Game 561: Daymare 2 (1993)

 

The title screen doesn't inspire much confidence.

       

Daymare 2

United States

Independently developed and published

Released 1993 for DOS

Date Started: 24 October 2025  

Date Ended: 27 October 2025

Total Hours: 7 

Difficulty: Moderate (2.5/5)
Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later) 

    

Jim Todd's The Mystic Well (1990), called Daymare in its 1992 DOS incarnation, was a workaday single-character Dungeon Master clone with no complex puzzles. It was mostly about mapping and fighting, although it did some interesting things with character classes that made it at least mildly replayable. The sequel, Daymare 2, offers a similar experience, with no classes and no class-specific levels.

    

The accompanying document outlines a bare-bones plot: "In a land far away, a powerful wizard enchanted his life force into a golden skull and proclaimed himself to be a god. Your job is to defeat him and banish him from your waking nightmares." A golden skull was the final enemy of the previous game, so this sounds less like a sequel than a remake. "I promise a better plot in Daymare 3," Todd says in the document.

      

Despite the name change, the game has plenty of mystic wells.

    

The game begins with a quick character creation process. Fifty total points are distributed among strength, agility, reason, and vigor so that each attribute is between 6 and 20. You can re-roll as much as you'd like, either to favor one or two attributes over the others or to achieve a roughly-balanced distribution. There are no other selections, not even a character name.

     

The brief character creation process.

     

There are a few welcome upgrades to the interface, starting with numberpad support for movement, including both turning and strafing. The lower-right and lower-left, which were blank spaces in the original interface, now have an automap and a comically-large version of the character's active weapon. Meters track health, stamina, hunger, and thirst, and statistics track protection against physical damage, fire, electricity, and poison, as well as weight and the amount of damage last inflicted on a monster, supposedly to help you gauge the utility of different weapons. It only stays up for a second, then reverts to 0.

 

I soon discover that the positive interface changes are balanced with a loss of any interesting puzzles and mechanics. There are illusory walls and a few pits, but none of the first game's hidden buttons, pressure plates, traps, sliders, and teleporters. It's also a smaller game, eight levels instead of 10, and the 32 x 32 dimensions a third smaller than the original game's 78 x 18. It takes me only about a third of the time to finish. 

     

All the game's doors simply open with buttons on the doors themselves. Three open with keys.

     

Gameplay starts like the original, with the character facing a well. There are wells strewn throughout the game, each one at least restoring the character's thirst meter, some restoring health and fatigue, and all providing experience for treasure (coins, gems, jewelry, ore) thrown into them.

 

The character begins with a t-shirt, blue jeans, a backpack, and a dagger. Dungeon shoes and a Scroll of Curing are found in the opening area. Doors lead east and west.      

       

The first enemies attack as I explore. There are blobs with faces, little stalks coming out of the ground that remind me of the corpsers from Ultima VII, wild dogs, and some kind of hostile plant. Killing them involves little more than repeatedly clicking the attack button. There's no cool-down period, but attacks do deplete stamina, so you have to sit still periodically to restore it. Health also restores on its own, albeit slowly. I spend a lot of time hunkered in safe areas.

     

An early enemy.

     

I find a shield, coins, some spell scrolls, various berries, and a couple of water flasks. Leather pants and a leather vest replace my starting clothes. The flasks are useful because they can be refilled at the fountain. The water meter depletes fast, so I imagine I'll want several in my backpack before any deep-dungeon dive. The game subtracts a point of agility once you cross an encumbrance threshold equal to your strength. This seems inevitable, as even without my pack, my gear weighs 12 pounds. After a while, I start over with a new character, favoring strength, when it becomes clear that I'm having trouble with the spell system.

      

Some of the game's many foes.

       

Spells have a lot of utility even for characters who are primarily fighters. The system, clearly inspired by Dungeon Master, has you string together combinations of one-to-four runes from a panel of 12 in the lower-right corner. You find these combinations on scrolls scattered throughout the game. I think the first spell I found was "Enchant Vial," and I never figured out what it did. "Combat Shield," "Energy Blast," and "Mend Wound," a light healing spell, also came along on the main level or the one just below it. I found the runes hard to memorize and easy to mis-click. It would be nice if the last spell that you prepared remained active until you wanted to change to something else, but instead, you have to click the runes every time you want to cast.

     

Here's another spell whose use remained a mystery.

     

There are a few illusory walls leading to secret areas, one with a message that confirms the use of treasure at the well. Another gives me a shuriken, an infinite-use ranged weapon, but it does so poorly, and enemies move to attack so fast, that I soon abandon it. A door to the north is locked, with a message in front of it that says, "Sorry, I lost the key." 

       

A useful message. If only the documentation hadn't already given this away. There's no explanation who "Algol" is.

     

The only way to exit the main level is to a lower level. Multiple stairways descend to different sections, some unconnected from the others. (I think; I didn't test every wall for illusory doors.) Armadillos and giant worms attack here, still relatively easy. I find my first long sword, a compass (useless with the automap), combat shoes, and rings that add to my defensive scores.  

