"Feels made in a basement but won't fit there and doesn't deserve to gather dust there."

I suppose it was a foregone conclusion that Deathlord would get squeezed by the Ultima franchise's combination of quality and name recognition. After initial frustration building characters, it was easy to dismiss as an Ultima clone, but the further I looked into Deathlord, the more I realized it had much that Ultima didn't. Okay, Ultima came in a box with a cloth map, a coin and an ankh, and Deathlord came in one of those minimalist disk folders. But Comparing the games is like comparing novels Walter Scott and Alexandre Dumas; they have obvious similar hooks, but you are missing something if you only look at one of the works. Either is a unique, rollicking good time with tons of things to see, where you can overlook something that's been done before. There's enough that hasn't. Although Deathlord probably wouldn't shave much if it were a person and has the feel of being made by people who wear baseball hats for bad professional sports teams and say ''yo'' too much, it's intricate and challenging. It even has a cool story.

The Deathlord has begun to move south and destroy villages and threaten the safety of the world of Lorn. He's even left you a hint: seven words, six items, and your incompetence stand in the way of your defeating him, foreshadowing the further sardonic humor you'll find. You start off on Kodan, the largest continent, where you can explore ruins(one pirate, one haunted, which develops a good part of the story quickly,) and an introductory dungeon where you learn about secret walls and traps. They go nicely with the assorted villages and towns and the big castle in the center. It features the emperor, who unfortunately let a huge eight-level dungeon build up under his own seat of power and now wants you to destroy the evil wizard, a pawn of the Deathlord, in charge. After that you are given a free ship(otherwise they cost 10000 gold, the most a character may hold at one time) and must explore a surprisingly huge world. It's a 16x16 grid of mostly uninhabited 56x56 disk sectors, but there are some rather large continents you will find if you map it. The game also has 144 dungeon levels(32x32 each) and 32 towns(64x64.) Counting total squares, it dwarfs Ultima V, the publicly-acclaimed standard bearer after Deathlord appeared, and with fewer player disks--two versus SEVEN. The simple ingenious compression scheme(byte FF, # of times icon repeats, icon #) sacrifices occasional detail for size. It's a good trade-off, and the only other game I know that tried this was Demon's Winter. But Demon's Winter didn't have Deathlord's ///-c| |=1/-//-(DEF-lord's?) if you'll pardon my Leetspeak. Technically Deathlord has over a million different squares, but even cutting discounting the huge sea sectors that serve only as a mapping headache, it is the biggest Apple game by far I have encountered. But it's also fun.

Deathlord's intrigue starts when you create your characters. It's a game with a Japanese flavor, and the races and classes are considerably different from normal. You have humans and gnomes and trolls, but there are also kobito(dwarves,) toshi(elves,) nintoshi(half-elves,) ogre(half-troll) and obake(dark elf.) Then the character classes, which sound beautiful enough that I'll indulge in a partial laundry-list: mahotsukai and genkai(offensive/defensive spell casters,) kosaku(peasants,) ryoshi and ronin(spell-casting fighters,) and shukenja(spell-casting thieves.) You even get cool icons for each class--spellcasters hold their staffs in different ways, and fighters flash a variety of different weapons, with ninjas looking especially sleek. All black and white, all cool except for the kosaku who is so useless he should probably look dumpy anyway, and the ansatsusha, a remarkably annoying NPC enemy with poison attacks. The standard items, of course, have similarly exotic names(yoroi, katana) along with the spells, and the towns and continents I know do as well. I'm actually unsure on quite a few--and I've solved the game, and I even have a list of all 131 monster names and their attributes! Deathlord can be inscrutable at times.

In general there are small trade-offs between the eighteen classes. Yabanjin get more hit points per level than kichigai, but they can't wear as much armor. Kishi trade a hit point for upper-level spell casting ability. Shizen and shisai get medium spell points for learning less offensive-minded spells than their pure spellcaster counterparts. Ideally you'll want all four types of spellcasting in your group, but should you string a fighter along who needs to improve drastically before reaching spell level two, or even start with a pure fighter and ditch him for a fighter/spellcaster later? It's not at all clear, and you can and will experiment a lot. You'll also have to balance the story with getting your bearings in the world. There's the dungeon below the castle to explore, and there are ruins to the east, where you learn of a wizard who has escaped. Guess what? He's out there. You can also try to use the partial map that came with the game, but you'll largely rely on trial and error with KONPASU spells in your boat.

