Ultima Underworld is a large technical achievement. Even before Doom and other great 3D FPS hit the scene, Underworld proved that a fully 3D, navigable world could be possible. But was it good?

Honestly, not. There's a heaping helping of obscurity and frustrating systems that the game outright refuses to tell, and instead of exploring, more often than not the player will despairingly fall out of the game's specific path. The game consists of someone wrongly accused of kidnapping out to rescue a girl, set in eight floors of mysterious talismans and underground races. The player can attack with several weapons (cough cough only use the sword) and can cast spells. Skills can be increased after going up levels, but only very specific mantras found in very inconvenient places can be used, and only a few of an entire skillset are actually useful. Some don't even do anything, but good luck knowing that without a walkthrough.

Combat is alright, save for the frustration where if attack isn't high enough no damage will be done, and this especially hurts at the first few floors. Swimming is done like a seasick cow, though an alternate, faster step-based movement can deal with these issues. Movement can be done with the mouse, but a list of archaic keyboard movements (not even fully explained in the manual) are the more ideal approach. It's not perfect but it's manageable.

Once you figure out which way is up and learn the summon food spell, the game will throw all manner of strange (yet boring) interactions and immensely obtuse things your way. Porticullis? No, poke through it with a pole, not use a switch or get lucky enough for a guard to speak to you. Learn a language from a mute prisoner? Less exciting than it sounds. Heck, if it weren't for a glitch that made potions infinite, this game might as well be unplayable once you reach the no-magic zones.

Ultima Underworld gives the illusion of choice but don't fall for the siren song of "old school design" - this game will punish you for not foreseeing its secrets perfectly. Grab a walkthrough and maybe this game will be more tolerable.

As someone who has always placed great value in the importance of history, antecedence, seniority and seriation in media and culture, my recent first-time forays into the Ultima series have honestly left me quite baffled by how long I managed to put it off— seeing how hugely influential it is.

Funnily enough, what drew me to want to check out at least a little of the series at this time was my past experiences with the number of successors to this game, and my desire to experience the game that is often lauded as their great-granddaddy. Sure enough, while Ultima 1 through 4 (admittedly, I only had the patience to finish the first of these, though I may return to the others at some point) quickly made me realize the extent of the influence they'd had on titles like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, playing through this game led me to quite a few realizations of how much it was echoed in titles like its immediate successor System Shock, Arx Fatalis (which probably qualifies as a soft remake of this, I suppose I'll find out to what degree once I go back to try and finish it as part of this cycle), Dark Messiah of Might & Magic, and even games like Thief and Dishonored which have branched off into their own subgenre of stealth focus.

From what I've seen, a good few people who play this game today will be quick to complain about how 'dated' the game feels; while I can agree to an extent, it's definitely not so to the point where it can't be greatly engaging and enjoyable by someone who has played a lot of newer titles. I played through it with the aid of the Ultima Underworld Portable mod, which affords toggleable mouselook, increased base brightness, and an array of handy hotkeys— advantages I most certainly do not regret having (a protip: it took me a while to notice that said hotkeys are case sensitive so accidentally turning caps lock on will disable them; I ended up restarting the game a few times before I realized this). Gameplay wise, my most negative takeaway is probably that I am very glad that we have moved past the era of videogames where you can swing a weapon at an enemy in a realtime 3D environment and there is a very high chance that the collision will simply not register not because you aimed it poorly, but because of stat-based calculations (though Elder Scrolls seems to be the high-profile series that held onto this unfortunate mechanic the longest).

After going through this experience, my self from several years ago that hesitated to go through very many rooms in Arx Fatalis without consulting a guide feels very silly. One thing you will quickly notice about this game is that as you come to discover more and more details about how it works, you'll be kicking yourself for not considering it as an option a few hours ago, even though most of it is information that the game does not spoon-feed you by any means. For instance, the ever-present hunger mechanic in the older mainline Ultima games is little more than a footnote in this game, even though it had me paranoid due to my early-game propensity to heal via sleeping because I hadn't found any of the hidden healing fountains yet, nor looked in the game manual to discover the readily provided list of basic spells you can do (something you cannot find anywhere within the game itself), which includes a light heal (or replanted the silver sapling, which effectively makes you unkillable in the same manner as BioShock's vita-chambers, with no penalty for reviving other than being sent back to the sapling's location). I also ended up carrying a lot of unnecessary items with me early on, because I had no indication whatsoever of whether I would eventually need them, while actually neglecting more useful ones (shoutouts to the one and only rotworm corpse you can leave behind in a distant corner of level 1 while thinking nothing of it, only to realize that you need it quite badly 10 hours later). This kind of thing stretches from the early game all the way to the finale; repeat playthroughs will give you the added benefit of knowing most if not all of the specific mantras, knowledge of which skills are useful and useless, how they specifically relate to the gameplay, and how one of the talismans is an indestructible sword, making that the wisest weapon skill to invest in right from when you start out, making for a far smoother experience. To be fair, this sort of thing can still be found to some extent in a lot of newer games, though by now we have an expectation to make it more intuitive and easy to manage without the benefit of hindsight.

