Al-Qadim: The Genie's Curse: Summary and Rating

 

That horse is false advertising.

            

Al-Qadim: The Genie's Curse

United States 

Cyberlore Studios (developer), Strategic Simulations, Inc. (publisher) 

Released 1994 for DOS

Date Started: 23 June 2026

Date Ended: 24 July 2026

Total Hours: 24

Difficulty:  Easy-Moderate (2.5/5) on default, but user adjustable

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)  

   

Summary:

     

Al-Qadim is an action RPG with minimal RPG elements drawn from the short-lived Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting of the same name. The PC is a young corsair (one of the character "kits" in this setting), engaged to his caliph's daughter, looking at a bright future. But his family is disgraced (and his bride kidnapped) when the family genie goes amok. To restore his family's honor and save his betrothed, he must discover the shadowy cabal that is freeing genies from their oaths.

    

This single-character game has fairly minimal RPG elements and plays more like an action/adventure than an RPG. Character attributes are fixed; inventory is very limited; dialogue options all seem to vector to the same conclusion. The character gains experience and levels up, but leveling doesn't make a palpable difference in battle except that the character gets a couple of additional sword moves. The titled orthographic viewpoint (single axis only) and many of the graphics (as well as the desert setting) are reminiscent of Dark Sun: Shattered Lands (1993), while the plot, Arabian setting, and some of the action sequences evoke Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire (1990). It's a fun game for its length, but not a great RPG experience, and it doesn't feel much like a Dungeons & Dragons title.

   

****

   

Well, I never did hear back from Herb Perez. It's too bad because one of the first things I would have asked is whether Al-Qadim started as a Dungeons & Dragons game or whether they grafted the name onto a product already in development. My guess is probably it did start with D&D in mind, given the histories of the companies and the principal authors, but Al-Qadim seems to have been given more leash than any D&D title I can remember since Hillsfar. Among the oddities:

   

• Leveling only makes the character stronger to the extent that it conveys extra maximum hit points. (The "extra sword moves" are only really valuable to the extent that you stupidly let the character get surrounded by enemies.) 

• Attributes don't matter at all. I don't think the game even knows what they are. I inspected the save game files and while I found values for experience, max hit points, and current hit points, I did not find any of the attributes.

• The corsair class is supposed to be able to dual-wield, use thief skills, and employ numerous non-weapon proficiencies, none of which appear in the game.

     

Why would anyone pay for healing when you can get healed for free on your ship?

      

• The Al-Qadim setting makes extensive use of social status, which is quantified. It isn't even mentioned in the game.

• Experience points are doled out quite liberally for solving puzzles and quest steps; little of the player's experience total comes from enemies. 

• Only a couple of the other Al-Qadim-specific classes make any appearance in the game, principally sha'ir, and they don't behave like sha'ir in the manual. I didn't see any familiars, for instance.

• Zakhara is supposed to be a melting pot of races. While there was a mention of dwarves (in passages that could have easily been CTRL-H'd), I saw no one but humans in my explorations. Admittedly, the graphics perhaps aren't detailed enough to differentiate some of the races.

• Nowhere in the game does it actually confirm where the action takes place. No map appears. You sail from island to island by menu. The official map of Zakhara does have a lot of archipelagos, but none of the names match up (admittedly, many of the islands are unnamed).

        

The "game world" in list form.

         

• "Shards" seem to be purely an invention of the game. 

• What we learn about genies, the way they are called, and what they can do don't quite seem to align with the rules in the Arabian Adventures sourcebook. 

• A "Zaratan," as has been pointed out in the comments, is a giant sea turtle in the sourcebooks.

• Many of the other creatures that you would expect based on the sourcebooks make no appearance. In particular, there isn't a single camel or Arabian horse.

          

The authors made the cyclops Arabian by putting the word "desert" in front of it. Also: what does he narrow?

        

So even though "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 2nd Edition" is displayed prominently on the box, I don't really see it. That isn't necessarily a complaint—I'm hardly a D&D purist—but it does hint at why the RPG elements of this one are so under-baked. If it had started as a Prince of Persia sequel, I'm not sure I'd be surprised. 

