Roughly how many people registered The Search for Freedom? How many have you heard from who beat it?

    
A: I'd say for sure under 100 registered; maybe 50 or so? But it did get included in several of those CDs with "5000 games" on them or what not, and has been on every major FTP site since the 90s, so distribution was good anyways.

Q: Are the game's characters and enemies named after anyone in particular? 
     

A: I don't think so. If anything, they would have been inspired by books I was reading, or games I was playing at the time.
   
Q: Why Teddies?

      

A: Well the obvious fourth race would be Hobbits, but I wanted to have something to make the game stand out a little bit. I'm not sure, but I think Ultima III had a race called a "fuzzy" without ever really explaining what that was, so I may have stolen the idea from that and morphed it into a teddy. [Ed. Dr. Feldman is correct about Ultima III.]

Finally, Dr. Feldman was kind enough to put his design notes for the game online here. These are certainly a must-read for anyone interested in this or similar games.

   

[Chet again. This was fun. Overall, I'm satisfied with the quality of AlphabeticalAnonymous's entries and the detail that they included. I know some purists think that I've abrogated my mission to play every RPG that ever existed; for those who feel that way, let's say that The Search for Freedom is still on my list, but I'll play it after every other RPG on the list.

     

I think it was a successful experiment, although not one that I want to repeat more than a couple of times a year. In the fall, we'll have some entries from Quirkz finishing my aborted attempt at Citadel: Adventure of the Crystal Keep (1989).]
     

****

    

Previous entry in this series

     

For further reading:

    

• Quest of Kings (1990), this author's first game.
• Pool of Radiance (1988), the first "Gold Box" game,  which heavily influenced this title.
• The Shard of Spring (1986), another influence according to the author. 
• The Bard's Tale (1985), another influence according to the author. 
• Dr. Feldman's official page for this game. 

07/23/2026 

Al-Qadim: Bottle Shock

Thanks! Feel free to drop by this entry and leave a comment.

       

The big mystery of this game is: What is giving genies the ability to break their bonds and act against the wills of their masters? It happened to Farid al-Mutan in times past, and it happened to my family's genie just recently, resulting in my mother, father, and sister being tossed into the caliph's prison. Meanwhile, the caliph (my future father-in-law) himself is growing increasingly tyrannical, suppressing speech and jailing people for criticizing his policies or even making jokes. (To be fair, neither the game nor the setting have given us any reason to believe that something like the First Amendment exists in Zakhara.) Oh, and my betrothed, Kara, is missing—transported somewhere by my family's genie.

   

Farid has told me that only the Genie Lords will be able to tell me what is happening. I spent the last session trying to find the name of their island, Jaza'ir Jiza. As this session began, I ordered the captain of my ship to take us there.

   

My dinghy came ashore on the north end of a sandy island. I started to move towards the center, but great fists of sand came thrusting out of the ground to block my progress and channel me along a particular path.

     

Apparently you don't want me to go this way.

      

The path ended at a carpet with a female efreeti. I ended up speaking to her second, though. Some guy (a sha'ir, it turns out) was levitating around the area in a cross-legged position, and I snagged him before I lost him. He introduced himself as Azrail Tajrish, Keeper of the Gate of the Four Winds. He expressed pessimism that the genies would be able or willing to help me:

       

The Council of Genies is all very well in theory. Mortals and genies SHOULD have a place where they can peacefully meet and settle their differences. But in reality the genies are unconcerned with the plights of mortals. Dao trade in slaves. Efreet delight in destruction. Marid cannot be bothered over a few thousand humans drowned, here or there. Only the djinn respect the power that humans wield over the lives of genies, pitifully small as it unfortunately may be. 

       

An interesting bit of world-building there. Until now, I didn't know that there were exactly four types of genies, and that djinn wasn't just a homophone but a particular class. In the coming hours, I would meet all four of them:

   

From upper-left to lower-right: a djinni, an efreeti, a dao, and a marid.

    

Each type is associated with a different element, which the images above should make clear, although the association of the dao with earth seems the weakest. Each inhabits a different elemental plane, accessed through portals. The Forgotten Realms Wiki tells me that efreet are lawful evil, dao are neutral evil, djinn are chaotic good, and marid are chaotic neutral. In my conversations with them, I don't know that these alignments really held up. They all seemed arrogant, callous, and unpredictable.

      

My understanding is that djinn, efreet, and marids come from Arabian mythology, although djinn is the master term for all of them and not a separate type. Dao seem to be an invention of Dungeons & Dragons, likely because they needed something for the fourth element. One thing I don't understand from this setting, and couldn't find it in the source book, is what compels genies to serve humans in the first place. How is the bond initiated? Are some genie types more susceptible to this process than others? 

