Game 587: Warriors and Warlocks - Scenario: Castle Myrhavell (1983)

 

The authors had so much faith in the game they made it their company name.

        

Warriors and Warlocks - Scenario: Castle Myrhavell

Canada

Warriors and Warlocks (developer); 408614 Ontario Ltd. (publisher)
Released 1983 for the TRS-80, possibly for Commodore 64 in 1984
Date Started: 29 July 2026

        

Warriors and Warlocks is a Wizardry clone that, at least on paper, tries to one-up its predecessor. Wizardry has six attributes; Warriors has 11. Wizardry has eight classes; Warriors  has 12. Wizardry has two spell schools; Warriors has three. Wizardry offered good, neutral, and evil alignments; Warriors adds lawful and chaotic to the mix. Wizardry let you adventure with six characters; Warriors ups it to nine. Wizardry was hard; Warriors is practically impossible.

   

In the alignment issue, Warriors shows some awareness of Dungeons & Dragons, but in general, all of its ideas are from Wizardry: the basic wireframe dungeon/menu town structure; classes restricted by attribute; passwords on the characters; good and evil characters not adventuring with each other; a "camp" command in the dungeon; the ability to recover a slain party from the dungeon floor; resurrection having a chance of failing; enemies sometimes unidentified when combat begins; leveling coming with increases and decreases in attributes, perhaps allowing the character to change classes. The manual even intersperses instructions with cartoons.

      

Graphics are credited to Martin Murphy, about whom I will have more to say in the next entry. 

       

Getting the game to run was a chore even when it was new. The game comes with confusing (at least time, as a non-TRS-80 owner) instructions for creating play disks out of the original disks. This process required the user to swap a bunch of disks, delete files, and even edit some of the BASIC code. It also took up to an hour. Commenter LanHawk spared me all of this by sending me a pair of prepared disks. He also suggested a better emulator than the one I was using, which dramatically changed my experience with the game. With the first emulator I tried to use, the game crashed every time I increased the speed. That's a big problem with Warriors because it is slow. I mercifully did not have that problem with the emulator LanHawk recommended (TRS80GP).

          

As you might get from the subtitle, the game was meant to kick-start a series, with characters stored on a hub disk and able to proceed from there to any number of scenario disks. The default (and ultimately only) scenario is "Castle Myrhavell," for which the manual offers absolutely no backstory except that it was once a bastion of peace but was later cursed by a warlock. The goal of the game is to "develop characters strong enough to explore the deepest parts of the castle."

     

Options at the Warriors' Inn.

     

The game boots up to the Warrior's Inn. (Despite a menu option to "visit a different inn," it seems to be the only one available.) The character creation process ("Recruit a new character") requires you to specify the character's name, race, and alignment before you find out his attributes and thus what classes he qualifies for. There is no option to reroll attributes, so if you don't like the character, you have to finish the process and delete him from the disk. Since I couldn't tailor the name, race, and alignment to the intended class, I got some weird combinations: a hobbit warrior named "Mystara," a dwarf cleric named "Venom," and so forth.  

      

Races are elf, dwarf, halfling, hobbit, and human. Races aren't mentioned at all in the manual, and I didn't sample enough characters to tell if there were any effects of race on attributes or available character classes. Alignments are lawful good, chaotic good, neutral, lawful evil, and chaotic evil. Attributes are intelligence, wisdom, intuition, ego, piety, courage, strength, agility, dexterity, luck, and vitality.

       

Attribute requirements per class.

       

Professions are fighter, warrior, bowman, archer, cleric, priest, sorcerer, wizard, necromancer, and warlock. Many of these pairs sound like essentially the same thing, and I think they functionally are. Fighters and warriors have the same equipment restrictions, as do bowmen/archers, clerics/priests, and so forth. Clerics share their spellbooks with priests, as do mages and sorcerers and wizards and necromancers. I think warlocks are like the bishops of this game, with access to all spellbooks. A few classes have alignment restrictions; namely, clerics and priests must be lawful, thieves must be neutral, and wizards and necromancers must be chaotic. The greater restrictions are on attributes. I initially rolled about 30 characters, and out of them only four characters qualified for clerics and two qualified for mages. I didn't get a single priest, sorcerer, necromancer, warlock, or even thief. 

          

This character doesn't have many options.