       

The basement gives way to a second underground level, this one with bats and trolls. These are the first really tough enemies, and even though I've hit Level 10 by this point, I start having to wait to rest more. My leather items slowly get replaced with iron. I find a Key of Iron just as I also find the stairs to a third dungeon level, this one a catacomb full of piles of bones and living skeletons and mummies. There are also these green blobs (I remember them from the first game) that cannot be killed with normal weapons. They cast a poison field attack that is hard to dodge. Ghosts are similarly immune to normal attacks and hit hard. I eventually find a "Fireball" spell and use it to wipe out most of them, but slowly and with a lot of reloads. (Fortunately, saving and reloading is so fast it's nearly instantaneous.) "Fireball" remains my primary offensive spell for the rest of the game, as the rune sequence is easy to memorize and click.

      

Fighting mummies in the catacombs.

        

I haven't been mapping the game, instead relying on the automap. I miss mapping a bit, and my choice not to do it here means that I probably miss a lot of secret areas.  

       

Opening a door to a surprise.

      

The iron key opens the way to the castle, where I'm greeted by giants. I don't really keep track of the two castle levels closely, but enemies include red blobs, red skeletons, priest-looking guys, and hooded men in red pajamas. One of the levels has a dragon's lair where I find what I think is the game's best weapon, the Starblade. It works against creatures that can only be damaged by magic, and I stop using my stamina for offensive spells. I soon find a "Healing" spell that heals all hit points, so that becomes my primary spell for the rest of the game. I also cast "Nutrition" a few times to restore my hunger bar and "Deflection" against a few spell-based enemies. 

       

Finding the best weapon in the game.

      

There are no real puzzles during this journey, just a lot of battle (enemies respawn rapidly, unlike the first game), leveling up, and the acquisition of valuable inventory. My iron items are replaced with elven ones. Warrior characters can assemble a suit of Khan's armor (also present in the first game) and can find Khan's skeleton at the site of the last piece, outside the door to the golden skull. There is no mention in the game or backstory as to who Khan is. There are alternate items for characters who want to specialize in spells.

     

Finding Khan's bones near a well in the final area. A robot looks on. By now, I'm wearing a full set of Khan's equipment.

        

The second castle level culminates in a portal that takes me to a swamplike environment, where enemies include giant bugs and ghosts. The map is strewn with ore to feed to the final well.

      

Fighting a ghost in the swamp area. The final tower is in the distance.

     

The last level is found in a tower in the swampy area. Robots, red dragons, beholders, and vampires are among the enemies. Long before I fully map the level, I find the entrance to the room containing the golden skull. He is hard, but easier here than in The Mystic Well, where he attacked in an area full of other enemies and teleporters. In this one, he's alone in a big room near a well that restores stamina, so I can retreat and heal as much as I want and keep "Deflection" going.

    

The Golden Skull hits me with a spell.

         

I eventually kill him and, after a few beats, get the message below. The game lets me keep playing at this point.

 

I would have felt rewarded with a few more asterisks.

     

There are a few mysteries that I'd try to solve if I liked the game more:

   

• I never found a use for the spells "Enchant Vial," "Adaption," and "Homing Sphere." I can't tell from their names what they're supposed to do, even.

• One spell, scrawled on the wall of a secret area behind an encounter with a ghost, teleports the player back to the starting square. I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't turned to look at that wall. Did I miss any other messages scrawled on walls?

     

I don't know what the spell has to do with the message.

     

• In the swampy area is a document that reads: "Ha. What a fool." I have no idea what it's referring to.

• Mysterious items that I never found a use for: Klein Box, Magical Tome, Scrying Mirror, Torch (all areas are lit). "Mana Cubes" were mysterious until I tried eating them; I think the author intended "manna" (the food) rather than "mana."

• One of the castle levels has a room full of books titled "Interesting Book." I couldn't find anything to do with them.

 

What makes it interesting?

       

Playing the game was a passable experience. Its lack of sound and its simplistic gameplay made it easy to listen to an audiobook while I was playing. I give it a 23 on the GIMLET. Its best score is in "Equipment"; its worst is in "NPCs" (0) and "Game World" (1, and that's generous). This rates it 3 points lower than The Mystic Well, which had more interesting puzzles and did more with the character classes. This one has a better interface, however.

      

The game's death screen.

      

Both Daymare titles are the product of Oregon-based Jim Todd, who used "Jing Gameware" as his imprint for The Mystic Well but just offers his name here. He distributed it as freeware but happily accepted donations.

   

On his web site, where you can download all his games, he says that he gave up game-making because he had problems with "the different varieties of DOS and mouse drivers prevalent in the PC community" in the 1990s. I remember well. It surprises me that with so many different configurations and builds any PC game reliably worked. Now that PCs have become stable and he's retired, he says, he's working on games again. Unfortunately, they all seem to be tied in some nebulous way to cryptocurrency; for instance, a MMO dungeon crawler that he's currently working on, Nythyria, "includes an in-game cosmetic (making it a commodity) called Glitter that is pegged to Bitcoin Cash." I don't imagine there's a lot of overlap between my blog readers and gamers who would find that description attractive.

