The Glass Shrine - The Game

The Game

Swords of Glass is an old first-person turn-based dungeon crawl published by Keypunch Software in 1986. It utilizes CGA graphics (4 amazing colors) to draw a simple wire-frame that simulated 3-D first-person perspective in a dungeon. The enemies were poorly drawn static sprites. In fact, the game itself is sadly repetitive and it takes forever to beat.

With all that said you might think that Swords of Glass is a horrible game. By today's standards, you may be right. However, back then, Swords of Glass was totally awesome! Not only did it allow 3-D dungeons in color, but it also had multi-player split-screen! This was a time when even action games hardly allowed multi-player, let alone split-screen multi-player RPG's. The game also contained many other realism factors that didn't appear in other games like weapons and armor upgrades as well as degradation over time. There were riddles and logic puzzles as well as hack and slash. Add that to a huge spell book with various effects. The game was just filled with cool stuff that most games left out.

In Swords of Glass you play either a warrior or a magician who is searching through a deep dungeon for the legendary Sword of Glass. I know the story sucks, but don't let that keep you from playing.

After you create a character, you then go into the store and buy weapons and armor for your journey into the dungeon. Once in the dungeon you would fight evil monsters to the death and pick up treasure chests along the way. After a little fighting, you return to the stairway and leave the dungeon. Then, you go to the store again, sell your spoils, and buy better equipment, and rest in the hotel. That's pretty much how the game goes. Each level of the dungeon becomes increasingly difficult.

On each level is a stairway down to the lower dungeon. There are a total of 8 dungeon levels and the Sword of Glass is somewhere on the bottom level. You will spend weeks of constant playing to get a character that powerful and the reward is very little. A simple you win, was all there is. Still, the game took countless hours of my childhood away from me, and I'm still glad I played this game.

There are a few flaws with the game, just like every game. The game play is a little too difficult. You have to put a lot of time into a character before they're capable of making to the next level. Also, many of the enemies seem a little foolish like giant fruit, bunnies, and jungle animals. The split screen had its problems as well, because one action from one person counts as the action for the team. This makes duel exploration very difficult unless you're in party mode.

The Utilities screen is very important in the game. Wait allows you to change how long you have to wait to read messages, Quick Plot lets you toggle the overhead map, Formation puts you into party mode if the second player is next to you, Nothing (Mons Move) is used to let you wait out paralysis and sleep traps, Abandon Player returns you to the town, at the expense of your player's life, and Hunt for People is used to find a tomb stone of a fallen fighter to resurrect them.

All in all, this is a very detailed game for its day, and it can keep you occupied for a long time if you can tolerate the antiquated graphics and lack of music.