Is Might and Magic: Darkside of Xeen a bizarre oddball or a straight‑laced classic—underrated gem or rose‑tinted relic—essential milestone or skippable footnote? (Why not all three? My answer is a resounding “yes, with extra Fireballs.”) Released in 1993, New World Computing’s fifth entry slammed a full‑sized sequel onto the back of Clouds of Xeen, then whispered, “Combine us and unlock a secret super‑game.” Think of it as fantasy RPG Voltron: each cartridge strong on its own, but together they form World of Xeen—complete with bonus dungeons, alternate ending, and NPC gags that break the fourth wall harder than Deadpool. Bizarre? The final boss is a shape‑shifting Guardian pretending to be a usurper king who moonlights as a space probe. Classic? Its first‑person grid may look creaky, yet aficionados swear the open‑world freedom still outpaces modern loot treadmills. Over‑ or undervalued? Ask the forums: half proclaim it the last “true” Might and Magic, the rest dismiss its cartoonish digitised actors as bargain‑bin Doctor Who. Fundamental or disposable? Considering later sandbox RPGs lifted its dual‑world gimmick wholesale, I vote fundamental—like discovering New Game Plus before New Game Plus had branding.
Historical Context
Slide back to early ’93. New World Computing, fresh off Might and Magic IV – Clouds of Xeen, wanted to prove that the aging grid‑crawl formula still had legs (and wings, and teleport pads). Sierra’s Quest for Glory IV was flirting with voice‑acting; Origin’s Ultima Underworld had pivoted to free‑look 3D; DOOM was mere months from chain‑sawing the market. NWC’s response? Double down on color, sprawl, and unabashed pulp. They shipped Darkside on eight high‑density floppies (with an alternate 5¼‑inch set also clocking in at eight), promising that if you already owned Clouds you could slot the new disks into the same directory and—abracadabra—unite two hemispheres of the planet Xeen. It was half expansion, half sequel, half marketing flex (yes, that’s three halves; Xeen bends Euclidean math). CD‑ROM reissues the following year folded in digitised speech and red‑book tracks, but the DOS floppy build remains the canonical ritual for masochists who like swapping disks mid‑pyramid raid.
My first encounter came via the 3 for 1 Fantasy Pack at Babbage’s: cardboard sleeve, neon dragon art, and the promise of 100‑plus hours of “open‑ended adventure.” I installed Clouds first, roamed the cheery surface realm, then popped in Darkside and felt like I had unlocked a forbidden mirror universe—sunlit meadows replaced by volcanic plains, perky peasants swapped for vampire queens. “Is this DLC before DLC existed?” I asked my 14‑year‑old self while the Sound Blaster burbled orchestral MIDI. The read‑me file screamed YES in ANSI art.
New World Computing’s broader line‑up in ’93 was equally eclectic: Heroes of Might and Magic was still two years off, but the studio had just published Spaceward Ho! on PC and mailed floppy demos of Zephyr (a forgotten flight shooter) to anyone who sent in a warranty card. In the RPG space, SSI’s Gold Box series was winding down and Eye of the Beholder III left players lukewarm. Markets were ripe for a confident, content‑stuffed dungeon‑plodder. Darkside delivered by offering a main quest stuffed with cosmic lore—Sheltem masquerading as Lord Alamar, Queen Kalindra vampirised and bottled like gothic ketchup—and optional side dungeons that could level a party from ingénues to demigods before lunch. The kicker? When you finally fused both games, a completely new pyramid opened, bridging plots from Book One through Book Five and detonating the long‑running Corak‑vs‑Sheltem rivalry in glorious VGA.
