Game 575: Arena of Death (1991), Game 576: Darkhold (1987), and BRIEF: Buio! (1984)

 

Why does my sword have a blue tip?

      

Arena of Death

United Kingdom

Hibbs Creations Limited (developer and publisher) 

Released 1991 for Commodore 64

Date Started: 1 May 2026

Date Ended: 1 May 2026

Total Hours: 2

Difficulty:  Easy (2.0/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)     

     

Arena of Death is so simple that it's barely a game. You start it.

      

You allocate 100 points among three attributes: strength (damage done), stamina (health), and skill (accuracy).

            

You select the best weapon that your strength will support, plus a backup weapon in case you fumble it.

      

I can take a broadsword or anything below.

     

You select armor if you want. Different types of armor have different protective values but also subtract form your skill.

      

Those rings aren't available to the player, but you encounter enemies who have them.

      

You enter the arena. The game tells you what kind of enemy you're fighting, what kind of weapon he wields, and what kind of armor he has.

      

Prepare to die, salamander!

      

Each round, the game rolls for initiative. If you get the initiative, you can charge, swing, thrust, change weapons, surrender, or check your status.

  

If the enemy gets the initiative, you can parry, dodge, retreat, change weapons, counter-attack, or check your status. 

    

Defense options.

        

Once one of you has taken sufficient wounds, the battle is over. If you win, you get between 0 and 2 points added to your three ability scores, your character heals, and you return to the main menu, where you can select different weapons and armor or, absurdly, save the game.

 

Win 5 times, and the game tells you that you win the match "and your freedom." At that point, saving the game (which is absurd) becomes possible. 

   

Win 10 times and you win the game and get listed in the Hall of Fame.

           

This was unexpected.

      

For my first character, I chose 40 strength, 40 stamina, and 20 skill. I equipped a broadsword. I won every match and had won the game 20 minutes later. My opponents, in order, were a lizard man, a "Chester," a centaur, a lizard man, a kobold, a goblin, a centaur, a dwarf, a bugbear, and another Chester.

   

Since what happens during battle is invisible, I have no idea which attacks and defenses work best, or whether the best strategy changes for different opponents or different opponents' weapons and armor. I similarly don't know whether certain weapons work better against certain opponents or certain armor.

        

The character status screen.

      

The points you get for each victory aren't really sufficient to have achieved a new weapon level by the end of the game, so the "development" isn't worth much.

   

Enemies I encountered in subsequent passes through the game include gnolls, warlocks, and warriors.  

        

"Like, I was fighting myself . . . or . . . something?"

     

In the rare case that you die, there's a chance of a resurrection. 

      

It's a good thing I didn't die or surrender often, because if either thing happens, the game asks for a disk (I don't know whether it wants the main disk or a save disk) and then refuses to accept anything that you insert. 

     

The game is sort of an all-text Darkwood (1992) but without the inventory upgrades that game offered in between matches. It gets a 9 on the GIMLET, nothing rising higher than a 2, 0s in "Game World," "NPCs," and "Economy."

    

Arena was created by Patrick Hibbs of Hibbs Creations Limited. No other games seem to be associated with him. I don't know if it's the same company, but a company by that name has four free apps on the Amazon app store, all from 2021: Different Types of Tea, History of Lifted Jeep Wrangler, How to Renovate Your Bathroom, and Advantages of Swimming. All appear to be text only; none have any reviews.

    

***** 

     

     

Darkhold

United States
Softdisk (developer and publisher); published in Loadstar magazine

Released 1987 for Commodore 64

Date Started: 1 May 2026 

Date Ended: 1 May 2026

Total Hours: 2

Difficulty:  Easy (2.0/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)     

    

Darkhold is an action game in which one or two players joystick their characters (a warrior and/or a wizard) around a dungeon, kill enemies, and collect treasures. It was created by frequent Loadstar contributor John Mattson, whose work we saw previously in Questwriter (1990), Labyrinth (1991), and Knight's Quest (1991).

    

The dungeon has four levels. Each level has rooms arranged in an 8 x 8 grid, wrapping, for a total of 64 rooms on each level and 256 levels in the dungeon. The characters navigate the larger dungeon corridors and then poke their heads into the individual rooms. Each room can contain some combination of:

   

• Stairs up or down.
• A monster (specters, basilisks, manticores, trolls, harpies, fire newts, dragons).
• A treasure chest.
• A healing fountain.

       

A basilisk blocks the way to a treasure chest.

    

Despite their names, both characters are pretty much the same in combat. They both have missile attacks activated by the joystick button, but enemies close the distance fast. As soon as a character touches an enemy, they're presumed to be in melee combat. It's over fast.

      

The wizard melees with a troll.

