Dismal Passages - Part I- The Wicked Curse

When you see the sentence "Curse upon you!" written with a space before the first character in a game, you know something special is waiting for you. Dismal Passages is a text adventure from 1992 that poses as support for older computers, but is really more of an experiment than a finished product. No listed publisher, no clear genre in catalogs — the game behaves like it wants to exist in secret.

It's a classic text adventure where you type commands and the game describes what happens. Around you is the Wicked Curse — some evil curse you have to solve. Sound? None. Graphics? Just a black terminal. Only text that gradually reveals itself to you. You get lost in the darkness, search for items, solve the mystery. It's like reading the diary of someone who just found themselves in hell.

You play it using classic commands — go, take, examine. The controls are primitive, the parser only knows basic words. If you type something the game didn't expect, you get an error. But at the same time, this very dialogue between you and the machine creates a suffocating atmosphere. You're not here for graphics or sound. You're here for imagination and anticipation of what's going to happen to you next.

Games like this aren't made anymore. Today we play for effects, for visuals, for stories dictated by a screenwriter. Dismal Passages comes from a time when a game was a dialogue between creator and player in his head. It's not gilded, it's leaden.

Playing it today means stepping into the past without a map. You're missing an instruction manual, waiting takes longer, you mix frustration with fear that you'll miss something important. But that's exactly why it's worth it — to try how games were played when a game was just text and imagination. In an MS-DOS emulator it opens up like a tomb that didn't want to bother with the care of beauty.