The story won't be winning any awards, but it does its job and is quite engaging, especially for a dungeon crawler, a subgenre of RPGs not known for its intricate plots.
And from that point onward, your main goal becomes just that. In the process, you stumble upon a mysterious sorcerer who goes around resurrecting ancient villains, all antagonists from the earlier Bard's Tale games, while also framing those with a chance to put a stop to their nefarious plans. As one of those adventurers, you're not particularly fond of this new development, so you set out to try and find out why your kind is being so unfairly maligned. The game's story goes something like this - the local church gets a bit overzealous with its prosecution of heretics, magic users, older races and unsanctioned adventurers, and starts executing everyone it doesn't like with enough enthusiasm to put even Warhammer's inquisitors to shame. Going just by the opening sections, you wouldn't guess how varied the game's tilesets get or what weird, imposing, verdant, magical, glacial, or otherworldly environments your party of adventurers will visit on its heroic quest. And later on, when you get to the first real dungeon that actually has some color in its cheeks and offers plenty of winding paths, puzzles, challenging encounters, and non-obvious ways to progress, this is where the game is at its best. The game keeps dangling these little mysteries right before you, and you can't help but press onward just to find out what awaits you behind the next corner. You find locked doors that you have no way to open, you activate hidden switches and levers that seemingly do nothing, you occasionally catch a glimpse of a blocked-off part of the area you will need to revisit later, you stumble onto mysterious signs and glyphs that clearly do something, you just don't know what that something is. Even those initial claustrophobic tunnels are designed in such a way to always show you something intriguing and cool just outside of your grasp. But even in those grey and gloomy tunnels, some of the game's positive qualities manage to shine through, like its more than decent level design. Play through that intro, and you'll think that the game is all about holding W in dull linear corridors while following glowing quest markers and occasionally engaging in simplistic combat. It does very little to showcase the game's actual strengths, is kind of confusing and entirely pointless. This intro section is not very well done in my opinion. Story and Exploration The game starts with you witnessing a public execution, running around the streets of Skara Brae for no apparent reason, and then going through an extended tutorial section where you get a chance to familiarize yourself with the game's controls and mechanics. Barrows Deep actually has very little in common with its predecessors despite a plethora of nods, references, and returning characters, but I do think that it can provide an enjoyable experience to anyone looking for 30-40 hours of dungeon-crawling action. As is usually the case with reinventing the wheel, things didn't go exactly as planned, and instead of a triumphant return of the dungeon crawler, we got a game with some great ideas and neat features but also a heap of issues and questionable design decisions. The result? The Bard's Tale IV: Barrows Deep. And now, two direct sequels, a "construction set", an action-RPG spin-off, and more than 30 years later, Fargo's new studio, inXile Entertainment, decided to update the series' classic “first-person exploration, turn-based combat” formula for the modern audience. Introduction The first game in The Bard's Tale - or should I say Tales of the Unknown - series was a dungeon-crawling RPG created by Michael Cranford and the Brian Fargo-helmed Interplay team way back in 1985.
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