Ishar 3: The Seven Gates of Infinity

Ishar 3: The Seven Gates of Infinity concludes the trilogy from studio Silmarils and moves the adventure into seven interconnected worlds, between which the player travels using magical gates. A group of heroes must journey through diverse environments, from desert plains to icy realms, and face a threat endangering the very existence of the game's universe.

The game's structure remains faithful to its predecessors — first-person movement, party management with individual skills, and simple but functional combat — but with significantly greater environmental variety thanks to the concept of the seven gates. This brought a more varied visual style and more types of puzzles and tasks, but also higher demands on orientation within a vast, sprawling world without modern navigation aids. The sound design and music on DOS underscored the distinct atmosphere of each world, which was seen as a step forward within the series.

Ishar 3 tends to be rated as a dignified, if not revolutionary, conclusion to the series — it rather expands the proven formula than fundamentally changes it. Today's player will appreciate the variety of the seven worlds and the closure of the story arc, less so the archaic controls and the density of systems that players of the nineties had to figure out without internet guides. Within the context of European RPGs, Ishar 3 remains an interesting testament to the courage of a small studio to build its own, distinctive fantasy worlds. Although Silmarils closed the series after this installment, their approach to RPGs — with an emphasis on travel, trade, and the atmosphere of unknown lands — influenced the perception of smaller European studios as full-fledged alternatives to the major American publishers. The trilogy as a whole thus today also serves as testimony to the diversity of the RPG genre on PC in the first half of the nineties, when several distinct schools of game design existed side by side. After finishing the trilogy, Silmarils moved on to other projects, but none of them ever achieved a reputation similar to the Ishar series, which remains their best-known legacy among retro RPG fans.