        

Curiously, I find myself lamenting the absence of the social status system the most—not because I like such systems, of course, but because from a role-playing perspective, I enjoy defying them. While I was in the middle of Al-Qadim, I wrote a paean to American faith in individualism and individual progress. Such faith is a core part of my own ideology and identity, and thus I always enjoy stories in which an individual comes up against a rigid system and refuses to kowtow to it, leaving pompous nobles to sputter at his insouciance. I understand that Robert Jordan was planning to write a series of novels set after The Wheel of Time in which Mat Cauthon would travel to the Seanchan Empire; that's the kind of story I would have enjoyed.

     

You get some "sassy" options with the caliph, but they don't lead anywhere.

       

As I head into the GIMLET, my feelings about the game are relatively neutral. It was easy to play and write about; it moved along at a good clip; and it offered a more complex plot than the typical RPG. On the other hand, it didn't really have any of the things I like about RPGs, so it felt like I was doing something that was modestly fun but otherwise unrelated to this blog. I would expect the GIMLET to hover just at or below the "recommended" level (say, 35-40), but with such low scores in the core RPG categories (2, 5, and 6) that it doesn't really qualify for that label. Let's see: 

         

Category	Assets	Liabilities	Score
1. Game World	Setting in Arabian mythology is rare among RPGs.  Strong story. Character's place in the world is clear. NPCs generally react to plot developments.	Not a lot of lore to the setting explained in the game. Some major elements left enigmatic, such as the basic nature of the human-genie relationship.  Game world is small and limited.	5
2. Character Creation and Development	Standard experience and leveling. Some levels come with a new sword move.	Only character creation choice is the name. Attributes not used. Character does not get intrinsically much more powerful.	2
3. NPCs	Large number of NPCs, many with strong personalities. Talking with them advances the plot and fills in the lore. Full-sentence dialogue options with some minor role-playing choices.	Dialogue options are mostly illusory.	6
4. Encounters and Foes	A few original monsters. D&D bestiary is always well-varied. Light navigation puzzles and a few role-playing encounters.  Can encounter as many enemies as you want via traveling.	Game does not incorporate most special attacks/defenses. Puzzles are mostly facile and role-playing encounters are rare.	5
5. Magic and Combat	A couple of combat options: sling, sword (with different attacks), shards.	Not nearly enough options. Battle is not tactical; just a lot of running around.	2
6. Equipment	Sword, sling, Ring of Protection all get some enhancements. Potions and shards.	Very under-developed. No armor, wearables, choice of weapons. Many of the potions don't seem to really work.	2
7. Economy	It exists, and there's a gambling game. Potions and shards are a money sink.	No complexity. Far too generous. Only really need it to buy quest items.	3
8. Quests	Clear, multi-stage main quest. Some side quests and side-areas. A couple of places where the player has multiple ways to approach a quest or quest-stage.	Quest path is generally linear and does not offer many choices. No ending choices or alternate outcomes.	4
9. Graphics, Sound, and Interface	Nice graphics. Not "immersive" but definitely pleasant. Adequate sound effects. Support for keyboard, mouse, and joystick.	Mapping both attacking and other actions to the same key was a bad decision. Menu does not adequately differentiate selected and unselected options.  Sound effects relatively rare. No background sounds.	4
10. Gameplay	Good length. Flexible difficulty.	Very linear. Not much replayability.	5
Other/Total			38

       

Longtime readers will know that I don't include music in category #9, and I usually play the game (as I did here) with the music turned off. However, I took the time to listen to the soundtrack later, and there are some unbelievably good compositions on it. I don't know a lot about eastern music (other than the double-harmonic scale, quarter tones, etc.), so I can't tell you what references it makes or what traditions it evokes, but it's complex and subtle, with beautiful MIDI work that really draws out the individual instrumentation. You can listen to it here; I particularly recommend Track 6, with its complex drum rhythms. Credits go to Eric Heberling, Rob Wallace, and Nada Lewis; Heberling also did The Elder Scrolls: Arena from the same year and is currently working on The Wayward Realms, a forthcoming game from Arena's developers.