       

I'm ahead of myself, though. First, I had to get past the female efreeti guarding access to the Genie Lords.  This part was annoying as hell because I had to keep going back to the same place: the city of Bandar al-Sa'adat. Each trip involved a walk of a few minutes from the efreeti to my boat, a return to my ship, probably a battle with some pirates or water elementals on the way, another couple-minute walk into the city, and then a reversal of the entire process.

       

Please just let me get to where I'm going.

         

First, she demanded the wisest snake in the world. I knew where to get that: at the store called Reptilian Desires. I had to pay about 60 gems for the damned thing, and when I got back to the efreeti, she just told me it wasn't good enough and ate it. 

     

Wouldn't the wisest snake in the world not get caught in the first place?

       

I had to pester her a couple more times to get the next quest. Her master, Gubishbuskin, apparently thinks this world is too cold. She wanted me to bring the "hottest coal in Zakhara." Again, I knew where to find it: at the coal shop in Bandar al-Sa'adat. I repeated the journey, bought the coal for 50 gems, brought it back, and was told that it wasn't that hot after all. 

    

Now she wanted "the famous veil woven by Idrid." I got lucky on this one, as I mis-remembered Ingrid's Shop of Wonders in Bandar al-Sa'adat as Idrid's Shop of Wonders. But even though it wasn't the same woman, she had the veil. I had to go to the moneychanger and exchange some gold for gems before I could pay her price. If you're wondering what happens if you've already splurged on healing potions with your gold, I imagine that you'd sail back and forth between islands, getting attacked by pirates, killing them and looting their chests, until you had enough.

     

You don't have to sell me on it.

       

That isn't to say that there aren't dead-ends, though. After a save, I tried talking rudely to the efreeti or refusing her tasks. She just shut down and refused to talk to me anymore. I suppose I would have been lost at that point if I didn't have a saved game to reload.

       

I will confess: your plan has succeeded.

            

Of course, when I got back to the efreeti, she just torched the veil and laughed. The next thing she wanted was the Bottle of Eternal Emptiness. I had no clue on that one, but since all the other items were found in Bandar al-Sa'adat, I went back there—this is the fourth time, in case you aren't counting—and started asking around. A guy hanging around the closed inn told me I could find it on the Lost Isle of Senat. Since the name of an island is all I need to go there, I returned to the ship and ordered the captain to steer a course.

   

The island turned out to be a hellish place with glowing red sand that continually damaged my health when I walked on it. There were fire elementals floating about, but I mostly ignored them as I raced around the island, swallowing healing potions, trying to find the bottle. It was in a chest in the center of the island. I snagged it, ran back to the ship, and returned to Jaza'ir Jiza.

      

Until you, you know, put something in it.

           

The efreeti refused to believe that it was the bottle. I convinced her to open it and check for herself. Apparently, since the Bottle of Eternal Emptiness contains nothing, its vacuum sucks in everything in the area. A few moments later, the efreeti was trapped and corked in the bottle, and I was free to walk past the entrance she had been guarding. It would have been cool if I could have taken the bottle, but the game wouldn't let me interact with it.

        

Phenomenal cosmic powers . . . itty-bitty living space!

        

Beyond the efreeti was a huge checkerboard with alternating black and white squares. It took me a while to figure out what I was supposed to do with it. The board had four entrances, and I noted that if I walked directly towards the center of the board from any of the entrances, certain squares would light up. If I walked too far, the lights disappeared and I had to start over. I discovered that there was an identical pattern from all of the entrances: Five squares towards the center, then a 90-degree turn to the left, then three squares, then a 90-degree turn to the left, then one square. At that point, depending on what entrance I had come from, I got teleported to one of the four genies' realms.

      

The result of trial and error.

          

There was a lot of backtracking during this section, but I'll skip that and just summarize. Ultimately, I had to reach the efreeti lord Mirza Gubishbuskin, but to reach him, I had to complete a quest chain involving the other genie lords. I guess it started with the marid lord, a giant creature relaxing in a pool with scantily-clad women (or perhaps nymphs) all around him. He told me a long and pointless story about how he once brought a tidal wave to douse an island that Gubishbuskin had set on fire. It transpired that he used to have a slave storyteller named Shahar Izad, but he lost her to the dao lord in a chess game. He put her voice in a jar before she left so the dao lord couldn't benefit from her talents. He wanted her back.

