Temple of Apshai Trilogy

The Temple of Apshai is a computer role-playing game from Epyx. The game was released for the Apple II and Atari home computers in 1980. In 1983, it was released for the Commodore 64 and for DOS for PCs. Even later it was made available for the Amiga in a much more graphically-rich version than the previous versions.

The game puts the player in the role of a lone adventurer, exploring the mysterious ruins of the Temple of Apshai. The player can investigate room after room of a dungeon setting seeking treasure and monsters to defeat. Like many early role-playing games, Temple of Apshai has statistics for the player which increase based on experience (rewarded for defeating monsters and accruing treasure). Along the way, the player can discover and use powerful weapons and armor to help them defeat the sinister inhabitants of the ancient ruins.

The Temple of Apshai—and the series as a whole—is most often described as a graphical version of Rogue. With simplistic dungeon layouts and a minimal storyline, this is an adept comparison. As in Rogue, the object of the game is to do little more than garner treasure and defeat monsters in order to build up the character and escape the dungeon. Temple did go beyond simply adding graphics, however. Every room in Temple has a text description to add a richness to the game which was unachievable graphically with the day's limited home computer capabilities. Some may even say Temple took a few steps backwards compared to Rogue since all levels of the game are pre-built and unchanging compared to Rogue's random levels