Warlord's Temple, by Matt Williams, is an old game which, whether you realise it or not, has influenced your lives in such phantasmagorical ways your small human minds cannot possibly hope to comprehend! In it, you are Marcus, a young adventurer who wanders (as all good adventurers do) into a mysterious land with an mysterious red sky and a mysterious castle with a mysterious amount of BLOOD AND SKELLINGTONS. Mysteriously, you come upon all manner of mysteriousness!
Which explains NOTHING to the poor reader. I apologise. It transpires as you progress through the plot via an interface with an old diary and other such devices that a dark serpent, Dreadfire, has beamed into the castle and levelled the kingdom that the land once housed, causing most of the people to leave, for reasons unknown. As such, the castle is full of evil demons and all manner of things with sharp point mandibles that want you suck your soul out and sodomise it repeatedly. And pre-fabricated enemies, naturally.
What makes this game such a classic is that, while if it were released today it would be seen as a "pretty good game", at its time it tries out all manner of conventions used more commonly today than in 1996 (when it was released). The title screen, for one, is deceptively simple but involves a HELL of a lot of #change and #put command utilisation. As well as this is the spell/mana engine, a precursor for future games in the same way Chrono Wars 10 was a precursor for the inventory engine I so wantonly raped in the Dizzy games.
In short, Warlord's Temple owns you. Go get.
