Betrayal at Krondor Pack

PC RPGs have always been a bit more hardcore than their console cousins, and "Betrayal" is one of those pinnacles of what made PC RPGs what they were. This game is not for the faint of heart. Expect to spend a lot of time making maps, exploring arbitrarily, restoring from save, not to mention tons of optimization in menus. You must not only manage hit points and mana but also food, and many types of food will spoil quickly. This is back from the times when the PC was a sadistic GM whose goal was to kill off your entire party mercilessly as soon as you screwed up, so if you're used to modern-day console RPGs that bend over backwards to give you every chance to beat them, this will be a bit of a shock. Still, there is a decent story here, wonderfully challenging puzzles, and deep combat and non-combat systems to explore.

My older brother got this game the day it was released on CD, and it took us 2 months to get it to run, and we had to have a boot disk to do it. I've beaten it at least 3 or 4 times since then, most recently when I discovered DosBox. I just heard of gog.com today, and came here immediately to see if they had this game. And now I'm going to buy it. I just hope it has CD music included with it. That made the game even better than it originally was.

This was the first game that I've owned and I bought when I already knew that I will have the computer (two months before it). Even in that times it was an old game and setup was not easy, but I finally manage to configure it properly. After that it took almost one year to complete it. Basically I've learned english by playing this :D. Really I could lively remember hours spent by solving the riddles, trying to translate it and reading through all the dialogs. I think that the 2nd walkthrough will be just few months shorter than the first one before 15 years. :D I believe that the story is making the game, and story of this one is simply one of the best.

That it is slow paced is not necessarily a bad thing. Some can see it as so, which is why I pointed it out so prominently. However, I don't think it is at all. Many seem to have problems with Antara, but I don't. While it doesn't compare as well to Krondor, it is still a fun game. I have a minor problem with the clunky combat, though. It's nothing you can't get used to with time.

While it was considered by many to be the inferior follow up (not sequel) to Krondor, Antara is one of my all time favorite games. The combat system is almost exactly like that found in Krondor, and the story and atmosphere are as worthy of the original as anything I have ever seen. You can spend loads of time ignoring the main quest, going around meeting new people, finding enjoyable and often humorous tavern songs, or just exploring the wilderness. These elements rarely feel like a chore, and you will find yourself blissfully ignoring to storyline to see all there is to see. So fond of the atmosphere of this game was I that I re-bought the 3 cd set a few years back, procured an old copy of windows 98, and ran that with a processor slowing program within a virtual desktop. Now, thanks to gog, we don't have to perform such silliness for the game. If you liked the original, or just like RPGs with a lot of character, pick this one up.