Curse of the Azure Bonds

Plot

The adventure begins in Tilverton, where the player characters wake from a magic sleep in an inn, stripped of possessions and memory. A landlord tells them they were unconscious for over a month after an attack. Each character has five azure-colored bonds on one arm. The party was ambushed on the road to Tilverton and cursed with these magical bonds, which represent five evil factions that can control the characters' actions.

The sage Filani provides information about the bonds. The first bond forces the party to attack a royal carriage, leading to a fight with guards. After defeating the Fire Knives assassins and removing the first bond, the characters are banished from Tilverton for attempting to kill the king. They may then journey to Shadowdale or Ashabenford.

Other locations include the Elven Forest, Zhentil Keep, the temple at Yulash, and the citadel at Hap, though these are accessed via a menu rather than free exploration. Yulash is under siege, with dangers from crumbling walls and sinkholes.

Development

The game includes a manual and an Adventurer's Journal with contextual paragraphs to read at specific points. A 2-ply code wheel featuring runes was used for piracy protection; during play, the player must enter a letter from the wheel to continue. Curse of the Azure Bonds was the first of three sequels to Pool of Radiance, followed by Secret of the Silver Blades and Pools of Darkness. Characters from Curse of the Azure Bonds can be used in Secret of the Silver Blades. The game was released on the Apple II, Commodore 64, and DOS in 1989, the Amiga and Macintosh in 1990, and the Atari ST in 1991. It was distributed in the UK by U.S. Gold. A planned SNES version was abandoned. The game is linked to an AD&D adventure module based on the computer game.

Reception

Curse of the Azure Bonds sold 179,795 copies, nearly matching Pool of Radiance; over a third were the Commodore 64 version. By 1996, the Pool of Radiance series had combined global sales above 800,000 copies. In CU Amiga-64, Tony Dillon gave the game an 89% score, noting the graphics were similar to Pool of Radiance and the first-person perspective resembled The Bard's Tale, with an overhead view like Gauntlet. Paul Rigby in The Games Machine initially criticized Pool of Radiance but found Curse of the Azure Bonds a dramatic improvement, awarding it 90%.

He praised the new classes, better storylines, and improved combat engine. Scorpia in Computer Gaming World was more critical, finding the ending disappointing, the game speed still slow, and little added beyond the ranger and paladin classes, with emphasis on hack-and-slash over puzzle-solving. She called it a standard follow-up, better in some ways but combat-heavy. In a 1993 retrospective, she described it as a sequel with a bit more plot, mainly hack-and-slash leading to a kill-the-villain ending.