Speaking of errors, you'll commit many early. It's possible the pooled gold from your first attempts at parties may buy you a ship, but personal experience first: as a rookie, I wound up dying when my characters walked on swamps. The time after getting whipped by bandits because I had no armor, I used the rob command and once too often, succumbing to guards who rushed through secret doors to apprehend my party. After a while I learned that non-participants in combat didn't get experience(one spellcaster skulked at level three) and realized my party was unsuitable before changing it up. Yet there followed moments of accomplishment; my first merchant storeroom successfully pillaged, the first batch of guards defeated, buying a boat, the first town routed, hanging out in havens with experience-building fights and no level-draining monsters, locating one of the game-winning items during a snowy day home from school with slightly blue flu, and successful runs deep into a dungeon that would net valuable items.

The controls and gameplay take some getting used to, and you'll often waste turns by hitting an invalid key if you try to play things by ear. Single-key commands are based on odd synonyms, and when you start you'll probably first notice how you can't walk onto Kawa using the IJKM keys--you have to (E)nter it from a direction, an oddity. However a theme I find with Deathlord is that something that initially seems awkward allows great creativity; a town surrounded by water where you navigate mazy canals would not be possible in other games with different controls, but in Deathlord, you can visit such a fascinating place. (O)rate is used to talk, (F)ind is used to search, and (R)ob seems like a stretch. What's particularly annoying is that monsters don't suffer the same malaise. They can move diagonally when you can't and even attack through kitty-corner walls, are coming at you. Even worse is the command to get out of the pit; I turned the game off once because I had a hard time finding ^ even in the manual and found, twelve years later on a mailing list, I wasn't not the only one. But most wicked of all is something that you can't classify as a bug; when a character dies, or you're caught committing a crime in a town(guards there have long memories,) THE GAME SAVES IMMEDIATELY. No leeway, buster. You better keep track of everyone's hit points. Coupled with the party-killing nuisance below, you can wind up with dead adventurers quickly. There are also three nuisances that are not unveiled until later; the first is that if a character with 10000 gold(the maximum--this ceiling prevents easy stockpiling of wealth after suicide missions in dungeons) gets more gold, it is not added to your total. So you have to pause to loot, and it isn't easy to transfer the stuff, especially if several characters are maxed out. Looting is also inhibited when you find any one player can hold only one of each type of item at a time, so taking a new, nice-sounding item is a leap of faith. Finally the game looks first on player disk one to see where a saved game is and then to the second disk. If you reset a game(which is otherwise handy when you're lost) while on the second disk, your characters are restored as they were when you swapped disks. Awkward. But all this seemed back-burner once I figured out how to use macros--command strings of up to fourteen letters accessible by one of four keys. Being able to rise above such details(you can also use ? as a wild-card spell search) yet having the ability to name your group makes you feel like you're really managing the party, and I found that having to use exacting but ultimately logical instructions made me feel as if I were overcoming even greater odds.

Fortunately, standard disk-swapping techniques(defensively, to back up characters after good progress, and offensively, to duplicate the game-critical items that also improve your party--this game helped me refine the process in general) aid your fight back against such a stringent game(I even opted to reboot when given crummy extra hit points on level advancement, too extreme a policy in retrospect) and the kill/save feature teaches you the importance of backing up your work(a good general habit) like nothing else. It can even reset a town after you've robbed it and beaten up all the inhabitants or reset a lucrative hideout with easy, experience-rich fights and treasure. As the potential tripwires can be overcome with care, I believe they're canceled out by the imagination Deathlord shows. You see it first in the towns, which also double as tutorials for dungeon solving. There's a pyramid where you need to find secret doors to get out, and I've mentioned the town on the water. Swampy ruins are also abundant and captivating, and seaside towns may require you to enter from water and land to root out important hidden locations.

