Ishar 2: Messengers of Doom

Ishar 2: Messengers of Doom is the sequel to the European RPG from studio Silmarils, moving the action aboard a giant flying fortress heading toward an impending doom. The player once again assembles a group of adventurers and explores the vast, vertically structured environment of the ship and the surrounding islands, while trying to uncover the cause of the approaching catastrophe and find a way to prevent it.

Compared to the first installment, the game expands the possibilities for movement and interaction with the world, adds more elaborate puzzles tied to the ship's mechanisms, and offers a wider range of characters with their own abilities and equipment. The combat system remains simple, with the focus of the game lying more in exploration, gathering information, and solving related tasks than in pure action. The graphical presentation on DOS systems built on the first installment with colorful environments and accompanying music that nicely underscored the somewhat oppressive atmosphere of a dying airship full of strange inhabitants.

The second Ishar is ranked by fans among the high points of the series thanks to its imaginative setting and denser story dramaturgy. For today's player, the main obstacles are the austere controls and the absence of modern conveniences such as an automap, yet they will appreciate the atmosphere of a decaying world and the honestly elaborate, if demanding, design that rewards patient exploration of every corner of the ship. Like the first installment, this game was also released on several European platforms simultaneously, with the DOS version benefiting from more advanced sound cards and a wider color palette, which gave the music and sound effects a more pronounced presence. Silmarils maintained their characteristic visual signature in the second installment as well, with hand-painted portraits and backgrounds that set the series apart from competing RPGs and remain instantly recognizable to this day. The theme of the dying airship also gave the entire game a fairly unusual sense of urgency that open-world RPGs of the time usually lacked, contributing to Ishar 2's reputation as one of the most atmospherically powerful installments in the entire series.