Made as the pet project of Ian Boswell and Martin Buis, it was released in 1989 by Broderbund - a company not exactly known for RPGs. It got good reviews from magazines, but bue to a lack of marketing on Broderbund's part, it sold less than 5,000 copies and largely fell into obscurity for many years before eventually seeing a rerelease on GOG in 2020. I can certainly see why it retained enough of a following to get one too; while it is a pretty standard dungeon crawling RPG at a glance, it shows a lot more refinement than many of its contemporaries. It has a fully-featured automap that even allows the player to add custom notes to specific spaces, and a surprising amount of detail is given to descriptions and prose found within the dungeon, so the puzzles are natural and well-designed rather than feeling like irritating guesswork. Combat resembles the '80s Ultima titles, though with a bit more polish - each round is broken up into a movement phase and then an attack phase where each party takes actions, and every character sprite has quite a few animation frames. Character creation seems to take inspiration from Ultima too - while you must have a party comprised of one of each class (Fighter, Paladin, Priest and Magician), you answer a series of unique personality questions to determine their starting stats. The spell system is given a lot of thought too, with your magician and priest needing to acquire the rings of specific gods/circles of magic to cast certain tiers of spells, and then know the correct prayers/words to use in order to invoke them. (The gods are temperamental, though, and may refuse to aid priests or even damage them if they invoke too often). Even little touches like the health bars that go up and down as you take damage or heal it are clever touches, as is the experience system; each character gets a different share, though it's weighted toward getting kills in combat. It looks like just another dungeon crawler at a glance, but it's immaculately well polished, has a lot of intricate mechanics and genuinely well-crafted dungeon crawling that rivals the ingenuity of games like Ultima. It really is kind of a shame it didn't get more attention in its day. Thankfully it's got a new lease on life with the digital age, so it's definitely one to check out if you enjoy these types of games.
Publisher: Broderbund
Released: 1989
Platform: Apple II, PC