Mechanics
Boot Darkside and you’re greeted by the ever‑cheerful character roster: six adventurers arrayed in a first‑person viewport, each portrait animated in 256‑color comic‑book style. Core classes include Knights, Paladins, Archers, Clerics, Sorcerers, and Druids—plus the rowdier Barbarians, stealthy Robbers and Ninjas, and all‑terrain Rangers—with hirelings you can bolt on like temporary DLC companions. Movement is tile‑based: forward one square, rotate 90 degrees, the digital equivalent of playing chess while wearing a VR headset strapped to a 486 DX2. Sounds archaic? Maybe, yet the rhythm becomes hypnotic. Thunk forward, swivel, peer into the distance where cyclopes patrol. Press Q to quick‑swap to automap—a parchment overlay that fills in only after you physically slam against every wall like a Roomba with a broadsword.
Combat triggers whenever hostiles occupy your forward tile. The engine freezes into a turn‑based slugfest: party acts, monsters retaliate, rinse and Fireball. Spells escalate from quaint (Magic Arrow) to “school lab accident”: Starburst nukes every enemy tile outdoors, Lloyd’s Beacon bookmarks coordinates for insta‑teleports, and Town Portal makes FedEx look sluggish. Halfway through Darkside you earn Fly, converting tiled plains into a 3‑D chessboard—your party hovers above chasms while ground‑bound trolls shake fists like angry Muppets. It felt revolutionary in an era when most RPGs still punished you for thinking vertically.
The quest design is freerange mayo. Sure, the Dragon Pharaoh begs you to find three Energy Discs to power his pyramid, but the world never gates you. Want to sprint into the Southern Sphinx at level 3 and punch mummies worth 50000 XP? Go ahead; just don’t complain when they crit you into dust. My proudest speed‑run anecdote: I once pilfered Queen Kalindra’s mirror off a vampire bat thanks to a string of lucky initiative rolls, bypassing an entire quest arc and confusing the NPC flag system so badly that the Dragon Pharaoh congratulated me for “defeating Lord Alamar” a full ten hours early. (1990s code, folks—held together with bubble gum and Monty Python references.)
Humour pops up everywhere. A vendor selling “Fine Leather Jerkins” insists on the pun; a talking well dispenses stat boosts in exchange for gold then belches; a sign outside Necropolis reads “Population: Dead.” My favourite Easter egg is the rumoured pixelated Elvis hidden somewhere in the Darkside desert—click him and your party receives a one‑point Personality boost because, apparently, the King has charisma to spare. That absurdity becomes my thematic through‑line: Xeen treats comedy like the seventh party member, always there to lighten the cosmic stakes of Sheltem’s planet‑folding antics.
Let’s rant about the economy. Gold floods in faster than you can cast Bank‑Blast (not a real spell, sadly). Hirelings demand weekly salaries that dwarf NASA budgets, training halls charge exponentially for each level, and the banks of Vertigo and Olympus pay ludicrous 10percent monthly interest—compound it right and you can retire your party before touching the Pharaoh’s pyramid. Inflation? Never heard of her. But the true money‑sink is attribute fountains: a moat‑encircled spring promises +5 Might for 50000 gold “once per character.” If you’re like me, you’ll micro‑optimize who drinks first, save‑scum the RNG in case the fountain glitches, then realize you just spent Saturday night spreadsheeting a fantasy well. (Modern live‑service games dream of this engagement loop.)
Graphics? Chunky but charming. Monster sprites scale as they approach, growing from postage‑stamp goblins into screen‑filling ogres before vomiting 12‑frame animation loops. Backgrounds shift palettes per realm: ash‑grey underworld, neon magenta cloud‑city, turquoise desert. The CD version adds full‑screen digitised cut‑scenes—Sheltem snarls, Corak intones exposition—with lip‑sync that looks like puppets overdubbed in Esperanto. Sound‑blaster effects ping with satisfying crunch; each sword swing sounds like striking a radiator, each spell like someone bottling thunder in a jam jar. Addictive? Absolutely. After 40 hours the “You are victorious!” sting still hits like Pavlov’s bell.