       

"Al-Qadim whisks away traditional role playing on its magic carpet" is how Petra Schlunk's August 1994 Computer Gaming World review begins, which is an accurate sentiment. The review echoes everything I've said about de-emphasizing exploration, character creation and development, equipment, and combat tactics in the name of more streamlined action gameplay. She liked the originality of the setting, as I did. "Some might appreciate the attempt to lighten up role-playing," she concludes. "But many hard-core fans won't be amused." She lumps the music in with sound, though, in saying that they "could be a bit more robust." I think that's fair for sound effects but not the music.

       

I don't think much of "a complex, pre-generated character," and "tightly-woven storyline" just signals there are no player choices. But they're right about "grand cinematic musical themes."

          

I looked over Wikipedia's and MobyGames's summary of other reviews, which average around a B-/C+, but the general theme is that it's an inoffensive enough action game but not much of a CRPG. I gather it generated the same type of discussion as the simplification of character attributes and the move towards more action-oriented combat in Skyrim or Fallout 4. Some reviews worried that the game was a harbinger of the future, and they already started to lament the loss of more traditional titles, both RPG in general and D&D in particular. Many who think that RPGs hit a major slump in the mid-1990s (I don't have an opinion on this yet) will find common ground in these reviews. But, honestly, it's a bit obnoxious to blame an individual game for an industry-wide trend. Al-Qadim did well with its own intentions.

          

Despite it selling nearly 100,000 copies, my sense is that Al-Qadim didn't leave much of a legacy. Any influence it had is impossible to detect among hundreds of console games that were already offering the same approach to gameplay. I don't think there was an explosion in Arabian fantasy among CRPGs in the later 1990s. It certainly didn't do anything to prop up the Al-Qadim tabletop setting, which aside from one 1998 offering published its last module the same year. 

    

SSI will continue to squeeze everything it can out of the D&D license for a couple more years, and I will dutifully play all of them. We may see an SSI/Cyberlore partnership again as early as 1995, with World of Aden: Entomorph; otherwise, Cyberlore will go off in its own direction, specializing in fantasy strategy and simulation games before getting out of the business in 2005. 

    

I'm a bit annoyed that we never had any resolution on the duck.

  

****

   

Previous entry in this series

     

For further reading: 

 

My index of games played by lineage has all other Dungeons & Dragons titles.

The Internet Archive has the Al-Qadim: Arabian Adventures source book. 

 07/30/2026

Game 582: The Odyssey (1993)

       

The Odyssey

United States

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

     

This is not Odyssey: The Legend of Nemesis (1996), but rather an intriguing shareware effort from David Larkin of Brooktondale, New York. When I fired it up, I thought that the timing worked out particularly well on this one, as I just finished listening to a Teaching Company course on "Famous Greeks" and was planning to see the new Christopher Nolan The Odyssey that weekend. It turns out that game isn't based on any existing legend, nor is it set in any kind of real history. It just uses names and themes from Ancient Greece to tell its own story.

   

The game is set in the city-state of Athenia. Rome is mentioned but it has already fallen. The city has been besieged by demons whose leaders will not explain what they want. The PC is an Athenian guard who is one day summoned to the chambers of Damocles, Seer of Athenia. The Seer has had a vision that the monsters are controlled by a "Chaos Master" named Nok Hurthtu. His vision further showed him that the PC is the one person who can defeat the Chaos Master, and to do so, he will need to descend into the earth, past sewers, crypts, and caverns.

     

The Seer lays it out for me.

       

No sooner has the Seer finished explaining his vision than Nok Hurthtu (or a vision thereof) appears in the chamber, howling wordless sounds. "It is a primeval mass of bestial desires and turbulent motions only sporadically able to assume the semblance of reason," the Seer observes. The Chaos Master manages to get out a few threats before disappearing, leaving a couple of chaos rats in his wake.

     

Man, don't have a hernia.

      

Character creation consists of only a name. There are no attributes that I can see, except attack and defense scores based mostly on inventory. The character has a level, but I'm not sure what causes it to go up, as there are no explicit experience points. Health is purely ordinal, starting at "good" and proceeding through "scraped," "hurt," "wounded," "mauled," "badly wounded," and "critical" before death.