      

The manual warns you to expect this. There are no attribute requirements on fighters or bowmen, so the idea is that you resort to those if you have to, then level them up and switch to other classes as their attributes increase. This is less possible than the manual suggests, as they will almost certainly die before any leveling happens. 

     

The game weirdly creates characters "DEAD" and at Level 0. They "level up" to Level 1 and resurrect the first time you view them. After creation, the next stop is the armory, where each character can spend 20 gold pieces on basic equipment with the usual restrictions. After that, the player switches to the scenario disk, slowly adds up to nine members to the party, and enters the castle courtyard.

      

20 gold does not go far.

       

Once inside the castle, movement commands are (L)eft, (R)ight, and (F)orward, with stubborn doors entered with a (K)ick. One of the game's innovations is allowing the player to move forward up to nine spaces at once with the 1-9 keys, although this movement can naturally be interrupted by enemies.

      

Those enemies are brutal. You may have noticed that my characters all started with hit points in the range of 1-6. There's a fixed battle with three centaurs close to the entrance, and they absolutely slaughtered the first party that I fielded. I backed up the hub disk after making my second party and avoided the centaurs, but I kept losing characters to rabid dogs, squeaky pigs, fighters, bats, kobolds, and whatever else happened to attack me. At the beginning of the game, a single hit is likely to kill new characters, so all it takes is one bad initiative roll.

     

A typical battle after two rounds.

       

In combat, characters have options that, depending on their equipment and position, might include attacking, parrying, shooting a bow, using an item, casting a spell, dispelling undead, waking a character who's asleep, and fleeing. Only the first three characters can attack in melee range, and only they can be hit by melee attackers. Level 1 spellcasters only have access to one Level 1 spell and one Level 1 spell slot, so they're pretty useless.

    

As I said, I allowed myself to backup and restore the character disk so I wouldn't have to keep creating new characters. Over about a three-hour period, I entered the castle, walked around until I found an encounter, and did my best to win it. At the end of the period, I had fought about 20-25 battles, but I had only emerged unscathed from two of them, giving my characters a total of 73 experience points. The only contemporary review I could find, from the December 1984 80 Microcomputing, complained about this very thing: "Nobody in my house advanced to a point where they could successfully win an encounter."

         

I can relate.

       

You might think save states are the key to cheating, but they're actually quite useless. The game is pathological about its pre-rolled random numbers. If you enter the dungeon, take a save state, walk 10 steps, get a random encounter with three wolves, and have a character killed in the first round, this will reliably happen every time you reload the save state. I can't think of anything to do outside of combat that would interrupt the number pattern. (In-combat, a player could screw around with parrying to change the initiative order, but it would take longer than just reloading and trying again.) The game will insist on using the same generated numbers even if you leave the dungeon and re-enter. The only way to force a new set of numbers is to go all the way back to the inn and disband the party. At that point, it's easier to quit the game and restore the backup.

      

After a while, I reluctantly decided to sacrifice the 73 experience points and start over, this time spending more time on character creation. You really can't expect success when your three fighters and two bowmen—the only characters who can reliably attack every round—got their jobs because they didn't qualify for anything else. I spent about two hours in which I rolled about 100 characters before I found nine that satisfied me. None of them met the requirements for warriors, but I had some strong fighters, a couple of archers, a thief, and a wizard. Then when I went to shut down the emulator, I screwed something up and none of the changes that I made saved to the disk.

     

Options at the Village Square. My party members are all Level 0 because  I didn't know at this point that I needed to view them first.

            

Checking the word count of this entry, I decided I couldn't quit here. I took a day off and then continued with my old party. I got into a comfortable rhythm of:

   

1. Copy the backup hub disk.
2. Start the emulator.
3. Insert the disks.
4. Restore a save state from the inn.
5. "Enter the village square to form a party."
6. "Recruit the same party as last time."
7. "Enter the castle."
8. Spin around the entry square until I meet a battle.
9. Do my best.
10. Exit and save if I won; go back to Step 1 if I lost, which was usually. 

       

This whole cycle took about five minutes (with the emulator on "Turbo," of course) and produced about 100 experience points per hour. A couple of times, I had to restock on arrows and/or buy an equipment upgrade for my lead characters, although I didn't see a huge difference as their armor class went up. 

         

The rare Level 1 blow that isn't fatal.

       

Now, in retrospect, I think that maybe the way that the author intended the game to be played was for the front ranks to have constant turnover while the back ranks slowly leveled. The player was perhaps meant to discard slain characters after every sortie and roll new ones, perhaps occasionally getting lucky and rolling a "keeper" with high attributes or HP. But this process takes a long time and is less subject to automating with macros, so I stubbornly kept at it.   

