Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon
If there's a moment when Westwood Studios brought the dungeon crawl to perfection, it's Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon. Many consider this 1991 sequel the pinnacle of the entire series — and rightly so. Unlike the first installment, confined to the sewers beneath a city, a varied adventure unfolds here: you begin in a gloomy forest, penetrate the sinister temple of Darkmoon, and climb the floors of a tower, each with its own atmosphere and logic.
The core remains faithful to AD&D rules — movement across a square grid in a real-time first-person perspective, party management, combat, and spellcasting. But the second installment added more spells, more varied monsters, a more elaborate story full of twists, and craftier puzzles that force you to search every wall. The atmosphere is heightened by excellent graphics and sound, especially impressive on the Amiga.
Westwood polished their formula to a shine here before turning to real-time strategy and creating Dune II and Command & Conquer. For lovers of the genre, Eye of the Beholder II is an essential piece of history — a dungeon crawl that retro gamers return to again and again.
Game 68 of 121 for Commodore Amiga
The same title elsewhere (1)
Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon stuck to the first game's recipe, and here too the PC/DOS version with VGA graphics and support for AdLib or Sound Blaster sound cards is the baseline, running smoothly even in demanding fights. The Amiga port arrived later and ran into the same pain points as its predecessor — disk-based loading stretches out transitions between screens, and mouse control feels less snappy than on a faster PC. Music and sound effects on the Amiga sound atmospheric thanks to its Paula chip, but because of the slower pace the PC/DOS original is still generally regarded as the smoothest, definitive version.