           

The dao lord was a female genie named Beya Hrampulpishkin, the one who tells Gubishbuskin about the Genie's Curse in the backstory. She and her associates were classic Sinbad-looking genies, sitting in earthen tunnels amidst piles of treasure. Shahar Izad was in a nearby cell, able only to pantomime her desire to get out of here. Beya would only release her if I brought her an "airy jewel of pale blue fire."

       

Beya and her servants.

      

I had to visit two djinn sisters to get the jewel. They were stereotypical I-Dream-of-Jeannie genies, floating about in midriff-bearing harem-style costumes. They were named Bubishah and Satarah, and to get anything out of them, I had to keep alternating conversation between them, always addressing them by their names at the outset. This was hard and annoying given that they kept floating around and often got close enough to each other that I wasn't sure which one the game had targeted with the action command. They didn't like it if I addressed them by their sisters' names.

        

At least I can see the differences between these colors.

       

They agreed to give me the jewel if I promised to do anything they wanted. When I did, they commanded that I: "Sail to the furthest reaches of Zakhara, fight impossibly old and strong monsters, face certain death a thousand and one times, recover the world's most fabulous treasure, and yet give all your prizes to us." I had several chances to back out of the deal, but I kept saying no, I'd do it, and they finally just gave me the jewel for being honorable or something.

   

Beya freed Shahar Izad, who followed me back to the marid, who gave me a potion that would make me invulnerable to the flames in the efreet domain. He was delighted to have Shahar Izad back: "She will remain here . . . and tell me delightful stories for a hundred and one years." I pointed out that since he had given her away, he released her from her contract. She said she'd stay and tell him one more story. She of course is a reference to the character most often given as "Scheherazade," the storyteller of One Thousand and One Nights, who postpones her own unjust execution by telling her husband stories with cliffhangers until he finally relents. I worked with a woman named Scheherazade once, and while she was perfectly pleasant, I kind of felt bad for her. There are some names so steeped in lore and expectations that to give them to a child is like setting them up for failure.

          

If marids really are chaotic neutral, this argument isn't likely to stick.

        

In Gubishbuskin's realm, his efreet servants didn't want me to reach him and tried to block me with flames, but the marid's potion kept them from harming me. I made it to Gubishbuskin, the most impressive visually of the genies. I told him my story, and he recounted how he had been freed from Farid's service by an unknown agent. 

      

I just told you that I was from Zaratan.

         

I asked who was behind it. "It is the Nameless Masters who released me from my servitude," he said. "And they are the new masters of your family's genie." I pressed him on who the Nameless Masters are. "Why, an alliance of powerful sha'irs, of course." Well, that's a bit disappointing. He was surprised that I'd never heard of them: "Why, your own father is one of the Nameless Masters, son of Al-Hazard!" As I sat there stunned, he gave me a Moonstone Shard that added another bonus to my sword.

    

In my last entry, I made a joke about how cool it would be if it turned out my father really had commanded the genie to destroy the Wassab ship, but I really didn't expect it to play out this way.

         

I just want to say that this is a really nice graphic of a palace door.

        

For the fifth time this session, I disembarked on Bandar al-Sa'adat and made my way to the caliph's palace. There, the guard wouldn't let me access the dungeon without the caliph's permission; the guards wouldn't let me talk to the caliph without the vizier's permission; and the vizier said the caliph was too busy to meet with me.

      

Why can't I just attack all these people?

       

With no other leads, I decided to head back to Farid and see if he had nothing new. But on my way out of the palace, I was approached by a  man who said that the head chef had prepared a banquet in my honor for saving the caliph. I went to the "kitchen" (really just a stove in the hallway) and spoke with Sumia, the head chef. After dinner, she told me there was a secret stairway to the dungeon from the kitchen. "It leads to the old dungeon, which was designed long ago to imprison marauding monsters." The man who runs the Office of Trade has the key. Overall, her dialogue pointed to a little conspiracy at work against the caliph; if she isn't the one who tried to forge the vizier's seal, she's probably working with the one who did.

   

This was confirmed when I reached the Office of Trade, and the proprietor said I would need to speak with Omar the Baker. "We have changed our codes. Do not mention the wine cellar, but instead tell him that you want the Key of Bone." I assumed correctly that Omar the Baker was the guy selling sweetcakes in the market. He gave me the key.

       

When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty.

        

Back in the palace, Sumia told me more about the old dungeon and the passageway to it, "left behind by the dwarves that built the palace and the old dungeon." This is the first time in this game that I've heard about any of the classic D&D races like dwarves and elves, and it threw me for a second. The dungeon that I've already visited, the new dungeon, was built specifically for the caliph's political enemies. Her organization, the Brotherhood of Freedom, built the secret passage from the old dungeon to the new one.

