Dungeons of Avalon: Better not to Know

Note: Occasionally, my blog is a sober and objective account of the historical development of RPGs, and occasionally it's a very subjective and visceral account of my particular experience with a game. This post, in its original form (below) was one of the latter. As we discuss in the comments, there clearly were endgame graphics and text in the game's directory, so it's a mystery why they didn't trip when I defeated the Dark Lord. Perhaps I was supposed to defeat him some other way; perhaps there were issues with this (unofficial) English translation; perhaps there were other associated emulator issues. Whatever the case, it is clear that the issue is not that the developers didn't program an endgame and deliberately made the final battle impossible to hide that fact. When I asked that question below, it was never meant to be a serious accusation; just a reflection of the frustration I was feeling at the time. Nonetheless, I apologize for even raising it as a possibility without more information.

*****

Commenter dahauns wrote and offered to figure out the hex editing if I could send him the saved game file. I did, and he had it back to me within a couple of hours. All my characters had 255 in all attributes, and their hit points and spell points were close to 1,000.

Super-Gideon.

I re-engaged the combat and, predictably, found it not too difficult. My characters were able to withstand the trolls' barrages, and eventually I was able to kill them all with mass damage spells. It still took 8 rounds of attacks to defeat the Dark Lord.

End-of-battle statistics.

Guess what happened then?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. There was no congratulatory message. No, "you won!" screen.

Sighing, I realized that it was going to be that kind of game--the kind where you have to drag yourself out of the castle and back to the main city to see your victory screen. Consulting my maps, I marched down four levels and emerged triumphantly into the sunshine.

Nothing.

Could I have missed something? Or is it possible that there is no endgame? Is it further possible that, realizing they didn't have time or resources to develop an endgame before the disk had to ship, the developers deliberately made the final battle impossible?

I really hope I'm wrong. There is a file called "ENDGFX" in the directory, suggesting some kind of ending graphics. But I don't know what you need to do to trip them. Short of more information from the Internet, we need to regard the endgame as unachievable.

 

****

 

Edit from 23 March 2022: Years after I wrote this, commenter Busca directed me to a site whose author has exhaustively disassembled this game. He confirms that a bug causes the endgame message not to trigger but offers a workaround so that the player can view the final screen.

 

The "winning screen" to Dungeons of Avalon.

     

He does not, however, offer a solution for the impossible final battle.
 

 

Dungeons of Avalon: Defeated (with Final Rating)

The party meets its demise at the well-drawn face of the Dark Lord.

   

Dungeons of Avalon

Zeret Software (developer); CompuTec Verlag (publisher)
Released 1991 for the Amiga in Amiga Fun; 1992 in Amiga Mania
Date Started: 2 August 2015
Date Ended: 5 August 2015

Total Hours: 16

Reload Count: 14

Difficulty: Easy-Moderate (2.5/5) until last few hours, then Hard (4/5)
Final Rating: 31

Ranking at Time of Posting: 108/195 (55%)

The other night, I made a pivotal decision to keep playing Dungeons of Avalon instead of writing another blog post about it. In some ways, it's too bad I didn't. You would have enjoyed the amusing experience of reading another complimentary post about the game, probably calling it "satisfying" and "well-paced," followed by a post full of wild, incomprehensible rage. As it is, you're going to get something in between.

I'll say this: the game is pretty good through the 5 dungeon levels. The dungeon continued to be well-constructed, full of navigation puzzles, riddles, and clues--probably not quite as good as Dungeon Master, but better than Eye of the Beholder. The developer showed a talent for testing the player's credulity in the direction of the dungeon corridors, snaking corridors through places that you would have insisted must be solid wall, suddenly opening up new areas when you thought you had a complete map, and offering buttons and pressure plates that didn't just open new areas but utterly changed the configuration of areas. A flick of a switch might turn a huge, open, 20 x 20 room into a twisty maze. It was fun to map and navigate.

Level 3 of the dungeon. The gray squares in the middle are walls that appear when a pressure plate is tripped. Unfortunately, one blocks the way back to the stairs to Level 2--unless you take a teleporter. But if you do that, you can never return and you have to reload or restart the game.

