Any setup tips for this one? When I click to turn it often turns twice. Additionally the combat is so fast that it can't be what was intended. Is there an auto-attack?
Sounds like the cycles may be too high, I recall having this issue when I tried the game.
Try setting the cycles to whatever a mid-range i386 would be I guess, a quick search says 4720.
A major point in favor of old console games is they were typically designed for only one system, and those systems tend to have very accurate emulators. By the nature of varying hardware, emulating old PC games is more difficult.
DOSBox is a very inaccurate emulator to begin with, tho. I should try playing some of these games on the HQBox.
I hope everyone involved with designing the UI, movement, and combat got the clap. This is one of the worst pieces of **** I've ever played.
The UI and movement made me give up
It's not worth putting up with. If you aren't right on point, you can't hit anything. Clicking the sides of the window will trigger mouse movement and stop you from attacking. There's no restoration spell so level drains are permanent. Later enemies attack so fast and hit so hard you can lose the front rank in seconds. Spells have a bad tendency of hitting the wall instead of the target and if they're too close the shots will fly through them. It's horribly designed all the way around.
Last edited by Tweed on November 24th, 2025, 06:24, edited 1 time in total.
I hope everyone involved with designing the UI, movement, and combat got the clap. This is one of the worst pieces of **** I've ever played.
The UI and movement made me give up
It's not worth putting up with. If you aren't right on point, you can't hit anything. Clicking the sides of the window will trigger mouse movement and stop you from attacking. There's no restoration spell so level drains are permanent. Later enemies attack so fast and hit so hard you can lose the front rank in seconds. Spells have a bad tendency of hitting the wall instead of the target and if they're too close the shots will fly through them. It's horribly designed all the way around.
I wish the combat was more engaging and I agree that the presence of level draining monsters did nothing except add to the pain. Cleaning out all the living walls in the catacombs was particularly dull.
The world itself was the game's most interesting feature and had a good ambiance. For example, I liked that Strahd not only knew the party was there but made contact very earlier on to have a chat. Gave him an unexpected air of a noble vampire instead of just being a final boss waiting to be staked.
All hail Dagger of Throwing +2, the most consequential item in the game. Can be used to kill any creature safely if you step back into a hallway. For some reason most of the creatures will not chase you down a narrow hallway. The game seems to assume you will spam resting or use this technique due to the number of fire elementals and level drain creatures.
The best spell in the game being Negative Plane Protection is refreshing. (Absorbs one level drain attack. Apply at all times.)
Changing the cycles for Dosbox appeared to do nothing, which implies this game was programmed based on time delay? Enemies seemed to move and attack very fast for an RPG, so it's possible I was not playing the game as intended.
Spells seem to be treated more as hard counters to certain monsters, with a fallback amount of damage if it doesn't directly counter monsters. For example, magic missile seemed to one-shot the blue undead creature, frost seemed to kill treants in one hit, and I think burning hands is intended to counter bat swarms.
The game is brutally unfair. Don't feel awkward about setting all of your stats to max when creating a character.
The Good
The art for interface items is great. Both the icons and how it appears on your character.
Not having to sift through boxes and barrels in dungeons for items was nice. Even if the cost of this was all items strewn on the floor.
The comments from the pair of characters you make are nice to communicate the intended tone and additional information. Modern games do this very poorly because they write too many lines of dialog and they insist on treating the character as the player, which creates a weird sycophantic dynamic in the writing.
The haunted forest made me feel good about hording some potions and wands and gave a situation where they were both useful and I felt good about using them up.
Thief not required in party.
The Bad
There are a lot of powerful creatures in this game but they all share the same basic AI patterns, which makes them only scary when they attack in large groups or from behind.
Figured out you could rest pretty much anywhere without consequence about halfway through the game. I hate this. At least do save crystals like a JRPG or set areas where rest is safe like DDO. I found myself still minimizing resting because recasting buffs was slow and annoying.
I don't agree that the setting is as good as others are saying. I think this is something to do with how persistently depressing it is. There's nothing to save. It is also weird that you and Strahd seem to be at the mercy of a higher power that wants to toy with you by sending you there and keep you there until fate happens. A bit too fatalistic; seems to ignore other divine entities.
I didn't like that the final boss had fast level drain attacks and that you can only reliably hit him with a plot item. The variety this added was essentially in the form of making the final encounter into an FPS where you can only shoot once every 15 and invalidating the characters that had been built up.
The Ugly
As others have said, the movement and attack controls really hurt the game. I'll add that it was quite a shock to be pretty far into the game and learn that you need to enter the non-grid movement mode to get between certain objects in the world in order to progress. I also found it annoying that a lot of creatures liked to melee you and then shift to the side one grid cell so you couldn't target them. Eventually I figured out that switching to analog movement during combat fixed this because I could rotate 30 degrees and hit them in both locations.
Dungeons have unmarked grid cells that teleport you to other locations. Sometimes into the midst of powerful enemies. I don't understand how this was ever considered acceptable. Marking the floor with a rune would have been easy.
I don't think it would be possible for someone to have the patience to finish this game without save scumming to avoid level drain or consulting companion material for hints. There's plenty of times when you are wondering around a giant dungeon and what you don't know is that you should be testing every wall to figure out which one is an illusion or scouring every low resolution texture to find a tiny pebble-shaped switch to progress to the next area. Unlike better games, there's no design language as to how these are hidden or governing logic as to how they are constructed in the world. There's even a particularly nasty illusionary wall that you can only access by leaving grid movement mode.
