love this gem
I think i got the original disk as a freebie with another game. it was my first dungeon crawler. i loved it then and playing it once again in 2026 i love it now. it has surprising complexity, weapons are hand based, right or left, so you can wield a sword in one hand, shield or missile or another. you can play ranged, mage, sword and board, duel wield, heavy/light armor.
where you click is where your weapon attacks, low stab, high, wide sweep. missiles for ranged, there are exploding canisters. once again, where you click it where the missiles go, high or low, how hard is based on how high it goes. missiles only go straight ahead.
there are companions, with their own health and armor/weapon needs which you have to attend to. there is lots of flavor text as you explore, hidden traps, switches, ambushes, secret walls and caches. there is a strong story and the opening fmv movies are great! its difficult combat. i cheated sometimes and stood in doorways and sniped hard to kill characters, im not ashamed lolol.
you earn experience by doing, what weapon, armor, tactic you use levels up. there are infinite mob spawn sites here and there where you can grind experience for new weapons you want to try out mid game. monsters have different weaknesses and strength so what works for one wont do spit on another. you have to strategize and plan out. save often as you will die and respawn at your last save point. there are mysterious drinks and potions. no clue what they do till you try.
only grip is how hard it is to see what weapon/armor stats are. you can find out but you have to equip each one, the go look at how it changes your base stats. a bit cumbersome. there is a map that fills out as you go and you WILL pore over it, add notes, try to find hidden walls and routes that you missed, very old school
its just a whole lot of fun to play, and frankly im tired of triple aaa games with realistic graphics, 200g of memory and not any fun to play and full of data mining, upsells, rng loot boxes.
this is pure gaming. very much like lands of lore, another stellar old school dungeon crawler.
runs fine today, some confusion at the starting screen asks which of 4 games to play, i chose the first. though you do have to download and read the manual found in the extras section to learn how to do things and yes! that is the original manual with pictures and lore. so nostalgic.
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