Sword of Fargoal, VIC-20

Written by Jeff McCord of Automated Simulations, Inc. and first published for the expanded VIC-20 by Epyx in 1982, Sword of Fargoal is a simple dungeon-crawling, Roguelike action game where you play an explorer who is searching a series of randomly generated levels for a legendary sword.

Of course these dungeons are inhabited by many hostile monsters – and humans – that must be fought, and they also contain gold and magical items to be found and collected.

Your explorer is a little blue stick man who you control with a joystick. Initially you can see only your immediate surroundings, but as you explore a level more of it is revealed. If you find some stairs these will allow you to move up or down the dungeon depending on the direction they go. If you encounter something hostile you can either fight it (by simply standing in the same place and watching the text messages at the top of the screen that describe the battle move by move), or you can run away (although most creatures will pursue you).

Your Hit Points (HP) are shown as a number in the top left-hand corner of the screen. If your HP drops to zero you’ll die and it’ll be game over, but you can retreat if you’re getting badly hurt and give yourself a chance to heal (because your HP slowly recovers over time). You can also use heal potions to heal yourself (by pressing ‘H’), if you have any.

Gold that you find is also shown at the top of the screen. You cannot spend gold, but you can take it to a temple and exchange it for experience points. You can only carry a limited amount of gold, and when you find more than you can carry you’ll bury some so it can be collected later. It’s worth noting that temples, when you’re in one, will make you invisible to enemies and will double your health regeneration rate, which is useful if you’re in trouble.

What is good about Sword of Fargoal is that it has a number of details that are not immediately apparent that make it more interesting to play than you might think. Like the fact that there’s a difference between human enemies and monsters. Monsters rely on sheer brawn and will attack you without thinking, which means that they can be tricked into falling into pits if you stand on the other side of one. Human enemies are more intelligent and can steal from you, then run away, and if that happens you can pursue them and try to kill them before they escape and retrieve what they stole from you. There are hidden treasures or traps, that stay hidden until you walk onto them, which have a 50/50 chance of being good or bad. You can also find maps to lower levels on the upper levels, and if you do find one that particular level will be fully revealed when you arrive on it. Staircases also spawn monsters, which indicates them travelling up and down levels, which is neat.

One thing to note about travelling between levels is that – because each map is randomly-generated – levels don’t remain the same after leaving and returning to them.

When you finally locate the Sword of Fargoal a timer begins, giving you a limited amount of time to escape the dungeon. You’re given 2,000 seconds (33 minutes) to return back through the levels to the exit of the dungeon.

Sword of Fargoal is a decent game on the VIC-20 and is still quite enjoyable to play now. I was absorbed by it for a number of hours recently, which was unexpected because – let’s face it – it looks like crap. But I’d go as far as to say that it’s one of the best VIC-20 games I’ve ever played. It requires 16K of RAM to run, so make sure that your emulator (or actual hardware) is set up to support that. It’s also relatively similar to the famous Temple of Apshai, which was released before this and was also published by Epyx.

An expanded Commodore 64 version of Sword of Fargoal was released by Epyx in 1983, and – believe it or not – a remastered edition of the C64 version was released on Steam in 2022. There’s also an enhanced iOS port that was released in 2009; it’s available on Antstream, and I also noticed that there was a sequel “in the works” that was funded via kickstarter.com, but it’s not clear whether it was completed or not (the last update was 2020 and it doesn’t seem to have been completed and released, although I could be wrong).