We already know the Amiga catalogue is a kaleidoscope of demo-scene flexes, bedroom curios, and at least three different chrome-teapot tech demos, so why does Abandoned Places: A Time for Heroes still feel like that oddball cousin who shows up to the family reunion in chain-mail, quotes Dragonlance at the snack table, then politely asks if anyone can resurrect a minor deity? Depending on whom you corner at a retro convention, the game is either a cult-classic crawler that dared to out-dungeon Dungeon Master (hyperbole very much intended) or a clunky curiosity whose grid mazes deserved to stay, well, abandoned. Underrated? Overpraised? Foundational? Forgotten? Yes, simultaneously. It’s a title where your cleric keels over from hunger one tile shy of an oasis, bread loaves function as encumbrance therapy, and spell runes look suspiciously like Hungarian tongue-twisters. Don’t play coy, we’re exploring because nothing screams “fond Amiga memory” like swapping disk four just to watch your paladin faint from thirst while the drive accessorises the soundtrack with grinding noises.
Historical Context
Back in 1992, International Computer Entertainment (ICE) occupied that strata of UK publishers who filled the pages of Amiga Power between joystick ads and mail-order fish-and-chip coupons, scrappy, budget-minded, convinced the A500 could still out-shine choking MS-DOS VGA rigs if you pumped the Copper list hard enough. Meanwhile, deep in Szeged, Hungary, a small collective calling itself ArtGame, or, when Western magazines couldn’t spell their surnames, “the Hungarian Development Team”, wanted to prove that Eastern-bloc code could rival FTL’s Dungeon Master and SSI’s Eye of the Beholder. Their pitch became Abandoned Places. ICE boxed it in metallic neon artwork that looked like Boris Vallejo’s intern experimenting with highlighter pens and shipped it to continental retailers on seven floppies (Amiga first, DOS port later).
My first sighting: a smoky Boston electronics shop looping the game’s attract mode on an imported PAL A500. The mosaic title font shimmered, timpani boomed, and an English narrator (clearly reading phonetic copy) welcomed “Four haer-rows of Kalynthia” to destiny. Hook sold. Fifty bucks poorer, I left with a jewel case whose manual smelled of dot-matrix ink. The manual doubled as copy-protection: key spell scrolls were printed in barely-visible grey, so photocopies produced blank parchment, a budget trick that accidentally became world-building flavour.
1992’s dungeon zeitgeist was crowded. Eye of the Beholder II and Ultima Underworld dominated PC mags, while console kids flirted with Shining in the Darkness. Press buzz for Abandoned Places leaned on two claims: an overworld map that let you march mini-pawns between towns in real time, and weather effects that could literally murder under-clothed adventurers. Amiga reviewers applauded the ambition; DOS critics shrugged and said “nice but rough.” Sales settled around a respectable quarter-million across platforms, enough for ICE to bankroll a sequel the next year (we’ll save that cautionary tale for another column).
Mechanics
Party Roll-Call and the Nine-Slot Bread Dilemma
Character creation resurrects four long-deceased champions, warrior, paladin, cleric, and mage templates, scrolled from a rune-circle UI. Class stats echo AD&D orthodoxy: fighters soak damage, clerics patch holes, wizards nuke rooms after a coffee break. Each hero also packs a personal inventory grid whose most precious resource is, brace yourself, bread. Food depletes steadily both in dungeons and on the overworld march, so veterans bulk-buy loaves in the starting city until the encumbrance warning flashes red. No authoritative source confirms weight secretly slows your cool-downs, yet empirical testing shows the more you lug, the more combat feels like swinging through quicksand. Whether intentional or placebo, loaf management becomes the game’s unofficial score multiplier: carry too much and you suffer; carry too little and you starve at dusk.
First-Person Mazes Meet Top-Down Road Trips
The heart of Abandoned Places is a grid-based, 90-degree dungeon engine straight out of Dungeon Master, stone corridors, pressure plates, spinners that flip your orientation like a Gravitron ride. Movement keys nudge the party one tile at a time; weapon icons animate individual cooldown swipes. Combat runs in real time, but the Amiga’s blitter can only juggle so many sprite frames before the frame-rate coughs, so timing your front-line swings feels more rhythmic than frantic, a proto-Legend of Grimrock cadence.
