Posted by Devin de Gruyl on Jun 30th, 2009
Sword of Fargoal, mostly on the strength of that frantic endgame sequence with its mad scramble back to daylight, is notorious in Commodore circles as one of the most fiendishly difficult RPGs of all time. Do not be led into false security just because there are few game elements, or a simplified user interface compared to other Roguelikes, or the fact you can probably play a complete game from start to finish in just over two hours. Unless you’re prepared, this game will pull your pants down to your ankles, wedgie you over your forehead, steal your lunch money, and truss you up like a human piñata from the football goal. Make no mistake about it, this game is hard. In fact, there are many who grew up with the C64 and this game, playing it for well over twenty years off and on, who have lost literally hundreds of brave knights to the vicissitudes of the dungeon, that will swear upon a stack of AD&D 2e sourcebooks that this game is impossible!
And yet, it is anything but. It can be conquered, but it requires a combination of careful planning, level-grinding to the extreme, and plain old-fashioned good luck.
Yet for all its infamy as being the Everest of 64-dom, Sword of Fargoal is also something that so many other high-difficulty games are not. Sword of Fargoal is actually fun. It can be maddeningly addictive, in fact. It very much has that “just one more try” quality to it that so many of the great games of yesteryear featured in abundance. You might have just been curbstomped by a Dire Wolf or a War Lord, but hey – you actually got to the ninth dungeon level this time! Maybe if you tried again you’ll make it even deeper! Or say you just managed to get all the way back up to the first level with the Sword in hand, only to get it filched by a Mercenary – or maybe even had the clock run out on you when you were just a few short steps away from escape. In most other games you’d probably chuck the controller at the screen in frustration and vow to never pick it up again… but more often than not, Sword of Fargoal will entice you back with its siren song: “You almost made it that time… come on, try again… you’ll make it this time, for sure…”
It is, of course, not much to look at visually. Even just glancing briefly at the screenshots in this review will tell you that much. It is, however, arguably an improvement over the simple ASCII text of most Roguelikes even today. They do the job they were designed to do – convey visually information about your surroundings – quite effectively and efficiently, and for an early video game you can’t ask much more than that given the relative limitations of hardware at the time. Sound, on the other hand, is a triumph of atmosphere. There is no in-game music apart from a few short ditties that play at various points, but the sound effects are marvelous… whenever you hear that low rumble in the background that tells you an enemy is lurking nearby, you can actually feel the hairs standing up on the back of your neck. And the fanfares that play triumphantly whenever you gain a level, slay a monster, or find a useful item in a “mystery square” really give you a special feeling of accomplishment… especially if you’ve been holding your breath before stepping onto those capricious white boxes and waiting for it to blow up in your face or drop the ceiling on your head! I cannot stress enough the importance of sound in this game… if you don’t believe me, try playing a game with the volume turned off and see how much less of an impact it has. Fargoal is a prime example of a game where even minimalist audiovisuals can still be quite powerful in the right hands.
Some Roguelikes have not aged particulary well. Rogue itself, Larn, Omega, Moria, and other ancient ASCII-based dungeon crawlers might still be fun to pull out from time to time for nostalgic purposes, but they have all been supplanted by newer, deeper, more intricately-designed, and usually better descendants – NetHack, ADOM, Angband, and so on. Sword of Fargoal is unique among the oldsters in that it remains, for whatever reason, just as compelling today as it was in 1983.
Finding a copy for C64 emulation purposes is fairly easy, as the original author (to whom the rights to the game appear to have defaulted) has implicitly allowed its not-for-profit distribution by featuring links to download sites on the Fargoal homepage. Digging deeper into the tubes, you might be able to find an even earlier version of the game for the C64′s immediate predecessor, the VIC-20 (arguably an even greater technical achievement – a playable Roguelike using less than 20K of RAM and in BASIC besides!), or even “Gammaquest II,” the original Commodore PET game that eventually led to Fargoal‘s creation. The same website also includes a modern re-creation of the game for PC and Mac owners, which comes complete with optional modernized (but still retro-feel) graphics, configurable monster behavior, the option to set an error-checking feature to make each maze solvable, and player amenities such as an onscreen indication of how much damage you’re dishing out. The latest versions are shareware, but the demo version does not appear to be crippled in any way that I can tell. It’s even been ported to *nix systems, though you may have to search around for those (the Ubuntu repos definitely have it, however).
Sword of Fargoal is an easily-approachable game for the Roguelike newbie, while still a more than worthy challenge for even those who can attain the fabled Amulet of Yendor blindfolded. I’d say it’s definitely worth a look if you have any interest at all in the genre.
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