The Fates of Twinion: Summary and Rating

 

The game said this every time I leveled up after Level 19.

       

The Fates of Twinion

United States

Ybarra Productions (developer); Sierra Online (publisher) 

Released 1993 for DOS

Date Started: 2 November 2025   

Date Ended: 23 January 2026

Total Hours: 49

Difficulty: Moderate-Hard (3.5/5) 
Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later) 

         

Like its predecessor, The Shadow of Yserbius, The Fates of Twinion is an offline version of an online game that makes few concessions to its offline nature. It's relatively clear that the developers meant for it to serve as an appetizer for online play, not as a meaningful solo experience. Although it offers some clever puzzles and navigational challenges, the relentless nature of combat (enemy parties respawn instantly) and the limited character development make gameplay a slog.

 

***** 

     

I stuck with it as long as I could. I mapped a few more levels, fought some dragons, solved a couple more quests. But The Fates of Twinion is like the World War I of games. It takes hours to gain inches, and because of relentless respawning, sometimes it feels like you've never gained anything. Eventually, the crazy navigation challenges (there's a level where literally every open space closes behind you) and nonstop combat just overwhelmed me, and I decided that my time would be better spent elsewhere.

   

When I last left off, I was exploring a couple of Level 8 maps, "Dragon's Ire" and "Dragon's Flame." A commenter alerted me that to get into the central room in the former, I would need the Lava Glove from like 40 hours ago. I'm sure that was clued, but I didn't take notes in an organized enough manner to remember it. Anyway, the glove did open the right doors. It also signaled which lava squares were illusory.

      

I'm still not trusting something called a "lava glove."

      

On the other side of those doors was an intriguing chessboard puzzle. The goal was to reach the demons controlling the game from two southern squares, but the rules of the game—set out in various wall clues—prevent you from just walking to them. Every square on the chessboard has either a knight, a rook, or a bishop. Some of them are human, some Night Elves, some golems. I think any square can have any piece, but as you encounter them, you rotate through them in that order. After you kill each enemy, you take on the movement pattern of the enemy you just killed. Thus, after you kill a rook, you can move "normally," one square in any cardinal direction. Kill a bishop, and your next move is diagonally. Kill a knight, and you jump two squares in one direction and one in another. The problem is, the controls don't actually change, so you have to learn through trial and error that, for instance, moving west after killing a bishop will actually move you southwest, or that moving east after killing knight will actually move you one square east and two squares south. I'm honestly not even sure that's consistent. I felt my way through the area with a lot of trial and error. Oh, and for some reason, I had to make my way to the demons twice. The first time, they swatted me away, saying I wasn't strong enough.

       

Having just killed a knight, my next move forward is going to put me in one of those black squares in front of the water.

    

Killing the two demons nets the player lots of experience, but as I found during this final session, gaining levels in the latter third of the game is only good for raising maximum hit points. You stop gaining attribute points around Level 21, and you stop gaining skill and spell points shortly after that. By then, you've already maximized all your skills and spells anyway. 

         

One of the two demon chessmasters.

       

Killing the demons also allows easy access to teleporters that reach the two feuding dragons in "Dragon's Flame." Each wants you to kill the other. I don't think it matters which dragon you agree to help. It's not like one is evil and the other is good. Their names are Gambril and Osterog. Before you can take on the one you intend to kill, you have to get a blessing from a wizard on the level, then enter a particular teleporter to keep the blessing. The game isn't really explicit about this. I had to get help from a walkthrough. It's a very nicely detailed walkthrough, with maps showing exactly where to walk from stage to stage. It was written by someone named Ragnar, who I imagine is the same Ragnar from Sweden who used to appear on this blog but mysteriously stopped commenting in 2015.

     

I chose to kill Gambril for some reason.

       

I'm not sure that the dragon quest is strictly necessary, as you don't gain anything that is required on future levels. I mostly got items my character couldn't use and experience he didn't need.

      

I stupidly chose to carry all these items for the next few hours, but I never found any wizards to show them to.

          

The game lost me on the two maps of Level 9: "Hocus Pocus" and "Hopeless Hallways," particularly the latter. I like mapping, but my enjoyment of the process vanishes when I encounter too many things that I simply can't map. I like to be able to look at my maps and figure out how to get from one place to another. This is impossible when wall patterns change, doors constantly lock and unlock, pits turn from illusory to real and back again, and so forth. And of course, while I'm trying to figure this all out, there are unskippable combats every few steps. Enough was enough.

       

The fact that the wizard village was called "Hocus Pocus" might also have had something to do with it.