Throughout the dungeon portion, combat was moderately easy, particularly thanks to the game's liberal approach to saving and loading and the frequent placement of rest squares. Each new dungeon level provided two monsters, progressing through gnoms, worms, trolls, vultures, silver ninjas, gnom fighters, master trolls, gnom kings, spiders, and master gnoms. Bigger and bigger parties emerged, but they were still quite readily defeatable, especially when I started to get mass-damage spells like the monk's "Stormfist," the healer's "Flame Ball," and best of all the magician's "Air to Fire."

Spiders and their poison were menaces on lower levels.

 
The game offers a couple of "walking dead" scenarios, and I learned that it's best not to push any buttons or use any keys until you have the rest of the level mapped and are prepared to note the specific changes. To get back to the surface after you complete Level 3, you have to be sure to re-set one switch; otherwise, the return path is blocked. Level 5 has three keyed doors--two leading to the same area, so you only have to open one--and only two keys. I unlocked the wrong two doors and had to reload a much earlier save to replay the entire level again.

If I have one major complaint about the dungeon, it's the annoyance of having to trek back to the surface to get trained and increase levels. Temples and stores show up in dungeon squares, and you don't really need either, but the only training facilities are in the two towns. Because it's such a pain to retrace steps--twice!--to go get trained, I did it very rarely and ended up increasing multiple levels every time I returned to the surface.

I did have a period of major frustration on Level 4, when suddenly my characters stopped being effective against enemies. The combat scroll kept telling me that most of my attacks "failed," and only spells seemed to do consistent damage. I spent a lot of time sleeping at rest squares to restore spell points, and progress was maddeningly slow. Then I realized that the reason I wasn't having any luck is that all my characters were blind. The spell "Eyesight" restored them, and everything was all right again.
 

Level 4 had three ways to the stairs to Level 5, labeled "easiest," "medium," and "heaviest." I explored them all, of course. I think the "easiest" was actually the hardest. Anyway, note that two of my characters are (BL)ind here, but I didn't notice that until much later.

 
Other miscellaneous stuff about exploring the levels:

• In addition to the messages found in various corridor spaces, there were three "information scrolls" that imparted clues when read. I don't know why the developer chose to put these three pieces of information on scrolls; none of the clues were particularly important.

• The economy in the game is horribly broken. From the moment you complete the dragon's quest on the first level, you have more than enough gold than you need for everything.

• Shops never sell anything useful; in fact, they all have the same inventory of paltry starting equipment. One good thing: shops keep what you sell them, so you can use them as a kind of inventory-holding system if you're not sure if you need particular items.

• The "identify" command in shops was never useful. Every time I used it on a piece of equipment, I was told it was already identified.

• Huge attribute increases accompanied each level-up. My characters started with their best attributes in the 10-12 range and finished with many of them in the 80-100 range.

The lead character's attributes near the end of the game.

• I wasn't clear about this before, but only the first 4 characters can attack in melee range. The rear two can use missile weapons. If you equip such characters with daggers, they are somehow able to throw daggers every combat round. These rear characters didn't take any physical damage for the entirety of the dungeon; only in the castle, when enemies get their own spells, did they become vulnerable.

• Spell points remained conservative throughout the game. After a recharge, mages and clerics can maybe cast their most important spells 4 or 5 times. You can't just spend the endgame spamming nukes.

The healer's final list includes resurrection ("New Live") and the useful "Restoration," which returns everyone's hit points to maximum, as well as mass-damage spells like "Flame Ball" and "Frost Breath."

• Monsters never do respawn, so you never have to worry about getting attacked in places that you've cleared. It also makes the game a bit deterministic, but because of the level caps, there are way more experience points available than you could possibly need.

• Kham's face kept showing up before key areas, asking either standard riddles ("When you look in me, you see yourself") or bits of lore from mythology ("Tell me the owner of the sword Excalibur!"). There were no dungeon messages to help with the latter, except on one of the castle levels, and I thought a couple might have been a little unfair.

This isn't even correct. Charon ferries you across Acheron.