    

The interface suggests an Ultima influence, but one light enough that I wouldn't call it a clone. It similarly has roguelike elements without being quite a roguelike. Commands are movement (no diagonals), talk, attack, use, look, and (in something of an innovation) scroll the window without moving the character. There are icons and keyboard backups for these commands, though the keyboard backups use the Command key, which is a little awkward.

        

My once-per-Mac-game reminder that if my screenshots were honest, you would always see the menu bar. As it is, you can always see a bit of the game's folder behind the game windows.

             

The character is cast immediately into combat with the rats, a la Ultima VI, but the battle is an easy one. It is nominally turn-based, but the game assumes a "pass" if the player doesn't act within a few seconds. To fight, the player clicks on the "attack" icon and then the enemy, at which point a little pop-up menu appears with options based on the character's equipped weapon. Having no weapon (odd for a guard), my options are to kick, punch, or block. The rats die quickly, leaving hunks of meat behind.

    

I naturally speak to the Seer and get a text box. I will soon discover that about 50% of interactions in the game involve no input from the player. That doesn't mean that they're the one-line NPCs of Ultima and Ultima II, however. Some NPCs have a lot to say, and the character has a lot to say in return, all unprompted by the player. The dialogues can get fairly verbose. Here's an example with Homer, a farmer:

       

PC: "How's it going, Homer?"

Homer: "Terribly. We lie here like slugs under the sun, waiting for our life to burn away and for our little souls to flee to Hades." 

PC: "All of our souls have to go to Hades eventually, Homer." 

Homer: (angrily) "We should all go out and fight the Chaos demons! I try to tell people this but they're all cowards. We should all fly from the walls and live or die in one glorious battle. Enough of this besiegement! Better a quick death than a slow one." 

PC: "You would throw all the city's lives away when there's some chance they could be saved?" 

Homer: "You're one of those fools who thinks there's hope. Why should we believe that? The mists and the demons have never stopped coming." 

PC: "And we have never stopped fighting. And we will fight, Homer, to the last man, to protect those who cannot fight for themselves. Meanwhile you will ensure that the city has enough to eat. That is your duty. And I will thank you to stop whining about how the world isn't arranged to your liking. We all have to suffer now."

       

The game isn't shy, as you can see, about giving a fixed character to the PC. He's brave, noble, intolerant of despair in others, intolerant of those who shirk their duty, unafraid to speak truth to power.

      

Achilles not being very Achillesque.

     

With some NPCs, the player gets a keyword-based dialogue box, but it's hard to find words that actually work. No NAME, HEALTH, JOB here. Rarely does the NPC say something in the previous dialogue that prompts additional discussion via keyword. The box is used more as a puzzle element, with the player feeding keywords that other NPCs have given him. The box supports full sentences, but it doesn't seem to read the keywords within the full sentence like Ultima VI did. When talking to the Seer, CHAOS MASTER gets some additional dialogue, but WHAT CAN YOU TELL ME ABOUT THE CHAOS MASTER does not?

     

Athenia is 60 x 60 tiles, surrounded by a stone wall. There is no exit, the old gate having been walled in to defend against the demons. A palace occupies the central part of the map, containing the Seer's chambers and guard quarters to the south and the king's throne room to the north. West of the palace is a farm with several workers and a couple of houses for the farmers. There's also a small lake with an island that I cannot reach. Northeast of the palace is a temple, then a bunch of small buildings. Southwest is a forest with some ruins plus the only other monster I've encountered so far: a wild boar, who I punched to death and harvested for meat. There are 15-20 NPCs, including guards and farmers, running around.

     

One key element of this game involves the passage of time. As in Ultima V, NPCs have daily schedules. They work during the day and go to bed at night, sometimes in houses or rooms with locked doors. A small window tracks the passage of time in eight phases depicting the position of the sun. (Full night, which lasts three phases, is depicted by a single graphic with a moon and stars.) The "sunrise" graphic is cute, showing a god literally hauling up the sun, which rises in the west and sets in the east.

     

That must be Helios (bottom right).

      

A full day's cycle takes between 18 and 19 minutes if the character stands still. If he moves, time passes a lot more quickly. Each move is assumed to take about three minutes, so 480 moves pass an entire day. That can happen in as little as 80 seconds if the character is moving continually. I had entire days elapse in which all I accomplished was talking to two or three NPCs.