 

Upcoming Games: Fates of Twinion (1993), Infinite Fantasy Adventures (1993), Telnyr III (1993), Sword Dream (1993), Realms of Arkania: Star Trail (1994), Tower of Alos (1982)

The first 1994 game is on the list! (Again—there was one there for a little while, but we found some new 1993 games to bump it off. I don't remember what it was, so I re-rolled a new one from the list.) After that, I'll go back to the usual practice of alternating a "current" game with one from the backlist.

    

As a reminder, this discussion is to offer:

     

• Opinions about the game's RPG status. While applying your own definitions to such a discussion is fine, what really helps is if you apply mine. The FAQ (7th question) covers my definition.
• Tips for emulating the game
• Known bugs and pitfalls
• Tips for character creation
• Trivia
• Predictions for my reaction and/or the GIMLET score (without specifics that will spoil the game).
• Sources of information about the game from around the web, particularly obscure ones that I might otherwise miss during my pre-game research.

 

These are the next six titles:

 

•  Fates of Twinion (1993 | Sierra | DOS). I have to admit, I don't really look forward to this one. It's an expansion to Shadow of Yserbius (1992), an online, multiplayer game that really suffers in its offline format. I don't know what to expect from the sequel.

•  Infinite Fantasy Adventures, Volume 1: The Fantasy Worlds of Tamrak (1993 | Independent | DOS). This shareware Ultima clone may have been created with the DC Games kit. It looks a lot like The Rescue of Lorri in Lorrintron (1991).  

• Stone Mist 2: Legend of the Overfiend (1993 | Bit Brother | DOS). Not looking forward to this one, either. I had a lot of trouble with the first game in the series. Busca exposed the game's mendacity. Onto the 1994 list it goes.

• Telnyr III (1993 | Independent | Commodore 64). The third game in a trilogy by Australian jazz guitarist Peter Boothman. The first and second games only took a few hours and were extremely simple. Here's hoping that Boothman learned some new techniques for the third—or that it's similarly short.

• Sword Dream (1993 | Independent | Macintosh). This is a creation kit that produced top-down games in its 1993 version and first-person games in its 1997 3D incarnation. They look reasonably good, but the extent to which I play it is going to come down to whether there are sample scenarios included with the kit.

• Realms of Arkania: Star Trail (1994 | attic | DOS). I had mixed feelings about the original, which disappointed some readers, but I'm looking forward to seeing what's new in the sequel. MobyGames suggests there are more side quests and role-playing options. 

• Tower of Alos (1982 |  A&F | BBC Micro). This game came up on a random roll. Cursory investigation suggests that it is yet another knock-off of The Valley (1982), although I seem to recall that some work by El Explorador de RPG traced its origin to an even earlier title. I thought maybe I'd use this occasion to untangle the entire mess.

        

I await your thoughts. Please remember to keep the discussion spoiler-free. 

Sandor II and Daemonsgate: Summaries and Ratings

 

My most recent loss.

        

My current Wordle "win" percentage is 97%. I hope we can all agree that's not some kind of flex. Wordle is an easy game. Occasionally, you get into the kind of trap depicted above, but that certainly doesn't happen often. I thus occasionally indulge the fantasy that if I just win enough games in a row without losing them, the wins will overwhelm the losses to the point that my win percentage rounds to 100%, and then maybe I'll get a personal call from the president of MENSA or something.

    

I realized during my hiatus that I'd been thinking about my statistics in the right-hand column (sorry, mobile users) the same way. These days, it takes about 35 wins to nudge the "won" percentage a point higher, but some part of me has been looking forward to the day when it rounds to 100% or is actually 100% because I've gone back and finished the ones I've lost. Either plan is folly. If I never lost another game, my wins would round to 100% (just for games that have a winning condition) at Game #9950. As for going back and winning the rest, there's no way in hell I'm taking the time to win Moria, let alone Angband and BOSS: Beyond Moria too.

   

In fact, the thought continues, I've been thinking about those statistics all wrong. Higher isn't better. They're already too high. There's no way that 9 out of 10 games deserve to be played all the way to the end. I am old enough to start to make out the reaper's shadow in the distance, and yet I chose to spend the equivalent of seven working weeks on Fate: Gates of Dawn?! When I've never played the original Fallout or Wizardry 8? I should be pumping up those "loss" numbers, not trying to reduce them. I don't want to go back to the way things were during my first year, but I think from now on, until my win/loss ratio gets down to 85/15, the burden of proof is on the game.

   

So let's rip off that Band-Aid and get started. I'm going to soft-pedal the GIMLET for these two games. If you want to see the specific scores, you can go to my ratings spreadsheet; here, I'm just going to discuss the strengths and weaknesses and final score.

         

       

Sandor II: Kotalan und die drei Schwester'n

"Sandor II: Kotalan and the Three Sisters"

Germany

Motelsoft (developer and publisher)

Released 1991 for Atari ST

Date Started: 27 May 2025  

Date Ended: 20 October 2025

Total Hours: 15 (not won)

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

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later) 

            

Summary:

 

The third RPG from the German developer Motelsoft, Sandor II puts the player once again in the land of Sandor, where an evil wizard named Kotalan has kidnapped the daughters of King Salinos. A single pre-created character must assemble a party and ride to the rescue. Top-down overland exploration contrasts with first-person dungeon exploration, with themes and mechanics cribbed from several popular American titles. A relatively linear narrative leads the party from city to city, dungeon to dungeon, finding objects necessary for the next step, often by solving some kind of riddle or mechanical puzzle. Combat takes place on a tactical grid, likely inspired by 1980s SSI titles. Sound is scant and annoying, and the graphics and interface are a confusing mess, somehow regressed from the original Sandor.