• Starting on Level 3, you find lots of artifact weapons and armor in treasure chests, including a whole set of stuff belonging to someone named "Ara." The loot is unbalanced towards knights and warriors, though. I never found a single magic weapon that my thief was able to wield.

• The monster portraits are so much fun that here's a bunch of them:

 

Does this one's name make any sense in German?

Level 5 required me to run around and find a series of six messages that, together, made up the phrase THE UNICORN IS ALIVE. I had to figure out a complex series of wall switches and pressure plates to open an area, find a key, then close the area and open a new area (but in the same general space) with a door. On the other side, I bellowed the phrase, opened a chest, and at last found the Rune.

Believe it or not, "Leave it" or "Go away" would have been better options.

         
I returned to the surface, shuffled through my equipment at the shop, and visited the training guild. Each character rose 4 levels, and then the game told me that they had achieved the "highest level." (This was Level 16.) I had a momentary pang here--you know how I feel about level caps--but I rationalized that it wouldn't be too bad if the game was over quickly.

This is never a message I want to see.

         
Now, when this all happened, it was about 07:00 in the morning. That's right: the game had kept me playing feverishly all night, and just about ruined my productivity for the next day. But I crawled into bed feeling good about Dungeons of Avalon in general. It had provided me with a decent challenge, and while it wasn't going to win any awards for combat or economy, I was confident in a GIMLET at least slightly north of the "recommended" level.

Khan gives me a scroll to defeat the Dark Lord at what I assume is the endgame.

      
So you're the developer of a game, and you've constructed things in such a way that brings your player and his characters to this point. You're 12 hours in, the player has had a moderate amount of fun, you've challenged him with a easy-moderate difficulty level, and you've level-capped him well below the sum of all the experience points in the game. What is it time for?

1. A single-level castle with a few memorably difficult combats, culminating briskly in the endgame.

2. Four castle levels! Combats nearly every step! New monsters capable of mass-damage spells! Hundreds of thousands of experience points that the characters earn for absolutely no reason! An impossible final battle!

If you answered #1, you have a better sense of decency than these developers. This is the danger that you find with independent games. Big game studios might sometimes play it safe in a way that leads to banal results, but at least they usually, for the sake of the market, insist on a reasonably winnable game.

The castle had some of the same navigational puzzles as the dungeon, but not as many, and by this time I had the "Eagle Eye" spell, so I was able to rely on it instead of mapping. That was the only small grace.

A well-done automap.

The battles in the castle were relentless. Some corridors had them literally every step. Quickly, I got so sick of them that I tried running from every combat, but it fails about 50% of the time, and when it does, enemies get a free set of attacks--in slow combat mode. That was less fun than fighting the interminable battles.

A typical party in the final areas.

Finally, after a good four hours of slugging, I made it to the fourth floor of the castle. The area consists of a few treasure chests, a store, a temple, and--tucked away in a nondescript corner--the final battle with Rhateph, the Dark Lord.

For the first time in CRPG history, the villain's smack talk is entirely justified. (Except that only one of us is a human.)

I've said this before and have been proven wrong, but here goes: the final battle is simply unwinnable. The Dark Lord is capable of killing one character every round, no save, but that's not the worst part of it. The worst part is his 13 "fire troll" allies, each of which either makes a devastating attack or casts a devastating spell every round. There is absolutely no hope of defeating them. I reloaded about 25 times, trying every strategy I could think of, but there wasn't a single combat in which the trolls didn't kill both my spellcasters in the first round--before the characters could even act--and mass damage spells are the only way that enemies like this will fall.

The Dark Lord's allies destroy my party in the first round.

In those 25 attempts, my entire party died within 2 rounds in 23 of them; the other two took 3 rounds. There are no spells to protect against the magic of either the fire trolls or the Dark Lord. There are no spells or potions to improve the initiative of the characters to ensure they act fist.

