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