    

As time passes, the character gets hungry and fatigued and must occasionally eat and rest. Eating hasn't been much of a problem so far, but resting causes time to pass so quickly that if the player doesn't almost immediately start clicking the button to awaken the character, he'll keep sleeping until he starts taking damage from starvation. I can only guess that game speed is tied to the system clock, but I took pains to emulate a Mac (the Color Classic) that would have been popular in 1993. 

    

You may have noticed that the inventory system uses a small paperdoll interface with slots for both hands, legs, chest, and head. There are also two windows that open independently: the character's backpack and items on the floor. You can drag from one to the other to pick up or drop items. It's a bit like Ultima VII in that regard. So far, I haven't found a single weapon or piece of armor. There's a guy named Mr. Jones who runs a shop, but it sells things like food, torches, and potions.

       

You'll note that nobody stands between me and my man.

        

That leaves the plot. The Seer didn't give me much to go on. He said I would need to descend into the sewers, but I haven't been able to find any sewers or other pathway down. King Antiphos and his guard captain, Frederick, are a bit useless. 

     

Three distinct problems (and thus, potential side quests or main quest steps) become apparent other than the demonic siege: 

    

• I heard from NPCs that there's a traitor in our midst. Someone has stolen next year's seed from farmer Marian and Paul, meaning that we'll starve to death. The guards' payroll has gone missing. The enemy seems to anticipate our troop movements. But Antiphos denies the problem and refuses to hear anyone even talk about a TRAITOR. 

• A sleepy guard named Manthos tells me about a woman living in a northeast house who only comes out at midnight. I hang around the locked houses at midnight and find a blind woman named Sarah leaving a house full of trash, cobwebs, and one locked interior door. She's waiting for her husband, Xenophos, to return from a quest. It's clear that she's a bit loopy and he probably died a long time ago.

• Theocritics and Electra tell me that their daughter, Xallas, went for a walk one night and never came home.

    

I explore everything and feed what I think are all the important keywords to every NPC, but I get nowhere for a while. However, there are many locked doors, and based on my experience with Sarah, I know that they sometimes open for a very short time when certain NPCs go about their daily schedules. I hang around a few of them and catch Bartholomew, an officious guard captain (and advisor to the king) leaving his house. I manage to sneak in as he leaves. In the corner of his room, I find a key, but it's only possible to enter this corner by walking through a fire, which nearly kills me. Fortunately, I have plenty of time to rest because he locked the door behind him, and this key doesn't go to that door.

      

Bartholomew's secret corridor.

         

Sixteen hours later, when he comes home, I rush outside and start trying the key on all the nearby locked doors. It opens a nearby door into a short hallway where I find a scroll. It's a note from Bartholomew to the Chaos Master, indicating that Bartholomew has been following his orders to steal the seed and the payroll and to report on troop allocation.

   

Frederick tells me to bring all evidence about the traitor to him, but I can't get him to acknowledge the scroll or Bartholomew's guilt. I thus take it directly to the king, where I have an option to show it to him. Bartholomew is summoned, denies the charges at first, and finally confesses. King Antiphos throws him in jail and rewards me with a Scepter of Lordly Might, which when used increases my level (permanently) to Level 2.

     

Nice sobriquet.

         

For a while, I can't figure out any other leads. There are four locked buildings, plus the locked door in Sarah's house, plus a locked door in a ruin in the forest. There are three locked doors in the palace, but two of them just go to the chambers of the Seer and Mr. Jones, neither of which have anything. I finally find that one of the locked buildings has a window. It turns out to be the jail, and I can see Bartholomew inside and talk to him through the window. He has a little more information to offer, including that the Chaos Master used to leave him notes in the sewers and that he has the sewer key. At my encouragement, he gives it to me. He also says  that he hid the payroll and seeds in a room and threw the key on the island. Unfortunately, I have no way to cross the water.

     

I do not want to know how he managed to keep the key on his person in jail.

