Dark Designs II: Closing the Gate

Dark Designs II: Closing the Gate is a video game in the role-playing (rpg) genre developed by Softdisk Publishing and published by Softdisk Publishing originally released in 1991. It is currently playable on DOS.

Dark Designs I and II are decent dungeon RPGs, similar to the early Wizardry and Ultima games: multi-character party and first-person perspective that switches to a top-down view in combat.

In and of themselves, the two Dark Designs have nothing special: the typical fantasy plot, monsters, and a user interface that Ultima fans will be familiar with. Rather, the games' biggest draw - and the fact that secures their place in gaming history - is the fact that they were both designed by the now-famous John Carmack, when he was an employee of SoftDisk, months before forming id Software with his brother Adrian and John Romero.

The games were included in 2 issues of 'Big Blue Disk', a monthly shareware that came on 3.5' floppy disks by subscription. While by no means revolutionary, the Dark Designs games show the same care and polish that became the hallmark of John Carmack's later games. They are fun to play, and even feature some nice features not usually seen in early RPGs. For example, during character creation, you can assign each number you've obtained to any stat, and secret areas abound. In addition, the games automatically saves the game in progress from time to time, a welcome feature that should be used more often in today's games.

In summary, fans of classic commercial RPGs like Ultima will probably find the games overly simplistic and somewhat repetitive. However, as shareware titles, they are certainly some of the best made in that period, and one of Big Blue Disk's best games. And as some of John Carmack's earliest games, they are priceless to his fans and id Software historians:)

It is possible that we have multiple downloads available when different versions exist.