Die Dunkle Dimension

It's a warm summer’s day and you've decided to go for a walk. You hike across a nature reserve and observe animals and plants. Suddenly you see something glitter a few meters in front of you in the tall grass. Angry about this environmental sin, you rush to pick up the supposed piece of glass.

As you get closer, you realize that it's not a shard at all, but a transparent sliver of an unknown mineral about a foot long. It emits a faint strange light, almost a dark glow. You pick up the shard to examine it more closely. It hits you like an electric shock and you fall. Even though your mind tells you that you're standing on solid ground in the middle of the great outdoors, you fall into - into what?

It's as if you are falling through an endless, whirling, winding tunnel, a maelstrom beyond space and time. You're falling very fast, hurtling through the swirling nothingness at tremendous speed. You let go of the splinter in fright; you fall even faster than you did into the whirling inferno and disappear out of sight. You keep falling, you see strange landscapes and demonic grimaces scurrying past.

The player is thrown into the Dunkle Dimension. This world has been in permanent twilight ever since a demon invaded it, destroying the world's balance and energy source. The object of the game is to stop the evil, whose very name is so dreadful that one dare not even speak it without being burned, and restore the magical balance of the world.

Die Dunkle Dimension is a German roleplaying game where the player moves around an overland 2D scrolling area, and a first-person perspective for the labyrinths. The player can visit cities and other places of interest as well, that can be entered as you are used to in the Ultima series. They have various places to visit, among others shops offering weapons, armour and reagents in order to cast spells, food rations, transportation (horses or ships) or offering healing. NPC's can hold valuable information that can help to succeed in your quest.

At the start of the game you can create your own character by giving your hero (or heroine) first a name, e.g. your own. The computer will recognize the gender of the character based on the name, but will ask again beforehand. Then the primary attributes are assigned among four choices: Stärke (Strength) (SR), Geschicklichkeit (Dexterity) (GE), Klugheit (Wisdom) (KG) and Charisma (CH). Now enter the first letter of the characteristic that is particularly pronounced in you. (S/G/K/C) You get two extra points for this attribute. When that is done you get to specify a difficulty level: Leicht (Easy), Mittel (Medium), Schwer (Hard) and the game then distributes random points according to the information on the values. Afterwards you indicate whether you prefer to focus on Attack (AT) or on Parrying (PA).

Conversation with NPCs proceeds exactly as in the Ultima series except that you only type the first four letters of your keyword. All NPCs respond to NAME, GESUndheit (health), and BERUf (job). The rest of their responses are from keywords that they feed you or that other NPCs tell you to ask them. From time to time you will also be asked questions that you can answer with "J(a)" or "N(ein)".

Enemies are encountered on the world map as well as in dungeons; combat takes place on separate top-down screens where the player fights monsters in a turn-based tile-based system. Your character accumulates experience points and level up, gaining higher amount of hit points. If an enemy successfully flees, you get its gold but no experience points. If you flee, you lose some experience points. Like Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, if you kill an animal, the corresponding experience points will be deducted.