Play Tales of the Unknown: Volume I – The Bard’s Tale Online

I first played The Bard's Tale back in the late 80s on MS-DOS, a game published by Electronic Arts. It was part of that wave of early computer RPGs that really defined the genre before things got more graphical or cinematic. You knew what you were getting into: a deep, grid-based dungeon crawl that demanded patience and a lot of note-taking.

You control a party of up to six characters, choosing from classes like fighters, mages, and of course the bard. Your goal is to explore the city of Skara Brae and its many underground levels to find and defeat the evil wizard Mangar. The gameplay is strictly first-person, moving screen by screen through mazes, fighting turn-based battles with monsters, and managing your party's health and magic. The bard's unique ability to sing songs that buff the party or harm enemies adds a strategic layer. It's a slow, methodical game, and it can be brutally difficult with frequent random encounters. Making it through a tough floor and finding a new stairway down gives a real sense of hard-won progress.

Each game uses different controls, most DOS games use the keyboard arrows. Some will use the mouse , "Alt" ,"Enter" and "Space bar".