Game 567: Dark Designs: Passage to Oblivion

Softdisk misses out on the opportunity to emphasize the "IV" in "oblivion."

        

Dark Designs: Passage to Oblivion

United States 

Softdisk (developer and publisher)

Released 1994 for Apple II GS, possible Apple II release unconfirmed

Date Started: 25 January 2026

           

The original Dark Designs trilogy (Grelminar's Staff, Closing the Gate, and Retribution), all from 1990-1991, were competently-programmed "afternoon RPGs" that drew inspiration from Wizardry, Might and Magic, and Phantasie. They were published by Softdisk, one of several disk magazines available at the time. When you're getting new games every month for a flat subscription fee, you don't really expect them to be epic, and in that sense, the original trilogy's 4-7 hour playing times and 30-31 ratings on the GIMLET are actually quite good.

     

The first three games are all the more notable for having been written by a young John Carmack. He was long gone from Softdisk by 1994, enjoying the accolade and profits from Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, but he remains credited for the engine. During the three-year gap, Softdisk apparently received hundreds of letters from fans demanding more Dark Designs games. Development was taken on by Peter Rokitski, who had been hired as the magazine's principal programmer after Cormack's departure. He had already resurrected a previous Carmack trilogy, Catacomb (a third-person shooter), with Sylvan Idyll (1992), Ether Quest (1993), and Sand Trap (1994). By the end of the second Dark Designs trilogy, as bulletin boards and the Internet brought the diskmag era to a close, Rokitski was essentially Softdisk's only employee, handling the duties of programmer, editor, quality tester, and assembler.

    

That was us! Only it was "Agamon."

       

The original Dark Designs trilogy concerned an invasion of demons through a planar gate. In Grelminar's Staff, the party searched the ruins of Castle Grelminar for the artifact that would close the gate. In Closing the Gate, they, well, did that. In Retribution!, they pursued the archmage who had opened the gate through a portal and into a hell dimension to get revenge. That archmage was called Agamon in the original series but is for some reason called Agamol here. The author likely got confused between "Agamon" (the wizard) and "Agamal" (the castle where he lived).

      

Ah, the problems faced by fantastical worlds.

        

The sequel series picks up "many years later" in the city of Tarador, where "good Queen Victoria has suddenly begun to act very strangely." She has ignored her duties and has created an army of strange creatures. "Whispers . . . have it that she has been possessed by the spirit of Agamol." The main PC is an adventurer with a friend who works at the royal palace. His friend appears on his doorstep one day, dying, saying that "the only hope for Tarador is the legendary Potion of Salvation." Legend has it that the potion is in Oblivion, "from which no one has returned (alive)." To get there, the party has to arrange passage from a "travel agent," who is demanding 50,000 gold pieces and the Bones of a Saint.

   

Gameplay begins in Tarador with a default party, but of course I dumped them and created my own. Character creation involves rolling five numbers between 3 and 18 and allocating them to strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, and piety. From there, you choose one of four classes: fighter, thief, priest, and wizard. Although the party can hold only four characters, there is room for 15 on the roster. The game instructions suggest that if the combined experience of the characters on the roster exceeds a certain value, prestige or multi-class characters become possible.

        

Creating a new party.

        

New characters start with nothing but staves, and the early game is brutal. It reminds me of the first Might and Magic, where you have to either keep reloading or keep remaking characters as you ever-so-slowly amass experience, gold, and equipment. Random encounters are frequent and deadly; no place is safe, and enemies might attack on any movement, including turning and winning a previous battle. Of particular difficulty is poison, which many enemies can deliver and no Level 1 party can possibly cure. You have to return to the inn frequently to restore hit points, which costs 50 gold every time (fortunately, most battles produce more than that). You can save anywhere, which makes it a little easier than Might and Magic, but character deaths are written to the disk immediately after battle. The game even deletes all your gold as battle begins and doesn't restore it to you until it ends. That way, if you open the disk drive (or kill the emulator) to prevent a character death from saving, the party has no gold when you reload.

      

Carefully exiting the inn.

      

As with the first trilogy, exploration and combat mix Wizardry and Phantasie elements. Instead of a wireframe first-person view or a top-down view, the game offers both, side-by-side. The top-down view shows an 18 x 11 grid, with unvisited squares obscured. A marker indicates special encounters or treasures. You get frequent atmospheric messages as you explore, the text making up to some degree for a lack of graphics.

      

Text offers what graphics cannot.

              

All controls are handled via intuitive keyboard commands. The options are usually on the screen in case you forget. You can bring up an in-game help menu with the ? key in case you forget anything. Until late in this session, I didn't notice that there was a S)earch command for secret doors.

