Akalabeth: World of Doom

It's game history. One of the first game for apple II. you just have to play this!

Akalabeth it's such an important game for the whole CRPG thing. It's a game that you can't ignore if you are interested about the subject, one of the first commercially successful CRPGs out there. It opened the path for most CRPGs we now know. Now, as far as the game goes, it's pretty much unplayable for "fun". It's frustrating, it's hard, it's obnoxious. The story it's pretty much all written in the manual, you don't have too much story to follow in the game, you basically need to find X-es on the map, do the dungeons and then follow the quest at the castle. Sounds pretty, but it's brutal. Everything you do in the game takes food. You pretty much need a whole country food resources to be able to move around wherever you want in the game. Dungeons are also painful. Most of the monsters you find are stealing your food. If you want to get into the adventure that is Akalabeth, you pretty much need to expect to die of starvation and start over. That's what you will be doing most of the time. Now, as i describe the game as an unplayable game, some might as why i would give it 5 stars. Because it deserves. At the moment when it was released, it was an awesome thing. Everyone should try it and view it as the piece of gaming history as it is. In this times, a game like it it's not intended to be fun, as you definitely have better choices. I'm really thankful to GoG that they made this game available as free download. Great job!

A shame that my little brain can-t play the game at all. I found it extremelly hard to navigate the menus and how to do the actions required. Maybe I need to try a little harder.

Much like the early stone tools of Neanderthals, or a credit card imprinter (google it ;)), Akalabeth is a game that is only relevant today from a historical or academic perspective, not an artistic one. It is and was an achievement only for pushing the technical boundaries in computer gaming in its time. It is not a creative achievement, for it has neither inspired music, or story, or even sprites. It is not an achievement in game design, for there is no real strategy or variation in gameplay, particularly if one uses the MA/LM strategy. The fact that this game-breaking strategy (and a relatively easy one) exists in one of the earliest RPGs is exactly one of those elements that should fascinate any gaming scholar. All of this is not to bash or diminish in any way its importance, or a resentful criticism. Quite the opposite. Because the greatest achievement of Akalabeth was perhaps, to inspire a young Richard Garriot to pursue game design, and any GoG user surely knows the results of that labor. So, thank you Akalabeth, (even if I spent more time on you than i should have ;)) for being the stepping stone to getting the Ultima Series, which many of its games were and are great achievements in all aspects of game design.

The game hasn't aged well, it gets repetitive and it probably won't be enjoyable to people that didn't play it back in the day.