Prince of Evil

Prince of Evil was published in 1993 by the Taiwanese studio Softstar Entertainment, and it is one of those games that only reached Europe by accident. It is a top-down action game rooted in Chinese mythology: you play a prince cutting his way through a landscape of demons, spirits and dragons with a blade and, above all, with magic. For a DOS game of 1993 it looks unusually good — bright VGA, fluid animation, closer in style to the console games of the day than to typical PC fare.

The armoury is more interesting than the fighting itself. Besides your basic attack you carry several magical weapons — arrows, fireballs and others — and each has its own pool of energy that drains as you use it. You cannot coast through the whole game on one favourite spell; you have to judge what to spend on the way and what to save for the boss. Healing and stat-boosting items drawn from Chinese folk medicine round it out, so even the first-aid kit follows a logic of its own.

The structure is straightforward: move from area to area, clear out everything that moves, and meet something larger at the end of each section. The difficulty is judged reasonably well, but the game holds its best abilities back, so the first hour feels thinner than the game deserves. Get through that and you have a brisk action title with unusual art behind it.

I would not oversell it. The level structure repeats itself, the story is mostly scenery, and the catalogue also files it as an RPG — fair only in the sense that it wears fantasy clothing, since there is no real character progression to speak of. As a window into Taiwanese development that Europe barely noticed, though, it is worth a few evenings.

On oldgame.cz the game runs directly in your browser; you only have to start it.