Spirit of Adventure Reviews

It looks promising and I really, really want to enjoy it; however, the game play seems alpha and the coding 25 years old. If it were be improved to something similar to the updated Bard's Tale trilogy, Devil's Whiskey, etc. then it would well worth it.

I enjoyed my time with this game, but would only recommend it to people who grew up with 8/16 bit RPGs - it's very much of its time (1991) and this is a basic DOS-Box port so don't expect anything modern! It's open-world in the style of RPGs of this age - there's very little guidance about what you're supposed to be doing or where things are. Even the castle where you level characters up isn't initially shown on the map. The atmosphere this engenders is probably what I enjoy most about these old games, though! Get out the grid paper and be prepared for a lot of methodical mapping - towns don't have signposts and you have to barge into every random house to make sure you don't miss things. But streets do have names, which is a nice touch. The game's development was also quite rushed by the end - apparently the publisher pushed it out before the developer was happy with it and it shows. Oh, and make sure to read the manual, else some things won't make much sense! Especially you have to use J (for the German "Ja") for Yes/No options rather than Y! (And be prepared to use the "flee" option a lot - there's no penalty for it and a lot of enemy types aren't worth fighting when it costs more to heal the status ailments they inflict than you get from killing them)