Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss, a Playthrough Report

December’s DOS Game Club game was Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss, a role-playing masterpiece from ORIGIN Systems released in 1992 that clearly was lighyears ahead of its time. For reference, this game was released a month before Wolfenstein 3D, and even DOOM a full year later was not able to manage some of the capabilities of the 3D engine (swinging doors, jumping/flying, fully polygonal objects like the benches and shrine, …). Apart from the remarkable engine, and perhaps true to its Ultimna nature, the game is also superb in its world building.

This screenshot-heavy playthrough report first appeared in the form of short daily Mastodon toots which have been collected and expanded upon in this article. Enjoy reading my struggles from wrongly captured inmate thrown into The Abyss to the celebrated hero of Brittania. I’ll have a short review summary waiting for you at the end of this report.

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05/12: First Steps Into The Abyss

Who’s playing Ultima Underworld for the @dosgameclub this month (and the next 2)? I think I explored everything on level 1 but wow there is very little hand holding (and even a slight bump into a wall halves your HP haha) I talked to both the green and gray goblins but can’t figure out how to break into their sturdy door marked as “keep out”… Any hints?

05/12: Dwarf Encounters

Okay so now I figured out my paladin’s STR attribute is way too low, I can’t carry anything, ouch. Anyway, I solved the mountainfolk’s mine infestation problem and they gave me something in return I have no idea what to do with. Like most stuff I encounter in this game, haha.

UWEDITOR.EXE still works in DOSBox, yay, I fixed my stupid STR mistake!

I encountered a slightly confused dwarf jabbering about blueprints he wants me to retrieve but it’s high up and I need a fly potion for that, but that’s locked away and he can’t remember where the key is.

After a confusing puzzle room and a few beheaded I managed to behead again, I retrieved and handed back the blueprints. My reward? Another fly potion. “Yay?” Oh well, I turned lvl 8.

08/12: Lizard Encounters

Level 3 looks like a fetid swamp and some of the fumes seem to disorient me or suddenly teleport me to other dead ends? I encountered Lizardmen who’s tongue I do not speak, but luckily, a mute prisoner was able to teach me a few of their words. Bica, Tosa yeshor’click.

Many doors are locked and after attempting to bash them with my short sword and breaking the sword, I reloaded. I tossed my lvl1 keys in the mines of lvl2 so went back to retrieve them, but they don’t fit. Objects are permanent?

Things get interesting when a gray lizardman talks about a mystical sword broken in two by a wizard mad man. He first wants me to find their leader who was off a beast kill quest but never came back before releasing any more information. In my attempts to locate the missing lizardman, I ended up in a spider maze and endured heavy bleeding after battling with a bigger gray one. But he was guarding a precious key! Yes!

09/12: Level 3 Bandits

I found the remains of the lizard in question and another secretive message. In the meantime, I found the last key that opens the storeroom doors only to find… bandits and their leader. They are not talkative and I seem to have agitated them. They tasted my blade. But it was my only longsword and it’s now a pile of debris, and they drop… shortswords. Fuck 🤣 Don’t fight besides the water. Fallen enemies drop their stuff in it and you’ll have no idea what valuables you’ve missed!

10/12: Trolls and Knights

Descending further, I encounter both trolls and knights on level 4, and yet again tension. The knights seem keen on having me join their order but I’m a bit hesitant as to not to upset the trolls. Some knights offer a lot of knowledge on the mazes and puzzles up ahead, so I carefully listen and note down everything. I finally found someone willing to eat my rotworm stew and got dragon scales in return! Both clans warn me about a “chaos knight” wreaking havoc in the north area.

11/12: Knighthood

It’s clear by now that this is not your average modern cRPG. Carrying gold is next to pointless and very heavy: trading is much more valuable in the Abyss. And you’ll likely need weird item 1 two levels down, so hold on to those! I try my hand at knighthood and it suits my paladin rather well. I vanquish the chaos knight with ease after having learned useful chants from my colleagues. A trip to the hidden tombs resulted in plate mail and a broken hilt of a mystical sword! Now what to do with it.

12/12: Reaping the Benefits of Knighthood

Knighthood has paid off big-time. Our leader considered me ready to venture deeper and opened up the armory full of plate armour! In the meantime, I have accumulated 3 artifacts of The Avatar, including the Sword of Justice that had me scouring every inch of the walls in level 3 thanks to a vague hint. A trip back to the blacksmith refored the two broken pieces into one of the finest swords I’ve ever laid eyes on! Bye bye, trusty spare longsword. Off to more perils of level 5, then!

14/12: The First Lava River

After following my first lava river I can’t seem to progress and my fly potion is used so I return to level 4 in search for another way down. There, I’m greeted by a few angry trolls that go down quickly with my new forged sword. Back on level 5, in a maze I encounter the Ghoul community and want to ask their leader about a “crazy wizard” as a hint from lvl3 but can’t seem to? One can play the flute and one requests 10 fish for mine access codes. Back to a river it is…

15/12: Dead Weight

Hauling 10 fish around procured from a river in lvl3 meant I had to even dump my plate mail and come back for it. The mines yielded something to again trade for a gold nugget that’s too heavy to lift. Sigh. Anyway, level 6 is lots of lava, and I’m glad to wear those dragonscale boots, thanks Marrowsuck! I’m slowly exploring the realm of the Seers it would seem (ha!), with posh marble flooring. A library book: “not just pointy hats with stars: what every wizard should know about fashion”. Hehe.

