Game 544: Blade of Doom (1993)

 

With the title and the company name, it feels like the authors were playing off Doom by id Software. But Doom was released later in the year than the file dates for Blade. It's just one of those weird coincidences.

     

Blade of Doom

Germany

UD Software (developer and publisher)

Released 1993 as shareware for DOS

Date Started: 11 March 2025

Date Ended: 12 March 2025

Total Hours: 4

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

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)   

   

In broad strokes, Blade of Doom is a single-character Dungeon Master clone. You run around a dungeon, find keys, open doors, navigate teleporters, fight enemies in real time, collect inventory items, stave off hunger and thirst, and level up. Having just finished Walls of Illusion, I'm not particularly eager for another game of the same type, but there are some interface features that make Blade at least a little more interesting than the standard clone.

     

The game is little-known online, probably because surviving versions (or, at least, the two I found) are unregistered shareware. "UD Software" appears to have been a one-off partnership between Karl Schuster and Uwe Dörr of Walldürn, Baden-Württemberg (Dörr's initials serving as the name of the company). They asked 30 DM, or about 35-40 of today's dollars or euros. More on this in a bit.

    

I don't know what's happening here.

   

After an interesting title cinematic featuring a row of gravestones, a skull, a flash of lightning, some kind of spectral dude whose torso becomes a ribbon of light, and a few digitized words in German, the game brings you to a main menu, on which you can define a different hero for two saved games. I completely overlooked the "create character" option when I first started playing; I just kept hitting "new game" and I guess using the default character. It wasn't until I had this entry ready for publication that I realized there is a character creation process where you can assign bonus points among multiple attributes. 

   

Character creation.

    

Once the game starts, it is instantly familiar to anyone who has played Dungeon Master or one of its derivatives. You have a compass/GTFO cluster that you can use for maneuvering, but thankfully it's replicated on the numberpad. Almost nothing else has a keyboard analog, which is too bad. When you meet enemies, you click the large attack icon in the lower-right hand corner. You start finding items and add them to your inventory while keeping a careful eye on your health, fatigue, hunger, and thirst meters. If enemies damage you too much, you camp for a while to restore hit points. Yada yada.

    

The game begins.

    

But Blades has a few surprises in its interface, if not its content:

    

• Confused about what a button does? There's a separate program (ANLEITNG.EXE) that allows you to click on each button and get a description of what it does. 

       

The game's description of the hit point bar.

     

• The inventory screen has a paper doll on which you directly place pieces of armor. This is rare even for commercial games of the era.

  

Slowly assembling armor pieces.

     

• If you don't feel like going to the inventory screen, you can scroll through the items in your pack in a window on the main screen. 

• The "eye" icon, which takes you to your inventory screen, starts to close as you get fatigued.

• There's no full on-screen automap, but you can get a map of the immediate area by clicking on the "scroll" icon on the main interface. Or you can go into the inventory screen and print an ASCII map of the dungeon level. Explored and unexplored areas, stairs, traps, teleporters, messages, pits, and secret doors are all symbolized.

 

The game's printed map of (most of) Level 3.

         

None of these features absolutely enthralled me, but I found them all at least notable.

   

Beyond that, we just have the variants on the standard Dungeon Master template:

    

• Magic seems to be taken directly from Dungeon Master. You combine two or three runes to make a spell, then select a power. You set up a particular spell in the book, then cast it from the main screen. I've only found one rune ("Reversal") so far, so I haven't been able to experiment much. I don't know whether there are in-game instructions for spell recipes or whether that came in a separate document. 

     

The spell creation interface.

      

• Character attributes are speed, power, knowledge, learning, and endurance, plus offense and defense statistics based on the inventory. These values all start quite small (3s, mostly). You get to increase one attribute by 1 point when you level up.

  

Reaching Level 3.

      

• Combat takes place on the main screen like in Dungeon Master. It's real-time, and it involves clicking furiously on a large attack icon in the lower-right corner or casting a spell. There's a brief "cool down" period but no feedback on damage done. The enemy just eventually dies, or you do.

• Among the first three levels, there have only been five monsters: bats, spiders, lizard men, some kind of viney plant thing, and worms.  

   

One of the stranger enemies.

    

• Enemies are reasonably well drawn and animated, but they always look like they're a square or more away from you. I suppose drawing them small was also cost-effective.

• All doors require keys to open. All keys look the same, but they're not. You need to find the specific key for the specific door.

     

Opening a door with a key.

    

• On the disk screen, the save/load buttons give you no feedback at all, so you just have to trust that they worked and click the option to close the screen. 

• The demo game has no money, although there is a line for it on the character screen.

     

Level 1 was a large 40 x 30. Its primary purpose seemed to be to introduce the door mechanic. The level was full of doors, some with keys right in front of them, some with keys that I had to retrieve from distant parts of the level and walk back. There was one door for which I never found a key, making it impossible to complete the map. 