       

The goal of the game is to find four pieces to a medallion. They are stored on the four levels in random treasure chests. Treasure chests otherwise contain gold, which adds to each character's score. Collecting chests in rooms that have them is the only way to "clear" those rooms. If the room only has an enemy, with no chest, there's no reason to fight him, as you get no special benefits from killing enemies. If you pop into a room, see only an enemy, and immediately leave, the room is considered "cleared."

     

Hey, I'll take the W.

        

Various notes:

   

• Some enemies have ranged attacks. Harpies are the worst enemy in the game, as they have some kind of "magic field" that damages you as you spend any time in their presence.

• Healing fountains heal 30 hit points with each visit, and they're good for multiple visits. At some point, the healing fountain will disappear and the room will become a standard monster room with no chest.

• When two players play at once, one of them controls the "party" as they move around the dungeon. Once inside a room, the players can operate independently. But battle is over quickly, and enemies are optimized for a single character, so I can only imagine it was a boring, frustrating experience. Both characters have to independently leave the room using the same exit to continue. 

     

The two characters together in a room with a healing field.

      

• If you use the "fire" button on the joystick while outside a room, the game thinks you want to drink a potion. I never found a potion anywhere in the dungeon. It's possible I missed some documentation.

• Similarly mysterious are the "items" section of the main screen, which never show more than one item (the character's weapon upgrade). 

• If you just stand around in the corridors, enemies "ambush" you and draw you into a temporary room, though you can just immediately duck out, the same way you can in regular rooms. 

• Both characters can upgrade their weapons on the first level. They make a minor difference in battle, and the task is accomplished quickly, so it's not a huge part of the game. 

           

Wandering the hallways between rooms. The checkerboard rooms are unexplored; the ones with the blue wavy lines have healing fountains.

     

It's not really an RPG—no character development—but it was over fast and it was diverting enough for an hour or so. The levels are generous enough with healing fountains that you're never in any serious danger. It only gets a 7 on the GIMLET, lacking any real RPG elements.

 

 ***** 

        

      

Buio!

"Darkness!"

Italy

Editoriale Video (developer and publisher)

Released 1984 for ZX Spectrum

Rejected for: Insufficient character development 

     

Until I found a few entries in a ZX Spectrum database, I thought that Time Horn: Il Corno del Tempo (1991) was the first Italian RPG. It may still be. Buio! is yet another adaptation of The Wizard's Castle (1980) or Monster Combat (1980), and a relatively uninspired one at that. The only relevant statistic is the character's forza ("strength," but more accurately, "hit points"), which goes up and down based on luck more than experience or skill.

   

There's no backstory. The character is cast into a 16-level tower, randomized for each new game—a process that seems to take forever even accounting for the year and platform. Each level has 10 x 10 squares. Each square offer some combination of monsters, treasures, and special encounters. To get to the next level, you have to accumulate 2500 x L gold pieces, where "L" is the level you're currently on, then find the "key," which automatically teleports you along. Why they didn't just make the key a stairway is one of the many mysteries of Buio!

      

Starting out on Level 1 with no gold, 8000 hit points.

       

Combat is with generic mostri; the game doesn't even bother to pull from a database of different monster names. As combat begins, you have to decide whether to go for a leg (G), body (C), or head (T) attack, and hold down the appropriate key. Some monsters are particularly resistant to some attacks and vulnerable to others, but unless I'm missing something, the only way to tell is to try one of the options and see how fast the monster's health depletes. Meanwhile, your own health is depleting quite rapidly, even at era-accurate speeds. I had a tough time making my initial 8,000 hit points last the level. The only other option in combat is to run (R).

   

The combat screen. Nothing to do here but hold down the key.

        

Special encounters include piles of treasure, weapons that add to your health (there is typically only one of these per level), merchants who will sell weapons, teleporters that take you to random places, and enchanted rooms that raise and lower your strength. 

    

An "enchanted place" saps my strength.

       

A map of the level can be accessed every time you defeat five monsters. It shows the locations of rooms with monsters (M), weapons (A), keys (+), and special encounters (#). Monsters can wander into any room, though, so the "M" isn't really helpful. Movement is with the 5678 keys. It's probably an emulator issue, but I found the game to be horribly unresponsive to my keypresses.

       

The level map. I guess there are 496 monsters remaining.

        

I made it to Level 2, but no way am I wading through 15 more levels of this just for the inevitably brief congratulazioni! at the end. 

