The Land
DOS - 1989
Description of The Land
The Land is an interesting and unique shareware RPG based on the fantasy trilogy "The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant" by Stephen R. Donaldson. In typical Roguelike games manner, you create a character, travel the lands and dungeons in search of treasure and magic. There is a main goal that you will discover while you play.
What sets The Land apart from other RPGs despite outdated CGA graphics (in 1989!) is judicious use of Donaldson's intriguing fantasy gameworld. In addition to novel classes such as "Bloodguard," all characters have some vow or oath to follow, which is done by devoting a certain amount of time to their cause. If the characters don't follow ("service") their own, their abilities will be reduced over time.
The amount of service changes from class to class and level to level. You start the game with 6 months of service per year, with additional 1 month added every five levels. This provides a nice break from the mundane "kill monsters, get gold, upgrade equipment" routine, although much of Donaldson's imaginative monsters are present to make the game quite unique already anyway.
Well worth a look, especially if you are interested in Roguelikes with a difference.
Review By HOTUD
External links
Captures and Snapshots
Comments and reviews
moonbug 2015-01-06 -1 point DOS version
You can get latest version from here:
http://www.roguebasin.com/index.php?title=The_Land
The game seems to be freeware now (no need to register). It comes with a file "theLandFAQ_v1_0.txt" that probably was only given to registered users. Watch out though it's in UTF-16 format, so if your favorite text editor (like say DOS edit.exe, hehe) can't display it correctly, then try to open it with Firefox or other unicode-aware program.
Anyway, no comment on the game because I'm not going to try playing it without first reading the books. Some say they're hard to read because the protagonist has major flaws, but then again that can make for a more interesting story than Peter Perfect hero with all 18's stats and unfailing Lawful Good alignment (in AD&D terms...)
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DOS Version
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