Game 578: The Search for Freedom (1994)

 

         

The Search for Freedom

Canada

Independently developed; published as shareware 

Released 1994 for DOS

Date Started: 19 September 2025

    

This series represents a "first" for the CRPG Addict. We've had guest entries before on special topics, and at least twice (Time Horn and Die Drachen von Laas), I've allowed guest authors to finish a foreign-language game that I started. But I've resisted allowing guest entries that cover an entire game, without my having touched it. The Wargaming Scribe's coverage of Les Six Lys a few months ago was supposed to be the first, but since the game was so short, I figured I could maintain the blog's original vision by giving the Scribe most of the review but still playing it myself. Given that it took—spoilers!—seventy-two hours to win The Search for Freedom, I don't think that will be happening again.

      

Thus, for the first time, I present a guest commentator's full series of reviews of a game, from title screen to GIMLET, including all subtitles and captions. Let's see what we all think at the end of the series, and I'll decide whether or not to do it again. If I don't, it won't be because of the quality of the series, which I think is excellent.

   

Our guest commenter is AlphabeticalAnonymous, who left his first of over 250 comments on this blog in the summer of 2021. He is a science professor working in Kansas. He has previously lived and worked in Boston, California, and Germany.

    

I will comment occasionally [in italics and brackets] but the words in this series, beginning after the asterisks below, are otherwise his. His compiled review of the game is almost 30,000 words and over 100 pages, so I will be alternating them with my own entries for a while, which should give me some breathing room to enjoy a vacation and otherwise get caught up after a difficult spring. Thank you, AA!

     

*****

         

I’ve been playing shareware games, on and off, for decades. The earliest that I can swear to playing was EGA Trek (1988), which hooked me with both its bold colors and vivid sound but undoubtedly even more by virtue of the (wholly unlicensed) Star Trek theme. The author was one Nels Anderson of far-off Framingham, Massachusetts, a location that seemed distant and exotic (I was living in California at the time); little did young Me know that decades later I would be a daily rider on the Framingham-to-Boston commuter train. Anyway, Mr. Anderson gladly took my $10 registration and sent me the latest version of the game along with an eclectic 3.5-inch sampler pack of other offerings. Imagine my disappointment when the new, registered version turned out to have its explicit Star Trek references all safely anonymized: for instance, Klingons and Romulans were now Mongols and Vandals. The gameplay was identical, but my satisfaction was palpably diminished. I suppose it was an early lesson in the power of name brands. The earlier version still offers me a quarter-hour of nostalgia every year or so.

The Search for Freedom is another shareware game, but more modern and with far more complex gameplay than my old EGA Trek. Although the documentation states that Freedom is Howard Feldman’s first game programmed on “the IBM,” the result is no small fry:

     

[The game] will require a minimum of 60 hours to complete successfully. In all, there are 4 towns, 22 dungeon levels, each 20 squares by 20 squares, and 2 outdoor areas, each 32 squares by 32 squares. There are well over 60 magical spells to master, over 120 monsters to battle.

         
The first town and dungeon comprise the free portion of the shareware game, after which one must pay to register the game and open up the rest of the world. The game is still available for download on now-Dr. Feldman’s website and he is still accepting registration at $10 each—in nominal terms the same that I paid for EGA Trek, though rather more affordable 35 years on.
    
Aficionados of computer-based RPGs or adventure games will be familiar with Dr. Feldman through his curation of the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History (MOCAGH). The online-only Museum provides:

    

High-quality scans of the boxes, disks, manuals, clue books, maps, and accompaniments to thousands of computer adventure and role-playing games, most of them curated not from other sites but from scans that Feldman has made of the items in his physical collection. He also has complete sets of gaming magazines, newsletters, and hint books.

       
This description comes from the other exposure readers of these pages will have had to Dr. Feldman, as the author of the freeware CRPG Quest of Kings (1990, link to CRPG Addict's 2020 coverage). That game, his first serious production, was in some sense the prototype for the more elaborate Freedom. This second game was written in Turbo Pascal while he was a senior in high school, and so far seems that it would have provided good value for the money spent on the shareware registration.
     
Although I’ve been playing games via various types of emulators for two and a half decades, I had a surprising amount of trouble getting the game to run at all. Whether I tried the official version offered on Dr. Feldman’s website or the various (so-called) “abandonware” versions available on the web, I would repeatedly get errors telling me that “This is not an original copy of Search for Freedom” and to reinstall using my “original game diskette.” Even applying a patch from the game’s official website didn’t solve the issue. But every cloud has a silver lining; in this case, mine was discovering the eXoDOS project, which seems to provide a unified launcher and curated customization parameters for over 7,000 DOS and PC-Booster games. It installed (even on my Linux laptop, which is no small feat) and ran Freedom without any hiccups. 
      

From a bit later in the game. At least we'll recognize our enemy—the evil wizard Macabath—when we meet him.

