The Atari ST is almost a forgotten machine these days, unsurprising since it was primarily popular in Europe, and both gamer and media attention is usually focused with laser intensity on the American and Japanese gaming scenes to the exclusion of all else. A full-fledged personal computer whose stand-out feature was its affordability, the Atari ST was a fine gaming machine for its time and many a talented game developer worked on it including Peter Molyneux, David Jones, Jez San and, of course, the Bitmap Brothers.

The Bitmap Brothers not only took the EA “developer as artist” credo to heart, they pushed it further to become self-described rock star developers complete with sunglasses, leather jackets and cocksure attitudes. They were perhaps a tad overrated and it’s telling that, unlike their notable peers of the era, the Bitmap Brothers had trouble transitioning out of the Motorola 68000 game space. (The PC version of their 1993 game, The Chaos Engine, was excoriated in Computer Gaming World with “Gamers wishing they could turn their Pentium into a Super Nintendo so they can play a home video rip-off of some 1980 arcade hit need look no further …”) Their arcade-inspired games were enjoyable and had some neat ideas but they weren’t especially innovative. Yet when the Bitmap Brothers did think outside the box, they did manage to come up with one of the best two-player games of the early 90s.

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Din’s Curse is not on Steam.

Soldak’s first game, Depths of Peril, is available on Valve’s digital distribution service but not Soldak’s second, Kivi’s Underworld, nor Din’s Curse, its third and best yet. The game is available on Impulse and GamersGate but Valve rejected it for undisclosed reasons. Soldak itself has no idea why.

(Original image source.)

Din’s Curse couldn’t have been rejected because it isn’t good. Game reviewers with over a decade of experience have been generally positive with their comments. Anyone who puts stock in Metacritic’s subtly massaged Metascores might take something away from the fact Din’s Curse Metascore is higher than a lot of games on Steam.

But then the Metascore doesn’t actually matter because Valve doesn’t seem to have much in the way of standards for games it accepts for its digital distribution service. For example, take this title. Comments from various reviewers include “… it’s best to skip this one …”, “… 90 percent first-person shooter, 10 percent strategy game, and 100 percent bad …” and “… a complete failure … I couldn’t stop laughing at the fact that this game exists.” This “complete failure” of a game is somehow good enough for Steam.

Din’s Curse couldn’t have been rejected because it’s a broken, unplayable mess. Soldak has been particularly outstanding with its post-release support. As an indie developer, it cannot afford to support games indefinitely yet it still has put out multiple patches for Din’s Curse in the year since its release to fix minor bugs, fine-tune gameplay and even add new features. There’s nothing in the game that qualifies as a major bug — not a single crash to the desktop, nothing that prevents play. There are buggier games on Steam — the Known Issues thread for Magicka now spans 57 pages — yet Valve has no problems selling them.

Din’s Curse couldn’t have been rejected because the digital distribution service lacks physical shelf space to stock it. The game’s installer takes up less than 200MB of hard disk real estate so it’s not going to overload Valve’s servers or strain Steam’s bandwidth pipes. Valve can afford to allocate 1GB for each of Steam’s 30-million-plus accounts to store screenshots so it’s clearly not short of storage space.

So what is it exactly?
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Din’s Curse is slightly more complex than your average action RPG and it may seem overwhelming in the beginning. Here are some hints and tips for those starting out.

• If the town is being assaulted and you’re not sure where the attacker is, pay attention to how the townsfolk are oriented. Use that in combination with the mini-map to locate the invaders.
• If NPCs are under attack in town or in the dungeons, hit P to pause the game and throw them some food and/or a health potion to save them.
• To a catch a stealthy thief in town, move the mouse cursor slowly around the vendors. If present, the thief will become faintly visible.
• Enemies respawn in the dungeons depending on the pace of the world. If you can’t seem to find enough of a species on a particular dungeon level to complete a quest, consider completing other quests. Alternatively, try searching on other dungeon levels.
• If you can’t seem to find a boss or item on a level, it’s probably because there’s a hidden room somewhere. Note that there are sometimes hidden rooms behind hidden rooms.
• If potions and food seem more expensive than usual, it’s due to a shortage. (There should be a flashing icon or two in the vendor inventory.) Visit the Apothecary and make the related quest the main priority.
• Be sure to stock up on potions and food before you leave a saved town. Prices might be prohibitively high in the next town or there might not be any vendors there at all.

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Din’s Curse class system is one of the best things about the game yet it may well be one of the least appreciated elements. Despite Soldak touting the 141 possible classes as one of this action RPG’s key selling points, most players will likely stick to one of the six main character classes until they hit the level cap, a process which could take dozens of hours, then shelve the game because they think they’ve experienced everything the game has to offer.

That would be a shame because those who spend time with the character class system and put some thought into creation and development will be rewarded by a flexible system that lets them create a character that best fits their personal playing style. It’s capable of producing something slightly unusual like a wizard brandishing a sword, a more flamboyant mutation like a swordsman who teleports in or out of trouble and even something conceptually absurd yet tactically sensible like a stealthy warrior tip-toeing around in full plate armour.
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