Bloodwych

Source: Wikipedia, "Bloodwych," available under the CC-BY-SA License.

Bloodwych is a computer dungeon role-playing game developed for the Amiga, Atari ST and MS-DOS as well as the major 8-bit home computer platforms. It was developed by Image Works from 1989. Its box featured artwork by Chris Achilleos.

The plotline identifies the player as a champion of Trazere who, after recruiting up to three fellow champions, travels through dungeons and mazes fighting creatures along the way to find and destroy the evil Zendick, and banish the Lord of Entropy.

Gameplay:
All of the champions fall into the four classes of Warrior, Mage, Adventurer or Thief, each with their own particular capability. Within each class there are four characters available, each with their own colour of Red, Blue, Green or Yellow. Each colour also has its own particular advantage, largely with respect to the families of spells the character will be most adept at casting and developing. However, that colour is also important when it comes to matching up coloured rings later in the game to magnify the effects of spell-casting.

One particularly memorable quirk of the game is the ability granted to players to hold simple conversations with traders, other champions, and even enemies during combat. Stock pseudo-medieval phrases such as "Truly my courage is remarkable" and "Begone, thou oaf" are selected using a menu, and can be used in combination to flatter a desired companion, aggravate an enemy, or lower the price of an item which the player wishes to purchase. Many gameplayers have found that the price of a long sword (RRP 10 gold pieces) can fall to as little as 6 or 7 after the shopkeeper has been buttered-up with phrases such as "Thou seems fine" - particularly when this strategy is used in conjunction with the Beguile spell (most effectively cast by Megrim).

Bloodwych is also remarkable for the sheer scale of its maps. Gameplay can easily last weeks until the player eventually navigates his way though mazes and past monsters to the start of the enormous and fiendish "towers", in which the gameplay becomes focused on the task of collecting crystals, with a view to destroying Zendick and his associates.

Similar games of the time included Eye of the Beholder and Dungeon Master.