That’s six attributes and nineteen different skills along with lists of known saints and alchemy formulas. Here, look at this character stat screen: Darklands does not fuck around when it comes to rules and mechanics. The ruleset on the other hand is almost perfectly byzantine, requiring the services of a 120 page cluebook 1 to properly understand.
Its age means that it has some genuinely archaic features - mostly relating to the UI and combat commands - which I’m sure would have been thrown out or improved as technology moved on.
Darklands is twenty years old at this point, and has a ruleset that is consciously and purposely designed for a computer game. For starters, going back and playing it today is like visiting the Lost World it’s an RPG that was made long before Bioware had had a chance to stamp the western market with their own particular brand of straitjacketed game design, and represents a fascinating glimpse into what might have been had they not gotten their grubby little hands all over the industry. Really I should just rename this column the Microprose Nostalgia Hour, because that’s what it is now.ĭarklands! Darklands is a really interesting game for a number of reasons.
