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Death Gate   Manufacturer: Legend In Brief: Good little game with generally good puzzles and a lot of conversation.
In some mythical world, a race of great magicians, the Sartyns, have divided the world into five parts, four representing the four elements and one hellish place, The Labyrinth, to house their enemies. Are these people evil, as those within the Labyrinth believe, overly ambitious and overconfident, as the remaining Sartyns say, or totally deranged and obnoxious, which is what this reviewer thinks. I mean, creating a world with lava rivers and no sunlight and randomly sticking people into it? Putting your enemies in a weird savage land full of evil magic and vicious creatures? Making big blind guys to do your work for you? Who could think of a worse plan?
Alright, it's just a game, but the thought that no race of magicians could possibly have designed such a bad system kept bugging me. The whole design makes no sense. If Glen Dahlgren, who designed this game, is ever given a chance to come up with a nifty new design for the universe then we're all in a lot of trouble.
But if the universe is badly designed, the puzzles are well designed, and in an adventure game that's the important thing. Like most Legend games, the puzzles are ingenious and fair, with the exception of the last puzzle, which you won't be able to solve unless you write down something a character tells you around the middle of the game (I knew the information would be needed, but I didn't think they'd have the gall to not give me a book or something I could reference when I needed it). Writing down everything the characters tell you is a little impractical, because these people talk a lot. If you like to converse with characters, this is the game for you. You're given a wide choice of questions and the ones you ask and the way you answer things can sometimes get you killed, and other times get you useful information. The dialogue is not, for the most part, scintillating, however, there is a very funny character name Zifnab who spends a lot of his time screwing with your head, and I liked him a lot. Besides having a lot of conversations, you've got a lot of reading to do. You find books everywhere, and you better read them all. I had a little problem with information overload, forgetting important information as less important information got shoved into my brain, but there were only a few places where I totally blanked out of something I needed to know to solve something.
The puzzles are a mix of inventory- and spell-based puzzles. They are properly placed, with the easy ones at the beginning and some fairly fiendish ones at the end (which I cheated on). You've got a total of five worlds to explore, a lot of people to meet and quite an array of puzzles. Visually it's alright, nothing special, and the music sounds pretty much like the music to every other Legend game, but more so (it annoyed my wife, who usually doesn't mind Legend's music). While not a great game, it is a thoroughly enjoyable one. -- Charles Herold -1999
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