The Bard's Tale II: The Destiny Knight

The Bard's Tale II: The Destiny Knight followed up Interplay's successful first-person dungeon crawler in 1986, offering players even larger and more treacherous mazes spread beneath the city of Skara Brae and beyond it. The goal for the party of adventurers is to find the legendary Destiny Wand, the only thing that can stand against the dark mage Lagoth, who threatens the whole world's balance between good and evil. The structure stays faithful to the first game — building a party of up to six characters from several classes and races, step-based first-person movement through the maze, and turn-based combat against monsters drawn in large, striking portraits that gave the battles a distinctive visual identity.

The second game adds an emphasis on puzzles, teleporters, dark corridors, and traps that often demand precise mapping and patient experimentation — the game is notorious for its difficulty and its lack of mercy toward careless adventurers who don't keep their own paper maps of each level. On the Commodore 64 the game ran smoothly even with plenty of monsters on screen and used a distinctive, atmospheric soundtrack that reinforced the sense of descending into ever more dangerous and darker depths of the maze. Importing characters from the first game let players continue the story with their already battle-hardened, experienced heroes and all their gear.

In the mid-1980s The Bard's Tale II was among the best-selling RPGs on the Commodore 64 and cemented the series' reputation as one of the most demanding and elaborate on the platform. Today's players may find it inaccessible due to the lack of an auto-map and the terse text interface with little guidance, but it remains an important reminder of what the dungeon crawler genre looked like before the graphical improvements and conveniences of the 1990s.

Why play it: Anyone who wants to see what the dungeon crawler genre looked like before the graphical conveniences of the 1990s will find in The Bard's Tale II a demanding but historically important experience without an auto-map.