Crystal Dragon - Almost half through the game

Just when I thought I would dry out of thirst I found a small stream of water streaming out of a wall that helped me tremendously and gave me much needed strength to both fill my waterskins and move on in the game.

A small pouring stream of water

Door like these requires special keys which you almost always have to look for on each level to continue further.

door entrance to level 6 with a dead rat in front

At level 7 it was time to be introduced to yet another evil beast. Some sort of hell hounds attacks me. They are extremely fast and manages to get around the double or triple amount of attacks for each one I can deliver. My only protection against them is to hurl magic missiles at them since they are pretty weak but like pirayas will eat you whole if you are not fast enough.

New spells and quite ample amount of food has kept the spirit going for my heroes. The puzzles continues but so do we. I get stuck every 10 minutes but somehow I manage to continue. There are no maps to be found anywhere on internet and my only help is a poor translation from german to help me out when stuck.

Teleporters could appear after pressing a button

Some doors could be bashed open

There is supposedly around 21 levels or so of this game and I am right now at level 9. The guards have been replaced by skeleton guards that are much tougher to defeat since spells that affects the mind like confusion doesn´t work anymore.

I have only two save slots to alter between

While going down to level 9 I was ambushed by a beholder that quite fast killed off my Paladin. It seems the beholder cast´s the confusion spell that makes my orientation impossible.

Probably the best looking monster so far

My tactics to kill the beholders is to be the first of us who casts confusion. Then I run up in melee against him, making one or two party swings and then cast confusion again and repeat the procedure. It works best when the beholder is cornered otherwise it might try to get away when confused and it is very fast so it is hard to pin it down. If there are several beholders you have to lure them away to be able to defeat them one at a time.
There is still no NPC:s or other texts that tells more about the history of this place. I have found a couple of scrolls which my cleric is unable to read, despite casting Read Runes. I think my wisdom is too low and fear there are important clues in those scrolls.

Mana regeneration is quite quick and there are no problems to find peaceful places to rest in. In that respect there is a good balance in the game. Food is also becoming more abundant due to the fact that there are a lot of rats running around and those could be eaten after you have throwed them to the wall a few times. You have to be careful though, since some of them could get you diseased.

I recently found out you can attack with two weapons at once. I threw off my shield for the Paladin and now equip a short sword + 2 in my left hand. It works very well.

A very useful hint from the game is this. When pausing the game you have some runes on the screen.  Clicking them reveals hints about the current levels like "Some pits are illusions" or "There is a mighty sword in the south". You really, really need them.

Another recommendation to potential players. The spell True Sight reveals illusion walls. That is if the player with the spell cast is the active player then the walls just dissappear. The problem is that you won´t see any difference to ordinary walls so you will never actually know if you see through illusionary walls or not. Since they often hide hidden buttons or useful items it is very important to be aware of where on the map those walls exists. To solve this problem, I always explore the full map first. Then switch on True Sight and change player to go around finding mismatches in the walls.

I am very eager to start with Dungeon Master 2 but feel I have not the time to play both games at once. Too bad it takes around 2 hours to complete each single dungeon level. I will continue on however.