 

***** 

 

Between the two games I'm wrapping up today, I feel worst about Sandor II. I'm not really "stuck" in it. If my mother's death hadn't forced a hiatus in the middle of the game, I probably could have finished it. My perception is that it's fairly nonlinear geographically but linear narratively, with each dungeon offering a clue or item necessary for the next dungeon, all the way to the presumable end. It was the same approach that the developer used with Magic Tower I: Dark Stone Ritual (1992).

   

Motelsoft is the kind of low-budget developer that its name suggests, but it's competent at analyzing the best elements of beloved commercial RPGs and combining them in interesting ways. I've said before that I think SSI's Shard of Spring (1986) and Demon's Winter (1990), two of the more under-rated games that I've covered, inform the core mechanics of Sandor and its sequel. But there are also elements of Pirates!, Dungeon Master, Phantasie, and probably a few other titles. Like Origin, the company never uses the same interface twice, which I also find admirable, particularly given their prolific output. Sandor II offers decent character development, inventory, puzzles, and backstory.

     

I kept looking for the "Visit the Governor" button.

     

But the game is a slog for three reasons. First, the combat takes far too long for the limited combat mechanics that the player is afforded. I believe Dungeon of Doom (1980) was the first game to use a tactical grid. Other notable appearances are in Tunnels of Doom (1982), Galactic Adventures (1983), Ultimas III-VI, and of course the Gold Box series. I've never articulated this in so many words before, but I've come to believe that a developer shouldn't waste a player's time with a tactical grid unless it offers enough tactics and environmental features to make the battle truly tactical. In other words, if you can't meticulously target the radius of a "Fireball" or make enemies come to you one at a time through a narrow mountain pass, then why don't we all just save time and fight our battles from a menu, thanks.

     

Oddly, the combat interface from the original Sandor was more attractive.

     

Problem #2 is the all-mouse interface, my objection to which many of you do not share or understand, so you're going to have to imagine the complete lethargy that overtakes me when I open the game and start clicking my way around the menus. Even if you regard the mouse as an acceptable tool, you must recognize that some interfaces are not well designed for it. To wit:

   

• Good use of a mouse interface: Exchanging an item of equipment by dragging it from one character and dropping it on another.

• Bad use of a mouse interface: Clicking on "Camp," then clicking on "Give," then clicking on the name of the character giving the item, then clicking on the item, then clicking on the name of the character receiving the item, then clicking "Okay."

   

The final straw is the one I'd rather not admit. I think part of me worries I'll get slapped with a Title VI violation. I'm just sick of stopping to translate. It's a complete momentum-killer. Understand that I'm not blaming the game for being in German. Both the authors and the audience were German. But it does prevent a brisk experience when I constantly have to stop and switch to a translation window. And before I get a bunch of comments suggesting other options, trust me, I've tried them. Anything that presumes to speed up the experience brings an equal number of speed bumps and other problems.

      

Sigh.

     

Issues #2 and #3 come together to create, I suppose, a fourth problem: I just find the game really confusing. I keep missing menu options, misinterpreting riddles, and finding items that don't seem to directly translate, and that I lack the cultural context to evaluate. Look at the riddle discussed here, for instance. It's discouraging to have to constantly stop and get help from German readers. This is all going to come up again, of course, but hopefully when it does, I won't be trying to get momentum after a long hiatus.

     

This screenshot has no particular reason for existing here.

        

In the GIMLET, pretty much every category registers in the 3-4 range except for NPCs (there really aren't any, aside from some "encounters") and graphics, sound, and interface (all poor). I gave a 5 to character creation and development. Everything else is "not bad but not outstanding," the kind of message that the final rating of 33 is intended to send.

   

Motelsoft will have plenty of additional chances, of course. Projekt Terra (1991) is still on my backlist. Escape from Ragor (1994) was selected for my 1994 list. There are 15 other titles, all the way to 2006.

 

****** 

         

      

Daemonsgate

United Kingdom

Imagitec Design (developer and publisher) 

Released 1993 for DOS 

Date Started: 4 August 2025   

Date Ended: 20 October 2025

Total Hours: 26 (not won)

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

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later) 

        

Summary:

 

This ambitious title has the player take the role of Gustavus, the guard captain in the city of Tormis, which has inexplicably been surrounded by besieging demons. Gustavus must assemble a party of allies, flee the city, discover the source of the invasion, and end it. The game features a continuously-scrolling, top-down world, much like Interplay's two Lord of the Rings games (and the later Infinity Engine) games, plus real-time-with-pause combat not unlike MicroProse's Darklands. The world of Hestor is a detailed, compelling place, informed by a huge chunk of lore in the manual, a background video, evocative maps, and multiple cinematics. Thousands of NPCs contribute to this lore. Alas, the developer's ambitions are sunk by tedious gameplay, including enormous cities (with no automap), an extremely long main quest, a confusing interface, and a character development system that encourages the player to front-load his grinding and coast through the rest of the game. 