Now it may be too corny to point out that you have to look beneath the surface to get the most of the game, as that is where you find the dungeons, the crowning jewel of the game, but each one is a mind-bender. You may be caught up in the outside world, with its different climates and neat towns frequently tucked away and the people with valuable information tucked away in those towns(sights to see: a wonderful garden maze, a temple with a water maze, and there are treasure chambers in a town and castle,) or you may even be slightly confused as to how to progress. You may even stumble on one of the items you need. Fortunately the novelty of improving my characters(also interesting as they only gain experience when they themselves get a kill!) and seeing the world didn't grow old before I got down to mapping, which is really a necessity. Once you are able to tackle the dungeons, you'll find some good ones.

The Cave of the Elements features dirt floors and rock walls on level one, dark space(air) on level two, fire and brimstone on level three, and a spiral of water on level four. I didn't try to tackle this until I got teleport spells for my mahotsukai and walk-on-water for the genkai. I went the wrong way in the spiral until I discovered the boat I should have used if I'd gone through the dungeon correctly. The right way leads to where you can see the plaque with the word, although there's a funny-after-you-passed-it twist! Much of Deathlord's dungeons are like that; you can use the teleport spell to bash around and get a feel for it, but that will force you to rest to recharge spell points, and you need to find specific places to go(false walls, secret doors) that will get you to the important places. For instance, beneath the emperor's palace there is a corridor that seems to go on forever, and you sense that maybe you are being pushed around.

Each dungeon teases you in a different way; entering one, you read that a word is on level seven. There's a maze through levels one and two, with nothing on the next two, so if you try to teleport, you need TWO spells to force your way to level seven--I've never seen a lack of spaces toughen a dungeon so elegantly. Then there's the Linear Dungeon which looks straightforward, but the monsters at the end are tough. Of course, you don't know if some dungeons hold a word unless you talk to people in towns, which adds another hazard to the hack-and-slash approach. But it's still fun to crash through the sixteen-level sunken temple or Telegrond dungeons, which are loaded with treasure, even if your characters get killed and you have to use the Character Utilities option to bring them back dead to the main continent, with an auxiliary character to go to a temple and resurrect them. In another dungeon it is easy to get to the bottom, but chutes get in the way of your return, another has several levels of rooms full of stairs that force you to climb, and another has swamps that drain your party. Of course there's also a three-dimensional labyrinth that seems much bigger than its four levels.

Perhaps the only thing that's truly nasty about the dungeons is how, though you aren't killed for teleporting into rock, you are for teleporting outside the dungeon bounds--above or below. Going two levels up from level two kills you, and even in Shumi's Tower you may suspect a trick on the game's part, teleport up to get to level four and--OOPS! Still, there is usually a chance you can stumble on a solution through guesswork or even brute force or getting a general hold on the map; I remember walking on water to find something, then finding a secret door on the island and feeling sheepish. I also teleported extensively to find a word(the process of elimination was its own puzzle, and I saw it through an unbreakable portcullis in the process) but walking backwards I was able to see how cleverly it was hidden. The final puzzle is a bit of a letdown for hard-core abstract puzzle fans, as you must bash your way through a sixteen-level dungeon and unique tough monsters to fight the Deathlord, but it's still as impressive and draining as you'd expect.

Yet tough puzzles might make the game too dry; there's always laconic humor in Deathlord. In the towns, people don't waste words(it also helps save memory.) Open a door and talk to someone before they attack you; 'DIE!' Verbose types may say 'DIE SCUM!' or 'HOLY WAR!' The best people to talk to say 'PAY UP!' although some shills just thank you for the gold afterwards. And guards don't talk at all, not even if you chat(seven canned responses there.) Signs spread about also contribute to the humor; in one dungeon, after opening twenty or so doors, you reach a plaque hoping to find a word, but you get two: 'DOOR STORAGE.' Skeletons defend a graveyard labeled NURSERY. In a huge pit of fire you read a list of sauna rules, and on the other end of the thermometer, a set of FROZEN STORAGE rooms pushes tasteless. Hidden pits guard urns in a temple; cross over to find they're empty and you read a plaque saying 'GREED IS A SIN. REPENT!' There's a cruel joke('See you on level 21') in the sunken temple a few levels below a congregation of rabid vegetables, and there's even an unbreakable gate that bars stairs down on the bottom level of a dungeon. You'll get suddenly teleported in sight of your goal if you try to take the easy way out. There's also irony; often you'll stumble through, unable to find a secret door, and a monster will pass through it. You'll run into a lot of reverse logic and seeing how you could have gotten through a dungeon more easily and bang your head a bit. Even when you solve a puzzle, Deathlord can leave you feeling outsmarted.

