The Odyssey: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

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

       

The Odyssey

United States

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

Date Ended: 3 August 2026

Total Hours: 25

Difficulty:  Hard (4.0/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)

    

Summary:

   

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

        

***

    

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

      

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

              

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

   

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

     

Some nice treasures behind this unkillable enemy.

         

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

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

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

       

The triton cannot see me in this wooded square.

           

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

       

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

          

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

      

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

       

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

   

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

      

What is that key made of?

           

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

     

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

         

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

 

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

         

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

       

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

       

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

    

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

      

I wonder if one of the lions is named Ruh.

        

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

     

These are the moments I live for.

       

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

   

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

    

Any tile can have a secret, I guess.

        

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

     

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

       

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

   

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

     

The Beast Master has a worthy ending.

       

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

     

This was a little cheesy.

       

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

     

A ball of energy kills the bad guy.

        

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

     

That really limits sequel possibilities.

          

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

    

Here's the GIMLET:

       

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

    

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

   

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

        

****

   

Previous entry in this series

   

For further reading:

   

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

 08/12/2026

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

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

        

Dungeon Arcade

Israel

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

Date Started: 22 July 2026

Date Ended: 22 July 2026

Total Hours: 2

Difficulty:  Moderate-Hard (3.5/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)

       

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

   

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

     

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

                  

Along the way, the character can find:

   

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

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

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

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

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

• Armor, which protects the character against hits.

• Shields, which do the same.

           

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

       

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

  

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

   

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

        

Melee combat with a spider.

          

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

    

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

         

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

          

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

      

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

      

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

       

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

    

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

       

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

         

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

     

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

         

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

    

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

    

****

      

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

     

Search for the Jewel of Strength

United States 

Independently developed; released as freeware

Released 1987 for the Atari 800 

Date Started: 22 July 2026

Date Ended: 22 July 2026

Total Hours: 1

Difficulty:  Very Easy-Easy (1.5/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)

     

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

       

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

      

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

       

I just love the "in the countryside" detail.

         

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

   

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

   

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

     

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

        

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

  

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

     

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

          

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

      

She died anyway.

       

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

       

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

        

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

        

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

   

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

        

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

      

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

     

I hope it isn't my good NPR tote.

       

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

   

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

     

But the kingdom was not saved for me.

       

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

   

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

         

The lizard man needs to work on his meter.

       

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

     

Can't say I didn't try.

        

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

   

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

       

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

             

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

      

08/08/2026 

The Odyssey: Tales from the Crypt

Almost every time I enter a new room.

        

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

   

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

   

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

   

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

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

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

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

    

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

     

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

        

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

    

Personal Assets:

 

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

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

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

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

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

• Potion of Heroism. Increases attack power temporarily. 

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

     

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

        

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

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

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

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

        

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

     

Environmental/Navigational Assets: 

    

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

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

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

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

     

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

       

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

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

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

    

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

     

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

   

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

     

The madman's inventory.

          

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

    

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

         

The setup.

    

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

    

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

   

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

    

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

     

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

     

Activating the pressure plate without exposing myself to the goblins.

      

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

     

Highlights from the next rooms:

          

All of the narration below takes place in this area.

      

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

        

I don't think the sign was necessary.

      

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

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

     

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

       

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

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

      

Xenophos was a bit paranoid.

        

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

     

Handing Xenophos his armor in the dark.

     

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

     

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

      

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

          

Tricking the demons into throwing their knives at each other.

       

Miscellaneous notes:

   

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

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

     

The game's description of a giant bat.

       

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

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

      

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

     

Time so far: 15 hours
   

****

   

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08/12/2026