Then there’s the overworld: a scrolling map reminiscent of Defender of the Crown rendered in painterly hues. You plot a course with the mouse, days tick by, random-encounter alerts pop, “Bandits at Dusk!”, and the engine snap-loads a bespoke arena back in first-person. It’s jarring, charming, and ambitious, harking forward to Might & Magic VI’s hybrid zones. Light winter storms inflict HP attrition if you forgot cloaks, making weather not just atmospheric garnish but a passive DPS threat. Sierra would have killed you outright; Abandoned Places merely nags you to shop better.
Rune-Casting and Accidental Hungarian Lessons
Spells activate from a rune grid shaped like a pentagram, each sigil labelled with syllables, “Sár,” “Für,” “Náv.” Fans later noted many draw from Hungarian phonetics, likely easter eggs from the dev team rather than formal linguistics. Casting “Sár-Náv” conjures a light globe, handy in catacombs. “Für-Sár” hurls a modest fireball. Unlike Eye of the Beholder, where runes stack dynamically, Abandoned Places demands exact sequences, one typo and you expend precious mana producing a sad sparkle.
My recurring absurd motif emerges here: bread crumbs. I once panicked during an ogre ambush, mis-clicked my cleric’s spellbook, and instead of healing cast “Náv-Náv”, a wind burst that scattered half my bread stack across the floor. Watching magic carbs tumble while my party died cemented bread as both lifeline and comic relief.
Difficulty Curves, Save Shrines, and Disk-Swap Zen
Save points exist only at shrines, one per city hub, so you’ll marathon multi-floor dungeons on faith. The Amiga version loads each level from floppy, punishing reckless experimentation with minute-long read grinds. I cultivated disk-swap zen: meditate as drive clicks, sip flat Mello Yello, then unpause to face gelatinous cubes. On WHDLoad images today, loading is instant; oddly, the tension also vanishes.
Legacy and Influence
Why did Abandoned Places fade from mainstream retrospectives? Timing, polish, and geography. Commodore imploded two years later, shrinking Amiga mind-share. The English localisation, serviceable but clunky (“The necromancer Bronakh escapeded!”), invited ridicule in magazines that had just applauded LucasArts’ razor-sharp wit. DOS ports faced brutal competition from Lands of Lore and Ultima Underworld.
Yet the game’s design threads out into the medium. Overworld travel fused to tile-based dungeons shows up in Might & Magic revivals. Weather-induced HP drain resembles Don’t Starve’s night-time sanity spiral. Even the rune grid whispers through Nordic-flavoured indies that use phoneme combos for magic crafting. Several ArtGame alumni migrated to projects like Imperium Galactica, seeding Hungarian talent across European dev hubs.
Fan devotion lingers. WHDLoad patches optimise memory; Amiga mod archives host György Dragon and Lajos Suvák’s soundtrack in crunchy ProTracker glory; YouTube long-plays clock four-hour full clears. A 2018 community translation patch fixed item descriptions, evidence someone still cares enough to hex 68000 assembly at 3 a.m.
Closing Paragraph + Score
So what is Abandoned Places in 2025? It’s the half-eaten loaf in the retro lunchbox, stale around the crust, surprisingly hearty inside, faintly smoky with Hungarian paprika. It’s a dungeon crawler that dared bolt a hex-based overworld onto a Dungeon Master chassis and sprinkle linguistic easter eggs nobody asked for but everybody remembers. Sometimes the music loops awkwardly, sometimes the English localisation trips over its own participles, yet when night falls on the Kalynthian plain and your wizard finally nails “Für-Sár” in one click, the Amiga’s Paula chip sings magic.
Final verdict: 7.0 / 10. Add a point if you adore inventory micromanagement and weird Euro-fantasy vibes; subtract half if disk swapping gives you PTSD. Either way, pack extra bread, practise your runes, and remember: abandoned places are only abandoned until some hungry heroes with doubtful accents show up.