Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss

released on Mar 11, 1992

The Isle of the Avatar was discovered during the Fourth Age (as related in Quest of the Avatar), at the climax of the Avatar’s quest. The Stranger from Another World, who came to Britannia in answer to Lord British’s summons, completed the Test of the Eight Virtues and became the Avatar — the embodiment of the pure axiom of life. It was during his journeys that the Avatar unearthed a chilling artifact: the skull of Mondain the Wicked, the first of the Triad of Evil. There were those who claimed that the artifact held the power to destroy all life on our world. Fortunately, it was the Stranger who discovered it, and not someone of lesser Virtue. Upon completing the Path of the Eight Virtues, the Avatar embarked on a search for the Codex of Ultimate Wisdom. Legend linked this ancient tome with the subterranean maze known as the Great Stygian Abyss. “Truly, no one has ever plumbed its depths,” wrote Shamino, who arranged by magic to obtain a map of its corridors. “I cannot imagine the horrors that await the first to venture into the Stygian depths.”


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This game is not as dated as people say it is in my opinion. It has a lot of aspects that are a little weird for today's standards, however, it still plays amazingly. Setting the grounds for what is, in my opinion, the best game genre ever, this game does it quite well I feel.

Sure, it's still the genre in its infant years at this point, but it offers a lot of unique and open ended game design that makes it fun. I really love the gameplay. The fact the interaction works almost like a point and click makes this game so much more entertaining to me.

If I had to criticize anything, it's the fact that the combat is a little jank. This issue would be solved in Looking Glass' later title System Shock, but it is kind of a problem here. Otherwise, it's alright. This game fucking rules.

PS1 Translated Version:

So, a few issues are that your character's stats are randomized on creation. You really want to have more than 20 strength. You'll find yourself struggling juggling items and not being able to equip/wield gear, it sucks. It sucks because there's a bug where if there's too many items on the ground the game struggles keeping track of everything and can end up corrupting the items in memory causing essential items to get lost, ruining your save file. 30 is the max strength, so aim for a high strength value and throw lots of junk into the water to avoid this. I have a 17 strength paladin, it is not fun finding new armor and ending up unable to equip stuff and having to throw so many items away.

I tried editing my save file in a hex editor since I have a memcard pro so that I could raise my strength value, but there's a checksum I am too lazy to try and reverse engineer

Save times are also brutal, and with certain things being randomized like your chants to the ankhs, it can be kind of tedious trying to get good rolls to raise the skills you actually want to raise.

Outside of this though, really awesome and worthwhile experience. The overall game is a lot of fun, and the framerate is really impressive given other options on the system like King's Field struggle. Sometimes the way your character moves in this version can be kind of awkward though, you'll want to go straight and the game will kind of move you diagonally awkwardly.

Also specific to the PS1 translation itself, there's definitely some silly bugs and issues, maybe further patches will come someday that iron out some of these. I experienced glitchy text quite a few times.

The DOS game manual can explain a lot of important mechanics and is still worth reading for the PS1 version, good luck!

ngl I had more fun playing this than the original system shock

it is way better than i thought it'd be, it definitely didnt age well, but damn, i am having so much fun.