I always love rpg games and this one looks a bit like lands of lore type of game.

People said it's inferior to Lands of Lore but well, latter was released almost 3 years earlier, which is also a reason it received more attention. Anvil of Dawn or Stonekeep were at the end of the era for this type of game.

Anvil of Dawn possesses a distinct style and its atmosphere is highly coherent. Everything is polished. I guess most players are bothered by the fact that it becomes kind of grindy. In contrast to Lands of Lore, there is no fast regeneration option, monsters do not respawn, the enemies are bulky, you control only one character. You practically have to search every nook for keys because what you need to progress is mostly unknown and could be anywhere. So unless you have and steadily use consumable items, it becomes very chewy and therefore the game offers a wide range of loot you have to economize with. The spells are also expensive and they should have sped up casting and prevented players from wasting their mana when they cannot finish the spell. There is kind of a lack of standard riddles but the game compensates with gameplay mechanics. Finally, a tad more story-telling would not have hurt.

Never played this game or even heard about it before but the incredible sprite graphics I saw in the screenshots and the trailer just made me buy this game. In the trailer an enemy warrior or something died with a green flash and turned into a bare skeleton and then shattered... That was really cool. Can't wait to dig into this game.

I'm still waiting for the Eye of the Beholder games to be released in GOG though...

Never really gotten into dungeon crawlers, but this one caught my attention because you're only controlling one character (like in Neverwinter Nights, don't like party RPGs) with easy keyboard/mouse interaction & it isn't as hard that most of the ones I've tried in the past, thus losing the interest in the first place.

As AWaterKnight stated, missing resting option & minor HP regeneration are bad, bad things, but then again you'll find more than plenty healing items/spells/altars to make up for that.

Always disliked respawning monsters in games, so that's also a plus.

Key searching/quest advance item search can be annoying, but after I've done my first playthrough, I'll be making complete maps including each & every major/important item. You mean the spell system being clumsy in the latter part? Did that error a couple times.

I for one find Anvil of Dawn quite relaxing timewaster, there's no rush anywhere & one can sort out their inventory & advance the quest on their own pace & the puzzles do not make you insane. 9/10

It's a decent game. I'm not sure why GOG charges for it, when it's available for free on Abandonia for who knows how long. I guess those who don't know how to use DosBox can pay for the packaging.

The amount of games available free on tpb will blow your mind.

tpb is different, since it's not considering the state of the games. I.e. people illegally put up games which still have concrete restrictions on distribution. Abandonia on the other hand offers only games which can be distributed for free.

http://www.abandonia.com/en/faq

On the other hand, since GOG now offers to buy this game, they might pull it off the site eventually, since otherwise it's going to be unfair.

No. Abandonware cannot be legally distributed for free. If a game isn't being sold, it isn't automatically free, it just means if the copyright holder decides to sue the distributors, he might have less of a leg to stand on when claiming trillions of lost profits. Even a game that's available as a free download from the copyright holder (e.g. TES) cannot be hosted anywhere else without the copyright holder's permission.

GOG is charging for it because the rights holder decided to start selling the game. Downloading it for free is piracy.

When the game was not available for sale anywhere, people felt more justified in distributing it for free, since it was impossible to actually pay for it. But this was still illegal, as Starmaker pointed out. And now that the game is available for purchase, that justification is no longer valid anyway.

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Then again, the game was always extremely easy to find on eBay, Amazon and the likes – and it always was relatively cheap. So that justification actually isn't a real justification in the first place.

As for the "worthiness" of the game: in my personal opinion, it's one of the games you'll never forget. Of course, it plays like "Lands of Lore" or the "Eye of the Beholder" games, but it's absolutely outstanding. The atmosphere is truly unique, the world is depicted in a very versatile way, you stumble upon exciting characters and sidequests along the way (you even meet all the other characters you didn't choose at the beginning of the game and talk to them). It's a bit hard to explain, really, but in my opinion, this game kind of has a soul similar to "The Last Unicorn".

The Abandonia version is a CD rip, which doesn't include speech. I bought a copy off of Flea-bay a few years ago. Buying it here assures that we continue to get great RPG classics. I'm glad I bought an official copy here.

Edit: Abandonia should take down their version, as it's clearly for sale here. No thanks, I would rather support GOG. Tinhat theory; I really don't want to end up on a FBI watchlist because I downloaded anything from that rancid site.

Good to know, thanks.

Me and my ushanka ain't afraid of no feds. My point was that there isn't a legal distinction between Abandonia and sites with nastier reputations, and moral qualms vary from person to person, from information communism to the virtue of commerce (what humblebundle works off), with code bootleggers who claim moral superiority taking the crown as the most annoying hypocrites out there. I paid for GOG finding this game and hosting it, and I got my money's worth several times over.