        

Bartholomew's key doesn't open any of the locked doors, so I'm stuck again for another hour or so, to the point I start mapping the city and inspecting every individual tile. Eventually, I find a section of wall with a keyhole, open it, and find another key plus a ladder down. I run around town with the new key but can't find any door that it fits. I return, go down the ladder, and immediately die at the claws of a "shadowy stalker."

     

Ah, so it's going to be this kind of game.

            

On multiple subsequent reloads, I encounter this situation in the sewers:

   

• The first room has a Scepter of Lordly Might and a helmet. Unfortunately, it also has an invisible shadowy stalker, who can kill me in two hits. If I target empty squares, I can sometimes hit him, but never kill him before he kills me. There's a ladder I can take immediately to a lower level. 

• On that lower level, a pressure plate opens a wall. There's a wraith and two goblin archers behind the wall. Every time I approach them, I get killed by arrows. They will not budge from their positions to chase me around corners and get into melee range.

• If I try to ignore the wraith, the only place to go is a corridor where a cannon is constantly shooting cannonballs down it. No matter how I time it, I can't get down the corridor before the next cannonball. Even if I could, the chamber at the other end is absolutely packed with enemies.

    

I return to Mr. Jones's shop looking for items that might help. The Potion of Invisibility is out of my reach, but I buy a minor wand (which stuns enemies) and a bottle of Greek fire. It takes about 10 reloads, but I'm eventually able to stun the shadowy stalker and kill him. I loot the chamber; there's also a Potion of Invisibility under the Scepter of Lordly Might. The scepter brings me to Level 3. I have to wonder whether there's any traditional leveling in this game or whether it's all scepters.

      

The only exit from this chamber other than the two ladders is locked, so I go down to the lower level with the pressure plate and cannonballs, but whatever I try, I cannot make headway against any of the obstacles here.

     

One of the places that I keep getting killed.

              

Just as I'm about to give up, I discover that there are a couple of squares in the lake around the island shallow enough to let me cross. I find a key, which opens the doors in the ruins to the southeast of town, where I find the stolen payroll and seed. Returning the payroll to my friend Joseph gets me a dagger, while returning the seed to Paul gets me a tunic. Before you get all excited, these two items do absolutely nothing to help me against the enemies in the sewers.

    

It's become clear to me by the end of this session that this is not a typical RPG. It, or at least its beginning, is extremely linear, and every battle is a unique puzzle that has to be solved with the right tactics, items, or both. I might already be in a "walking dead" situation because I've already spent too much of my starting money with Mr. Jones and have no way of earning more.

   

Mr. Larkin charged $25 for the game and promised a hint book for anyone who paid the fee. I made contact with the author, and he said he no longer accepts any money nor makes the hint book available, but he directed me to a video series (starting here) that solves the game. I hope I don't have to consult it, but I'll let you know.

         

Time played: 3 hours

   

****

   

Next entry in this series

07/27/2026 

Al-Qadim: Won!

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

          

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

   

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

         

Finally!

      

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

     

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

         

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

       

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

    

I don't trust this guy.

         

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

    

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

      

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

       

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

  

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

   

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

       

This also feels very Quest for Glory.

        

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

       

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

        

I love that second dialogue option.

       

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

          

Focus on the ends, not the means.

        

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

        

"Except three years of continual war."

       

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

   

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

        

I did find mostly death there.

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

       

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

      

You people need to learn how to use a cipher.

              

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

  

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

     

I wouldn't be so sure.

      

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

    

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

            

I died taking this screenshot.

        

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

      

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

           

This could be a lot of people in this game.

      

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

  

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

         

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

      

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

    

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

         

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

        

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

     

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

     

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

       

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

      

Fighting a translucent image of a mage.

      

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

   

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

      

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

      

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

      

The captain in his real form.

        

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

       

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

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

            

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

    

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

    

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

          

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

      

The underwhelming final boss.

        

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

        

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

         

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

      

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

A wedding photo. Nice shoes, hero.

        

Miscellaneous notes:

   

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

      

I could have fought more random battles with pirates.

       

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

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

    

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

       

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

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

      

I slightly inconvenience the Nameless Masters.

       

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

       

My final statistics.

       

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

   

Final time: 24 hours 

   

***

   

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07/30/2026