Akalabeth: World of Doom

I really enjoyed playing such an old game, couldn't wait to beat it the first time! It was a challenge from the start, had to figure out some key bindings, the game is very unforgiving at the beginning. The game really shows that it is a first attempt at making a video game. I also had trouble when I installed the default game and I couldn't progress past the first quest. So better try the extra installers! (I used the windows installer.) The game play is about navigating the map until you find the castle, the nearest dungeon and town. Then you can move between these three ignoring the rest of the map. The dungeon crawling is a bit fun and a bit confusing, lots of monsters and traps around. I even tried drawing a map - but somehow managed to mess it up, like the walls were moving... I died about a dozen times, but then managed to win in the end and I don't regret spending the time on it!

Akalabeth is still a basic game, the ancestor of modern RPG games. It's a great throwback game to have fun with for a little while. Just not the one from GOG. I don't know what they did to their version of it, but it's buggy. You often will end up with one of two errors that stop you from being able to complete the game: 1) You receive a quest from Lord British to kill a(N). It doesn't state the monster to defeat, so you cannot actually defeat anything to progress. Even if you kill every monster on every level of a dungeon, you physically can't progress. Start over. 2) You receive a quest from Lord British and kill the quest baddy. When you return to Lord British, he then says "Go now and complete they quest!". Even if you go back and kill a dozen of your quest monster in a dozen dungeons, you cannot progress. Start over. Outside of those two game breaking bugs, it's a fun game. Play the original or a different version from somewhere else, though.

Due to a bug in the gog release, you cannot turn in the quests that you need to progress and beat the game. The game itself runs fine, looks fine and plays fine, a true marvel for the late 1970s when it was made. HOWEVER. I do find it a glaring drawback in this release that it cannot be beaten or even made progress in without installing third party fixes.

Close enough, thanks :) I initially thought that this was Dungeons of Daggorath and it took me back to the days where we used to make so much out of so little in game development. While I wasn't yet a teen, much less a "true developer" in the late 70's, I still had access to Radio Shack and eventually my own real first computer that utilized the Z80 processor of which I could play and develop games on. To this day I still develop games and noticing little forgotten gems like these always takes me back to the "good-old-days".

Akalabeth is a massively important game in the history of CRPGs, being the game that made Ultima I possible. That said, it doesn't hold up well at all, which can't really be held against a game that was inventing the genre as it went along. If you insist on playing one of the earliest RPGs, give this one a short bit of your time (it's free after all) then jump into Ultima I which is a better realizing of what Lord British was trying to do with Akalabeth (Ultima I doesn't exactly hold today either, but it's still much more playable than Akalabeth.)