    

As a side note, I've never had any formal lessons in Italian, but my general familiarity with the language from food, music, architecture, wine, and Dean Martin songs, coupled with my knowledge of French and Spanish, means that I can almost always "triangulate" the language. Like if you know "woods" is bosque in Spanish and bois in French, it seems inevitable that it's bosco in Italian. Given that, the translation of Buio! surprised l'inferno out of me. It was on my "upcoming" list for weeks, and I just assumed it meant "wow!" or something. It has no cognates that I know of in the other Romance languages. Google says that it comes from a Latin word for reddish-brown. Imagine if there was an English language game called Reddish-Brown!

Arena: Won!

It sounds like Bethesda originally intended for the PC to be ported into later games.

        

I was somewhat bored with Arena by the end of the last entry, so I just raced through the last few dungeons without doing any extra side quests or anything. 

    

The last few dungeons are real time sinks. Not only are some of the levels extremely large, but the player is also encountering much more difficult enemies, including liches, iron golems, stone golems, and fire daemons. These enemies might individually take five minutes to kill, even if the battle goes well.

    

I thus adopted a few tricks to make the process go faster. Down stairways show up on the automap in blue if you get anywhere close to them. So I didn't have to explore every inch of the rather large final levels, I bought a large stack of Potions of Invisibility and used them to just race around the levels, maximizing coverage, until I found the blue stairways. Even on the bottom levels, where I had to explore more carefully to find quest items, Potions of Invisibility helped ensure that I didn't have to stop to fight every battle. Unfortunately, wraiths, ghosts, vampires, and liches can see through the invisibility.

     

Fortunately, wraiths die fast.

         

Other strategies:

   

• Commenter Vince is correct that "Shield" and "Mana Absorption" are a powerful team. You can create spells that call upon them for fairly low casting costs. Cast it, run around the level, let your shield absorb magical hits from creatures while simultaneously restoring your own mana bar, then cast again.

• I found a Mithril Longsword of Firestorm so I could take advantage of this powerful spell without having to constantly switch my weapon to fight higher-level enemies. If there's any enemy Mithril can't hit, I never found it.

• I also bought a large stack of Potions of Strength to enhance damage.

• I was much more liberal with "Passwall," allowing me to explore levels more systematically. 

 

Even with these tricks, I spent far more time on the game this week than I should have, particularly where it's the last week of classes and I'm behind in grading. One of these days, my students will find out about this blog, and I don't know if they'll forgive me.     

          

The Conclave of Baal kicks off the final quest.

     

The quest for the seventh and eight pieces were, as usual, split into two parts: one dungeon to find the map to the second dungeon, the second dungeon to find the piece of the Staff of Chaos. As this session began, I entered the Vaults of Gemin to find the map to the Murkwood. The thin excuse for this quest came from the Conclave of Baal in Stormhold. The priest told me that an initiate, "thinking to impress his masters," cast a destructive spell that caused the Vaults of Gemin to collapse. A tablet that held the map to Murkwood was lost.

   

The Vaults of Gemin were a two-level dungeon in Black Marsh. I think the first level was probably the single largest dungeon level of the game (maybe it was tied with the first three levels of the Mines of Khuras). If Arena were a grid-based game, the first Gemin level would be something like 100 x 100. The map occasionally had some piles of rubble to go with the "collapsed" story.

        

Yes, clearly some foul magic brought this whole place down.

       

Enemies included homonculuses, wraiths, hellhounds, ghosts, stone golems, and skeletons. Honestly, by this point in the game, almost all dungeons had almost all enemies, so listing them all doesn't make a lot of sense. I'll just focus on the new or particularly ubiquitous ones.

   

I got a bit lucky on the first level. The last few dungeons had located their stairs from Level 1 to Level 2 towards the center of the dungeon. Here, then, I just made a beeline straight down the middle, occasionally using "Passwall" instead of backtracking too much. Since the stairway was in the south-central part of the map, I saved myself hours of enemies (and, admittedly, experience points) over my usual strategy of following the outer edge first. 

     

I was prepared for a larger dungeon, but the second level was the last. It was large, but a lot of it was water, with about a dozen large islands, connected by bridges, each holding one or two large rooms. There were a lot of ghosts, wraiths, and homonculuses on the islands, and I made significant use of "Levitate" to get around the level quickly.

    

And yet I took only this pathetic screenshot.

        

Fortunately, the room with the tablet had a riddle on the door. For some reason, I didn't write it down or take a screenshot, but the answer was ONION and the riddle had something to do with peeling off a silk layer and crying.

     

I say "fortunately" because I don't think I would have noticed the tablet on the floor if the riddle hadn't informed me that there was something important there:

     

That really blends with the floor.

      

Back in Stormhold, the Conclave of Baal marked the location of Murkwood on my map, and pretty soon I was there.

      

I don't much care for the idea of an Elder Scrolls game in Black Marsh, but this area would be cool with modern graphics and sound.