One thing I must comment on is how this game is frequently lauded as something you can dive right into without prior knowledge of the Ultima series, which is true to an extent, but as someone who took the time to at least get a cursory rundown of the mainline Ultima titles that preceded it, there is definitely a lot of those games that ended up getting a significant echo in this one. Someone coming into this game from those is far more likely to be familiar with how to assemble and cast the rune-based magic spells, the fact that you don't gain significant stat increases automatically by leveling up but have to manually acquire them by praying at shrines, and have an overall easier time understanding the specifics and details of the setting and the plot, not the least of which being the creatures and monsters that make a reappearance and the whole thing with the eight virtues. Admittedly, because I did not finish Ultima IV (though I did like what little I played) I cannot make any particular comment on how this game's depiction of the Stygian Abyss measures up to the original, though from my very cursory understanding some parts of the story do not gel very well with previously established Ultima canon, and it wouldn't be too hard to imagine that being one of them.

With some of the gameplay and plot details having been discussed, another big aspect of the game that ended up leaving me with mixed feelings was the crux of how you progress through the story, with a variety of quests and puzzles of varying nature. These are quite simple at the beginning, being of the order of "fetch me this distant item" or "go kill this unfriendly beast/evil rogue", and will often get you not just concrete rewards, but clues that you will need later on— and quite fittingly for an older game with adventure/puzzle aspects, you better get into the habit of writing those down as you come across them real quick, because a lot of them are both vital to letting you reach the end of the game and will not be clearly repeated to you even if you go back and ask nicely. And honestly, even though as a lover of a lot of genuine vintage CRPG experiences that I missed out on due to this game being a year and a half older than me I was fully on board with this Myst/Riven style of game-spanning puzzles that the game expects you to keep track of yourself because it's not gonna do it for you, some aspects of said puzzles feel a little too prohibitively obtuse, which is not helped by the aforementioned permanent loss of access to vital clues. Though I solved a good few of these quests on my own, I never would have figured out how to get the Cup of Wonder on my own, between figuring out that the mage dude who's tripping balls on incense on level 6 is hinting you something that is vital to complete the game, figuring out how to actually trip on incense yourself, figuring out how to assemble the mantra from the very ambiguous visual clues that gives you, AND figuring out that once you follow the directions you get from chanting said mantra at the shrine, you need to play the flute song you get taught by one of the ghouls in order to actually make it appear. It's not great, but at least it's probably the only example of this that reaches such lengths. I also had trouble with the prison guards on level 7 permanently aggroing if you approach them without collecting the talisman from the mines first, which is damn near impossible to avoid on your first runthrough, and leads to the actual prison area being inaccessible until after you kill Tyball, who you have no reason to suspect necessarily has a prison key on him, which led me to continue on for an hour or two wondering if I was gonna have to reload a save and lose a bunch of progress. One more admittedly lesser example that comes to mind is how you have to input specific text parser words when talking to Garamon after you bring his bones back from the last level in order to access the final sequence, which feels like it probably would've led to a lot of blind guessing if I hadn't ended up spoiling myself on the solution.

On the flipside, some of these puzzles were quite unique and engaging, with the highlight for me easily being the one where you have to learn a chunk of the vocabulary from the lizardmen's language by asking a mute prisoner, who mimes the meaning of each word to you. While I don't think I'd go as far as to say that the amount of worldbuilding makes the world feel really genuine, like a place that feels alive and like it could actually exist as a place you could explore in reality (praise which I would give to a game like Thief or Painkiller in a heartbeat), it definitely gives it a genuine sense of character, which when combined with the early 3D first-person engine creates an experience that seems like it was unequaled by any other games at the time. Between the advancements represented by said engine, which served as an inspiration for id Software's early FPS hoorah Catacomb 3-D (which predated Ultima Underworld in release, but not in development) as well as predating both Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM while having the option to look in every direction AND do jumping puzzles as early as the first level— it's not difficult to see how this game was regarded as so groundbreaking.

At the end of the day, I definitely feel glad to have experienced and completed this game, both as a unique experience and a piece of history. I will say though that even though I fully intend to play Ultima Underworld II as well, I'll probably have to give myself a little break between this playthrough and that one (not least of which because everyone seems to agree that I shouldn't play it before completing the first part of Ultima VII first). Perhaps in this time I will reacquaint myself with a comfier game like Thief which allows you to carry around as many scrolls as you want without issue and is pretty good about registering every swing of your sword, even when that 's not necessarily the most efficient path to success.