     

My partial map of Level 1.

      

There were a lot of bats and a lot of items of food, though I learned the hard way that while mushrooms might be technically edible, you probably want to leave them alone. I found my first weapon, a knife, as well as a wooden shield. 

    

A couple of messages talked about JUSTICE (GERECHTIGKEIT), and indeed that was a password to get past a magic mouth. A second one, just before the exit, took another password clued in an explicit message: EINTRITT.

      

I thought we might be headed into Ultima territory here.

      

I went from Level 0 to Level 1 after beating my first enemy, a bat. Bats were the most common enemy, including a whole swarm of them near the center of the map next to a message that warned me I was entering the Realm of Chaos.

   

The first level has at least three messages encouraging the player to buy the registered version of the game. One of them has a square after it that wounds you for half your hit points. I don't know if the two things are connected. Throughout the game, I suspected that other aspects were related to it being a shareware version, but there was nothing I could tell for sure.

     

This message comes up frequently as you explore. That file isn't even in the package.

      

Level 2 was about teleporters; there were about half a dozen sections that I had to map independently. Enemies were the same as on Level 1. I reached character Level 2.

         

A teleporter.

    

Level 3 introduced some new mechanics. The "Walk of the Attentive Adventurer" (as a sign announced) had some spinners that would ensure I kept walking forever if I didn't watch for them and spin myself back in my original direction. Elsewhere, there were pressure plates that opened wall spaces. I never found any illusory walls (the kind you find by bonking into them), but the map legend suggests they're possible.

  

Spiders and worms were introduced as enemies. As in Dungeon Master, worms drop food, but here it poisons and instantly kills you.

      

 A worm attacks.

     

There was an odd puzzle in the southeast corner. "The nest is just what the hungry need," a message announced as I entered. It consisted of six lizard men guarding about as many eggs. In a nearby section are some alcoves with pressure plates, and I thought to weigh them down with eggs, for no other reason than that they were found nearby.

      

When I placed the eggs on the plates, they each spawned a ton of gear--swords, axes, shields, armor pieces, food, canteens—far more than I needed or could possibly carry. 

     

Somehow an egg turned into all of this.

    

The northwest corner had a huge open area with a building in the center. Messages around the center building read: "Get out of here. I don't need a human like you down here. Or do you want to challenge me to a duel?"

     

Sounds good to me.

    

A locked door led into the final area, and I was sure I would meet a boss enemy behind it. I had to go far and wide, through some teleporters, to find the key, but eventually I returned and opened the door. The only thing behind it was another stairway upward.

   

I knew that the dungeon was only three levels based on the number of level files in the game folder, so I was surprised by this turn of events. However, going up the stairway just takes me to a random square on Level 3 that I already explored, so I guess this must be the end of the trial. I think I've explored everything else exhaustively, save a part of Level 3 that's past a square that straight-up kills me every time I step on it.

        

The death screen.

      

In the past, it's been my policy to BRIEF games that I couldn't fully evaluate because we don't have the full version. However, I suspect that in the present situation, there never was a full version. I base this partly on the fact that it doesn't seem to exist online now, and 1993 is pretty late for that to be true. There are also no reviews, no testimonials, no walkthroughs, and no maps on either current or archived sites.

       

Two lizardmen attack at once.

    

Second, there's this paragraph in the accompanying documentation for one of the versions I tried:

      

Mit Blade of Doom möchten wir der Gaming-Community professionelle Spiele zu einem fairen Preis anbieten. Dafür haben wir uns für diesen Weg entschieden und verzichten auf den Vertrieb über Softwarefirmen. Wir hoffen, dass dies durch zahlreiche Bestellungen für die Vollversion belohnt wird und wir diesen Weg weiterverfolgen können.

     

Now, maybe there's some nuance here that I'm not getting in translation, but it sounds to me as if they haven't actually completed the full version, and they're waiting to see if they get enough people interested before they take the time to do so. For the full version, the goal is apparently to collect multiple pieces of a set of arms and armor, including the Shield of the Golden Cross and the titular Blade of Doom. The authors promise that this adventure takes place over 50 dungeon levels: "as far as we know, the largest dungeon currently in existence." Well, yeah. There's a reason for that. If the full version does exist, let's be leisurely about tracking it down. I identified a couple of potential leads on the authors but I hadn't heard back at the time this entry was published.

       

I think the authors are trying to tell us something.

       

Since this seems to be the only version, I'll rate it at a 15 on the GIMLET. There is a lot of potential for it to go higher, but since I wasn't able to experience spells, or very much character development, or more than a few enemies, or more than a few pieces of equipment, I have to rate it as a much simpler game.