        

Murkwood was two levels. The first was very large in total space, but mostly open, with occasional hedgerows. Fog made it difficult to see far in the distance. Wolves, homonculuses, medusas, and fire daemons made up most of the enemies.

   

The center of the level had a small hedge maze that brought me to a door. As you might guess, it had another riddle. The last two lines were enough for me (LOVE).    

     

Note the homonculus coming out of the mist.

         

The second level was very small, consisting of a kind of island with a pit around it. It looks intimidating, but pits are easy to jump over and cause no damage if you fall into them. (It occurred to me belatedly that fall damage isn't a thing in this game at all.) The central room, with the staff piece, had yet another riddle:

      

It's funny how they took pains to make some riddles rhyme and then just said "screw it" with others.

        

This one took me a few guesses. I was so sure it was RIVER that when I got it wrong, it threw me, and I went down some weird paths before remembering what rivers are made of.

   

The central island also had six "cells," each with an iron golem. If I had felt it was necessary, this would have been a great place to grind. Six iron golems are worth about 180,000 experience points, and to reset them, I just would have had to go up the stairs and back down. I just grabbed the staff piece and got out of there, though.

     

That would be the golems busting out of their cages.

            

"You amaze me with your tenacity," Jagar Tharn said when he appeared in my dreams. He, instead of Ria Silmane, told me that the final piece was in Dagoth-Ur in Morrowind. Morrowind fans will know that the later game retconned the name of the mountain as Red Mountain. Dagoth-Ur is the name of the game's villain, who lives in the mountain. Nonetheless, it's a mild retcon, and you could see how the name of the inhabitant could be conflated with the place. Anyway, since it's so prominent (and visible from every city in the province), the game had to pretend that the specific entrance that I needed was hidden, not the mountain as a whole.

     

I should have stopped here and posted this as the winning screenshot.

          

More important, when Ria Silmane did appear to confirm the final location, she said: "The entrance to that fabled mountain has disappeared with the Dwarves that mined it." The disappearance of the dwarves—later called Dwemer—is probably the biggest mystery in the entire Elder Scrolls setting, and here they've already referenced it in the first game. Amazing. 

       

Ria Silmane plants a seed that will spawn a forest.

           

My first stop in Morrowind was in Ebonheart, here on the mainland side of the province, not on the island of Vvardenfall (as in Morrowind). I got lucky with that choice, as that's where I found the quest for the map to Dagoth-Ur. In the palace, King Casik told me that he had the Anvil of Mithas, "greatest of the Dwarven blacksmiths." But he needed the only item that could shape something on the anvil without destroying it: The Hammer of Gharen. It was to be found in a dungeon called Black Gate.

       

Arena is like Star Wars: Every single character and place later gets an extensive history in the expanded universe.

        

Black Gate took over five hours, or almost half of this entire session. The stairs from Level 1 to Level 2 were neither in the center of the level nor along its outside edges; they were in the southwestern quadrant, but away from the walls. As such, I had mapped almost all of the rest of the level before I found them. (I did continue to avoid many of the battles with Potions of Invisibility.) 

     

That doesn't make a lot of sense, but at this point, I'm not going to question it.

          

The second level was almost as big, and the Hammer of Gharen was in a room surrounded by three locked doors, each requiring a different key. I realized later that any one of the keys would have been enough (the doors are three options, not in sequence), but somehow I had the idea that I would have to find all of them, so I ended up mapping basically the entire level. The place was lousy with iron golems, which are huge, so sometimes I had to fight them just to get past them. 

   

There's not much else to report from this five-hour process, which I suppose is a big part of what's wrong with the game. I finally found the keys, got into the chamber, picked up the hammer, and returned it to Ebonheart. The king pointed me to the entrance to Dagoth-Ur. I stocked up on potions and had my blades repaired before heading off. 

       

This just makes me want to play Morrowind.

           

Dagoth-Ur was a three-level dungeon with, as you might expect, a lava theme. It introduced the first new enemy in a while: vampires. These bastards cast powerful fireballs, regenerate hit points in the middle of combat, and have to be killed with spells. If you kill them with weapons, their sprite changes to a skeleton corpse with tatters of their robes hanging on, but they soon pop back to life (fortunately, not at full health). Spells like "Fireball" and "Firestorm" end them permanently.

     

A "dead" vampire.

        

I reverted to my "right wall first" exploration pattern, which was fortunate, as I found the stairs to Level 2 before exploring more than a quarter of the level. Level 2 took a bit longer, as the stairway from there to Level 3 required me to pass through five doors locked with different types of keys. Four of them could be bypassed with "Passwall," leaving only the diamond key—which was, of course, the last one that I found. In between was a large level of lava tunnels and pools, vampires, fire daemons, and medusas.