     

Here are some more things I can report about combat. You'll recognize a lot of them from Wizardry:

   

• When combat begins, there's a chance that enemies will attack from the rear. This means that the three rear characters suddenly become the "front line." There's supposed to be a way to change positions in combat, but I can never get it to work. Those rear characters, despite being mages, don't really have a lot less success in the ensuing battle than the front rank.

• Enemies are often unidentified, given as just general descriptors (e.g., "humanoids," "small animals," "men in leather"). 

     

Kinky.

     

• Either party can be surprised, giving the opposite side a free round of attacks. This was not generally survivable for my party. When I got a free round of attacks, meanwhile, it was enormously frustrating to watch my characters miss almost every time. 

• My bowmen often "do not have a clear shot." I don't know what causes that, but it might have something to do with which fighter they're behind and which of them goes first. Because of this problem, it took me forever to run through my initial purchases of 20 arrows per bowman.

• Sometimes bowmen get an extra shot between rounds. 

• Only once have enemies attacked in more than one group. 

• Enemies I've faced in rough order of difficulty: squeaky pigs, kobolds, vandals, vagrants, fighters, orcs, killer bees, vampire bats, wolves.

• Fleeing causes the party to run around randomly in a panic. I almost never recover from this. I get attacked by something that kills me while trying to get my bearings.

        

Fleeing also causes you to run into walls.

       

• The spells just use plain text names rather than Wizardry's arcane names like MAHALITO. 

• The mage spell "Magicspear" does a ridiculous amount of damage, like 20-30 compared to roughly 1-5 from my melee fighters. Only one mage has that spell, though, and he only has one of them. 

• My other mage started with "Glow," which finds secret doors.

• One of my clerics started with three spells: "Refresh" (minor healing), "Bless" (reduces opponent damage), and "Location" (gives coordinates). The other started with no spells at all. The one who started with no spells has worse attributes than the one who started with three, so I don't know what that's about. I ended up dumping the one with none and replacing her with another bowman. 

     

Level 1 cleric spells. Although the spell levels on this list go up to nine, the manual suggests that there are only five.

       

• The game is very stingy with gold. Battles even with humanoids generally return 0 gold pieces. Two is a bonanza. Needless to say, resurrecting characters has never been even remotely possible.

• I haven't found an item in post-combat looting, but the manual suggests it's possible. 

• I'm not convinced that "Parry" does anything at all. I think it's just a way of passing the turn.

• Characters apparently target specific enemies at the beginning of a round, not just the general enemy party. If we're facing three kobolds and Moronoe kills one in Round 1, I might get a message that "Morgen's target is already dead," even though there are still two kobolds. Again, this might have something to do with their specific positions in the party formation.

       

Changing the formation in camp. You can bring up this same screen in combat, but it never does what I say.

          

• Two Level 8 characters come on the game disk but are listed as "Out" (some contemporary material shows that those two characters are original and not the remnant of some previous player). If the new party could find them, they would be game-changing, but they'd have to search every square in the dungeon. 

• Nothing is more enraging than actually winning a rare combat then facing another one that you cannot beat before you reach the exit. Even keeping very close to the exit, this is possible. 

               

While I was going through all of this, LanHawk emailed to let me know that the Level 2 threshold was 800 experience points for bowmen and 1,000 for warriors. I had about 200 experience points by this point, and I was starting to despair. The only reason that I didn't quit is that I was about seven entries ahead. I had been hoping to get to the point where by mid-August, I had entries scheduled through mid-September, which would make it less likely I'd have to take a usual beginning-of-the-semester hiatus. Even given this, the amount of time I spent on Warriors and Warlocks basically qualifies me for institutionalization. I had it going almost constantly during the first week of August, dipping in every time I wanted a break or needed to listen to something or watch a training video. I binged an entire Teaching Company lecture series on Machiavelli. I broke down and looked into editing the character file at one point, but I couldn't figure out how experience was encoded. 

      

Finally!