       

The game begins with the player creating a party of six adventurers. These can be of four races—Human, Elf, Dwarf and Teddy (more on that in a minute)—who can be any one of four classes: fighter, thief, cleric, or mage. A Dwarf cannot be a thief or a mage; a Teddy cannot be a fighter or a cleric. You “roll” for your usual statistics: strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, endurance, charisma, and luck (which “can protect the player from danger when all else fails”). I sampled 50 rolls and they seem to be consistent with natural 3D6 in each category. Some classes also have minimum statistics in their prime requisite. Regardless, you can either take the statistics or roll again without limit, but there’s no option here to recreate your favorite adventurer who just happens to have stats of 18 in all categories. Then you pick a name and save the character.
      
The manual strongly recommends taking one character of each class. After thinking about it, I decided to take a slightly more interesting path with my two “extra” characters being a mage and a cleric. I couldn’t help but take advantage of the chance to recruit at least one Teddy; members of this unique race are: “Small, adorable creatures who won't think twice about swiping money or other possessions from under your nose. They are very fast, and are often charming conversationalists as well.” In other words, charismatic thieves. They receive stat bonuses to Dexterity, Charisma, and Luck but penalties to all other stats. I finally settled on the following party:
       

• Ruxpin, a Teddy Thief with low wisdom and endurance but high Dexterity, Charisma, and Luck. 

• Becket, a Human Cleric with low Strength and Charisma (perhaps he’s deformed) with otherwise decent scores in the remaining categories.

• Tyrion, a Dwarf Fighter with abysmal Charisma (4), poor Luck, but good physical stats.

• Kizke, an Elf Mage with low Endurance but very high (17) Intelligence.

• Durkon, a Dwarf Cleric with good Strength and Endurance and with top marks (18) in Wisdom. And finally,

• Elphaba, a Human Mage with high Intelligence and middling-to-decent stats in most of the other categories. 

      

Starting statistics for Teddy Ruxpin. I like the fairly detailed overview of so many statistics that the game offers.

       

After forming your party of six characters (no more, no less), the game begins with nine screens of expository text. It ably lays out the plot and introduces Kamazol, the evil arch-mage and (I presume) the game’s “Big Bad.” After slaying his parents and “ruling the continents for quite some time,” he was in turn (apparently) slain by a hero bearing the sword “Soulseeker.” But as so often happens in these tales, “in death he [Kamazol] would find life” and “did not truly die.” In fact, briefly killing him made matters worse because it allowed him to conquer Aegea (essentially, Hell). He is now a lich with a growing army of evil forces on both planes of existence. In 1000 days, a triple-lunar conjunction will open a portal for Kamazol to return to our world' it is of course our job to stop him. “The prophet of Smythetown” predicted that we six heroes would reforge the broken Soulseeker, find a portal to Aegea deep on the Island of No Return, and defeat the evil. However (the narration continues), upon our arrival in Smythetown the “beautiful little town” was overrun by the evil wizard Macabath and his minions. They work for Kamazol and threw us all in jail. But we are then slipped a lockpick and 250 gold along with a message from “The Viper Alliance” that reiterates the main points of the quest. Thence, the game begins.
       
The action begins in a locked cell within the City Jail of Smythetown. The initial gameplay seems immediately recognizable to anyone familiar with the Gold Box and similar games; after all, the game manual’s introduction notes that the game was “inspired by such RPGs as Pool of Radiance by SSI, Shard of Spring by SSI, and [The] Bard's Tale by Electronic Arts.” It offers a tile-based, first-person view with simple, solid-color-filled wireframe walls and doors. Either the color scheme is intentionally chosen for high contrast, or Macabath’s evil has manifested in a mandate to paint all of Smythetown’s walls in bright lime-green. Movement is with the arrow keys. 
      

In fair Smythetown's jail cell, where we lay our scene.

     

The interface seems promising, with quick keyboard shortcuts for most actions (the mouse does not seem to be supported). You can see the options in the screenshot above. Magic-users begin with magic points (MP) but they will have to pay at the local magic shop or temple to learn any spells to cast. View gives each character’s detailed stat sheet as shown above. "Encamp" offers options to rearrange combat formation, share or distribute items, rest, save, and so forth. "Search" seems straight out of the Gold Box: turning it on allows the party to notice hidden doors and other interesting phenomena, but at the cost of each tiled step taking 10 minutes instead of just 1. I don’t know how to feel, yet, about that 1000-day time limit, but I leave "Search" on for now. "Look" is just a one-time "Search." "Utter" gives the ability to say something. Finally, one can always view the automap.

     

The games offers several handy options. First, the full manual can be accessed via a text-viewer within the game. I could find no way to search for text, but one can at least jump to desired page numbers as indicated in the table of contents. The same manual is of course also available as a 20,000-word text file with detailed instructions, including a list of over 60 magical spells, 50 types of monsters, and nearly 30 different types of items. The same text-viewer seems to double as the adventurers’ notepad within the game, automatically recording key phrases or scraps of information; unfortunately, it does not seem to allow manual text entry, but then that’s what I have Emacs for. Finally, there is the more-than-serviceable automap that tracks one’s explorations and adds some basic annotations. Between the automap’s “you are here” feature and the blue-on-white compass arrow in the first-person view, it promises to be a game in which getting lost, at least, is not a serious danger.