       

Arriving in the final area.

      

The final level consisted mostly of a huge lava chamber peppered with islands, most with foes like homonculuses and stone golems. The final piece of the Staff of Chaos was in a depression surrounded by high walls. I had to climb up and then drop down.

      

This feels like a trap.

         

As  I reached for the last piece, I got a riddle:

   

From the beginning of eternity,

To the end of time and space,

To the beginning of every end,

And the end of every place . . .

    

This one took me a while. You may get it faster. By way of hints, I'll say that it helps to have experience with cryptic crosswords and I was very interested to hear how this riddle was localized in other languages. Then I looked it up and it turns out Arena only ever had an official English release. That must have saved them some trouble, not just with this riddle.

    

That's a lot of burning and brightness and cold and strength for a staff drained of its power.

          

After I found the final piece, Jagar Tharn popped up in my dreams to deliver the twist: "Have you discovered what I have known all along? The Staff is drained of all magical potential. I did it myself before scattering the pieces . . . It is a useless stick . . . Come find me if you dare."

   

So the entire quest for the Staff of Chaos was for nothing according to the game's own lore. It's still necessary, as mechanically you can't get into the emperor's palace without having finished it, but still. It's one of those tropes I hate.

        

I'm coming to kill him. Why would I let myself be "turned away"?

       

I never saw Ria Silmane again, which surprised me. Maybe the power tethering her to Mundus finally ran out.  

    

The final showdown took place in the Imperial City, the only city that the player can visit in the central Imperial Province. Imperials do not exist yet, so the populace is a melting pot of other races. I know some Elder Scrolls fans were upset when Oblivion retconned the Imperial Province to have a rather bland European climate rather than the jungle described in some early sources, but those sources post-date this game. The wilderness around the Imperial City is pretty standard northern-hemisphere forest, snow-covered during the winter months.

      

The jungles of the Imperial Province.

       

There's also no White Gold Tower in Arena, but rather a more standard palace accessible from a southern gate.

    

The Imperial Palace.

      

As I entered, a cinematic showed Jagar Tharn ripping off his Uriel Septim VII disguise and then taunting the character:

     

I have watched you as you blundered your way to this place. At one time I even considered approaching you with an offer to lead my Imperial Guards, but it is plain that you are not worthy of such a position. Be not fooled by what you would call success in your journey across the Empire, for you have never faced a being as powerful as I. Your death shall be slow and torturous, a suffering that shall span the millennium. Come, I await you in the dungeons below.

          

Great. An offer to have the job I already had 18 levels ago.

     

The Imperial Palace had four levels, but it was a bit unique in that a) the first level was fully mapped in my automap, b) there were multiple stairways between levels, and c) there wasn't a single locked door or riddle. Accordingly, it didn't take very long to get to the end, even though the creators loaded the dungeon with the toughest enemies, including a new one: liches. They can see invisibility, cast a ranged shock spell, and regenerate. When I had to fight them, I mostly spammed "Firestorm." When possible, I cast "Shield/Absorb Magic" and ran past them.

       

These liches may be undead, but they have strangely full-bodied hair.

            

It didn't take me long to reach the fourth level, another huge lake of fire surrounded by corridors that force you to go around the entire perimeter before you can enter. Fortunately, they were wide enough that I could just blow past most enemies.

   

Jagar Tharn, looking not much different than a vampire, was by himself in a structure in the center of the lava lake. I got my buffing spells up and attacked as soon as I entered. I soon discovered that he was completely immune to all physical weapons. He casts a variety of spells. I had to defeat him by casting my own spells, but by this time, I had plenty of my own, plenty of Potions of Restore Magic, and plenty of items capable of casting spells. I just had to keep up with Potions of Healing. As with the liches, I mostly defeated him with my sword's "Firestorm."

    

Hey, I'm a BattleMage, too!

      

Technically, he never died. He just stood still and stopped attacking. I was confused about some things later and checked online, and I guess he was supposed to surround himself with a protective bubble, but I never saw that. I just saw him stiffen and go inert. I took the opportunity to scout the area. His little building had four cells, two with treasure, one with a Mithril Key, and one (opened with the Mithril Key) with a heretofore-unmentioned Jewel of Fire.

       

Mondain's Gem . . . uh, rather, the Jewel of Fire.

       

The Jewel of Fire was apparently the key to defeating him, as when I touched it, I got a little cinematic of the jewel itself, then the congratulations message at the top of this entry.

       

This is all I got from the endgame cinematic.