16/12: Rune Hunting

Level 6 is a goldmine of artifacts and runes, if only I was to discover more combinations to cast them! The mages there gave plenty of tips and had me slay golems and hydras so I’d say I earned these trinkets. I now am in the posession of six artifacts and a hint to another I have yet to decipher. I now also understand why the cRPG addict scores this game so high. I can’t believe it was released a month before Wolf3D… I’m off to find that missing Vas rune!

18/12: Gate Travel

I found a Scroll of Gate Travel and it brought me to a secret room in lvl2 with a moonstone, enabling fast travel. But it’s useless as it’s one-way only? So many items seem either useless or are required six levels down making the game very obtuse at moments. Still, we press on. On level 7 we encounter hordes of angry trolls and goblins acting as guards for the mad wizard Tyball. They want me to show them a medaillion to pass and I said here’s my blade instead, resulting in carnage and meat.

18/12: Too Many Blocked Paths

Level 7 sucks. I’m getting tired of the arbitrary dead ends and locked doors and the fire hydras sometimes manage to one-shot me while I do my best to perform terrible platforming in an early nineties FP-RPG. Not great.

18/12: The Mad Wizard

Anyway, after retracing my steps countless of times, I discovered another secret door that led to Tyball’s maze as a shortcut through the lava pits (I think? I did not use the mini map with notes I found). At the end of the maze, Tyball the mad wizard attacks without warning, and the level drains my magic (there’s a way to disable this, but I’m a strong paladin and don’t care). Bum-rushing him to keep the fireballs at bay, he reveals on his dead bed that another huge evil lurks at level 8…

19/12: The Slasher of Veils

In order to banish the Slahser of Veils I have to find all the relics and construct a special tripartate key. The key itself was doable but the last relic eluded me. After consulting a guide, I would never have found that one. We then do what the ghost of Garamon (and I thought Caribus was talking to us in my sleep) tells us to do: throw everything into the fire! We’re sucked into a vortex and I run like hell from the Slasher only to surface ashore and be the lauded as saviour of Brittania.

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The Verdict

Instead of cursing the game’s unwillingness in helping the player successfully form correct combinations of runes to cast a spell, I should have consulted the manual. On page 28, the Eight Circles of Runic Magic are simply given to the player. Tyball’s chambers contains a book that also documents most spells, but at the very end of the game, most knowledge and cool items thrown your way are too little too late.

Of course, that’s not atypical of any sprawling nineties adventurous game: the manual and the map are just as important to study as the in-game world. Yet in Ultima Underworld, it is surprisingly easy to completely bork your playthrough: by unwillingly throwing something in the water, by not remembering where a seemingly totally unimportant item lies, or simply by not meticulously keeping your own journal instead of having the game track your progress, like most RPGs do nowadays. My constant struggle with encumbrance only made it worse: I threw out what I thought was not needed, only to find out that three levels deeper, I really did need said item. At times, I just gave up and called in the help of Sir Caribus’s guide.

For me, the biggest frustration from playing The Stygian Abyss came from the extremely janky platforming sections. Saving at every chasm jump gets old quickly, and for some reason the biggest physical danger in level 7 weren’t the fire hydras but the walls: as you jump into them, you accidentally halve your HP. Thankfully, the Ultima Hacks that introduced WSAD controls and a workable mouse look somewhat softened the blow. Yet at the same time, you can’t help but to admire ORIGIN’s attempt at creating such an immersive simulation as early as 1992. Most of the frustration is contained within one level.

Other minor quibbles could include the lack of variety in music—although the tracks that are present are superb—the usefulness of the majority of the skills, the items, and even the gold in the game, but these far from overshadow the great explorative moments the game has in store. The alliances aren’t as fleshed-out as I expected them to be, nor are the in-game consequences for making choices. The cRPG addict summarizes it perfectly:

Ultima Underworld is in many ways a typical Origin game: groundbreaking, innovative, well-produced, addictive, enormously fun to play–and at the same time a bit disappointing in what they did and didn’t do with the story.

You’re supposed to pick up tidbits of the story from scrolls, books, and what NPCs tell you, but at the end, I still didn’t really understand how Caribus fitted in all this, and how big or little the different factions that live within The Abyss and their struggles even matter.

In the end, my feelings of this game are more or less the same as for Might & Magic VIII. They’re both very good games containing factional struggles that are a tad underdeveloped, preventing them from overthrowing my personal RPG Big Boys. A remake was never done and the source was never released meaning sadly enough there is no source port available, although multiple attempts to recreate the 3D engine based on the original data files have been made.

Don’t forget that if it wasn’t for Ultima Underworld, there would be no Deus Ex.