Ishar: Legend of the Fortress

Ishar: Legend of the Fortress is an action RPG from the French studio Silmarils that loosely follows on from their earlier title Crystals of Arborea and opens the eponymous trilogy. The player takes charge of a group of adventurers tasked with defending the fortress of Ishar against enemy raids, gradually discovering a sprawling island world full of towns, caves, and remote shrines.

The game combines first-person movement through the environment with a fairly simple combat system and party management, where each character has their own set of skills, equipment, and tasks. Heavy emphasis is placed on recruiting companions, trading, and gradually unlocking new areas of the map, while the player must often juggle time, since the defense of the fortress runs in the background throughout the game. On the PC systems of the time, the game presented itself in colorful VGA graphics with atmospheric music, which in 1992 was a fairly costly undertaking for a small European studio.

Ishar earned a reputation as a dense but rewarding game for fans of European RPGs looking for an alternative to the then-dominant American series such as Ultima or Might and Magic. The controls and density of text feel archaic today and the game demands patience, yet it remains an interesting example of how European studios of the nineties approached the RPG genre in their own way — emphasizing atmosphere and a richly developed world rather than action pacing. The game was also developed simultaneously for several platforms of the time, including the Amiga and the Atari ST, with the DOS version, thanks to broader sound card support, offering somewhat more atmospheric musical accompaniment and cleaner audio. Despite its limited technical means, the series managed to maintain its own visual identity thanks to hand-drawn character portraits and stylized landscapes, which made Ishar an easily recognizable brand among European RPGs of the era. It is also worth mentioning that the name of the fortress Ishar itself gave its name to the entire trilogy, a fairly unusual decision at a time when studios were only just beginning to look for ways to build their own game brands.