To defeat the Dark Lord, you're supposed to use the "anti-aura" scroll on him. Maybe 1/4 of the time, a character was able to do that before dying. So I tried battles in which I concentrated every attack on the Dark Lord, hoping to at least kill him before his allies killed me. No dice. I thought maybe I could slowly whittle down the enemy party, so I tried to concentrate on killing some trolls, then fleeing in the second round, getting everyone resurrected, and re-engaging. That didn't work, either. Not only did it take 5 tries before I could kill even a single troll, the entire party re-spawns when you leave combat and return.

Using the "anti-aura" spell, and hoping that the Dark Lord doesn't decide to kill this character first.

I don't think party composition is the issue. I looked at the spells available to the other classes, and none of them offer anything to resist the enemy's magic. The whole things is so ridiculous that I felt I must be missing something. A switch that turns off all spells? An alternate location to attack the Dark Lord, without his allies? Another search produced nothing. About this time, I heard from commenter Quido, who offered me his set of maps from the game. They showed nothing that I hadn't found. More important, he said that he was unable to win the game--despite fully mapping it--for the same reason.

If this was a DOS game, I'd do something cheesy like hex-edit the characters to godlike attributes, just so I could get the endgame screen. This being an Amiga game, I don't know how to do that. I'm left only able to say Gib ein französisch Kuss auf die Ziege von deinen Nächsten, Herr Akbiyik!, offer a $50 Amazon gift card bounty to anyone who can prove they won the game and explain how, and move on to the GIMLET:

• 4 points for the game world. There's a decent back story, a fairly clear quest, and a slightly-original approach with the spirit of the previous hero helping you along the way.

• 4 points for character creation and development. There's a somewhat standard, but still interesting, set of races, classes, and attributes. Leveling is swift and rewarding throughout the game.

• 2 point for NPC interaction in just a couple of places, plus the ability to add slain NPCs found in the dungeon to your party (I didn't really explore this).

• 3 points for encounters and foes. The enemies offered by the game are generally original, but not very memorable. Until the last levels, they can't do anything but engage in melee combat. Even those capable of spellcasting, towards the end, are only capable of a single, generic, mass-damage spell. The riddles get a point.

In a game where monsters were generally well-designed, this one is the exception.

• 3 points for magic and combat. There aren't really any combat tactics, but at least the battles last quickly. The magic system is pretty decently-balanced, with limited spell points keeping you from over-relying on it.

The end of a tough battle. Too bad all those experience points are worthless.

• 3 points for equipment, basically a standard set of weapons, armor, potions, scrolls, and such. It shares my frustration with Dungeon Master for not telling you anything about weapon damage and other statistics. Everyone gets a ring slot, but there's only one ring.

• 2 points for economy. While you need money for initial equipment, healing, and leveling up, a stash you find within the first hour keeps you going for the entire game. My party had tens of thousands of unspent gold pieces at the end.

Wasting money on healing in a temple, because why not?

• 3 points for a main quest and at least one side quest (the Level 1 dragon), plus lots of side-areas to the dungeon that you technically don't need to solve to progress.

• 4 points for graphics, sound, and interface. The graphics are grotesque and beautiful--probably the best part of the game. I give a point for some limited sound effects. The controls suck a bit--you can move with the keypad, but everything else, even the combat screens, requires mouse navigation.

• 3 points for gameplay. If the game had just consisted of the dungeon section, with the difficulty encountered there, it would have earned a 5, maybe. The castle section ruins the good will that the brisk, moderately-challenging dungeon section built up.

The availability of so many rest spots makes the game a little easy--until the final areas.

Add them up, and we get a final score of 31, just below what I consider "recommended," but notably the highest score I've ever given to a diskmag game. Games you get with your monthly subscription aren't supposed to be epic, but this is a reasonably good dungeon crawler for the money. If only the developers had known when to quit.

There's not much else to say about a game that's gone mostly unnoticed by history. I found one review, in the May 1992 Amiga Joker, which starts off saying something like, "Never was a robust dungeon so inexpensive!" The review praises the quality of the game in a subgenre (diskmag games) that rarely delivers quality. I'll let my German commenters tell me if there's anything else notable in the review; the skewed angle is giving me headaches trying to OCR the page, and I don't feel like typing it all into Google translate.