 

**** 

      

Abandoning Daemonsgate is part-choice, part necessity. I can't get the next plot point to trip. Internet sources, including comments on my last entry, say that when I entered Pestur's Gate, someone was supposed to show up and direct me to meet Councilor Pestur in one of the inns. I can't make this happen no matter what, and if I meet Councilor Pestur in the town offices, no keyword I feed him advances the plot. I could reload an earlier save, do the more recent stuff, and try again, but that's where the "part-choice" comes into play.

       

Even as I leave the game, I love details like this.

     

It's so disappointing. As I covered in my first entry, the backstory and materials for Daemonsgate are wonderfully compelling. The interface, which is otherwise a bit of a mess, has some strong features, including an in-game encyclopedia that slowly builds as you talk to people, detailed descriptions of all items, and a party that slowly grows by convincing NPCs to join you. Unfortunately, the development team was too small and their ambitions too large. So many things don't work that I started keeping a long list.

       

• There are dozens of items in stores that seem to serve no purpose, hinting at game mechanics never implemented: lanterns, armorer's tools, fletcher's tools, flint and steel, chalk, and so forth.

• About half the time you try to leave a conversation with someone with the ESC key, the game crashes.

• NPCs often say things that suggest they were meant to be in different buildings or in different towns, or offer dialogue that seems to belong to other NPCs.

       

We are not in a guild.

      

• NPC dialogue has a constantly-growing list of keywords, most of which the NPCs have no reaction to.

• Taking a boat trip resets your preferences for music and sound effects.

• Shops routinely buy and sell something other than their signs indicate.

• Whenever I examine my food inventory, no matter how much food I have, the game says I have 7 days' worth.  

     

Those are some dense fruit loaves.

    

• When you pay for lodgings, you get an object called "Lodgings" in your inventory which sometimes, but not always, goes away when you rest.

• The towns, while evocatively designed and filled with details, are so large that it's nigh-impossible to find anything. 

• The game requires a mouse to select commands from menus. The placement of commands on menus doesn't make any sense, and one menu has only one command. The words are small enough that it's easy to select the wrong ones. There are insufficient keyboard backups.

• Inventory management is a confusing, unintuitive mess.

• Character development is entirely player-driven through training and practice sessions in camp. The player is highly motivated to just get it all out of the way early in the game.

• It is too easy to acquire the best inventory or near-best inventory early in the game.

• The above two factors trivialize the combat system. 

• You can avoid combats anyway by entering and then escaping. Even fixed enemies disappear when you do this. I suspect that this can break the game in places.

      

At 26 hours, I was probably only a third of the way through the game. Judging by a couple of resources, I would have spent at least a few weeks (real time) running around the continent, finding the five temples in the five "Skull Mountains" and activating the "Matrix Configuration," which would trap any further demon arrivals in Elsopea. Finding each temple involves a host of sub-quests, doing favors for local rulers. 

     

I think I found the right inn.

      

Returning to where we last saw Alathon, we would have discovered that he had moved on, prompting a long chase and several more sub-quests, culminating in the discovery that Alathon was dead. His spirit, trapped in a bottle, would have told us that to close the titular gate, we would need a Lore Master (Alathon himself) and a powerful Daemonologist. We would have picked up the Daemonologist in Dryleaf after doing a favor for him.

   

The next phase would have led us to the tomb of Karadith, a hero from the game's lore, and the recovery of his sword, the only weapon capable of slaying the daemon leader Alkat. Finally, we would have returned to the city of Tan-Eldorith, gone through the gate to the demon world, and destroyed it from that side (here's a video of that). We would have gone to Alkat's citadel, killed a bunch of sub-bosses to get various keys. ("This last level is VERY BADLY DESIGNED!" says a walkthrough that mysteriously ends abruptly with that sentence.) We would have confronted and killed Alkat, triggering the endgame cinematic. Even though we would have destroyed the gate, Alkat's death would have "torn a hole in the void," sending us to a mysterious place, and setting up the backstory for Daemonsgate II.

       

Confronting a demon earlier in the game.

             

The GIMLET comes to a 38, which in earlier years would top my "recommended" threshold, but which by 1993 is either on the line or just below it. This score is bolstered by its strongest category, particularly the game world (8), with which I find no fault except a lack of change based on player agency. NPCs and equipment both get a strong 6; the rest of the scores are 2 or 3, lowered by factors like the ones I described above: no character creation, a weak development system, confusing combat, no magic beyond creating things in camp, a poor interface, and tedious gameplay. 

 

Alas, poor reviews killed any chance for that sequel. In an April 1994 Computer Gaming World review that I could have written myself, Bernie Yee says that the game is "composed of good elements, but in their overly ambitious attempt to create a huge and complex world, the designers failed to integrate the good parts into a great whole." He laments the lack of any kind of automap, which a game with cities this size really needed; he calls the graphics "mundane" and "uninvolving"; and like me had problems with the interface. 

     

The knowledge base, offered by many games in the current era, was one of the game's best innovations.

