There is often a frustrating difference between what you mean to click on and what the game thinks you clicked on, which makes targeting specific enemies or properly positioning a wide-area spell more difficult than it should be. A major issue, though, is that “clicking on what you want to interact with” is not as simple as it sounds when sprites overlap. Moving, talking, or attacking are as simple as clicking where you want to go or what you want to interact with. The game is primarily controlled with the mouse, though there are a number of keyboard shortcuts as well. It isn’t anything stellar and it leaves some room to create a gimped party, but combat is still quite fun and a flawed party can easily be corrected by the game’s generous character editor.įor the most part, the game’s interface works just fine. Combat is completley turn-based, with each character having a number of Action Points that are spent by moving or performing actions. Battle takes place on the same grid as dungeon exploration, and characters have a mix of spells, special physical attacks, and consumables at their disposal.
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Instead, it has a few trees of melee combat, ranged combat, and magical skills, so players are free to make anything from generic warriors and wizards to crazy hybrids like dual-wielding ninja mages. The game doesn’t use a class system of any kind. Players create a party of four characters and put points into their stats and skills when they level up. Prepare to explore every inch of these caves.Īs far as combat and character advancement go, Avernum doesn’t do too much out of the ordinary. It is quite easy to find some trinket you’ll need long before you even find the quest that calls for the item, which makes random exploration very rewarding and helps negate a lot of potential frustration. The game has three major quests to complete, but almost every aspect of these quests is completely non-linear.
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The caves of Avernum are expansive, and every nook and cranny is full of danger and treasure. Unlike many modern RPGs, Avernum doesn’t focus on major plot choices or character development. The game’s good sense of humor also helps keep it entertaining. It really is one of the most interesting settings you’ll ever find in a game, though it is held back by its reliance on clichés like all-powerful tower-dwelling wizards and evil super-empires. The many characters you can interact with span a diverse range of stories, motivations, opinions, and personalities, and the countless tales they tell about their world help give it impressive life and depth. The vast subterranean prison of Avernum is inhabited by outcasts from the surface world who must all struggle to survive the same terrifying dangers after being cast into that forsaken abyss.
It may not be very pretty, but there is still a lot to like in this game, and one of the best things about it is the setting. It also can be a bit hard to spot small items lying on the ground, but other than that the graphics are perfectly functional for gameplay and don’t get in the way. It also suffers from consistency issues since player character images, NPC portraits, menu illustrations, and large splash images all have very different art styles.
The game uses fairly simple sprite graphics, very little music, and some art and sound effects are reused enough that they become a bit repetitive. Thus, I find myself cast out from the evil empire that rules the entire surface world and am thrown through a magic portal into Avernum, the labyrinthine system of inhospitable caves inhabited only by convicts and monsters.Īvernum was clearly created on a very small budget, and nowhere is that more clear than with its graphics and sound.
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Recently, Spiderweb Software released a second remake of that humble game, Avernum: Escape From the Pit, and that seemed like a good a time as any for me to finally play through it. I played the free demo for that game back then and enjoyed it, but never got a chance to play through the full game. Way back in 1995, Spiderweb Software released its first game, a downloadable RPG called Exile: Escape From the Pit.
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