I had high expectations for this game based on the title alone. It stands right up there with Dragon Mountain or Fortress of Doom or Lake of Despair; creative and intimidating all rolled into one. I had just finished being suitably impressed with the likes of Dungeon, Orthanc, and Moria and so I was extremely excited to sink my teeth into the epic known as Devil’s Dungeon. Not Grandma’s Dungeon; not Goblin’s Dungeon; we’re talking THE Devil’s Dungeon. What could possibly go wrong?
My experience with this game is not an epic tale to be sung by bards. I haven’t been this disappointed since Firefly was prematurely cancelled from television.
The game was written by C. William Engel and is available for the Apple II, Atari 8-bit, Commodore 64, TRS-80, and VIC-20 machines. However it plays as if it were on my graphic calculator from math class. There are no sound effects or graphics. The only directions or documentation I could find for the game are found above. I felt as if there should be a game board that you have in your possession to use in conjunction with the program. There is a feeling of something missing. I went down a rabbit hole looking for any kind of documentation for the game and came up with nothing.
The game creates randomized dungeon levels and each level has 16 rooms. In Room #1 you can trade your experience points for boosts in both Speed and Strength. You can also leave the dungeon from Room #1 and call it a day which makes this the easiest game I’ve played to date. It gives you your gold piece total and dumps you into dos.
You move from room to room by typing in the number of the room you wish to go to. You can type LIST to get a listing of the rooms you’ve already visited. In each room you have a chance of encountering a random monster. The computer gives you the stats of the monster and you push down the letter F for fight and watch the results unfold. You do have a WAND that you are given. When you use the wand sometimes nothing happens, sometimes it destroys all of the monsters, and sometimes it deposits you to a deeper level of the dungeon with another 16 rooms.
I played for awhile and was having moderate success and then just decided to leave out the door at Room #1. I cashed in my chips so to speak. I derived zero enjoyment from this game and was not entertained in the slightest. It is the only game I have played so far that I would suggest you avoid. I guess because it does have attributes; and they do improve throughout the game; you could say this checks a box regarding the definition of a computer role-playing game. However it is stretching it in my humble opinion.
Devil’s Dungeon you say? Well the devil is in the details.