Wizardry: Labyrinth of Lost Souls

Lore & Background

Wizardry: Labyrinth of Lost Souls is a first-person dungeon crawler in which the player guides a party of up to six adventurers through grid-based labyrinths, moving one tile at a time and fighting turn-based battles against randomly encountered monsters. The party is arranged in a front row for melee and a back row for ranged attacks and spellcasting. Characters are created by choosing a race, alignment, and class, then distributing bonus points among six attributes. Races include human, elf, dwarf, gnome, and porklu, each with different attribute tendencies. Alignment restricts which classes a character may take and which characters can adventure together, as good and evil characters cannot be in the same party. Classes include basic fighter, mage, priest, and thief, alongside advanced classes such as bishop, samurai, ninja, and lord, some of which must be reached by changing class later in the game. Magic is divided into arcane spells and priestly miracles, with limited uses restored by resting at the inn. Equipment is unidentified until appraised. The town acts as a menu-driven hub with an inn, shop, temple, and guild. The game is deliberately punishing: characters who die must be revived at the temple, where resurrection can fail and destroy the body permanently, and a party wiped out deep in the labyrinth is lost along with its equipment. The labyrinths include hidden doors, traps, teleport tiles, and dark zones. An automatic map fills in as the party explores, but it can only be viewed while carrying a dungeon map or having cast a mapping spell; GameSpot stated the game "lacks an automap feature" and advised players to map by hand.

Reader's Guide

The game was produced as part of "Wizardry Renaissance", a Japanese initiative to revive the Wizardry brand with new licensed titles. By this point the series trademark was held in Japan rather than by its original American owner, having passed from Sir-Tech through a succession of Japanese rights holders; the trademark was later acquired by Drecom. The game was first released on the Japanese PlayStation Network in December 2009, and was localized for Western territories by Xseed Games beginning in 2011. It received mixed reviews, with critics praising its faithfulness to the classic first-person dungeon crawler and its character artwork, while criticizing its minimal story, dated interface, and reliance on grinding and random chance. IGN criticized the PlayStation 3 version for making players put in large amounts of work and not rewarding them enough. GameSpot criticized its old-fashioned design and handling of mapping, but praised its challenging and addictive combat. Reviews of the iOS version were more favourable but still divided, with praise for character development, artwork, and music, but criticism of the interface and separate tracking of inventory and money per character. The 2020 Windows release drew similar comments, with Shacknews describing its dungeon crawling and combat as repetitive, broken up mainly by episodes of severe bad luck. The game's significance lies in its role as a revival of a dormant franchise in the West and its adherence to punishing, old-school dungeon-crawling design.

Did You Know?

• The Windows version was delayed from May 29, 2019 to January 15, 2020 due to intellectual property licensing issues.
• The iOS version was offered as a free download with the full game unlocked by an in-app purchase.
• Good and evil characters cannot be placed in the same party.