Meet your dwarven sidekick! You get several such characters tagging along with you.īut your most common area of combat will be melee fighting, although most of your weapons are inefficient at first – it’s not until you free a dwarven warrior and his axe that you begin to kick down doors, but just barely. Level themes vary now and then, but the blocky, grid-based level structure is omnipresent regardless of whether you’re in a castle or a cave network. This technique does make the game look even better than more high-tech 3D games (like Daggerfall) in some places, but the visual mastery comes at the cost of limited movement options and bland architecture, allowing about the same sort of level complexity as the Fuhrer’s bunker in Wolfenstein 3D. Take heed, however, as the movement animations you see are completely pre-rendered shots. The game delivers an oddly convincing illusion of 3D as you seamlessly drift through the game’s narrow passages and dark caverns. Stonekeep uses a grid-based tile system where you move from one screen to the next using the arrow keys, much the same way as in Wizardry Dark Servant, but with more polish and visual trickery. It turns out that the Shadowking, or Khull– Khuum on formal occasions, is the culprit behind this dastardly act, and you are tasked by a doe-eyed goddess, Thera, to battle through the remains of the sunken city and destroy the Shadowking. Fortunately, you escape and eventually return years later, seeking resolution. Shadows completely envelop the fortress and Stonekeep is sent hurling deep down into the Stygian Abyss. The boxed version comes with an actual paperback novella explaining the backstory, but the essentials are just as well compacted in the eccentric introductory FMV – life is normal as normal could be in your stereotypical medieval castle, but then the skies turn black. The story behind the ill-fated titular fortress is a complex and often confusing one. Computer hardware advanced at a steady pace, however, and the game went through an equally steady stream of feature creep until it finally shipped before Christmas of 1995, some five years in development. When it was first drawn up and later due for release somewhere around 1991, it was supposed to run on a 80286 CPU and not require a hard-drive. Stonekeep went through a long and bumpy creation cycle.
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