This game was one of the first I ever played as a small child on my father's C64. Even at the age of four it was extremely easy to understand and quite fun. You explore the dungeon and kill monsters; what could be more simple than that? As I grew older and began to understand the intricacies of the game, it made the whole experience just that much richer and more enjoyable. Even when we bought a new IBM desktop computer with new games, or when I got a Super NES and started playing that, I would still come back and dust off the old Commodore once in a while just to play this game.
This game was one of the first I ever played as a small child on my father's C64. Even at the age of four it was extremely easy to understand and quite fun. You explore the dungeon and kill monsters; what could be more simple than that? As I grew older and began to understand the intricacies of the game, it made the whole experience just that much richer and more enjoyable. Even when we bought a new IBM desktop computer with new games, or when I got a Super NES and started playing that, I would still come back and dust off the old Commodore once in a while just to play this game.
At its heart, it's just a basic dungeon
crawl. You explore the dungeon one step at a time and kill monsters along the way. But that simple description belies the depth of the thing. As you killed monsters, your experience grew until you leveled up, becoming stronger just like in any other good RPG. You explored the dungeon until you found the stairs down to the next floor, but the trick was that once you go down, you can't go back up unless you found a set of "up" stairs, which were rather rare. As can be expected, when you went further and further down into the dungeon the monsters became stronger, and if you hadn't leveled up enough on the floors above, the monsters on the lower floors would slaughter you. As you leveled up and killed monsters, you also found treasure in the form of gold or special items. Special items sometimes upgraded things like your weapon or armor, or gave you special abilities like seeing farther in the dark. In between floors, you could also spend the gold on upgrades or healing potions.
But honestly, what I truly loved about this game was the sound effects. They were very simple, being limited by the shoddy speakers of the Commodore 64, but despite that limitation they were still very memorable and worthy of note. The slow, JAWS-esque "duh-DUH" when monsters moved added a sense of suspense, because it was very easy for monsters to appear out of the shadows and attack you when you weren't ready for them. The "clang!, tink!, whomp!" sounds of combat were superb, despite their simplicity and inherent cheesiness.
I don't know if this game actually had a real goal or not. I could never survive past dungeon floor 10 or so to find out. The floors are all randomly generated, meaning that your game experience would be different every single time. And while the lack of a plot or story is a little depressing, this game is still a great one, a perfectly enjoyable waste of time for when you've got an hour or two to spare.
