Might and Magic: Book One - The Secret of the Inner Sanctum
released on Jun 01, 1986
Feel the power... Experience the magic! Lead your party of hand-picked adventurers into the enchanted Land of Varn. From dark, moldy caverns through corridors of majestic castles, you'll travel in search of clues to unlock the Secret of the Inner Sanctum. Daring exploits of heroism and sorcery will keep you riveted for hours. Choose from a variety of extraordinary personalities and lead them on an adventure of a lifetime. Over 250 weapons and items and more than 92 mystical spells to use in your search for the Inner Sanctum. Battle legions of ravenous monsters as you travel through forests and islands shrouded in mystery.
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Since reading The CRPG book and educating myself more about the origins of the genre, I've taken some time to sample the first entries of all the biggest long-running franchises - ULTIMA, WIZARDRY, THE BARD'S TALE, POOL OF RADIANCE, etc., and I think that this is the most immediately accesible iteration of that common experience they were all going for back then.
Really fun world to explore with just a hair more QOL than its contemporaries. Still brutally difficult and yet totally breakable, still byzantine yet overly simplistic in certain aspects, still ... just insanely old. But a good time if you're game for it!
Really fun world to explore with just a hair more QOL than its contemporaries. Still brutally difficult and yet totally breakable, still byzantine yet overly simplistic in certain aspects, still ... just insanely old. But a good time if you're game for it!
It's a decent evolution of games like Wizardry, but still a slog at times, and I've always hated the hybrid fantasy/sci-fi setting of stuff like this and Ultima. Pick a lane.
I love older games, but this is too outdated to play at all. Perhaps good for its time, there is no reason to play it today.
Full transparency: I played with guide and map from beginning to end. I'm sure that there will be a huge difference in the experience by playing with it or without it.
But it's a fun game even with a guide, without a guide, you have to draw maps yourself, discover places, dungeons, mazes, NPCs and stuff by yourself. The guide spell it out for you, where you have to go, clues, passwords, etc.
While I see the appeal of discovering things by yourself, I just don't have time to explore and draw everything by myself. Not to mention the environment looks mostly the same and some of the clues are very cryptic. Oh and there are a lot of hidden path that looks like a wall but you can actually pass through. As far as I know, there's no way of knowing this except by bumping into every wall you see.
My time with the game is spent mostly on grinding, because this game is stupidly hard on a certain point. Without the guide, I imagine the grinding will be spent while chartering the world and dying a lot of times because the game doesn't tell you when you are very underleveled for a certain area, until you got decimated by the enemy.
A very fun thing about this game is that after a certain level, you unlock magic that can easily break the exploration. You can phase through wall, teleport anywhere (within 9 tiles of you), and fly anywhere in the overworld. This, combined with the guide made the game a lot of fun because you can just skip the exploration and go through the actual meat of the content (quest, boss fight, superboss fight, etc).
But it's a fun game even with a guide, without a guide, you have to draw maps yourself, discover places, dungeons, mazes, NPCs and stuff by yourself. The guide spell it out for you, where you have to go, clues, passwords, etc.
While I see the appeal of discovering things by yourself, I just don't have time to explore and draw everything by myself. Not to mention the environment looks mostly the same and some of the clues are very cryptic. Oh and there are a lot of hidden path that looks like a wall but you can actually pass through. As far as I know, there's no way of knowing this except by bumping into every wall you see.
My time with the game is spent mostly on grinding, because this game is stupidly hard on a certain point. Without the guide, I imagine the grinding will be spent while chartering the world and dying a lot of times because the game doesn't tell you when you are very underleveled for a certain area, until you got decimated by the enemy.
A very fun thing about this game is that after a certain level, you unlock magic that can easily break the exploration. You can phase through wall, teleport anywhere (within 9 tiles of you), and fly anywhere in the overworld. This, combined with the guide made the game a lot of fun because you can just skip the exploration and go through the actual meat of the content (quest, boss fight, superboss fight, etc).