           

Judging by Ragnar's walkthrough, I ended my experience having seen 22 maps across 9 levels. The game as a whole has 33 maps over 12 levels. You might think it was a shame for me to give up so close, but it appears to me that they get more complex as they go along. For instance, the four maps of Level 11 ("Celestial Boundary," "Spheres Asunder," "Trials," and "Tribulations") take up 14 pages of the walkthrough. Plus, there's the whole "Sunk Coast Fallacy." Look it up.

  

The walkthrough indicates that the player will confront five Dralkarian Gods, each after obtaining a magic item that proves the player worthy of challenging the god. Each drops a magical ring, which must be given to Queen Aeowyn to control the Portal of Time. But after you do, Queen Aeowyn betrays you. She simply wants control of the Portal for herself, so she can become immortal and conquer the universe. The player has to escape her initial attack, then return and defeat her at the entrance to the Portal. The final battle is with Aeowyn herself and a bunch of lich allies. After that, if the player still wants to keep playing, he can explore an area called Chronozar's Demesne, where if successful he finds a Jester's Cap that raises all attributes and a literal Easter Egg. 

     

A rare moment of decoration in the environment.

       

The factor that I find most tedious in Fates is the immediate respawning of enemies. If you go one direction and then decide you have to turn around, you have to re-fight every enemy in the backpath. It was completely unnecessary. Allowing the player to clear a level, at least temporarily, would enhance his motivation to stay on the level instead of teleporting back to town every time his potion stock gets low. It would make trying to solve the many navigation puzzles far less tedious. 

   

The second major problem is the lack of meaningful character development, in both skills and equipment. It isn't absent; my character definitely grew measurably more powerful with each level, and it was fun to repeatedly find myself trouncing enemies that used to toss me bodily from the dungeon. But completely maxing your statistics and having nowhere to put new skills or spell points is no fun.

        

I've got nowhere to put these points.

      

There's also fairly limited character development by equipment. The game gives the character slots for a helm, armor, weapon, amulet, and ring, but throughout the game I only got upgrades to these slots every few hours. Moreover, it's not always clear when something is an "upgrade." You can guess based on the sale price for some of them. It would be nice if there were more purchasable upgrades, too, as I ended the game with over a million gold pieces.

      

Combat remained rather boring throughout, although I did have to change my strategies slightly every few hours. By the end of the game, my default strategy boiled down to:

  

• For most combats, just barrel through them with physical attack and heal afterwards with spells and potions (which I always kept a large stock of).

• If the combat is more difficult than that and if it involves multiple enemy parties, use one of the charming items/spells (Sovereign Scroll, Zeus Scroll, Chimes of Whatever) and let them fight themselves while going back to the first strategy.

• If the combat is more difficult than that and it involves only a single enemy (e.g., some of the demon and dragon battles), cast "Petrify" until the enemy is frozen and then finish him off with melee attacks. 

        

You can tell it worked the third time because he stopped attacking.

      

For all of that, I thought I liked Twinion a bit better than Yserbius, mostly because the maps offered more complexity and challenge. Thus, I was surprised when I ran through the GIMLET and I calculated Twinion at 31 against Yserbius's 37. It's perhaps the greatest inconsistency that I've ever seen at the end of such a comparison. While I'm glad to see I valued Twinion a bit higher (5 vs. 4) in the "Encounters" category, which I often boost for good puzzles, I wonder why I was so deluded about the relative merits of Yserbius's backstory and NPCs. If I made a mistake, I think it's definitely in having rated Yserbius too high.

         

Never walk alone . . . unless you're playing offline.

     

Sierra released the offline versions of Yserbius and Twinion so close together (I don't think that Twinion even had its own box) that Computer Gaming World covered them both together in a review by Bernie Yee in February 1994. I quoted that review in my Yserbius summary, and the same quotes apply: "Hollow version of its online self"; unfavorable comparisons to better games of the period, like Lands of Lore, Ultima Underworld, and Betrayal at Krondor. I wish that Yee had made more of a distinction between the two games, although I suppose in the grand scheme of things, they're basically identical. The problem with both Yserbius and Twinion is that they offer unbearably quaint, early 1980s Wizardry- and Bard's Tale-style gameplay in an era that had moved well beyond those templates while at the same time regressing them to single-player mode, which removes most of the tactics and strategy that I play games like Wizardry to enjoy.

   

Rather than repeat material about the fate of Yserbius and Twinion, and their modern resurrection as MedievaLands, I'll refer you to the final paragraphs of my last Yserbius entry. It's too bad that 1993 couldn't have gone out with more of a bang, but if I had continued this game, I would have been playing it into April. It's time to move wholly into 1994.