The Dragonsphere shows that the evil sorcerer is about to break free from his magic prison. As king you must now pick up the mouse and point-and-click your way to defeat him.

Release Date

January 1994.

Pros

When you die, the game will tell you what happened then automatically restore the game to just before you died. Very handy as you do not need to manually reload.

The story is very good. There is more to it than just whacking the big bad guy. Even though Dragonsphere was released over a decade ago, I have not played another game that has a similar story to Dragonsphere.

Cons

The speech sounds terrible.

The graphics being of that age are quite low resolution. This means that looking for tiny details in the locations can be a bit difficult.

Other Points

The introduction sequence does not have speech.

Although there is speech when talking to other characters descriptions must still be read. And there is a lot of reading to be done.

There are two difficulty levels, novice and challenging. After completing the game on challenging, I started again on novice. With the little bit that I played on novice, I only noticed very slight differences in descriptions of certain things.

Biases

Reviewed gog version. No idea what version number if there is one.

I really liked Blade Runner, The Secret Of Monkey Island, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge, Borrowed Time and Under A Killing Moon.

I also liked Martian Memorandum, Curse of Monkey Island, Escape From Monkey Island, Indiana Jones And the Fate Of Atlantis and Simon The Sorcerer.

I did not like Dark Seed.

I have completed the game.

DRM

Dragonsphere is avaiable DRM free from GOG.com.

Minimum Requirements (as stated on GOG.com)

Windows XP or Windows Vista
1.8 GHz Processor
512MB RAM (1GB recommended)
3D graphics card compatible with DirectX 7 (compatible with DirectX 9 recommended)
2GB HDD
Mouse, Keyboard
I am unsure why gog listed the harddisk requirements as 2GB when the download size is only 82Mb and takes up only 88Mb installed.

Computer Played On

Core 2 Duo 2.16GHz
2Gb RAM
ATI Radeon X1600 256Mb RAM (laptop version)
Logitech G35 headset and/or Realtek HD Audio(no idea what model) with portable egg speakers or Logitech ClearChat Premium PC Headset.
Win XP Pro
Graphics settings are set to whatever I feel comfortable with playing on this PC. They are usually not set to the highest settings. All screenshots are taken with my settings.

Handy Tips

If Dragonsphere is freezing often when you leave a location, try this fix. Edit the dosboxDrangonsphere.conf file in the Dragonsphere install folder(gog installation). Search for the line that says “core=dynamic” and change it to “core=auto“. For more information, see this gog forum thread.