    

A few steps later, I was through a secret door and in the so-called old dungeon, yet another puzzle maze that involved a lot of pushing and pulling rocks to clear passages. The monsters that the caliph chose to "imprison" are curious. They consisted of a bunch of giant spiders (why?), a lot of undead (or were they originally alive?), and one cyclops.

   

The cyclops spoke with me. I had a chance to kill him, but I didn't. He introduced himself as Pangar-bek and asked what I wanted. I said I wanted to search his cell. He said he'd let me if I helped him escape from the palace. When I expressed my skepticism that a cyclops could just waltz through the palace, he found an old rug and covered himself.

      

I'm sure that will do the trick.

            

I got caught a couple of times, which led to a "game over" screen in the dungeon. But after a few reloads, I learned how to avoid the guard patrols and lead Pangar-bek to the exit. Once we got out of the palace, I insisted on leading him through town to the main exit. "Please do not harm any humans as the blood would be on my hands," I said as we parted. He promised to stay away from humans, and he told me of an island called Hajar where the Nameless Masters store great treasure.

       

I think you can take the carpet off now.

       

Back in the dungeon, the cyclops's cell had a note with the key to moving forward. The dwarven builders had hidden levers in the walls activated by pressure plates on the floor. To activate them, I had to:

   

• Drag a stone over the closest pressure plate.
• Find a nearby wall "made of porous, lichen-friendly stone."
• Hit the wall eight times, "once for each triumphant dwarven king."
• Pull the lever that then appeared.

   

The hardest part—yet another colorblindness issue—was identifying the right sections of wall. I guess to most people, they really stand out, but I could barely tell the difference. (Because I get these suggestions every time I mention colorblindness, I have already set Windows 11 to account for Deuteranomaly, and I already have the Enchroma glasses. They don't really help.)

       

It's just north of me. Note the ugly circular table weighing down the pressure plate to my left.

        

The lower part of the level had six more cells activated by wall switches, each disgorging some monster. There was an ettin, a mage, several zombies, earth elementals, fire elementals, and acid slimes. (I don't really understand this dungeon—was someone coming down here and feeding these captives?) Combat has become fairly trivial, although the ettin was tough. Some of the cells had treasure, and one of them had the pathway to the newer dungeon.

       

One of the uglier enemies in the game.

      

Once there, I had to avoid guards and automatons on the way to see my father. I stupidly went to the location of my father's old cell before remembering that I had bribed someone to move him to somewhere else. I didn't know where, so I had to explore the entire dungeon.  

      

Nice of them to put the scales of justice in the floor periodically. Just as a reminder.

         

I found him in the eastern section. He reluctantly admitted to once being a member of the Nameless Masters.

         

We were a force of good against the evil that ran rampant in this land . . . But the power we controlled was too much for some of our members. They wanted to use the magic for their own gain. I objected and left the group . . . Perhaps they are behind this. I do not know. They weave their magic through special words . . . The only way to cancel one of their spells is to speak it in reverse.

        

Sounds like the game has a different conception of "sha'ir" than the sourcebooks.

        

Finally, he told me where the Nameless Masters now live: the fog-shrouded island of Al-Naqqil.  

   

I earned enough experience points to reach Level 7 from this conversation. I avoided the guards, made my way back to the palace, and returned the key to Sumia.

       

Hadn't thought about that, but cool.

        

Back on the ship, I was surprised to see that Al-Naqqil wasn't a travel option. So for now I decided to try Hajar, the island that the cyclops had told me about. The island was small, with a bunch of scattered piles of gold and a few cyclopes guarding them. Those thorn-shooting bushes were also there, but it turns out that I'm immune to their attacks now. I don't know why. My level? My Ring of Protection +3?

   

A short maze of columns led to a clearing with a large treasure chest in the middle. But approaching the chest causes it to disappear, and lighting bolts shoot out of the columns and kill me. I'm still trying to solve this problem as I wrap up this session.

      

Either I'm missing something or this is one big practical joke.

            

Nothing has really changed in my overall impression of the game. The plot is good; the dialogue is well-written; there are some light role-playing options; some of the puzzles are fun. It continues to evoke a lot of the humor and tropes of the Quest for Glory series, particularly Trial by Fire and Wages of War, and I suspect the developers were exposed to them. Combat and character development remain underwhelming, and it's edging towards lasting too long. One more session would be good.

   

Time played: 18 hours 

   

****

     

Previous entry in this series 

   

Next entry in this series

  07/25/2026