‘The Bard’s Tale’ is a critically successful dungeon crawler
trilogy with its first installment; Tales of the Unknown: Version 1 having been
released in 1985. This game is your classic RPG that also bares an extremely
close resemblance to ‘Wizardry’ though with upgraded graphics and some
additional, innovative game play elements. The game features your standard turn
based combat, first person dungeon crawling that will leave you painstakingly
mapping out the maze-like dungeons and also riddle based puzzles that will have
you trekking back to another dungeon just to find the answer. 'The Bard’s Tale'
is a classic case of what 1985 contributed to the world of RPG gaming; lots of
hard work, punishingly difficult battles, and a great sense of accomplishment
when you finally kill the bad guy. If you enjoy a good old RPG that’s not so much
focused on the story but rather on the game play then you should definitely try
out this game.
Gameplay and plot
There’s not a great deal of storyline with this game and
generally the plot can be described quite simple as ‘kill the bad guy’ who in
this case is an evil wizard called Mangar. Mangar has seized control of the
city of Skara Brae and has employed a vast number of monsters to help keep him
in power whilst Skara Brae has been cut off from the rest of the world by his
evil spells. You need to overthrow this evil mage and free the city by guiding
a party of six adventurers through dungeons, mazes, the very city itself and
all the way up to the towers where Mangar lurks.
'The Bard’s Tale' is your classic dungeon crawler with a large
focus on grinding for experience, upgrading your party’s skills and acquiring
better equipment. At the very start of the game you can create up to six characters
and there’s a huge variety of races and classes for you to pick from. Some
classes are only available after you've gained more experience which is great
if you’re a mage as two out of the four mage classes two can be transitioned
into at a later stage, adding in a greater sense of achievement. Something which really made this game stand
out from the crowd was its introduction of the Bard class where you can
weaponize music but alongside that there’s a vast selection of spells and
skills that allows you to fine tune your combat strategies.
There’s also a great deal of flexibility when designing your
party as even when you have a full party of six characters you can always make
new ones and replace your old ones at any point during the game. There are
seven different races including Hobbit, Half-Elf, Gnome, Half-Orc and of
course, your regular Human race.
Depending on your race, when you roll out your character to determine
their stats, some attributes are likely to be higher or lower than other races,
for example an Elf has a higher chance of having a higher Intelligence
attribute. As well as this some classes are not available for certain races
such as a Gnome cannot be a Paladin or Bard whereas a Dwarf cannot be a Conjurer
or Magician so some care needs to be
taken to ensure you have a well-balanced party whilst keeping race, attributes
and classes in mind. A poor balance of skills and classes can, in some games, be
counteracted by lots of leveling and equipment, but in ‘The Bard’s Tale’ it can
be truly fatal and poor choices at the start may haunt you throughout the
entire 80 hours of gameplay this game entails.
Combat is initiated through random encounters and there’s no
telling when an enemy is going to get the jump on you because they’re not
visible on the screen. Some enemies are in scripted locations and these ones
tend to be mini-bosses who serve a grander purpose than just providing a source
of experience and coins. You can try and run away from battles but it’s not
always successful and you’re left with no choice but to fight back. The combat itself
is turn based, like the majority of dungeon crawlers, and you’ll pick each and
every one of your character’s action before it will allow the enemy to attack
you back. I found the combat a little confusing to start with as at the start
of a battle it would describe to you in text how many enemies you’re facing so,
say, 7 maddogs, 5 barbarians and 4 magicians. You then choose to attack which
of these three rather than individual opponents. All combat is described to you
in text and when you fell an enemy there’s no visual indicator of this, it will
simply say that you managed to kill them after it says how much you hit them
for. I found this confusing because there is no gauge of your enemy’s health so
you’re basically attacking blindly, with no idea which of the 7 dogs you keep
hitting whilst just kind of hoping that they’re all low on health. Once they’re
all dead though you get experience and treasure, typically involving money and
the odd item here and there.
The game is unashamedly harsh about how it treats death and unless
you’re willing to pay the enormous fees to bring a dead character back again
then that’s it, game over, they’re dead. There’s no way to reload a previous
save and there’s no alternative ways of bringing a party member back. As a new
player, when almost all of your party is dead and you don’t have enough money
to bring them back, what do you do? Sod all really. You can’t raise the coin
with your remaining members because, well they’ll die trying and you can’t just
stand pathetically at the temple wondering what to do next. You really do have
no choice but to start a new game or, as the manual suggests, back up your
character files or just turn your pc off before they die. In all fairness, this
genre of game has always been like this. Dungeons and Dragons type inspired
games have always come with permadeath, ridiculous resurrection procedures and
in-explicitly punishing battles that will leave a new player confused,
frustrated and upset. I was all three, and it took me several restarts just to
get through the first areas but thankfully by the time you've raised a few
levels and acquired a good stack of money things become easier, but my God
those first few hours are nightmarish.
Graphics and audio
Visually the game is quite advanced for its time; it was one
of the first RPG games to have 3D graphics and animated monsters but it’s certainly
a game of strong learning curves. This was a time when previous dungeon crawl
games, and there weren't many of them, were crude attempts at putting table top
games like Dungeons and Dragons onto a PC but they were never very successful. 'The
Bard’s Tale' is mostly grey menus with the details of your party on and the area
in which you’ll look out at the world is very small indeed. The environments
are maze-like due to their physical repetitiveness so unless you’re very
carefully following a map or making your own you’ll probably get lost several
times over. Graphically, it’s a fairly
attractive game aside from the plainness of some locations and the characters
are all very detailed. Unfortunately your race doesn't affect the appearance of
your character, so orcs will just look like humans, but you can clearly see the
difference between the classes.
Overall
'The Bard’s Tale' is an incredibly long game that will take
you roughly 80 hours to complete the entire thing. There’s not a great deal of
storyline and it’s fairly archetypical of a D&D inspired dungeon crawler;
kill the bad guy, ask no questions, but the dialogue is witty and interesting. The
movement is very smooth and though the graphics are under-informative they’re
still partially animated, colourful and detailed enough for you to get the
general picture. A huge aspect of this game used to be the painstaking art of
mapping out square by square the areas you visited but nowadays you can find
that all on the internet, ruining the fun a little but if you don’t feel like papering
your living room with graph paper it’s probably your best bet. Although this
makes you feel more like a cartographer than an adventurer there’s a great deal
of fun and achievement to be had in ‘The Bard’s Tale’. There’s also something strangely
relaxing about this steady paced, strategic game that will leave you fiddling
about with spells, equipment and items for hours and all in all I’m glad that I
gave this a good hunk of my time, even if I did keep dying.
Score – 8/10
I hope you enjoyed reading this review of 'The Bard's Tale', if you'd like to read more of my video game reviews then feel free to check out Rambling Fox Reviews.
I hope you enjoyed reading this review of 'The Bard's Tale', if you'd like to read more of my video game reviews then feel free to check out Rambling Fox Reviews.
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