Death Gate

Moby ID: 175
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Description official descriptions

Two thousand years ago, an advanced race known as Sartan split the world into five realms. The mensch races - the humans, dwarves, and elves - were split between four of those worlds named for the four elements, and the race of Patryn was banished to the deadly Labyrinth. After those two thousand years, some of the Patryn have found their way through the Labyrinth's exit. The game's protagonist is a young Patryn named Haplo, and his mission, given to him by his lord Xar, is to sail through the Death Gate into each of the other worlds to find each world's seal piece, so that the Patryn may reconstruct the planet and have revenge on the Sartan.

Death Gate is an adventure game that follows the tradition of interactive fiction with graphics. The entire game is viewed from first-person perspective and has plenty of text interaction through selectable verb commands, text descriptions, and dialogues with multiple choices. There are also many puzzles in the game, most of them inventory-based. A unique gameplay feature is Haplo's ability to cast magic spells, which are essential for solving many of the game's puzzles.

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Credits (DOS version)

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Based on the novels by
Design
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Music and Audio Direction
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2-D Animation
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Reviews

Critics

Average score: 81% (based on 24 ratings)

Players

Average score: 4.2 out of 5 (based on 51 ratings with 7 reviews)

A surpisingly exceptional spin-off of the Death Gate Cycle books

The Good
*Though the story-line was greatly altered from the books (there being seven of them, they had little choice but to trunicate) the writers managed to preserve the basic plot and even gave the game some new interesting twists. I half expected the game story to seem choppy and inadaquate compared to the books, but I was presently surprised to see that it flowed quite nicely, even if gameplay seemed a bit short.

The game designers also came up with an extraordinary idea: spell creation. Instead of the typical 'find spell scroll - read spell scroll - know spell' play, in Death Gate you discover spell runes* through various means. The runes can then be placed into certain patterns that allow spells to be cast. Another great idea that never caught on.

The art work is quite nice by '94 standards, I recall being quite impressed the first time I played through. Though most scenes are static, there are a few cinematic cut-scenes through the game.

The Bad
The static scenery is kind of drab, though I think the exceptional art work helped keep it from being monotonous.

*Unfortunately, despite being great, spell casting was not developed as much as I would have liked to see it. Your character's entire spell repitoir is limited to just a few spell runes and patterns. It would have been nice if there were a wider range of combinations and more opportunities for spell creation.

Gameplay was a little short, but perhaps I only feel this way because I was a dedicated reader of the books.

The Bottom Line*
If you have read the Death Gate Cycle, I would greatly encourage you to try out the game. The story is much more simple, but fun nevertheless. The gameplay is very similiar to many Sierra games of the time, being static and puzzle based. I recommend this game to anyone else who enjoyes interesting games with intricate plots and puzzles.

DOS · by Gutter Snipe (21) · 2003

Very clever and immensely enjoyable, a must try!

The Good
Let's start with a small confession - this is a Legend fanatic here. I played all of their games, no stretch, and adore almost each and every one of them. They are true gems in the history of adventure games, the successors to Infocom, that were slightly overshadowed by Lucas Arts and Sierra in the early 90s. At any rate, Death Gate is no exception in a legacy of great narratives implemented into even greater AGs.

Let's continue with yet another confession - I'm not an avid fan of the standard, run of the mill, dwarves/elves/dragons fantasy genre. By this I mean that I'm not very excited with such a setting, simply because in my mind it's been done way too many times. But every so often I'm pleasantly surprised when I find something, in any medium, that rises above the banal.

And Death Gate is exactly such an example.

True to its place in the category of fantasy, the game is epic. It involves events of cosmic proportion; race wars and conflicts, racial superiority, evil, clandestine guilds and societies. It also features the obligatory comic reliefs, the chance companions, the casual love story and of course - a copious amount of magic and deceit. All of this is presented in lush, colourful artwork, depicting detailed and varied locations and crisp environments. There's a myriad of characters to talk to and interact with in different ways and attitudes, all rendered in large, richly detailed portraits, all voiced expertly. You get to experience first-hand a literally sundered world, as you voyage through the different lands and realms. In each of these you will encounter various denizens and monsters, and learn more and more of your quest. Huge sources of info are also books scattered throughout the game. One thing can be said for sure - nothing is as it seems, and there are many shades of black and white here. So be prepared for lots of twists and turns.