        

MobyGames's round-up of reviews shows a median in the 60s, the lowest a crazy 15% from the Czech magazine Score: "Daemonsgate is rubbish. Its poor presentation and poor execution are perhaps surpassed only by its impossible story and lackluster gameplay." The best score, at 94%, came from the January 1994 Electronic Games: "A role-player's dream . . . complex and masterfully done." The author would disagree with the multiple items on my list: "The only thing really missing from the game is a good auto-mapping function." The German ASM, in June 1994, provides the average take: "While the story behind the game is certainly interesting, by the time you've encountered the first scrap of truly relevant action, you've already lost interest three times over."

     

The game's lead designer was Nigel Kershaw, whose only previous experience had been a board game called King's Table: The Legend of Ragnarok (1993). Daemonsgate may not have been successful, but it didn't seem to affect his career: he has remained in the gaming industry for the subsequent 32 years, most recently at the Liverpool-based Wushu Studios. This was his first and last RPG, however. (It was also Imagitec's last RPG; its subsequent offerings were almost all action and racing games.) I made tentative contact with him over the summer and really hoped to get some more background from him, but he stopped responding to my messages. Perhaps he didn't care for my first few articles.

    

As I suspected, that hurt a bit, but perhaps with these two games behind us, I can get some momentum and wrap up 1993 before we wrap up 2025. 

 

Game 560: Excelsior, Phase One: Lysandia (1993)

 

Welcome back, True Believers.

       

Excelsior Phase One: Lysandia

United States

Castle Software (developer); published as shareware
Released 1993 for DOS, 2000 for Windows

Date Started: 17 October 2025

      

Excelsior is a superior Ultima clone, so superior in its opening stages, at least, that I hesitate to even use the word "clone," which seems pejorative. But it is clearly inspired by Ultima, down to the tiled iconographic perspective, the use of most of the keyboard for the game's commands, and the detailed "handbook" that gives the player a tourist's view of the game world. 

    

The backstory (perhaps only a framing story; time will tell) casts the player as a "Fixer," an agent of the Council of World Watchers, sent to various planets as necessary to "correct any deviation in the cosmic fabric of planetary history." You have already served the Council for two eons. Your latest assignment is to the planet of Lysandia, where some unspecified evil is growing. "The populace is losing their will to advance, and progress is stagnant." The mission requires you to adopt the guise of a local, and thus the character creation process is couched as the Fixer selecting the body he or she will inhabit for the duration of the mission.

      

Part of the backstory.

     

As for that process, it's far more extensive than any Ultima, and I really hope the game makes use of its complexity. Every character starts with 15 points allocated to strength, dexterity, and intelligence and 5 allocated to luck, charm, and piety. After giving the character a name, the player next selects the race, which modifies the statistics. There are 13 race options: human, elf, dwarf, gnome, halfling, imp, troll, half-orc, half-elf, half-gnome, giant, golem, and glynn, the latter being a kind of angelic being with yellow skin. The effects on attributes are predictable: elves get lowered 1 point in strength, and raised 2 in dexterity and luck; trolls get 3 points of strength, -4 to intelligence, and -3 to charm; and so forth.

    

Sex is next. Males get +1 strength and -1 dexterity, women the opposite. "Sexless" is an option for imps, golems, and glynns, given their magical nature. The player then allocates a pool of 30 points to the three primary attributes and a pool of 5 points to the secondary ones. 

         

The final steps of character creation.

      

There are 13 classes available: warrior, archer, swordsman, ranger, militiaman, mage, cleric, paladin, scholar, bard, rogue, pirate, and assassin. These classes have various attribute minimums, not covered in the book, so it takes some experimentation to allocate the right number of points to meet the requirements. I wanted to make a sexless golem paladin, which is possible with 30 strength, 25 intelligence, and 8 piety. Yes, yes, hah, hah, paladins are always "sexless." 

   

The final step to character creation is assigning two skills from a list of 12: bandage, survival, scribe, lockpicking, seamanship, dark eyes, fencing, marksmanship, swimming, music, fist-fighting, and magic. Sometimes, a class gives you a skill already. My paladin had "Magic." I chose "Dark Eyes" and "Survival."

      

A final selection is the character's alignment, which is not absolute but set on a scale from "evil" to "good." I made my paladin modestly "good," but more on this in a bit. 

      

My starting character. Well, close to it, anyway.

      

Gameplay begins on an outdoor map, with the character standing between a city to the west and a castle surrounded by a moat to the east. The tiles are small, allowing for 26 x 18 of them to appear in the view window. My character starts with 60 hit points, 3 magic points, 250 food, and 100 gold pieces.

         

A new world awaits.

       

As I begin any Ultima clone, I tend to run through the same investigative questions.

    

How's the interface? 

   

Answer: in the best Ultima tradition. One command per keystroke: A)ttack, B)oard (a ship), C)ast, D)rop, E)nter, and so forth. Most of them are so obvious that I rarely need to look at the list of commands that can be called up with H)elp. Movement is with the arrow keys or numberpad, the latter allowing you to move diagonally.

    

Without any trouble, I head east to the castle, enter, and begin looking at things and talking with NPCs.

 

Is it going to offer NPC dialogue or just NPC monologues? 

    

In other words, for NPC interaction, is it going to clone Ultima I-III or Ultima IV and V? The answer, alas, is the former. NPCs mostly give generic lines.