Of the developers, it appears that lead designer Hakan Akbiyik's career lasted from around 1989 to 1994, with graphics and programming credits on a lot of minor games like this. His LinkedIn profile indicates that he transferred to web development in the late 1990s. The bigger success story is "monster designer" Frank Matzke, who spent some time as a graphic designer, transitioned to marketing and management, and now works as an executive for Bethesda Germany.

Doesn't being silver kind of remove the point of being a ninja?

"Monster graphics" are separately credited to Klaus Ehrhardt, who has a smaller graphics portfolio of 4 games. Rudolf Stember, responsible for the sound, went on to a very long career in sound design, joining the German company Factor 5 and moving with it to the U.S. in 1996. He still works for the company, now based in California. "Level designer" Thomas Jakowatz has only this and a game called Logical to his name.

Despite my dissatisfaction with the ending to the game, I'm mildly curious to see what the team came up with for Dungeons of Avalon II: Island of Darkness in 1992. Judging by images and videos online, it appears to be the exact same game with new dungeons. Even the town graphics are the same.

It's worth recapping where we are with German-published games. Legend of Faerghail: Couldn't finish because of a bug that made an entire castle disappear. Dragonflight: Couldn't finish because of a bug that kept the endgame video from playing. The Ormus Saga: Couldn't finish because I ran out of things to do. Dungeons of Avalon: Couldn't finish because of an unwinnable final battle. That's 0-for-4. Will Antares break the trend, or will it find a way to screw me, too?

Dungeons of Avalon: Breaking the Mold

This is the best image of a troll in any game ever.

Dungeons of Avalon has offered some surprises, not so much in mechanics or plot, but rather in its world design. I expected a standard structure of a menu town followed by 6 to 10 uniformly-sized levels. Instead, the game has delivered something more complicated: sprawling levels, irregular in size and shape, with multiple unconnected sections and a host of navigation tricks like buttons that completely reconfigure the wall patterns. The map I offered of Level 1 turned out to be only a small corner of the final level, and even here I'm missing one major section reachable only by teleporter.

The real extent of Level 1.

 
The reconfigurations have been trickier than those offered by Dungeon Master or Eye of the Beholder. Most of the time, buttons open up secret doors to new areas, but occasionally they'll simultaneously close existing openings, meaning you'll now have an east-west corridor bisecting what used to be a north-south corridor but no longer offers north-south access. In one place on Level 2, hitting a button somehow removed an entire section of corridor so that the entire dungeon shifted a few squares to the east. (In practical terms, this is probably accomplished with a teleporter so that nothing actually moves, but it's still pretty unnerving.)

There's more. There isn't a single "menu town" in the game, but at least two. In some distant corner of Level 1, I found stairways up and discovered myself in a city called Ghale, where instead of a menu option to enter the dungeon, I had an option to enter a castle. (Oddly, when I entered the castle and then later exited, I was back in the original city, H'Khan, again.) A message in one of the dungeon corridors suggests there's a third city, called Avalon, somewhere.

The second town has a spooky castle rather than a dungeon.

In its disdain for the traditional, neat dungeon level, the game reminds me a bit of The Dark Heart of Uukrul. There are also some plot similarities. Thanks to Atantuo's translation of the game documents, we know that the antagonist of the game is a wizard named Rhateph. When he came to Avalon, he found the people so trusting and guileless that they didn't recognize aggression when they saw it. Before long, he'd conquered the land and had the peasantry build his castle.

A wizard named Arakus ["Kham" in my translation, though] set out to defeat him but was killed in Rhateph's castle. He left messages and riddles behind him for the next party of adventurers to solve. I guess it's Kham's face I've been encountering frequently in the dungeons.

Anyway, this is similar to The Dark Heart of Uukrul, in which the party encounters messages and resources left by the previous (failed) expedition. The two similarities aren't enough for me to suggest a direct connection, but it's nice to think that the possibility exists that Uukrul had an influence on someone.

The useless thief starts to gain a little more confidence.