Despite all this, the story isn't the game's strongest point. That would be the puzzles. You see, in DG you have two kinds of puzzles: One, the good old inventory puzzles. The other is puzzles which are solved utilising the magic/rune system. There's a very piquant explanation to how magic works in the game's universe, relying on the possibility that everything is possible, and so the magic-user bends reality in this fashion in order to cast magic, to put it succinctly. Spells are obtained by watching others performing them, a very straightforward and comfortable approach. This is an AG remember, so no leveling up nonsense (no offence to RPG players :P). Of course, there's actually a third kind of puzzle - the combination of the first two types.The spells have very specific definitions to them, which you must follow in order to succeed. This makes it very interesting - you run into different situations and obstacles you must solve through careful engineering of a magic strategy. There's lots of good ol' fantastical logic here, and each and every puzzle relates to a specific situations in the game. So no random sliders appearing out of thin air. Gameplay is done via a simple PNP interface, with verbs used to construct sentences with hotspots on the screen. Many of these verbs are contextual.

As a final note, DG is free of any redundant combat sessions (which plagued the otherwise wonderful Shannara) - it's pure adventure, no hybrid symptoms.

The Bad
As much as I love rich dialogues and texts, the case here is a bit extreme - Death Gate is simply too verbose. Yes, it's interesting, yes it's engaging, yes it's done well - but it's too much nonetheless. If you're going to try it, expect volumes of reading material and hopelessly loquacious characters.

While the backdrops are indeed good looking, they felt a bit too static at times.

The music, while adequate and mostly fitting, is a bit repetitive at times.

The Bottom Line
All in all, an outstanding result of a great endeavour. Death Gate certainly ranks high amongst those Legend classics, a place it most undoubtedly deserves.

DOS · by Tal Cohen (31) · 2008

Were this game a spiky club, I'd take up masochism

The Good
This game should be considered a classic. In fact, it's one of the most impeccably crafted games ever released, in any genre, in any decade, on any platform. The way it all comes together can just make you wonder sometimes why you even bother playing any other games - this game simply keeps on coming up with original scenes, with stunning plot revelations, with nearly metaphorical settings and with superb puzzles that are so deeply interwoven with the plot and the game world that you might not even realize that they are, in fact, puzzles. The game is quite lengthy yet there is hardly a single scene that could be classified as "filler" (to borrow a term from rock music criticism); there are so many different places, on several different worlds and "continents", yet at no point do you feel like a tourist being escorted through an art gallery at a rate of 5 paintings per minute just so you could say you've seen it all. On every world you arrive, within a couple of minutes you're immersed in the alternate, often somewhat surreal reality, fascinated by the rich imaginative atmosphere and puzzled by the complex of problems that gradually is revealed to you.

There's something fairy-tale about it all that charms and lends an easy-going air, yet almost at every step this lightness is matched by an undercurrent of graveness, sadness, despair, tragedy, and an epic struggle between some vague possibility of light and goodness and an overwhelming reality of evil and misery prevalent. This duplicity originates in the larger structure of the game itself: your grand quest to reunite the world and face the ultimate evil is given a "human dimension" by several excursions into the seperate parts of the sundered world, inhabited by races that have long lost sight of the "big picture" that is YOUR ultimate concern, and instead are occupied by their own internal struggles and conflicts. The effect of discovering such a self-contained universe with its own rules and power structures is surreal and fascinating; yet it is even more fascinating when you realize that their problems in fact have their roots in this same "big picture" that they all seem so painfully unaware of. It is indeed a rather philosophical metaphore, and it gives the game unprecedented depth.

You see, most plot-led games (yes, even "Grim Fandango") have just one single "context", or "plane" (in terms of plot construction only) - this game has THREE, namely the context of your quest to restore the world and battle the "ultimate evil" (the fire-breathing dragon thingie on the cover), the context of the lives and struggles of the races living in the 3 populated sundered "worlds", and the context of your own identity in the racial struggle between your race, the Patryns, and the race that imprisoned you 2000 years ago, the Sartan.