       

It turns out, I was robbed somehow. This video shows what I was supposed to see: the aforementioned cinematic of the character approaching the Jewel of Fire, Jagar shouting, "You must not! The Jewel holds my lifeforce!" before melting, a portal opening, and Uriel Septim VII returning to thank the character for his assistance and naming him Eternal Champion. On a reload, not only did I not get any of that, but the game didn't even show me the first part of the cinematic. It just jumped from me touching the Jewel of Fire to the final message above. Must be some video setting.

       

Part of what I was supposed to see.

       

A few final notes:

   

• Apparently, you don't even need to fight Tharn; you can just run to the key, grab it, unlock the gate, and touch the Jewel of Fire.

• The ending I was supposed to get is from the CD-ROM version of the game. The original floppy version had a different cinematic, in which Uriel is shown portalling out of Oblivion with his guard captain, Talin, who I thought I was supposed to be. That's definitely how the manual begins. I haven't been able to find a version that does not begin that way, but I presume that one exists.

     

The original game also has thanks from the guard captain.

      

• The voice of Uriel Septim VII in the CD-ROM version is uncredited, but it sounds plausibly enough like Patrick Stewart (who did the voice in Oblivion). The two versions of Uriel look quite different, of course.

• I was Level 19 when I finished the game, about one million experience points shy of Level 20. 

• After the winning message, my character was returned to the Imperial City, where I could keep playing.

• It would have been nice to have a closing message from Ria Silmane, just to bookend things. 

• I somehow have 9 pieces of the Staff of Chaos in my inventory. 

          

This screenshot also shows how much I overdid it on potions.

        

I look forward to rating this one. I don't expect it to do terribly well despite its landmark status. While it set up so much for later games in the series, the gameplay that it offered was relatively bland. I enjoyed it a lot better in the opening stages, when dungeons were smaller and individual battles quicker.

   

Final time: 43 hours 

Realms of Arkania: Star Trail: Summary and Rating

 

What moment from the game do you think this box image was trying to recreate?

      

Realms of Arkania: Star Trail

Original German name: Das Schwarze Auge: Sternenschweif ("The Dark Eye: Star Trail")

Germany

attic Entertainment Software (developer); Fantasy Productions Verlag (original publisher); Sir-Tech Software (U.S. publisher)

Released 1994 for DOS

Date Started: 8 January 2026

Date Ended: 21 April 2026

Total Hours: 60

Difficulty:  Moderate (3.0/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)     

   

Summary:

     

This sequel to Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny (1992) uses the same interface —first-person dungeon and town exploration, overhead world exploration by menu, combat on a grid with an axonometric perspective—with a few improvements. Thematically, it's quite a bit different, requiring the party to visit only a small number of locations in its small world, offering only a couple of side quests and dungeons.

   

The plot concerns the recovery of an artifact called the Salamander Stone, which will help unite the Elves and Dwarves against the orcs, who seem to be conquering everything. The plot seems to lose its way a few times, and both it and the game world are difficult to interpret without external sources covering Das Schwarze Auge setting. The game has a lot of logistical considerations, particularly when it comes to overland travel, which sometimes created satisfying moments strategically and sometimes just annoyed me. In general, though, the game offers a full, sophisticated set of RPG elements, including detailed character creation, meaningful NPC interaction, tactical combat, inventory logistics, and a meaningful economy. In each of these areas, it regrettably has a number of negatives that balance its positives.

    

****

    

On a reload, I was able to win the final battle without losing anyone. I chose the quickest option, just re-fighting that battle, this time understanding how it worked. (It helped that one of my warriors had the Dragon Slayer equipped, which did a lot of damage.) My characters were still dying of thirst as I exited the dungeon, but I trust that doesn't carry into the next game or, if it does, that I'll be in a city when the game begins.

     

"All of you, this time."

       

As for the rest of it, there were a lot of things that worked well and a lot of things that didn't. The game has solid RPG elements, including its use of skills, the utility of leveling, tactical options in battle, a number of special encounters with role-playing options, and the survival elements. On the negative side, I think it was a bit sloppy in the way that it revealed story and lore to the player; inventory upgrades are few and far between; the translation from German is a bit wonky in places; and I never really warmed to traveling across the game world by menu.

      

You have my comments on combat from the last entry, and with apologies to those who disagree, I simply don't think the spell system works very well. It has the same problem as skills, really: Until you've played for a while, you don't have a strong sense of what will actually be useful. With skills, you get so many points that it isn't as much of a problem. With spells, so many start deep in the negatives (and in many schools, you can only advance by one per level) that you really need some experience or spoilers to know what to focus on. On the plus side, I do like that many spells have out-of-combat uses.

       

My mage's spell values at the end of the game. That's a lot of negatives.

         

Then you have a bunch of stuff that's simply weird, annoying, or both:

      

• A party created in Star Trail spends the entire game getting to the same experience level as an imported party. 

