Secret of the Silver Blades

The story begins in the town of New Verdigris, a mining settlement overrun by monsters emerging from the deeper levels of a nearby gem mine. Your party of adventurers is summoned by the Well of Knowledge to help the beleaguered townspeople. As you explore the mine, the dungeons beneath it, and eventually a frozen castle, you uncover the true scale of the threat — a Dreadlord Lich imprisoned in a glacier 300 years ago by a legendary group known as the Silver Blades, whose name the game takes. The Black Circle, an organization of evil magicians and warriors, is working to free him. You must stop them.

Like all Gold Box games, Secret of the Silver Blades uses the AD&D ruleset approved by TSR, with turn-based combat viewed from an overhead perspective and exploration of dungeons and towns rendered in first-person 3D. The system was refined considerably from the first two games in the series — Pool of Radiance and Curse of the Azure Bonds were notorious for their punishing difficulty and vast numbers of enemies — and the improvements introduced in Champions of Krynn were carried over here, making the game more accessible without sacrificing depth. You can import your party from previous Gold Box games or create an entirely new group of characters.

The combat is the heart of the experience, and if you enjoy Dungeons & Dragons style tactical fighting it delivers around 200 hours of content — the vast majority of which involves battling monsters. The game features the largest 3D terrain of any Gold Box title at the time, and the full-screen artwork and between-scene illustrations give it genuine visual atmosphere. The Amiga version benefits from mouse support and slightly richer colors, though the core visuals are essentially the same as the DOS and C64 versions. The C64 port runs well and is a faithful conversion, remarkable for the hardware.

The weaknesses are real. The dungeon environments are repetitive — walls of indistinguishable stone in the mine, the dungeons, and the castle that all begin to look the same after many hours. There is an exploitable spot in the mine where gems can be dug from a wall indefinitely, and the town armory has an infinite supply of gold regardless of how much you sell it. These are the kinds of small design oversights that undermine immersion. The auto-combat feature is best avoided, as characters left to their own devices — mages in particular — tend to cause as much damage to the party as to the enemy. The game also requires keywords from the Adventurer's Journal included in the box as a form of copy protection, so keep it close.

Compared to later Gold Box titles like Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday, Secret of the Silver Blades feels like a solid but somewhat mechanical entry in the series — heavy on combat, lighter on puzzles and story. Fans of the Gold Box format will find exactly what they are looking for. Those who prefer more narrative depth or puzzle-driven design may find it a long slog.