The graphics seem a bit rough at first, but there's magic in them thar pixels--just don't touch the pretty magic fields that wipe half your hit points. I've mentioned my approval of character icons, and the outside icons indicate varying climates rather nicely. In the north climate you have a different range of icons: tundra, snowy mountains, frozen swamp and so forth. In the south, desert and brush and hills appear. The town and dungeon icons are different as well. Among the hundred plus monster icons(opening a door and seeing a pile of them behind bursting to greet you should get your blood racing) which on the whole make tremendous use of black and white, few are dull or copycat--ogre mages in fact work well on a similarity as they are ogres with laurel wreaths, a detail that can catch you off guard. Whorls and krakens, different skeletons, all color of undeads, and even a three-headed monster, are part of Deathlord's world. The southern monsters seem sleeker, and the northern seem rougher--you get the feeling that the regions are not just thrown together, and even guards and merchants, the most visible denizens, look different in each climate---proper guards don't even exist in the far north. The only time the game looks unreal is when acid or fire patches appear as green or orange blocks, but the fire makes up for it by making the evil city surrounded by fire and mountains really feel like it's in a volcano, as the townsmen say. Although very little besides water and damaging magic fields is animated, Deathlord has managed to create so many neat 14x16 color-restricted pixel-maps that it deserves some sort of award. Also, Deathlord is good at blocking off areas you logically couldn't see; behind walls or over trees, the view is blocked, although sometimes you can see through a diagonal. And the lower levels of many busy dungeons are quite nice to look at. Even the pedestrian plus-sign declaring a character ready for the next level stays in your party's summary screen can make up for a tough foray.

Overall, Deathlord is a challenging, teasing game. From learning the ropes to my first time looting a town to discovering dungeons to finding items and then words, the game had many levels of discovery and more shelf life than I thought it would. I was playing it eagerly long after Ultima IV, where I was stuck on the final part of the Stygian Abyss, became a neat map on my cork-board and a cool coin in my disk. I am disappointed that a sequel never came about. Hearing that Deathlord was originally planned with a Norse theme makes me wonder about a future game that could have been, and it's too bad that this game never really caught on. Time has quickly healed the wounds of a conversation in eighth grade, but many replays have convinced me of this game's worth. I include the debate below:

Me: 'I like Deathlord. I guess.'
Aric(my friend:)'I saw the box for the game and I don't know how to say this but...'
Me: 'Yes?'
Aric: 'It kinda...'
Me: 'Well? C'mon!'
Aric: 'Err, SUCKED.'

Demoralizing stuff in eighth grade! Still, looking back, the only thing that might have sucked was the marketing, which might be excused as the game seems to refuse to appear fancy. You have to commune with it before seeing its intricacies. I remember joking with a friend(not Aric--I got bashed a lot for playing this!) after I'd found a word by accident. 'Found the first word yesterday.' 'Six months times thirteen to find everything--seven years. You'll be in COLLEGE when you solve it.' I actually got to ten items/words by my senior year in high school but then our Apple crashed. Fortunately, technology can do so much that I solved the game five days before Y2K(over twelve years. I wanted to do something cool just in case the world's technology melted down, and I did.) I was well out of college, even forgiving the slight cop-out at the end providing an unfair shortcut to winning. If you've never solved a game you liked from your youth after thirteen years or so, I hope you are able to. For me, it was well worth the wait to finish a game I fear terribly will fall off the map and hope more fervently that it won't.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 04/06/00, Updated 02/07/02