Doomdark's Revenge: the war you waged with a paper map and Lego pieces on the living-room floor

A remastered 1985 sequel that splits players between those who call the missing tutorial a challenge and those who call it neglect.

An army that landed in your living room

One player described covering the floor of his home with a hand-drawn map and numbered Lego pieces standing in for his own troops — the only way he could tell, from a distance, whether a unit spotted in the game was his or a possible recruit. The review went up the same day the game arrived on GOG's store. That is exactly the kind of devotion Doomdark's Revenge has always demanded of anyone who sat down to play it, and it will demand the same of you.

This is the sequel Mike Singleton wrote in 1985 to The Lords of Midnight: the threat of the first adventure is behind you, and the new story belongs to Doomdark's Revenge, waged against Shareth Heartstealer, empress of the frozen empire. The campaign blends quest and war, exploration and calculated strategy, and can be played solo or split among friends and family, each taking command of a different character. It's you, sharing your troops with whoever is nearby, trying to work out whether the unit rising on the horizon is a reinforcement or a threat.

The edition released on GOG in 2014 is credited to Mike Singleton and Chris Wild, distributed by Chilli Hugger Software: retro-styled, high-resolution graphics that never give up the turn-based pace built for players who drift in and out of the campaign a little at a time, plus a novella that runs alongside the story.

A nostalgia that outlives the emulator

The read that keeps recurring among longtime players is one of a job well done. A 2020 review praises this version for reproducing the original with cleaner graphics and a clearer interface — the kind of touch-up that doesn't betray the memory of anyone who once ran the game on homemade emulators. A German comment, also from 2021, calls this second adventure even better and more beautiful than the first. A French account from 2025 sums up the Lords of Midnight and Doomdark's Revenge pair as revolutionary for its time — and still a pleasure to return to today.

Not every fond memory comes without a caveat. A 2024 review gives high marks and keeps the nostalgia intact, but asks for an adjustment to Shareth's behavior: the villain's unpredictability, for its author, tips over from challenge into chaos. It's the feeling of losing your grip on the board at the very moment you need it most. It's the same praise for the old-days atmosphere, turning here into a single, pointed complaint.

No translation, no tutorial, no patience

On the other side, the most common complaint isn't the retro atmosphere — it's the lack of a helping hand. A 2023 Spanish review describes the game as closer to an interactive novel with no audio, entirely in English, whose tutorials cover only the basics: past that point, getting anywhere depends on intuition or resignation, which makes the experience hard and tiring — recommended, in its author's view, only to those already devoted to the genre. A 2020 German comment disagrees with anyone praising the interface: for this player the commands are utterly incomprehensible, and what's missing is a better introduction, a tutorial, and a German translation. It's you facing a screen full of English text, with no idea which command leads to your next move.

For another share of the unhappy, the problem never even reaches the rules: it's the installation that stalls. A 2024 review reports following every instruction and still failing to so much as open the game. Another, published back in 2014, is harsher: it speaks of a game that doesn't run properly and of GOG support unable to process a refund request.

The very lack of guidance that veterans treat as part of the challenge is, for anyone arriving without patience or fluent English, the door that won't open.

For those willing to crack it alone — or together

You won't be handed this easily, and that isn't a flaw to be fixed: it's the pact Doomdark's Revenge has proposed since its very first campaign. If you like forming a hypothesis, testing it, and correcting course with no tutorial guiding each step, you'll find satisfaction here — better still if you split the characters with someone else in the house, as the game itself suggests. But if you expect to open the installer and grasp the commands on your first try, or you rely on instructions in your own language, you'll run straight into the barrier the harshest reviews describe — and you'll very likely give up before the first battle.