   

But the game doesn't limit NPC monologues to one sentence. They frequently deliver entire paragraphs that the player must scroll, and every so often deliver messages so long that a black screen opens up to contain it all. There aren't many NPCs in the castle's single large level. Here's what they offer:

   

• Guards: "Enjoy your stay, and obey the law!"

• Clerics: "Come join my search for a higher being." 

      

That would be me.

       

• Warriors: "There is no more noble calling than that of a warrior." 

• Swordsmen: "There's no finer weapon than a well-made blade." 

• Andrew the Deft: "Know me as Andrew the Deft, friend." 

• Damian: The Ceremonial Man at Arms. Offers to train me in swordsmanship for 50 gold pieces. That answers one of my questions, at least: skills that you don't take during character creation can be purchased later. 

    

I later forget to return here. I guess I need to start making a list.

      

For services, the castle has a tavern where you can buy food, a bank where you can deposit and withdraw money, and a panel of six guildmasters who oversee the "leveling up" process when you gain enough experience. More on that later.

      

How do secret doors work?  

       

All games, whether iconographic or first-person, tend to offer four answers to this question.

   

1. There are no secret doors.
2. You have to search for them. Success may be certain or dependent on a character skill.
3. You just walk right into them; "secret" doors are in fact illusory walls.
4. You have to solve some kind of puzzle. 

      

Seemed like the obvious place to look.

       

Excelsior uses the #2 approach, with no skill involved. The places that the player must search are pretty obvious. You may have noticed that unlike many Ultima clones, the game does not occlude things that the character would not be able to see from the current position. That plus the fairly large view window means that "secret" areas are sometimes visible in their entirety. Almost right away, I find a secret larder off the tavern. That leads to the next question.

 

Is this the sort of game where you can just take things, or is that wrong?

    

It's amazing how relevant that question remains into the modern age. During the period where this blog was dormant, and I should have been playing old RPGs if I was going to play any RPGs at all, I admit I downloaded Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon (short review: like the "Scrollslike" approach; annoyed by the authors' irreverent, nonsensical use of Arthurian characters and themes). Almost right away, you're confronted with the question of whether it's okay to take this head of cabbage from the kitchen. You often don't know that a game has some kind of crime and bounty system until you screw around and find out.

         

No one seems to be bothered.

          

In this case, I grab sacks of food, hold my breath, and wait for the guards to snap to attention and start streaming towards me. They don't, so I guess I'm okay. The guards' lack of response automatically answers one of my follow-up questions: "Are any of the things I'm not supposed to steal technically key plot items that I'm required to steal, thus subsequently requiring me to slaughter dozens of castle guards?" You never forget your first RPG.

 

I also naturally check my alignment after the little heist, but it doesn't seem to have budged on the scale. 

      

What kind of king do we have here? 

     

That's another question that coincidentally echoes in Tainted Grail. If this is a boring Ultima clone, the king will be a benevolent Lord British-like character who sets me off on the main quest. Here, King Valkery seems more of an affable tyrant. He greets me with a "Welcome, commoner!" but says he's too busy considering a 30% tax increase to talk to me.

     

At least I didn't get a big exposition dump about virtue.

      

It's the king's mage who sets off the main quest. He has one of those multi-screen dialogues. As I (the character) speak to him, I recognize him as one of the Elder Fixers on the Great Council. He's the one who sent a warning about the problems the world is facing. He doesn't tell me much about said problems, but instead suggests that I find three mystical amulets which will help develop my attributes. He names three towns where I can find the amulets or at least leads on the amulets: North Blagsell, Roaldia, and Embiscule.

       

Part of a long encounter with the king's mage.

        

What sort of equipment system does the game offer?

    

The answer: much closer to Ultima V than the earlier games in the series. You can dual-wield weapons, for one thing. Instead of just one item of "armor," you can equip a helmet, gloves, shields, boots, and a torso item. On the negative side, there are no statistics available; you just have to assume that items that cost more are better.

    

I find a dagger and wooden shield in a secret area of the castle, but I naturally want better stuff, so I head out of the castle and west to the town of Oooblyae. The town has a tavern, a provisioner (torches, shovels, lanterns), a weapon shop, an armor shop, a spell shop, and a healer. I buy cloth armor and a shortsword.

        

Selections in the armor shop.

       

For NPCs in Oooblyae, one of them repeats that there's an amulet for each major attribute. Another tells me that there's a cartographer who can "aid me in locating a multitude of different places" in Castle Infinitum to the southwest. A third is proud of her pet duck that she's trained, and indeed you can visit the duck in a small pond in the town's center.

 

In an Ultima game, that would be a mantra.

       

What kind of combat system are we looking at?

        

This question has nothing to do with the duck. I could have segued that better. As you explore the land, enemies spawn randomly across the landscape and then head directly for the character. At Level 1, these enemies include gremlins, goblins, and kobolds. 

       

Things get out of hand.

      

Combat mostly uses the early Ultima approach. There's no separate screen. You just hit A)ttack or C)ast (if you have an offensive spell) and specify the direction. After combat, though, we find a more Ultima V approach in that enemies can drop multiple things, and just about anything otherwise found in the game—gold, food, weapons, armor, torches, and so forth—might be part of the NPC loot.