      

The automap after some initial exploration. A surprising number of those black areas seem to be utterly inaccessible. Completionists, beware.

        

Our motley band assesses the situation. As promised, we have 250 gold pieces, but no lockpicks or any other items to speak of. I suppose the picks are implied by our ability to unlock doors. Regardless, they immediately prove their worth when I try to move through the door to our cell. This presents me with options to pick the lock, bash the door, or cast the OPEN spell. I have no spells and don’t want to attract the notice of the guards, so I have Ruxpin, my thief, pick the lock. He fails several times, but each attempt takes no time and seems to have no negative consequences (the manual mentions that later on, some doors and chests will have traps with various negative effects). After a few tries, the lock clicks open, we step through the open door, and Ruxpin gets +5 experience points (XP). Each character starts out at Level 1 with 300 XP, and reaching Level 2 requires 600 XP in total. That’s a lot of locks to pick, so I hope that enemies provide more experience than that.
     
I soon have a chance to find out: we soon open another cell and find a ourselves face-to-face with a so-called "Insane Creature" and are immediately thrust into combat. I’ll cover combat in more detail once I have some spells and better understand the mechanics. For now, suffice to say that the party and its adversaries find themselves on a 21 x 21 tactical battlefield grid that more or less represents the local terrain (i.e., walls). Depending on their dexterity values, my characters have 9-15 movement points each. Characters can only move up, down, left, or right—no diagonals—and use two movement points per space. Attacking, casting a spell, or using other items requires at least three movement points. In this case, the enemy has only 20 HP. Although my characters are armed with nothing but their fists (1D2 damage, plus strength modifiers), they make short work of the Insane Creature. I also note that this enemy isn’t mentioned in the manual’s bestiary, so presumably there will be other surprises along the way. The Creature leaves behind one Leather Armour and six gold, and the party earns a disappointing 2 XP per character. Maybe picking locks is the way to go, after all.

We pick open several other cells containing dead men, "cause of death probably being old age." The only other clue we find in the jail is a man with a viper tattoo (the sign of the Viper Alliance) who is chained up. When we talk to him, he says not to rescue him but to instead “go on” and that someone named Arthur will rendezvous with us and provide further instructions. “To find Arthur, knock on door of Big Blue House and say ‘WHITE KNIGHT SENT ME.’”

Beyond the jail, I find myself on the loose in Smythetown, although the appearance of the environment is unchanged. I first go south and quickly find stairs down to the catacombs, where Macabath is said to reside. It’s pitch-black, and anyway we’re definitely not ready to take him on. Heading the other way, we quickly find the town Library. The game suggests to us that we need to save the world and don’t have time for books, but I know better. After all, libraries hold something infinitely more precious than gold: knowledge. My perseverance is soon rewarded when we go into the back room and find a book entitled Mastery of the Magic Art. Here I am offered my first real choice: do I want to spend a day (of my precious 1000 remaining) so that my mages can study the book? I decide to take the plunge. While the rest of the party twiddles their thumbs, Elphaba and Kizke pore over the tome for a full day. They emerge, exhausted but smarter: both of their Intelligence stats increased by two! So long as the 1000-day limit turns out to be a true challenge, I like this option of trading time to boost my capabilities for later in the game. But even if the time limit doesn’t really matter, I suppose we still made the right choice.

Continuing north, we pass the entrance to the Wayfarer’s Inn, but we feel nervous without weapons or armor and so continue hunting for a shop we were promised would be somewhere in town. We continue past a so-called Majik Shoppe to the northernmost edge of town, where we find that the main city gates are all locked by Macabath’s evil magic. Between that and the shareware registration, there’s clearly no way for the party to leave Smythetown at this point. We head west and pass through an unlabeled door, only to be informed that "Macabath has guards in each of the four turrets. They attack!" Uh-oh. We enter combat with four Sentry guards, each with 27 HP and 3 armor points (I think that armor reduces damage from successful attacks, rather than affecting a character’s likelihood of being hit). This is bad news because three of my party only do 1D2 damage and so are useful only as cannon fodder. The other three do 1D2+4 due to their better-than-average strength: between that and a few lucky critical hits we manage to miraculously kill two of the Sentries. By that point we’ve already lost a few party members and are too weak: the remaining pair of Sentries slaughters us. We are told that "The Earth is doomed. You have failed in your quest,” which at least doesn’t bury the lede. I’ll have to avoid that door next time.
     

Becket and Ruxpin were not far behind.

 Time so far: 1 hour. 1 party death. 0 reloads.

     

****

   

Next entry in this series

    

For further reading:

    

• Quest of Kings (1990), this author's first game.
• Pool of Radiance (1988), the first "Gold Box" game,  which heavily influenced this title.
• The Shard of Spring (1986), another influence according to the author. 
• The Bard's Tale (1985), another influence according to the author.