The Dark Spire is an outlier from a studio that never did something like it before or since, except working on the Japanese localization of Wizardry 8, which is such a different beast in terms of mechanics from how the Dark Spire works that it is really worlds apart. What The Dark Spire feels like to me is a love letter to a type of game that outside of Japan has fallen by the wayside and in the way how The Dark Spire turned out even modern Japanese dungeon crawlers aren’t as unapologetic in love with the early Wizardry games as this one is. I don’t know how financially successful it was but the lack of any sequel or further dungeon crawlers from SUCCESS implies it wasn’t great. Maybe they already knew that at the time and threw all their energy into making the game the best homage to early Wizardry that it could be despite how the market received the game.
If you ever played any Wizardry before 6, you know how this works. You have a city where you rest, buy stuff, level up, and in general, make yourself ready before you dive into the dungeon. Unlike Wizardry games, you don’t go down here but climb up a tower, but it’s really not all that different. Every level tries its damn best to kill you and only by fighting and fighting and even more fighting do you get experience to level your characters up, grow stronger, and be able to best deeper (or in this case) higher levels. Along the way you have to solve a lot of puzzles (far more than any in Wizardry), talk to NPCs, and if you’re smart map the dungeon and make copious notes.
While the game has an automap, it won’t show your location on the map, and remembering where you found various NPCs, gadgets or weird stuff that might be relevant later is rather hard to keep track of. There’s a story but by the time you reached one of the later levels, you likely have already forgotten what it even was about. You’re on a hunt for some evil dude who stole a magic gimmick, that’s it and the game really doesn’t go much deeper than that (there’s a 2nd ending that shows more but leaves you with even more questions, and the final 3rd ending that’s just as confusing). As irrelevant as the story is, what drives you forward and keeps you coming back for more despite how relentless the combat encounters come up is just how inventive the dungeon design is. Like all early Wizardry games, the driving force is exploration (basically mapping the dungeon) and seeing how far your party can get with their limited resources.
Wizardry games are not about individual encounters (boss monsters for example never posed much of a challenge in my experience but multiple random encounters easily managed to wipe me out on the higher levels). The phase-based combat so typical for the genre is less tactical than turn-based combat systems but that’s a virtue. With how often you fight you want them to be over as quickly as possible. Because you will be in a lot of them. Again and again and again. If you don’t like the combat, turn around, this game won’t be for you. There’s one thing where the game deviates from the early Wizardry formula and it’s kind of a big one. You can save everywhere. This makes things easier, for sure, as you can save scum a lot, but it won’t make things too easy because as much as you can save scum to get encounters that are more in your favor, it won’t stop the attrition from endless battles. At some point, you run out of spells, and potions and eventually hit points.
In the early phase of the game where you have to calculate both how far you can get and the return tour is probably the most difficult. Later on, you get options that allow you to basically fight until close to death and then use a spell to return. And like with many Wizardry games you will unlock an elevator for easier travel (but only to level 4, and the tower is 7 levels in total plus a basement, a secret post-game dungeon, and the training grounds accessible from the city where you can unlock prestige classes).
RPGs often fall into either one of two categories, class-based systems or classless systems, though the first category is the more common one. You select a character class with certain abilities as well as limitations. The few classless RPGs that exist usually allow you to select skills by a point-buy system. Class-based systems make things easier for newcomers, classless systems offer more freedom for experienced players. Dark Spire mixes it up by giving you a class-based system with the freedom of a classless system. While you have to select one of four classes (mage, priest, warrior, or thief) you can then freely buy levels in all classes, with the drawback that if you spread yourself too thin you have much weaker characters compared to someone with a more focused approach to progression. Dark Spire is also somewhat unique in that you can buy levels, skills, and even stat points with experience points, but this freedom makes it hard for people not used to the genre to decide where to spend.
Dark Spire is one of the games where learning about the available classes, the later prestige classes, and how you should develop them during the course of the game will help alleviate a lot of hardship later on. While you never technically get stuck with badly designed characters you will have to grind a lot of experience points to get them to the same place as focused builds that were planned with a bit of meta-knowledge about the progression in the game in advance. Like most RPGs, physical characters are more important in the first half and get totally outclassed by mages in the second half, so dual-classing physical/magic and magic/magic characters with a look toward the prestige classes makes a lot of sense.