      

But it was pretty obvious that one was here.

         

For combat, I've faced giant spiders, cottonmouth snakes, rats, fighters, wizards, bards, thaumaturges, necromancers, samurai, paladins (!), and ninjas. Gods know why the city is so violent. Battle shows the characters facing each other in ranks. It suggests a tactical map, but the only movement characters and enemies can do is between the front rank and the rear rank. The rank determines whom you can attack and who can attack you.

        

You specify an action for each character—attack, cast a spell, use an item, change weapons, move forward, or move backwards—and then execute. The game threads your actions with the enemies' in initiative order. It's basically Phantasie with the battle screen rotated sideways so the line between the parties is vertical rather than horizontal.

      

Bob has chosen to attack and now must specify the target of his attack.

      

Battle is rewarded with experience, and if the enemies aren't animals, gold and items, which you can then equip or sell at the item shop. My characters slowly amassed better weapons, armor, potions, mana pills, and attribute-boosting rings. 

     

Battle against a larger group. 

     

Running from combat only has about a 50% success rate, and if you fail, the enemy gets a free round of attacks. Every time I met a spider or snake, it was an agonizing decision whether to stay and almost assuredly get poisoned (even if I won) or try to flee. 

      

Eventually, I stabilized my party at Level 3 and started doing more than just shuttling between the inn and the weapon/armor shop. The opening map, the "Old Quarter" of the town, appears to be 32 x 32. You can't leave the map to the north, east, or west, but to the south is a new map, the "Palace Quarter," and gods know how many others from there. Some of the encounters I found in the Old Quarter were:

    

• Ivanna's Inn, where the party can rest and restore spells. The inn has several locked rooms, which my thief opened with a lockpick. Some of them had chests of gold. Some chests are trapped, but I think the only way to remove them is with a spell I don't have yet.

       

0.764% closer to my goal.

        

• Alain's Armor and All. They sell basic weapons and armor, potions (including one-use antidotes for a hefty 250 gold), speed and strength rings, recall scrolls (100% escape from battle), and horns, which I have no idea how to use. They don't seem to work in combat or out of combat. Anyway, since you can find most of these items in battle, the store is more useful for selling than buying, at least after an initial visit.

      

Getting equipped.

       

• Pat's Pub. It costs 20 gold to get in. There's a kitchen in the back with a few storerooms. One hallway has a fixed encounter with three fighters, a hierophant, and an illusionist. Elsewhere, a beautiful belly dancer named Natasha will offer hints if you buy her a drink. From her, I've learned that holy symbols cast the "Bless" spell; "Mark" and "Teleport" will be useful in getting back to Crytus, which is an island of "excarnation"; saints have been interred on Crytus; smugglers use the island in the Meriwyn as a treasure trove; and when you use a travel agent, you are sent immediately. 

     

Could I at least know what kind of drink I'm buying?

      

• Vyzap's Vault of Knowledge. They sell spells. This has been my biggest expense so far. At one point, I was up to nearly half of the 50,000 gold I would need, but I spent it all on spells (including, finally, "Cure Poison"). The store starts with only a couple of selections and then sells more and more as time goes by. I don't know whether the offerings are tied to character levels. So far, there haven't been a lot of great mage spells—no mass-damage, for instance.

• The Bent River occupies some space in the north part of the quarter. The game says we can't swim. I don't know whether there's another way to navigate it.

• The Temple of the Dog offers healing (at a reasonable rate of 1 point per hit point) and services to cure paralysis, stoning, and death—all way too expensive for the party at this point. 

• A warehouse north of the river has an encounter with 11 water spiders, the biggest single party I've faced so far. 

       

I hope you all enjoy being poisoned.

      

• Many houses with multiple rooms and treasure chests.  

            

I still have quite a bit to explore, even on the first map. I keep running into parties that are slightly too high in level for me, even though by the end of this session, my characters were between Levels 5 and 8. As I prepared to wrap up, I tried creating a new character, and suddenly I had a bunch of new options: paladin (fighter-priest), ranger (fighter-wizard), sorcerer (wizard-priest), yakuza (fighter-thief), hierophant (priest-thief), and illusionist (wizard-thief). So now the game has me questioning whether it's possible to win with the bland starting party. Certainly, I don't think there's enough for a thief to do that it's worth having a pure thief. 

       

A bunch of new classes become available. I wonder whether this is all, or whether combinations of three classes become available later.

        

It's clear that Oblivion is going to take longer than any of the previous three Dark Designs games, primarily because of the grind factor, but in that it at least provides an experience closer to the games it's emulating.

    

Time so far: 4 hours