 I've never been that big of a DnD guy, which is why I've always shied away from games like Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Eye of the Beholder. It's a first-person dungeon crawler, originally developed by Westwood for DOS back in 1991, before it was ported to Amiga, Sega CD, and later to the Super Nintendo by none other than Capcom in May 1994. So yeah, this is yet another port of a game that's best played on PC, and those This can go either way. Some of them are great, like SimCity, but more than a few are, uh, not so great, like Drakken or Lagoon. But you can safely put Eye of the Beholder in the plus category. The original PC game got rave reviews at the time thanks to a streamlined interface that's easy to use and an emphasis on puzzle solving more than combat. And since Capcom were the ones to port this to the Super Nintendo, that gave this game the polish it needed to work well on a home console. And because of that, Eye of the Beholder is a solid playthrough, even today. The story has you start in the city of Waterdeep, where the lords of the city hire a team of heroes to investigate some evil on-going underground beneath the city and eventually you run into dwarves, dark elves, monsters, you know, all the usual D&D stuff. But the name of the game here is setting up and managing your party. You choose four heroes with six races to choose from. Human, elf, half elf, dwarf, gnome, and halfling. After which you select from six classes, fighter, ranger, paladin, cleric, mage, and thief. In addition to that, you select each character's alignment, from lawful, neutral, and chaotic. Then of course you roll for each character's stats, and you're on your way. For a first person dungeon crawler on a home console, Eye of the Beholder has a surprisingly brisk pace, and it has an easy to use interface. You move along using the arrows, you manage your health and food by shoving items into your face and plopping food onto a plate. You manage weapons and armor by just pressing the X button and moving stuff around. It's a lot like Dungeon Master, which I looked at a few weeks ago. That's another decent SNES port of a PC game like this, but Eye of the Beholder cuts a slightly quicker pace, and to me that makes all the difference in the world. Navigation is quick and intuitive. Items, switches, and notches on walls are easy to see, and the mazes themselves aren't long for the sake of being long, or at least they're not as bad as they are in other games like this. But best of all, this game is compatible with the Super Nintendo mouse, so you can either go old school with the original mouse, or you can use one from Hyperkin, or your PC mouse, if you play on a desktop on an emulator. Like I said earlier, another thing that makes Eye of the Beholder stand out is that it's a bit more puzzle heavy. There's plenty of combat here, but if you give this one a play through, what you're gonna end up remembering the most about this one is the puzzles. Like, for example, to unlock this system of portals that allow you to warp around to each dungeon, you have to explore and find items and figure out how they apply to each portal, like this one here. I gotta figure out if anything I've collected so far works in these slots. This is a really simple example early on in the game, but I don't like to spoil puzzles like this, so I'll just say they do get a bit more in-depth than this, and it can be pretty fun and pretty dang frustrating, not gonna lie. I should also mention that no, there's no map in this game, but I managed to get along just fine, the mazes aren't too ridiculous, and the fact that navigating is so fast compared to other games like this, it ends up just not being a big deal at all. Since it's a D&D game, then it should go without saying that all the typical race, class, and alignment stuff is here. Fighters can use any type of weapon or armor, but can't cast any spells. Mages are powerful range fighters, but can't wear any type of armor because it interferes with their magic. All that kind of stuff is here in detail in the 60-page instruction manual, which really functions more as a guide than anything. Seriously, if you want to play this one today, just Google Eye of the Beholder PDF, and you should find a manual. Granted, everything as it exists in the game is still pretty limited compared to what you'll find in a PC game, but there's a surprising amount of options presented here in the manual, going over details about everything from ability scores, armor classes, spell directions, and stats, on and on. You gotta love seeing that kind of effort in a manual, and it really adds a lot to the game. I should mention an interesting bit of trivia. The Super Nintendo port of the game has music, while the original PC game does not. The Sega CD port also has music, and some of the funniest voice acting you'll hear in any game. I thought that I'd met my death at the blade of that drow. In battle, our king was grievously wounded, and the young prince kidnapped. I tried to stop the drow, but alas, I was overcome. Oh gosh, I'm just so put out by these drows. I mean, jeez, Louise. Eye of the Beholder also has two sequels made for PC around this same time frame, so if you dig this game, you'll want to check those out as well. And there's also a Game Boy Advance port that came later, but it's really stripped down and really slow, so it's missing a lot of what made the original worth playing. So yeah, Eye of the Beholder is more than just track three on Injustice for All and one of the most kick-ass riffs ever. It's also a pretty good port of a PC game on Super Nintendo. Its user interface is player-friendly, battles don't drag on for too long, there's plenty of depth in each character type, there's NPCs you occasionally run into, there's hidden rooms, there's traps, and best of all, you can save the game any time you'd like. I'll add a caveat to that praise, though, the same thing I said about Dungeon Master, and that's that if you do not dig games like this, then I don't think Eye of the Beholder is gonna win you over. It's good, but it's not that good. But yeah, if you're looking for a solid dungeon crawler with a Dungeons & Dragons flavor that takes about 10 or 12 hours to finish, then you should check this one out. All right, I wanna thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.