• You're told not to loot anything in the first dungeon, which would be absurd if taken literally, since the Girdles of Might are practically essential. Plus, I think you need to take some items to get through the dungeon.

    

There are only about six recipes in the game, and here are two of them—but, apparently, I wasn't supposed to take them.

     

• You can create new characters at any temple but can only add them to your party if you go all the way back to Kvirasim. (Some reviews made it sound like it was possible to create and add characters elsewhere, but if it is, it never worked in the places that I tried it.)

• The subtitle of the game refers to a side quest that cannot be completed. 

• The party irrecoverably loses all its equipment (except magic items) midway through the game.

• The main quest is for the Salamander Stone. After finding it, the party has it stolen in scripted encounters at least three times.

          

Adding insult to injury, I still don't know who this jackass was.

        

These are just the major ones. I think my entries documented a lot of minor annoyances, such as a chest that could only be opened with a specific interface setting, a series of deadly traps that there is no way to avoid, characters throwing tantrums and injuring themselves on locked doors, and an encumbrance system that's absurdly punishing given all the stuff the game wants you to carry for survival purposes. 

      

I've played plenty of games with difficult doors. This is the only one where my characters were this uncool about it.

          

But I'll end with some miscellaneous pluses: an excellent automap, a helpful diary (that I under-used), a welcome auto-combat option for easy battles, and an economy that never stops being relevant, particularly with the ability to donate to temples for favors. 

         

The game manual's screenshot of the diary makes a joke about reading the manual. This is getting too meta.

        

I don't know what the GIMLET will show, but it feels to me that Blade of Destiny was a better game. Star Trail makes definite interface improvements, particularly in combat, but Blade had a more sensible plot, more side-dungeons and side-quests, and better reasons to explore its large game world. I would expect Star Trail to come out a couple of points behind.

   

On the GIMLET, I give Star Trail:

   

• 4 points for the game world.
• 6 points for character creation and development.
• 5 points for NPC interaction.
• 6 points for encounters and foes.
• 5 points for magic and combat.
• 4 points for equipment.
• 6 points for the economy.
• 4 points for quests.
• 6 points for graphics, sound, and interface.
• 5 points for gameplay.

   

That gives us a total of 51, which to my surprise is 7 points higher than Blade of Destiny. Looking through my final entry for that game, I guess I had more complaints about its mechanics than I remember.

          

This doesn't strike me as the most competent of ads. You really have to struggle to see the name of the game.

       

If you have any experience with my GIMLET, you know that a score of 51 puts it in the top 10% of games rated so far, which may seem to be at odds with the tone of some of my entries. This has happened before, and it generally happens when the game could have scored higher in some of its categories if not for an equal number of flaws. "Character creation and development" is a good example. I'd love to give the game an 8 in that category. Classes are well-differentiated; class composition truly matters; leveling up feels rewarding; the large variety of skills gives you the chance to create unique "builds" for characters; there are (albeit limited) class-specific dialogues and encounters. All very positive. But then you have things like arbitrary caps on the number of times you can allocate skill and spell points per level, the chance of "failing" each allocation and wasting half your skill points, skills that aren't used, random rolls that give you only 2 hit points per level, and numerous irrevocable choices about swapping points that can't possibly be understood until you've already played the game. And so the game gets the same score (6) as, say, one of the Gold Box games, which don't do anything particularly spectacular in character development but also don't give me anything to complain about. Some games, in short, reach a 6 by simply adding; some reach it by adding and then subtracting. Those latter games are going to offer more sources of complaint.

        

Those fans upset with my coverage of the game would really take issue with some of its contemporary reviews. Here's Petra Schlunk from the December 1994 Computer Gaming World: "To say that I had fun would be inaccurate; to say that I cursed and raged against this game, yet could not stop playing it, would be closer to the truth." She goes on to complain about encumbrance issues, getting kicked out of NPC conversations, boots that always wore out, and the length of combat. ("Actually hitting an opponent or successfully casting a spell is a rare thing," she says in a nice moment of solidarity.) In the first star rating I can ever remember seeing in CGW, she gives it 3/5 stars. "Extremely aggravating in spots . . . For the hard-core only."

      

These bastards are going to live in my head rent-free for a while.

         

I don't know why I still bother to consult Dragon magazine, which never knew what it was doing with computer game reviews. It would stop reviewing computer games entirely within a couple of years, and at this point in its life was offering them in an "Eye of the Monitor" section that featured an annoying back-and-forth between two reviews (Jay and Dee) instead of a single coherent review. Here, they thought it was too logistically complex and difficult, but they praised aspects of the interface and combat system. I'd like to hang my hat on some choice quotes (""Why can't a game be challenging without being whimsically evil?"), but it's clear they didn't make it far out of the starting city, and it's hard to respect that. 