I spent another few hours after the first post mapping the twisting corridors of Levels 1 and 2. Navigation obstacles, in addition to the fore-mentioned buttons, have included one-way stairs, spinners, traps, and teleporters. The game is slightly unusual in that all teleportation squares both send and receive--although they might not just go back and forth. In one major area of Level 2, I had to find a set of buttons to open the ways to two teleporters. Each teleporter took me to a square area full of traps with a button. Once I'd pressed both of those buttons, the way opened to the next level.

A lot of games have spinners. This is one of the few in which they have consequences greater than just screwing up your map. Walking into walls deals damage. It's easy to accidentally hit the "forward" key too many times, hit a spinner, rotate to face a wall, and then slam into that wall. You have to either carefully annotate spinner locations or force yourself to move slowly down corridors.

This is what happens when everyone dies.

There were a couple places where I had to pass one of Kham's magic mouth puzzles. One asked me for the name of the dragon I had helped early in the game--fortunately, I had taken a screen shot. Another said, "To what did the snake-headed medusa turn you?" I don't know if this is answerable by anything in-game. I got it correct with STONE, but you have to know something about mythology to get it right. Granted, it's not a particularly difficult one. Here's another one that requires some external knowledge:

Fortunately, I correctly interpreted this as what is the winged horse called?

The corridors are littered with various messages, presumably left by Kham.

• "You must find the switches!"
• "Here you will find nothing. Search in the north."
• "The exit is to the northeast!"
• "I wouldn't go there if I were you."

So...search pretty much everywhere.

There were only a handful of monsters on the two levels: worms and "gnoms" on Level 1 and trolls and vultures on Level 2. Individually, none of the monsters has been hard, but sometimes I'll encounter a huge pack of them, and one of my party members dies. Even though there's a resurrection option in temples, I generally reload when that happens.

I've been leveling up at a pretty quick clip; most of my characters are at Level 5. Equipment upgrades have not kept pace with attribute upgrades. It's a major event when I open a chest and find something like leather armor or a helm. I've found three shops--one in each of the cities, and one in the dungeon--but they all just sell the same selection of basic goods. I haven't found anything that I've needed to identify yet.

I don't think I showed the paper doll inventory screen yet. I'm not sure why it says "00" by his legs.

           
Combat remains mostly boring, but that "quick combat" option makes all the difference. I need to start experimenting more with spells. Characters get 1 new spell level every 2 character levels, and 2 spells per spell level. As you might expect, the healer has mostly healing spells while the mage has mostly offensive spells. I've found a couple of navigation spells, but I frankly don't know what they do. "Magic Eye" supposedly "watches over me," but don't ask me in what way. "Levitation" doesn't save me from traps, even pit traps. And both are gone in about 3 minutes.

My healer's spells. I don't think any offensive spells do mass damage yet.

As I mentioned, I found myself in the city of Ghale at one point, and I chose to enter the castle. Only a few steps from the entrance, I got a vision of Kham, with multiple screens of text:

My name is Kham. I was the good magician of Avalon. In my search for the Dark Lord, I was killed by him. My complete party was defeated by the Dark Lord and his monsters. My soul will never find peace before the Dark Lord is...defeated. It's on you to fulfill the mission. But before you fight against the Dark Lord, search for the Rune. I need this Rune to create a spell to disturb the anti-aura of the Dark Lord. Search for the Rune in the dungeon. You will find some of my old party members there, too. They are all killed by the Dark Lord. But in the temples you can [have them resurrected]. They can help you on your mission against the evil. I wish you more luck [than] we got in our mission. Bring me the Rune and I will give you the anti-aura scroll...please hurry before the evil covers the Island Avalon.

"My soul will never find peace before the Dark Lord is not defeated..." Is he trying to trick me?

Later, in a chest, I found some elf bones. Unfortunately, you need an empty PC slot to insert the bones before you can resurrect the character. I dismissed my mage just so I could do it and see what happened. The resulting NPC didn't say anything, and because he was an NPC, I couldn't even look at his attributes and equipment. I suppose it's possible that he comments on things later, but for now, I'm happy to just keep my original party.

I can't even see his magic point total. I assume he doesn't have any.

