The Dark Spire

released on May 14, 2009

The Dark Spire is a role-playing game.


Released on

Genres

RPG


More Info on IGDB


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The Dark Spire, and all heavily Wizardry-inspired dungeon crawlers, are honestly not very different from the roguelites that everyone seems to love nowadays.

The premise is there, go into a dungeon full of monsters and treasure, explore until you are low on resources (on roguelites you would just die though, and here that's not an option) and then go back to the town, upgrade your characters, and go back to dungeon, now a little stronger and with more information, hoping you can advance a little further than last time.

The obvious difference, though, and the reason games like this are so cool to me, is that nothing is procedurally generated. Every single spot on the map is hand crafted. Every spinner / teleporter maze, every long corridor inside secret passages that lead to absolutely nothing, and every cryptic puzzle that honestly most people would need a guide to solve. It's hard not to feel the love of the devs in every little tile of the dungeon, and honestly, if you are making a game like this, it's absolutely out of love and not because you expect to create a new AAA franchise.

The Dark Spire is not very different from the first Wizardry trilogy. Even though the game is made way easier by a save anywhere option and a game over screen (instead of having to create a new party and gather the corpse of your fallen allies), the game can still be pretty unforgiving. Screw up in character creation and you probably going to have a hard time getting everything in the game (and by a hard time I probably mean an extra 5 hour grind or so by the end of the game.), getting ambushed by some enemy formations, specially in the later portions of the game, means instant death, and your only option is... dealing with it and loading a save.

Either way, the game can be a good time if you're into that type of the game. Gameplay is very simplistic, featuring only 4 races and 4 classes that you choose, with some dual class options down the line. And even though the game doesn't force to have all classes in your party, you can't really go wrong with it because every class brings lots of utility to your party. Warrior is a great tank and single target damage dealer, thief is necessary for chests / lockpicking, mages can cast devastating spells that will be useful through the entire game, and clerics, well, they can heal, and healing makes you not die (too fast!)

The game presents itself as a traditional dungeon crawler, but the twist is that everything in the game is meant to resemble a comic book, sort of. The visuals are a great part of this game to be honest, and it adds a very unique feeling to this game. Obviously, the visuals also make the game slower, so eventually, after you explore a floor a lot, you're probably want to change to the "classic" mode, making the game resemble the original Wizardry 1, with extremely minimalistic graphics (but faster gameplay!)

Music is alright, I guess. It's also definitively unique, and I have a bit of a hard time describing it, but eventually it gets kinda old (most because you're going to hear the same songs over and over again for a while).

It's also important to note that, while the story is not the focus of the game whatsoever, the game totally gets the silly Wizardry humor that a lot of other games of this genre fail to replicate.

Overall, if you're a fan of Wizardry and dungeon crawlers, you can't go wrong with this one.



This gem is my roman empire. I just hope one day I can finally sit down and finish it.

A surprisingly good dungeon crawler with great visuals and sound. Big recommend if you like the genre.

what is this description. "The Dark Spire is a role-playing game." damn fr

Masterful in it's craft from an auditory standpoint to a graphical one. Puzzles are satisfying to resolve and early ones come down to testing your cartography skills.

The progression however can be a bit slow due to the small amount of resources given at times. And a lack of full customization from an individual character standpoint degrades it for me, since games like Wizardry 8 have shown that even, player made characters can still retain personality and truly interact with their world.

Vacca diobestia che palo nel culo ho lanciato via il cane dopo una decina e passa di ore