This last context is particularly interesting from a "literary" point of view, as it involves things like loyalty, forgiveness, moral decisions and betrayal, all brought to life without the usual excesses of soap opera a la Final Fantasy and suchlike Japanese cartoon crap. The literary qualities of the game are indeed high in all possible aspects - the conception of the world itself is quite individual and in fact originates from "philosophical circles" (however dubious they may be, this still sets the game apart from practically every single game out there), the language is vivid and precise and the plot is constructed with skill and imagination, using all the attention-grabbing and gasp-inducing mechanisms out there.

But the literary aspects aside, where the game shines most is the actual puzzle-solving element. That's right - a game with one of the greatest stories in computer gaming actually puts the focus on the gameplay. And what gameplay. Forget stupid use broom-stick with mouse-hole to awaken the cat to get the book he's lying on puzzles (gee, I should get LucasArts to employ me). In this game,

1) puzzles are there to achieve something important;

2) puzzles are logical and involve rational thinking, ie, thinking about what you NEED and how to get it, rather than about what CAN be done and what the designers could've expected you to do;

3) puzzles are fun and user-friendly.

I haven't read the book, and don't know anything about the authors' style of writing, but I have to tell you that I don't see how this sort of a story could've remotely worked in a book. Either the designer has totally done everything from virtually scratch, or the book is, er, "something else". This is perfect for an adventure game: people use spells on you, you learn them, use them yourself; people leave objects lying around, you pick them up and use them; people throw obstacles at you, you invent ways to surmount them. This does not make for extremely exciting reading but it makes for a very satisfying game, the sense of accomplishment and participation continually accompanying you. It's not much fun, however, to read about the accomplishments and survival/adaptation/development of others. But, then again, most fantasy novels are crap exactly because they talk on and on about the ingeniousness and accomplishments of others, so that might very well be the case with this game's origins.

And yeah, I did mention using spells. They kick ass. Check this out: possess the body of a dog, bring paintings to life, compete in magic with your mirror image, manipulate servile zombies, unravel magical illusions, pretend to be the death god of a bunch of tiger people, use magic to make statues walk, etc. Did Simon the "sorceror" ever do stuff like that? Pah.

The Bad
"Mensch"? No kidding. The "philosophical circles" I mentioned are in fact the circles of people like Ayn Rand and Nietzsche at his worst. The "mensch" races of humans, elves and dwarves are continuously referred to as some sort of lower beings, and the "moral attitude" towards them consists in being "nice" and "sympathetic" to them rather than enslaving them or "letting them kill each other". And you obviously belong to the higher, noble race of sorcerors and "leaders". What kind of escapist, megalomaniac bullshit is that.

As to the practical problems with the game, there are very few. The static first-person image on your screen, virtually devoid of any movement, does not help in creating an illusion of a living world. And the literary talents of the writer seem to have stopped at the point of diversifying the speech and writing styles of the many characters - they all talk the same, and even supposedly "scholarly" books (which are supposed to be "dry") occasionally start sounding like some fellow on the Usenet wrote them. There are also some minor issues with some spells just too obviously being provided to you just a couple of screens before you suddenly need them, and some people being jailed and given slow-acting poison literally hours before the same thing happens to you. That's forgivable. (As would be the occasionally confusing directions of the navigating compass, if I'd understand WHY - why does the arrow point left if I have to go straight forward? That's stupid.)

The Bottom Line
Come on. It's based on a best-selling fantasy novel written by two highly-regarded female authors. It's designed by a fellow who co-designed StarControl 3. It's developed by the same company that released Shannara only a year later. And given all this, it still manages to be awesomely good! What are the odds against that?

DOS · by Alex Man (31) · 2003

[ View all 7 player reviews ]

Trivia

Extras

Packaged with the game was an exclusive short story set in the Death Gate universe, by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman.

Graphics

The game includes two sets of artwork: a high resolution 640x480 SVGA version, and a low resolution 320x200 MCGA version. The graphics of the latter are not automatically scaled down from the SVGA version; they were manually redrawn to take advantage of the lower resolution.

Inspiration

Based on The Death Gate Cycle, a series of novels by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman.

Voice acting

Lead designer Glen Dahlgren provided the voice of Sang-Drax.

Information also contributed by Kamnari and Ye Old Infocomme Shoppe

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Eurythmic.

Windows, Linux, Macintosh added by Cavalary.

Additional contributors: Patrick Bregger.

Game added July 21, 1999. Last modified February 20, 2024.