  
So the mission is clear: explore the dungeon and its branches as long as it takes to find the Rune, return to Kham with the Rune, and find the Dark Lord in the castle. It's still not an epic game, but it got a lot more interesting after the first post, and especially with the "quick combat" keeping the battles from becoming too tedious, I'm inclined to see it through.

Game 196: Dungeons of Avalon (1991)

I've mostly just been drawing names for the next games on my list at random, so I didn't plan it that I'd play three German-published games in a row--let alone two of them from the same publisher, CP Verlag, which seemed to specialize in releasing quick, forgettable games through its various magazines. This one, developed by Zeret Software (which only seemed to exist for Dungeons of Avalon and its sequel), was originally published in Amiga Fun in 1991, then Amiga Mania in 1992. I've tried without success to find where Zeret was actually headquartered. The lead developer has a Turkish name, but his associates sound German. I think Amiga Mania was a Hungarian publication, which is comfortably in the middle of all of this.

Oddly, the game takes place not in Avalon but in "H'Khan." The lead developer's name is Hakan.

It took me a while to find an English version of the game, and even then I don't know if it's an official translation. The quality isn't bad, but not everything is translated. Facing east, for instance, shows me an "O" on the compass, and a couple of the other terms and abbreviations are still in German. So is the manual, which I've uploaded here if anyone wants to give me a hand (not the whole thing, but maybe the backstory and what the advantages to "monks" are). The back story seems to be the usual rot about a wizard taking over a peaceful kingdom.

A bit of the backstory.

Dungeons of Avalon looks like Dungeon Master but plays more like Wizardry. You create a party of six characters in the adventurer's guild of a standard menu town and then descend into a dungeon of indeterminate levels, fighting creatures, opening treasure chests, and so on. Its encounter and combat system is straight out of Wizardry (perhaps via The Bard's Tale, which every German developer seemed to be familiar with), but it has the approach to dungeon design of Dungeon Master, including substantive walls, doors that roll up into the ceiling, opened by buttons, and a light smattering of navigation puzzles.

For your party of six characters, you choose between human, elf, half-elf, dwarf, troll, gnome, "lizzard," and sternbär races. (The latter translates as "star bear"; I have no idea what it's supposed to mean. A wookie?) [Edit: I guess it was "Stembar," an inside joke based on one of the programmers. See the comments.] Classes are fighter, thief, knight, hunter, monk, magician, healer, and wizard (these show a Bard's Tale influence, but perhaps by way of Legend of Faerghail). Attributes, which you can re-roll as many times as you like, are intelligence, dexterity, wisdom, luck, strength, and something abbreviated "KO"--probably constitution. There are no alignments, and every character is male. Portrait depends only on class and is not influenced by race.

Creating a party of characters. Gnarr is supposed to be a troll.

Each character is created with a handful of gold pieces, from which you outfit him with basic equipment at the "armour" shop (despite its name, it sells weapons and magic items, too). Identification of found equipment is done in the shop, as in Wizardry. A temple for healing and resurrections, and a training guild for leveling up, are also found in the menu city.

Buying items for the new party.

Once outfitted, you head into the dungeon, where the textures are reminiscent of Dungeon Master but the rest of the gameplay is more akin to Wizardry. Enemies don't appear in the hallways; instead, markings on the floor alert you to both encounters and treasure. Encounters are signaled by a barely-perceptible blue line; treasures by a star inside a circle. (I had assumed the latter was a Dungeon Master-style pressure plate at first.)

A button on the wall, but there's an encounter in between. Can you see that little bluish marking?

Combat is the turn-based, line-up-all-your-attacks-then-execute system that we've seen a million times (and are currently experiencing in Antares). Enemies can attack in multiple groups of multiple enemies at various distances. Characters can attack, use items, or cast spells. 

The one major combat difference between Dungeons of Avalon and Antares is the existence of a "fast combat" feature here, where instead of seeing the blow-by-blow account, you just get a quick summary of post-combat statistics. I saw this for the first time in Legend of Faerghail, another Bard's Tale-inspired German game, and I wonder if this developer was a fan.

Watching the messages scroll by in normal combat.

