Heimdall 2 - Into the Hall of Worlds

Year 1994, Sound Blaster churning out Norse motifs, and on the monitor a world unfolds that looked like a painting back then. Heimdall 2 got me before I could even load the first location.

It's an action RPG from British studio 8th Day set in Norse mythology. You play as Heimdall, guardian of Bifrost, hacking through worlds filled with enemies, puzzles, and loot. This isn't heavy-duty dungeon-crawling in spreadsheet form — the game leans toward action with RPG elements, where inventory and stats matter, but don't slow you down.

The controls are isometric, movement is straightforward, and combat happens in real time. For its day it worked well enough; today you need to get used to clicking and the fact that the game doesn't hold your hand. The puzzles are sometimes genuinely clever, other times frustratingly so in the way that adventure game logic of the era considered standard. Your inventory fills fast and navigating it takes patience — that's probably the biggest thorn that stuck around.

But the graphics. That's why I remember this game thirty years later. 8th Day decided to paint every scene with care that wasn't a given for a studio of that size. The backgrounds are packed with detail, each world has its own visual language, palette, and atmosphere. On a 486 it looked alive — and surprisingly, it still holds up today, because good artwork doesn't age as brutally as polygons do. The music and sound design carry the atmosphere further, though this obviously wasn't an orchestra.

Heimdall 2 today suits mainly those with patience for a slower pace and interest in an era when developers competed in visual craft more than in game systems. It's not an RPG that'll overwhelm you with depth — it's a walk through a carefully drawn world with some combat and puzzles thrown in. Fire it up in a browser via DOSBox and those first five minutes, when the opening location unfolds, are worth it just to see what someone could pull off back then with a few hundred pixels.