Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor (2001)

Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor is an obscure, unknown game from the past with one of the hardest, most unforgiving difficulty that has just to be met. In the core, it is a classic D&D adventure in which you gather a party, explore dungeons, fight evil and complete quests.

In this game, you need to destroy the Pool of Radiance, a literal pool of evil that unleashed hell and destruction throughout Myth Drannor. A previous party ventured forth through a portal to the dimension in which the game takes place but were obliterated by the forces of Evil. This evil consists of the Cult of the Dragon that serves a witch and her pet dragon. The goal of this Cult is to enslave the world and ready it for the new world order.

Your party is sent through the portal once again to stop this Cult. Besides the Cult, many wildlife, endless undead, Orcs, Orogs, Lizardfolk and vile beasts hinder your every move and attack you with veracious aggression. You are never safe and your path towards the Pool of Radiance is filled with danger, traps and an endless cycle of survival.

The graphics and animations are really well done for a game from 2001. The fact that it runs this smoothly on my modern hardware is also a surprise and a good piece of game design. The animations can be a bit slow, and some spells take forever to cast, but the nice gloomy effect that sprouts from it makes it worth it.

The sound effects are great. The attacks, grunts and environmental sound are really well done. In the music department, the ambient tracks are glorious and give you the ultimate D&D vibe. The combat track, however, is just one song that loops over and over again.

Pool of Radiance is humongous. It is one of the biggest and longest games I have ever played. Maps are enormous with hundreds of small rooms, death traps and encounters. You play through four massive floors, only to find that there are another eight floors waiting for you after entering Myth Drannor. I spent tens of hours in this game and never experienced this much playtime with any other game so far, in terms of beatable story.

This game is hard. Not just hard, sadistically brutal and unforgiving. The difficulty is absolutely ridiculous. This is the only game in which I got my ass handed to me on a silver plate during the tutorial. I needed to fight two orcs in a room and they simply annihilated me. I got destroyed so many times that I lost count. You encounter three orcs and they whoop the floor with you. You see a filthy beast with a scorpion tail, and he sticks that thing inside the place where the sun doesn’t shine. The main reason for the unforgiving difficulty is twofold:

For starters, the process of leveling your characters is very slow in the beginning and getting to level four is where the game becomes fun and rewarding. The three levels before that? Pure hell. You miss every attack, you hit opponents once every three turns, have ten hit points, no good weapons or skills and, of course, need to face the strongest beings in all of Dungeons and Dragons right at the start. The first three levels are where every encounter is a matter of life and death, and it is one of the most unfair and unforgiving starts of the game that is not matched by anything.

Secondly, the encounters in the game do not have a clear path. It is not that you encounter some weaker enemies first, then some stronger ones etc. No, here, everything is deadly, strong and dangerous with no exception. Every time you level, you become stronger. But after you think that you can take on the world, the difficulty spikes again and nukes you right back to oblivion.

Then, the magic turning point comes. When you reach level six, you can throw big fireballs, cleave enemies with devastating force by using two handed weapons and do NOT die in one hit anymore. It is here that you take control of the game and can finally play an epic, difficult challenge that requires every bit of skill, item management, spell usage and, most important of all, the environment. The doors, pathways and terrain are your best friends. You encounter a group of sadistically strong Drows, which can attack two hundred times in their turn, come with ten at a time and just cannot stop critting you. Your strategy is to go inside a room, stand behind the corner and let the little sh!ts come to you, where you can eradicate them one at a time. It is the element of strategy and using the terrain that made this game so much fun and rewarding for me.

A small issue with the game is the walking speed of your party. It is so, unforgivably slow, it made me cringe with every fiber in my body. With god-awful big maps like this, making a wrong turn and needing to walk back all over again was one of the worst things in the whole game.

Another small problem is the gold and items for sale from merchants. Many merchants (or should I say lack of), sell one useful item and the rest is trash. By picking up all the garbage from the dungeons, you can make yourself a millionaire in short time because you don’t buy anything else throughout the rest of the game. I ended with eight hundred forty thousand gold because of this.

Lastly, this game is very buggy. In the worst sense, this means crashes and game breaking bugs (character gets stuck and is lost until reloading save), and in the funnier sense, this means your characters getting stuck behind each other and spinning around like a helicopter.

In the end, I am filled with pride in finishing Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor and, at the time of writing, I see this as one of my biggest accomplishments to date.

I loved this game and the sadistic challenge it offered and would definitely recommend this game to everyone.

You can't fault PoR2 for the amount of content--enormous maps to explore and nearly every room has something in it, from a side quest to a comment from the "DM" about how the room looks, feels, or even smells. Those little comments are one of the things the game does well--they do a wonderful job of establishing atmosphere. (And on the topic of things done well, I have to give a nod to some of the sound effects, too--the sounds of the zombies walking, and ghouls attacking, are pretty gross.)

Imo, the biggest problem is that the mechanics are so boring. The game is mostly hack and slash, and it's completely uninteresting. At early levels you spend every battle watching as your party and a bunch of orcs attack each other and miss--over, and over, and over. When you finally kill them, you turn the corner, run into zombies, and watch everyone miss over...and over...and over.... It gets a little better as you progress, but not any more engaging. If the story was really interesting, I'd grit my teeth and keep going anyway. But it's not. The few good things about the game aren't worth the effort to get to them.