What do you get when you trap an entire medieval castle inside a cosmic snow globe, pepper the surrounding void with eight pocket universes, and then hand the player a rune-bag, a broadsword, and an inexplicable craving for roast lizard? (Answer: a 1993 PC game so forward-thinking that modern GPUs still raise an eyebrow.) Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds is equal parts unhinged experiment and bona-fide classic, the sequel that basically asks, “Remember when we reinvented first-person RPGs last year? Mind if we bend reality itself this time?” Underrated in casual-gamer memory yet worshipped by anyone who’s ever modded System Shock, it remains the Rosetta Stone of immersive-sim design. Fundamental reading or optional side-quest? Trick question, I’ve spent two anniversaries and one regrettable bowl of microwave mac-and-cheese replaying it, so buckle up.
Historical Context
In January 1993 Origin Systems shipped the eleventh official Ultima title, and only the second to abandon tile maps for full 3-D. Developed by the freshly renamed Looking Glass Technologies (née Blue Sky Productions), Labyrinth of Worlds landed barely ten months after its genre-shaking predecessor and fully eleven months before id Software’s Doom shareware would detonate across BBS boards that December. The 486 era was dawning, CD-ROM drives cost more than a used Geo Metro, and “texture-mapped” had just joined “multimedia” on the buzzword bingo card.
Origin tucked the game into a 1993 line-up that also featured Strike Commander and Serpent Isle, betting that sword-swinging in claustrophobic 3-D corridors could stand toe-to-toe with jet combat and isometric epics. Reviews swooned over free-look mouse control and physics you could feel; retailers, unsure whether “Underworld II” was an add-on, often stocked a single copy, my local Software Etc. kept it under the counter like contraband D&D dice.
In the arcade I was still dropping quarters into Mortal Kombat, oblivious that the 386 at home would soon let me jump, swim, fly and cast Kal Lor (Cause Fear) at a shard of sentient crystal. The whiplash from two-button uppercuts to six-degree keyboard gymnastics could snap a teenager’s brain stem, and I loved every second.
Mechanics
The set-up: the red-skinned Guardian encases Castle Britannia in a magical blackrock dome. Poking around for breakfast winds up uncovering portals to eight standalone worlds you must infiltrate and sabotage:
- The Prison Tower, a goblin-run vertical jail riddled with faction politics;
- The Ice Caverns, arctic tunnels where frost-drakes prowl frozen lakes;
- Killorn Keep, a sky fortress floating above endless storm clouds;
- Talorus, a crystalline city whose telepathic Xorinite residents speak in syntax riddles;
- Scintillus Academy, a deserted mage school full of spell experiments gone feral;
- The Pits of Carnage, gladiatorial arenas where the Guardian’s minions bet on your limbs;
- The Tomb of Praecor Loth, haunted catacombs humming with undead regrets;
- The Ethereal Void, a kaleidoscopic dream-maze that would make Escher call for Dramamine.
Each bubble world hides a Guardian outpost you must collapse before pocketing its blackrock shard and sprinting back through the portal for Lord British’s latest gossip and a well-earned roast bird (yes, there’s a kitchen inventory).
Movement pairs keyboard strides with mouselook years before Quake normalized WASD. Looking Glass even sprinkled in jump-keys, swim physics, and throwable objects governed by gravity that felt miraculous on a 386.
Character growth sticks to tabletop math: every level awards build points you funnel into Sword, Lore, Acrobat, or the perennially hilarious Charm (indispensable when convincing a homesick troll to lend you his fishing pole). Magic stays rune-based: drag glyphs to compose syllables such as Ort Wis Bet for a Light Heal, or experiment with undocumented combos that still circulate on fan wikis. My high-school notebook is littered with rune doodles resembling emo band logos.
Combat is real-time ballet: hold the mouse for a haymaker, mis-angle for a whiff that leaves your axe buried in a door-frame. Spells whiz by, arrows arc, and enemy path-finding is sly enough to kite you round stalagmites. Emergent chaos reigns: during one session I lured a frost-drake into lava, cooked its corpse for dinner, then bribed a skeleton mage with the leftovers. Try that in Eye of the Beholder.
And yes, physics gaffes still delight. Midway up the Prison Tower I donned Levitation boots while munching an onion; the encumbrance drop torpedoed my Agility and I pinballed down five stories like a medieval Pachinko ball, barely alive. I scrawled “save more often, idiot” on a Post-it that’s still stuck to my monitor.
Legacy and Influence
Sales lagged the original, sequel fatigue plus stiff competition from Dark Sun, but the tech’s fingerprints are everywhere. Looking Glass reused core systems for System Shock, deepened AI for Thief, and seeded philosophies that Irrational later distilled into BioShock. Bethesda has cited Underworld’s free-form dungeons as a direct nudge toward The Elder Scrolls: Arena, released just twelve weeks later.
Fans kept the torch lit: texture hacks, balance patches, and the Unity-powered Underworld Exporter now deliver 120 FPS spelunking on ultrawide monitors. Speedrunners door-clip through the entire multiverse in under thirty minutes; RPG historians hold seminars on how this game achieved “true 3-D space” two years before Hexen let you do a proper jump.
So why didn’t Labyrinth of Worlds achieve the pop-culture halo of Ultima VII? Blame title clutter (Roman numerals plus subtitle), an interface that juggles rune pouches and physics puzzles with zero quest-log training wheels, and visuals out-glossed by Doom nine months later. But for players who push through pixel grit, no other 1993 RPG offers such glorious “hold-my-beer” experimentation.
Closing Paragraph + Score
Fire up Ultima Underworld II in 2025 and you’ll hear creaky MIDI harps sparring with jaunty lute loops while NPC portraits grin like clip-art gargoyles. Stick with it and that aging shell cracks open into a physics sandbox where you can bake bread, charm trolls, decode crystal syntax and punt goblins off ledges, sometimes in the same five-minute stretch. That eclectic density is its magic; every corner feels primed for mischief, every victory is yours alone. My verdict? 9.0 / 10, minus one point for texture warp and menu arthritis, plus a bonus for teaching half the industry how to turn dungeons into living, breathing ecosystems. The Guardian still taunts, “Fool, you cannot hope to defeat me,” but after you’ve hijacked his sky-keep and sold his lieutenants dragon jerky, it’s hard not to grin back, “Watch me.”