The Bard's Tale II: The Destiny Knight

The Bard's Tale II: The Destiny Knight follows up the successful first game and returns players to the fantasy town of Skara Brae and its surroundings, this time devastated by the powerful artifact known as the Destiny Wand. The player once again assembles and leads a party of up to six adventurers, navigates intricate dungeons drawn in first-person wireframe style, and resolves battles on a grid field full of monsters. Compared to the first game, it adds more levels, tougher puzzles with teleporters and dark corridors, and a higher difficulty that became typical for the series. Players could carry characters over directly from the first game, so the time invested in building a party was not wasted, rewarding loyal fans of the previous episode.

On the Atari 8-bit, the game keeps the same visual language as the previous entry — a simple wireframe maze shown in first person, text descriptions of rooms and characters, minimal sound accompaniment, and controls through menus and keyboard shortcuts. Due to limited memory and disk drive speed, loading between dungeon floors was frequent, which contemporary reviews mentioned as a weakness, although this was common across the whole genre on eight-bit machines. The game's difficulty and the need to carefully plan equipment, spells, and party marching order made it a title more suited to patient players willing to invest time in mapping and manually recording routes through the maze.

Destiny Knight is still valued today as one of the tougher dungeon crawlers of the 1980s, and for genre fans it represents a logical, meaningful continuation of the path started by the first Bard's Tale. On the Atari 8-bit it shows how far the idea of a party-based RPG could be pushed even on more modest hardware, though today's player will appreciate its historical value and honest craftsmanship more than its comfort of controls or friendliness toward newcomers.

Why play it: Anyone looking for an honest, demanding dungeon crawler with historical value will appreciate Destiny Knight's craftsmanship and depth of systems more than any friendliness toward today's players.