The system in Dark Spire isn’t bad but given how much the game owes to Wizardry it feels like someone tried to improve on something that was already perfect in the first place and made it worse. It’s a more cumbersome system that’s not as accessible, nor does the increased freedom really offer any advantage. But it makes it easier for inexperienced players to hamper their character progression.
That said, I like how the game manages to make the thief relevant until almost the end of the game. Wizardry 5 was the first that did that to some extent, but The Dark Spire goes even further with how many locked doors there are that you need to unlock (apart from those that need special keys). Also, most of the good gear can only be gotten from treasure chests after encounters (and the best only on the later levels), and so the thief to dismantle traps remains indispensable if you don’t want to end up dead fast (there are some nasty traps close to the end that TPK you). The flipside of this is that there are almost no chests with good gear in the dungeon itself instead you mostly find puzzle items in fixed places.
Dungeon crawlers are no strangers to puzzles but most of them remain at a level where people who don’t like adventure games still have a chance to proceed. In the second half of Dark Spire, the game puts out all the stops and rivals some adventure games in puzzle density from the obvious to the cryptic to the completely insane. There are puzzles even a kid could work out, there are the ones you don’t get but which in hindsight make a lot of sense, and then there are those where you check them out with a guide and wonder how anybody should have figured that out. This is the kind of game where you really have to write down all the dialog with NPCs and every message you find to make sense of things. But sometimes that’s not enough.
Two things the game does that don’t really help are event-based new NPCs and wall-sensitive searching. I explain in short what I mean by those two. Typical grid-based dungeon crawlers are all about mapping the dungeons and where NPCs, machinery, traps, or doors are. You usually don’t expect the dungeon to change based on what you do except in specific situations like repairing broken parts or opening doors. What Dark Spire does is that NPCs or events can occur after some other stuff happened in squares you’ve already visited and not often is this obvious this is the case. So it’s easy in the game to get stuck because you actually need to trigger an event but you won’t know it because you already visited the square where it will take place before and there was nothing there, and there’s no clue that anything will be there later on.
This is bad design, no way around it. The game doesn’t even give you a hint that you might have, for example, check out the level you’re on again because something might happen. While giving you that kind of hint still means you have to check out a whole level again even if you explored it already, it’s better than wandering around cluelessly.
The second thing the game does is that in very few situations your direction for searching for stuff on a square yields different results. This is bad because the game itself and most other dungeon crawlers train you to view the direction you’re facing is unimportant when searching squares with the exception of visual clues on walls like holes or buttons. And since the game does this so rarely (wall-sensitive searching) you’re none the wiser you missed something because you don’t expect the game to behave this way in the first place.
All I’m saying is that the puzzle density is impressive but at the same time, the game adapts some of the worst excesses of the adventure genre that makes the later parts really cumbersome and aggravating. Don’t hesitate to check out solutions if you get stuck, it might be something you wouldn’t have found logically anyway.
Now that I talked a bit about my misgivings I should go back to why this game is totally worth playing. It’s the dungeon design that is just phenomenal. Every level has its own visual style and even soundtrack, its own theme, and many little events with NPCs that fit into each level. The structure of every level feels different, sometimes sprawling from the center to the farthest reaches, sometimes circling around a center. Some levels require trips between multiple levels to reach all sections in each of them. The design can be maddening, and convoluted but it never is boring. Just making the map for each level is exciting because everyone feels different and unique. It deploys all the classics, teleporters (between sections of a level, between different levels, and sometimes the teleporters behave differently depending from which side you enter), spinner, and lots of different traps. Plate puzzles that require you to not step on the plates and think outside the box on how to avoid them.
Like most Wizardry-type games the maps feel incredibly dense. The 22×22 grid maps are packed to the brim with stuff and only on levels 6 and 7 does it feel like the designers run a bit out of energy, though there’s still a lot to do on those too. But early on no square is wasted, few rooms are really empty.
The Dark Spire, despite some of the flaws I mentioned earlier, excels in almost every other department that’s important for a dungeon crawler. Great dungeon design, varied encounter design, many different enemies with different attack strategies, lots of things to discover, many puzzles, great visuals, and an excellent soundtrack to round it up. This doesn’t really feel like a game done by a company that never did something like this before, but like a masterpiece by experienced dungeon crafters. It’s a headscratcher for me why SUCCESS suddenly made his game out of the blue and then didn’t follow up on it but I’m thankful they did it anyway.
The Entropy Pump 