Beneath Apple Manor Review

Searching for all things role-playing on the Internet can reveal some wondrous things, including this recent retrospective review on CRPG Adventures for Don Worth’s Beneath Apple Manor, the venerable RPG/roguelike that originally launched on the Apple II way back in 1978 and saw some additional polish for two more platform releases on the PC and Atari 8-bit in the early 1980s. The review labels it as “probably the first commercial CRPG”, so it’s certainly worth checking out, if only from a historical knowledge standpoint:

Your character in Beneath Apple Manor has four stats: Strength, Intelligence, Dexterity and Body. There is no character generation, as every character begins with a score of 20 in each stat. Your Strength determines how much damage you deal in combat, and how much gold you can carry. Intelligence determines the effectiveness of your spells. Dexterity is used to determine how accurate you are when attacking. Body is simply your hit points, and when these reach zero you’re dead.

There are various activities in the game that deplete these scores. Strength is depleted by attacking monsters in melee, and if your Strength drops to zero you can’t attack at all. Your Intelligence drops whenever you use the Zap spell in combat. I’m not certain, but I believe the amount of damage you deal affects the amount of Intelligence lost, and much like Strength if your Intelligence gets too low you can’t cast spells until you rest. Dexterity is depleted simply by moving around. These scores can be restored by resting, which has a novel mechanic. You use the number keys to rest, and the number chosen determines how many rounds you want to rest for. The longer the rest the more your scores are restored, but the greater the chance you’ll be attacked by a monster. You can also press 0, which restores all of your scores to their maximum (except for Body), but runs a similar risk of monster attack.