Deathlord

The game plays as a turn based, top down, tile mapped CRPG. The player creates a party of up to 6 characters to move about the world, searching for secrets and fighting monsters. It uses most of the keys on the keyboard, mapping them to specific actions.

There is only one save-game slot, and the game autosaves if the party moves to another location or a party member dies. A party, once killed, needs a new party to resurrect them.

The world of Lorn is under attack from the Deathlord's forces. The Emperor of Kodan has sent word asking for a party to defeat the Deathlord. The party must search the world to find seven words, six items, venture into Hell, defeat the Deathlord, and return. There is no linear path to the goals, and much of the story lies in subtext as the developer chose to keep dialog options to a minimum within the game.

Originally, the game was intended to have a Norse/Teutonic theme, But the marketing department at Electronic Arts gave Al Escudero 5 weeks to change the assets (art, story, spell names, equipment names, location names, etc.).

Deathlord came in an album style box and included two double sided disks, the first containing a side for booting the game and a side containing utilities, while the other disk was the scenario disk containing the unaltered version of the game world. The box also included a paper manual and quick reference card. The utility disk would let players import characters from The Bard's Tale, Wizardry and Ultima III, as well as rename characters.

Computer Gaming World's Scorpia in 1988 described Deathlord as "A mediocre effort at best" and "a compendium of standard CRPG features glossed over with a tinge of pseudo-Orientalism by pasting Japanese names on as much as they could". Criticisms included poor documentation, poor class balance, and meaningless character alignment. The game hid the townspeople with important pieces of information, making mapping necessary, and frequently the player had to search many squares in an area for an important item. She described a dungeon as "one of the most idiotic dungeons ever", with a two-level maze of locked and fake doors, with a diagonal passage full of teleports and fake walls above.

Without a lack of mapping aids, this was very difficult, especially in sixteen-level dungeons that did not contribute to the story. In 1993, Scorpia called the game "poorly designed and implemented mishmash with a quasi-Ultima look", "extremely pointless", and "definitely one to avoid".