Download Halls of the Dead: Faery Tale Adventure II

Faery Tale Adventure II: Halls of the Dead is a 1997 fantasy role playing game and the long awaited sequel to the original Faery Tale Adventure from 1987. Once again the story follows the brothers Julian, Phillip and Kevin, who find themselves in the land of Farr and become involved in a struggle against the forces threatening the realm.

Unlike the original game, all three brothers are present at the same time. They can travel together or be separated completely, allowing one brother to explore a distant part of the world while the others remain elsewhere. The player can switch control between them at any time and decide whether they should follow one another or act independently. This unusual system gives the game a strong sense that three separate characters are actually travelling through the same world rather than simply forming a conventional RPG party.

The game places a strong emphasis on exploration. Farr is a large interconnected world filled with towns, wilderness, underground areas, temples, ruins, books, characters, hidden locations and objects whose purpose is not always immediately clear. Progress often comes from exploring, speaking with people and piecing together information rather than simply following a list of quests.

Character development is similarly unconventional. There are no traditional experience levels. Instead, the brothers gradually improve the skills they actually use, including sword fighting, archery, shield use, physical strength, agility and magic. Spellcasting uses several different forms of mana, while weapons, armor, magical objects, books and other items are scattered throughout the world.

The result is a game that often feels somewhere between an open world RPG and an adventure game. Combat is important, but much of the experience comes from wandering through Farr, discovering places and trying to understand how its many characters, objects and stories fit together.

It is also an uneven game. The interface can be difficult, pathfinding can be frustrating, dialogue is sometimes repetitive and a number of locations, objects and possible story threads appear unfinished. In this case however, those rough edges are closely connected to the history of the company that created it.

The Dreamers Guild was incorporated on June 4, 1991 by Joe Pearce and a group of friends who wanted to create a different kind of game development company. Their idea was unusually idealistic for the industry. Employees were intended to have a meaningful voice in the direction of the company rather than simply working beneath a traditional management structure. Pearce later described the experiment as financially unsuccessful, but still something he considered worth attempting.

During the 1990s the studio developed and ported a wide variety of games. Its best remembered original productions include Inherit the Earth: Quest for the Orb, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, Dinotopia and eventually Faery Tale Adventure II. The company also developed its own technology. David “Talin” Joiner created the SAGA scripting system for Inherit the Earth and later developed the more advanced SAGA 2 technology used for Faery Tale Adventure II. Joiner was particularly important to FTA2 because he had also created the original Faery Tale Adventure a decade earlier.

For a time The Dreamers Guild grew considerably. Photographs preserved by Joe Pearce show a substantial development team in its Chatsworth, California office by the middle of the decade. Yet underneath that growth the company remained financially vulnerable. Pearce later described The Dreamers Guild as essentially living from project to project, with little room for major delays or commercial disappointments.

Several of its most ambitious games did not provide the financial stability the company needed. Inherit the Earth sold poorly, while the acclaimed I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream achieved only modest sales. At the same time, The Dreamers Guild attempted to move into the emerging world of online multiplayer games. According to Pearce, the company entered that field without fully understanding the design and maintenance demands involved. He also traced the company's problems to one particularly bad business deal followed by further poor management decisions.

The consequences were severe. Delays involving the company's online projects contributed to The Dreamers Guild filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in late 1996. Chapter 11 was intended to allow the company to reorganize rather than immediately disappear, which meant development work continued for a time. Halls of the Dead was one of the projects still being completed during this period.

That makes FTA2 unusual historically. The company was already in bankruptcy while its final RPG was being finished.

Joe Pearce later described the situation very clearly: Halls of the Dead was completed after the bankruptcy filing and “barely got out the door.” He also said that FTA2 had an excellent design, but that not all of its ideas made it into the released game.

There is evidence of that unfinished ambition throughout the game. Locations and story threads appear to stop unexpectedly, some objects seem to belong to quests that were never completed, and material connected to planned areas remained inside the game even though those areas were not part of normal play. One of the clearest examples is the Island of Ione, an area Joe Pearce himself worked on but which was never included in the released game.

These remnants help explain why Halls of the Dead can sometimes feel enormous and strangely incomplete at the same time. The developers had created a large world and many interconnected systems, but they were finishing the game while their company was running out of time and money.

In 1997, The Dreamers Guild's bankruptcy was converted to Chapter 7 liquidation, ending the company completely. Several unfinished projects were abandoned, including online games and an educational adventure called Nick of Time. Faery Tale Adventure II: Halls of the Dead became the final game released by The Dreamers Guild.

That history is an important part of understanding the game today. Halls of the Dead is not simply a forgotten RPG with flaws. It is the last surviving work of a studio that was collapsing while the game was being completed. Some of its roughness comes from that situation, but so does much of its fascination. Beneath the unfinished elements is the outline of a larger and more ambitious game that The Dreamers Guild never had the opportunity to fully realize.

Source: Itai’s Game Preservation Research