Versus just getting summary stats at the round's end.

At this point, you've probably noted for yourself another of Dungeons of Avalon's strengths: its bizarre visuals. Everything from the weapons shop to the monster portraits are done in a highly original, grotesque style that reminds me of something I've seen before but can't quite place. Another element that may not be new, but that I can't remember from other games, is the animation of the character portraits. Each of them winks, blinks, waggles his eyebrows, and opens and closes his mouth more or less continually.

A freaky temple found in the middle of the dungeon.

Sound is also reasonably well done. The town section has a relentless techno track that I'd rather turn off, but once you enter the dungeon, you encounter an evocative soundtrack of howling winds, creaking doors, rattles, and other weird noises. Unfortunately, you soon realize that the track is only about 50 seconds long, and the same sounds just keep looping repeatedly no matter where you are or what you're doing. There are some "ows" to accompany combat and some nice tones that go with spellcasting.

The first level of the game.

I created a party consisting of a human knight, a troll hunter, a dwarf monk, a gnome thief, an elf healer, and a half-elf magician, then spent about 90 minutes mapping the first level of the dungeon. I soon learned that secret doors are clued by little grates in the lower-left corner; clicking on them opens the door.

Note the grate in the lower left.

The "rest party" option, which restores both hit points and magic points, only works if you're standing on a floor tile that's marked by the letter "C"; there was only one of these on the first level. Since there are no torches in the game to run out, no character ages, no wandering enemies, and no food meter, there seems to be no penalty to resting as often and as long as you want.

Chests can hold gold or items and can be trapped. I assume thieves are supposed to be better than others at dodging the traps, but I had about as much luck with that as in Wizardry.

The Level 1 thief was pretty miserable at doors, too, but once I got him to Level 2, the "pick lock" option worked more often.

If I had a wet rag in your position, would I have to heal it as much as I heal you?

When I first arrived at the level, a message told me to "Search for the 'Rune'!" I wasn't sure what that meant, but a little later, I ran into a face that demanded to know what I was searching for. Lacking anything else, I tried "RUNE" and was allowed to pass.

Beyond the face was a button that caused a lot of walls previously closed to open up. I soon encountered a dragon calling himself Elistaire, trapped by the "dark lord's" magic, and requesting a ruby dagger to free himself.

Later, I found the ruby dagger in a treasure chest and brought it back to him. He rewarded me with two chests containing 5,000 gold pieces each, way more money that I can even begin to imagine what to do with right now. The shop in town has only the paltriest selection of goods, and I've already bought everything useful there.

My reward. Taliesin's expression is appropriate.

My characters went from Level 1 to Level 3 during the first dungeon level; each level-up in town is accompanied by an increase in attributes.

The most terrifying training guild imaginable.

Some other quick notes:

• You take damage walking into walls, just like Dungeon Master.

• There are four squares surrounding the main dungeon window that seem to indicate active spells. One lights up when you cast the "magic eye" spell; I otherwise don't know what the spell does.

• You can save and reload anywhere.

• After experimenting a bit with reloading, it seems that the contents of treasure chests are fixed and predetermined, but the size of enemy parties is not. If you meet 4 worms in one encounter, you might only face 1 or 2 when you reload.

• Enemies don't seem to respawn; once you've cleared the fixed encounters on a level, the only way to fight more enemies is to move down.

• Door jambs fully occupy a square, like in Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder.

• The game is almost entirely mouse-driven, although you can use the arrow keys to move, and you occasionally have to type words.

A large part of the southeast of Level 1 had nothing in it. I don't know if I missed some other secret door dynamic, or if maybe there will be another set of stairs back up from Level 2.

On to the next level!

The game is fast-paced and marginally fun, and I do like what they've done with the visuals, but in general there's a "been there, done that" feel that you often get with diskmag games. In the context of The Ormus Saga, I talked about developers sometimes lacking self-awareness and turning out games of epic length with much less-than-epic content. If the developer of Dungeons of Avalon possesses that self-awareness, the game should wrap up by my six-hour minimum. We'll see.

Time so far: 2 hours

Reload count: 1