    

Combat is a lot harder than I would have expected. Multiple enemies can spawn at once and surround you. You miss a lot at Level 1, and they hit hard. I was killed in my first couple of battles with goblins. You can try to "escape" into a town, but the enemies remain on the map waiting for you when you emerge. That leads to the next question:

   

How can I reliably heal myself?

    

This is again a question that transcends Ultima clones specifically. The new player is always looking for a sense of what the damage/heal cycle is going to be. At one end of the spectrum, there are games that essentially restore you to full health after each battle, so that you only ever have to worry about one battle at a time. At the other extreme are games for which it is impossible to heal without some kind of resource, making the accumulation of battles as important as the individual battle.

   

The player usually seeks some kind of infinite resource that "breaks" this cycle. For instance, there are many games in which health regeneration does not happen automatically, but spell point restoration does (again, we see a parallel with Tainted Grail), so as long as you have a healing spell, you have an infinite resource. If health and mana regeneration both rely on food, potions, or other resources, the game becomes a lot harder. 

    

I can't have too many rounds like this.

     

Excelsior was very difficult in its early stages. There is no infinite resource. Health does not regenerate automatically. Healers and inns cost more money than the player makes from even several battles. For a while, I couldn't get out of a downward spiral in which I kept losing hit points in battle and hardly making enough money to compensate.

   

Fortunately, the game has a healing spell, and magic points do regenerate automatically (and quickly), but it costs 50 gold pieces for a spellbook and another 25 for the spell. I eventually got to a point where I was trapped in Oooblyae because I was down to 5 hit points; there were three enemies waiting for me outside; and I had no money. Unable to recover from this, I had to re-start the game and make the spell my priority.

     

How does the magic system work? 

    

Even Ultima has so many answers to this question that there's no common style across the series. The first two Ultimas made spells inventory items that you bought and used individually. Ultima III introduced the "pool of mana" approach, and the rest of the games built on that by adding first the need for reagents (Ultima IV), then the need to know the syllables associated with each spell (Ultima V), and then the need to purchase the spell first (Ultima VI and beyond).

     

Excelsior's approach is to make you buy a spellbook to hold all your spells, then buy each spell once. After that, you can cast your spells infinite times. The game gives each spell a two-letter code that you type when casting it, but it's not quite the same as the Ultima syllable system. "Anti-Pain" (AP) costs just a couple of mana points, so even though I started the game with only three, I could cast it, walk around, cast it again, and ultimately get back to full health as long as I could get to the safety of a town.

         

I buy my first spell.

         

But Excelsior has a wrinkle that I've only really seen in one other game that I can recall: Thalion's Dragonflight (1990). Each spell is given an alignment, and the spell costs less the closer the character is to its alignment. Moreover, as you cast spells, your alignment slowly shifts towards the alignment of the spells you're casting. In my case, "Anti-Pain" is on the "good" side of the scale, but only a few ticks above neutral. Thus, as I healed myself, I gradually became more "evil." I'm not sure how much sense that makes philosophically.

        

All I wanted to do is stop the bleeding.

        

Anyway, "Anti-Pain" still didn't protect me much on long journeys between cities, so I decided to spend a little time grinding around Oooblyae, at least until I had the best equipment the city had to offer.

   

How does character development work?

    

Same as Ultima III and beyond: experience and leveling. The Guildmasters take the place of Lord British as the principal agent of leveling. Gaining a level conveys more hit points and magic points; spells become more powerful; and there's a hint that glowing orbs found in each castle (behind a maze of secret doors, in the case of the Orb of Strength in Castle Excelsior) will increase attributes once the character has the associated amulet. You may recall that Ultima V had glowing balls in the dungeons that served a similar purpose.

       

These guys remind me of the "review board" of Skara Brae (cf. The Bard's Tale).

        

For now, the increased magic points and hit points were enough to make me feel a bit safer, and I was happy to see that the number of hit points cured by "Anti-Pain" also increased. 

    

Enemies scale to meet the character's level. At Level 2, I started encountering hobgoblins, gnolls, and mummies. So far, none of them seem to have any special attacks or inflict status effects. After some experimentation, I decide that having two weapons (providing two attacks per round) is more valuable than the additional defensive value of a wooden shield.

      

Not yet, anyway.

           

As I stabilize at Level 3 and prepare to set out around the land, I have two final questions:

   

How big a problem is food going to be?

    

Not much of a problem at all, it seems. It depletes slowly and is replenished cheaply. You often find a few dozen meals on slain enemies. As Hour 3 approaches, I'm still working off the initial allotment. No prolonged period stealing fish and chips for this fixer.

 

How am I going to navigate?    

    

Poorly, perhaps. The game did not come with a world map, and so far, there's no hint of any coordinate system. I feel like any top-down game ought to offer one or the other, ideally both. For now, I don't think I'll map, but I may have to do so if the world is large or complicated.

       

Perhaps there isn't just one world.

       

I would normally follow the coast in a clockwise or counterclockwise pattern, but an NPC mentioned a cartographer in Castle Infinitum. If the game does have a coordinate system, it's probably to be found there. Off we go into another world.

   

Time so far: 3 hours