Eye of the Beholder

Eye of the Beholder is a role-playing video game for personal computers and video game consoles developed by Westwood Associates. It was published by Strategic Simulations, Inc. in 1991, for the MS-DOS operating system and later ported to the Amiga, the Sega CD and the Super NES. The Sega CD version features a soundtrack composed by Yuzo Koshiro and Motohiro Kawashima. A port to the Atari Lynx handheld was developed by NuFX in 1993, but was not released. In 2002, an adaptation of the same name was developed by Pronto Games for the Game Boy Advance. The game has two sequels: the first was Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon, which was also released in 1991; after Westwood Studios was acquired by Virgin Interactive in 1992, Eye of the Beholder III: Assault on Myth Drannor was released in 1993. The third game, however, was not developed by Westwood, who instead went on to create the Lands of Lore series.

Gameplay

As a first-person party-based dungeon crawler, Eye of the Beholder takes place in an underground environment rendered from a first-person perspective in pseudo-3D graphics. The design and gameplay are similar to Dungeon Master from 1987. The player controls four characters, initially, using a point-and-click interface to fight monsters. This can be increased to a maximum of six characters, by resurrecting one or more skeletons from dead non-player characters (NPCs), or finding NPCs that are found throughout the dungeons. The ability to increase the size of the player’s party through recruiting NPCs was included in all three games in the Eye of the Beholder series. It was also possible to import a party from Eye of the Beholder into The Legend of Darkmoon or from The Legend of Darkmoon into Assault on Myth Drannor; thus, a player could play through all three games with the same party.

Plot

The lords of the city of Waterdeep hire a team of adventurers to investigate an evil coming from beneath the city. The adventurers enter the city’s sewer, but the entrance gets blocked by a collapse caused by Xanathar, the eponymous beholder. The team descends further beneath the city, going through Dwarf and Drow clans, to Xanathar’s lair, where the final confrontation takes place. Once the eponymous beholder is killed, the player would be treated to a small blue window describing that the beholder was killed and that the adventurers returned to the surface where they were treated as heroes. Nothing else was mentioned in the ending and there were no accompanying graphics. This was changed in the later released Amiga version, which featured an animated ending.

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