     

After a ridiculous amount of time, my bowmen hit Level 2, followed shortly by my fighters. My mages hit it at 1,100 and my cleric at 1,200. Each level up is accompanied by a mix of increases and decreases, mostly increases (just like Wizardry). Characters get some extra hit points; spellcasters get extra spells and extra spell slots. I wish I could report that it made the game easier. It did, a little, but my fighters only gained a couple of hit points and still routinely die in one hit. Having two mages capable of "Magicspear," and each capable of two of those, helps more than anything else. I wish I could get to the point that I could kill wolves without losing someone. They're worth almost 100 experience points each.

     

My level 2 party reaches an intersection.

        

I got into a somewhat absurd situation where I actually preferred when enemies attacked from behind, since my spellcasters all have between 7-10 hit points and can survive more than one hit. 

   

With all my efforts focused on survival and leveling, I didn't get much mapping done. The first level of the castle, which the game refers to as the "Courtyard," seems to have 39 x 38 squares, a weird number, made even weirder by the coordinate system, which counts in multiples of 10, with the (0,0) square inaccessible, one square south of the entry square. From there, coordinates are given as up to 180W and 200E, but on the y-axis, they're all north, up to 390. Even odder is that the x-axis is only 39 squares (instead of 38) because of a single alcove (200,20) in the eastern wall.

     

My map of the courtyard so far.

       

I've only found a couple of fixed encounters so far. There are two fixed battles with three centaurs (each) near the main entrance. These are the only battles for which the game has given me the option to "search for treasure" afterwards, but I didn't find any. The centaurs are replaced with messages telling of trees to the northwest and brambles to the northeast

   

Beyond that, the only other special encounter has been a notched dial on a wall, with numbers from 0 to 60. I haven't tried to do anything with it yet.

     

Try to qualify for the showcase showdown?

            

I nearly just wrapped up the entire thing here, particularly since it doesn't seem to have a main quest (though it's possible one develops). But where this game is so lightly documented, I figure I'll give it another few hours and try to at least map the first level.

   

What do you think: Do experiences like this teach me persistence? In my 50s, do I still need to be building character? 

      

Time so far:  13 hours

     

****

   

Next entry in this series

   

For further reading:

   

• Wizardry (1981), from which this game takes most of its ideas.

08/15/2026 

   

  

Game 586: Pagan: Ultima VIII (1994)

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

        

Pagan: Ultima VIII

United States

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

    

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

   

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

     

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

       

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

   

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

     

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

          

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

    

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

      

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

          

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

     

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

      

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

       

From the manual, the symbols of the elemental lords.

       

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

 

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

            

Our previous experience with someone from Pagan.

         

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

   

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

     

My first dialogue options.

        

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

         

Running, jumping, suicide.

        

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

   

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

    

The Avatar fights the power.

        

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

         

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

     

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

   

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

      

The Avatar stands there and takes my insults.

            

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

    

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

       

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

      

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

     

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

       

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

      

This guy should work for ICE.

      

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

       

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

       

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

   

On a reload, I go east from Devon's camp instead of west. There are some mushrooms that look like I should be able to pick them up, but I can't. I kill a couple of spiders and small enemies called skellots with my fists; these are not among the creatures described in the manual. Combat involves clicking repeatedly with the mouse on a moving enemy while trying to face the character the appropriate direction. Maybe I'll get used to it, but I don't care for it in these initial stages.

      

My first taste of combat.

      

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

     

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

         

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

      

Frankly, my dear . . .

        

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

   

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

    

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

   

Time so far: 1 hour 

    

****

    

Next entry in this series

    

For further reading:

  

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

  08/14/2026

The Odyssey: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

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

       

The Odyssey

United States

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

Date Ended: 3 August 2026

Total Hours: 25

Difficulty:  Hard (4.0/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)

    

Summary:

   

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

        

***

    

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

      

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

              

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

   

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

     

Some nice treasures behind this unkillable enemy.

         

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

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

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

       

The triton cannot see me in this wooded square.

           

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

       

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

          

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

      

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

       

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

   

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

      

What is that key made of?

           

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

     

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

         

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

 

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

         

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

       

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

       

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

    

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

      

I wonder if one of the lions is named Ruh.

        

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

     

These are the moments I live for.

       

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

   

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

    

Any tile can have a secret, I guess.

        

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

     

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

       

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

   

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

     

The Beast Master has a worthy ending.

       

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

     

This was a little cheesy.

       

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

     

A ball of energy kills the bad guy.

        

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

     

That really limits sequel possibilities.

          

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

    

Here's the GIMLET:

       

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

    

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

   

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

        

****

   

Previous entry in this series

   

For further reading:

   

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

 08/12/2026