The absurd connective tissue I promised earlier? The Magic Mirror network. Throughout both Clouds and Darkside, crystalline mirrors teleport you to cities if you guess passwords like “HUBBLE” or “EINSTEIN.” Why do medieval peasants know 20th‑century scientists? Because Xeen is secretly a terra‑formed shell‑world orbiting a distant star, built by space‑faring Ancients. The party wields longswords but references NASA—genre mashup perfection. That mirror becomes my comedic anchor: every time a lore drop veers toward melodrama, somebody types “NEWTON” into a gem and whooshes across continents like Scotty beaming hobbits. Nerd metaphor unlocked.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh9H9P7YHYc
Legacy and Influence
Despite critical praise—Computer Gaming World lauded its “sheer scope” and effortless integration of two titles—Darkside never reached the mainstream cachet of Ultima VII or Baldur’s Gate. Timing hurt: a year after release, gamers pivoted to texture-mapped 3D; grid crawls looked archaic next to System Shock or Elder Scrolls: Arena. Marketing didn’t help: box art featured a generic sorcerer blasting lightning at a bat; shelf browsers mistook it for shovelware. Yet its design quietly seeped into later RPGs. The dual-world unlock foreshadows Pokémon’s linked cartridges, Golden Sun’s password-bridging, and the shared state files of Mass Effect trilogies. Mechanics like free-fly and persistent automaps reappear in Might and Magic VI (still revered for its “fly-across-the-world” spell). Even Etrian Odyssey’s embrace of hand-drawn map scribbling echoes Xeen’s DIY cartography—except Xeen did it inside the game, no graph paper required.
For super-fans, Darkside endures as the apex of the “Sheltem Saga.” Book I spawned 1986’s Secret of the Inner Sanctum, Book II followed with Gates to Another World, Book III hopped to Terra, Book IV built out the Clouds, and Book V resolved the space-probe-gone-rogue storyline in bombastic fashion: Corak and Sheltem self-destruct inside Alamar’s throne room, their duel rendering both sides of Xeen whole and reenergising the cosmos. Later instalments rebooted the setting, but old-timers still quote the finale like MCU fans reciting “I am Iron Man.” That emotional resonance spurred a mod scene: World of Xeen editors let players craft bespoke dungeons, add jokes, even import selfies as NPC portraits. (In 2004 my friend replaced the Dragon Pharaoh’s hologram with Shrek; lore integrity died, but morale hit +99.)
Why niche, then? Two words: barrier-to-entry. Newcomers confront ancient UI, manual spell requirements (forgetting Walk on Water means soft-locking an entire sea dungeon), and DOS memory fiddling. GOG’s re-release bundles DOSBox presets, yet the average TikTok gamer still bounces off the tiled movement faster than a Dr. Mario pill. Another factor: Darkside’s humour straddles 1990s dad-joke territory—Elvis skeletons, Star Trek nods—that modern grimdark tastes deem cringey. I’d argue that camp is the franchise’s secret sauce, but in an era chasing photorealistic angst, zest can read as dated.
Closing Paragraph + Score
Revisiting Might and Magic: Darkside of Xeen in 2025 feels like cracking open a holographic pop-up book: each page flips to reveal lava caverns, cloud kingdoms, and talking wells that insult your hygiene. Beneath the chunky sprites lurks a design manifesto still radical—let players wander anywhere, let spells rewrite traversal, reward curiosity with comedic flourishes. Yes, the grid movement can induce claustrophobia, and yes, inventory Tetris with six party members will turn your scroll wheel into a smoking nub. But those quirks fade the moment you solve a pyramid puzzle by typing “Edison” into a mirror, pop into free-flight, and rain meteor showers on dragons eight tiles below.
Is it perfect? No game featuring a random moose cameo in a lava zone seeks perfection. Yet its sheer ambition—the audacity to fuse two full RPGs into one mega-campaign—earns everlasting respect. Darkside is the hidden hinge in CRPG history, connecting ’80s wizard-grids to ’90s sandbox epics, all while cracking puns at stat fountains. My verdict, scrawled in neon gel-pen across the Ancient’s psychic user manual: 9.0 / 10. Docked a single point because the banks’ 10 percent interest rate ruined my adolescent understanding of economics, but crowned a legend for proving that bigger, brighter, and unabashedly weirder can still feel timeless.