      

Before moving on to the European reviews, I should mention that at least one western source, the February 1995 PC Gamer, felt a lot better about the game: "Everything diehard roleplaying enthusiasts have been waiting for." While it allows that the game might be confusing to newcomers, and that "its complexities can take a bit of practice to master," it promises real rewards for players who "invest enough time to master its wonderful subtleties."

      

A wonderful subtlety.

      

German sources rated it generally more positively, including 86% from the June 1994 issues of both Play Time and PC Games,  87% from the May 1994 Power Play (which also gave it RPG of the Year), 90% from the November 1993 PC Joker, and 92% from the July 1994 ASM. It's impossible not to suspect a certain amount of native pride in those reviews, but they probably also benefit from playing the game in its native language with a baseline understanding of Das Schwarze Auge setting. There's also the stereotypical German affinity for logistics, to which this game particularly caters.

    

The Dragon reviewers mentioned playing with the cluebook. I was interested in taking a look to see whether, as with many games of the era, it provided a bit more lore and background. It doesn't, alas. It's a very workaday cluebook, with maps of all the areas and a "walkthrough" that gives simple instructions without explaining anything. It elides most of the optional areas and encounters in the game, although it does take the party through the entire Star Trail episode, which I believe was optional. However, the cluebook does have an interesting interview with attic co-founder Guido Henkel. He relates how he,  Hans-Jürgen Brändle, and Jochen Hamma founded the company in 1990 after their previous company, Dragonware Games, folded. Their first productions were Lords of Doom (1990), Die Drachen von Laas (1991) and Spirit of Adventure (1991). As fans of the tabletop Das Schwarze Auge, they dreamed of developing a computer game in the setting but were too nervous about approaching the owners of the rights. Eventually, those owners came to attic rather than the other way around.

     

According to MobyGames: "The image [of the] Elvenking during the end scene was inspired by David Bowie. There was a contest about this image. The first player who would send the correct answer to the designers could win a prize."

          

Henkel seems to regard Blade of Destiny as particularly flawed and is proud of the ways that his team fixed its problems in Star Trail. He is also particularly proud of the automap and in-game journal. The company went with Sir-Tech for American distribution on the strength of the Wizardry history; Henkel was playing Crusaders of the Dark Savant (1992) at the same time they inked the deal.

  

We are early in the life of the Dark Eye setting. Realms of Arkania III: Shadows over Riva (1996) will be with us in a couple of years. I don't think we'll be seeing a group of mobile-only games in the early 2000s (e.g., The Dark Eye: Nedime - The Caliph's Daughter, The Dark Eye: Secret of the Cyclopses), but assuming I survive that long, we'll definitely see The Dark Eye: Drakensang (2008). In the 2010s, there are several games under the Blackguards label, Demonicon (2013), some titles that MobyGames classifies as adventure games, and of course the 2015-2017 remake of the first two Arkania games using the Unity Engine. As of 2026, the latest PC game in the setting is The Dark Eye: Book of Heroes (2020). There's a later iPhone game called Forgotten Fables: Wolves on the Westwind that sites list as part of the universe.

       

Combat in the 2017 remake of Star Trail. It keeps the tactical grid, but you can zoom around and rotate it.

           

Alas, attic Entertainment Software wasn't around for this resurgence. Shadows over Riva was their last and only game after Star Trail, although they did publish games from a few other developers, including one that we may see: Druid: Daemons of the Mind (1995). In interviews, Guido Henkel said that the licensing costs for The Dark Eye prevented the series from being profitable for the developers. He left attic in the late 1990s, and the company closed in 2001.

      

Henkel went on to work at Interplay, where he produced Planescape: Torment (1999) and apparently modeled for the cover art of the Nameless One. He reportedly lives in California now. He dabbled for a while in mobile games and now works as a film restorer. Johchen Hamma remained in the games industry. He was the executive producer of ArcaniA: Gothic 4 for Spellbound Entertainment. He's also listed as a consultant on the Blackguard titles (2014-2015). Hans-Jürgen Brändl went to work for Blue Byte Software and worked on the Settlers series of city simulators. He died in 2005.

 

Despite my rocky experience with Star Trail, I am authentically looking forward to its sequel, and I don't think there's any chance I won't select it for the primary list in 1996.  

      

****

    

Previous entry in this series

 

For further reading:

     

My coverage of attic Entertainment Software's other titles:

    

• Lords of Doom (1990) 
• Die Drachen von Laas (1991)  
• Spirit of Adventure (1991) 
• Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny (1992) 

04/26/2026