If the game doesn’t offer more than one fate, I’m going to be pretty angry.

Fates of Twinion

United States

Ybarra Productions (developer); Sierra Online (publisher)

Independently developed and published

Released 1993 for** DOS**

Date Started: 2 November 2025

Fates of Twinion is the sequel to The Shadow of Yserbius (1992), an online multi-player dungeon crawler that ran on the Sierra Network. Sierra re-named it the ImagiNation Network during the year of Twinion’s release. (I covered the history of the games and the network in my first Yserbius entry.) I spent five entries on Yserbius before concluding that while offline play was technically possible, it wasn’t very feasible. Getting ahead involved a lot of dying and grinding, and I concluded that Sierra likely “intended it not for authentic offline play but to whet the player’s appetite for an online account.” My primary rationale for that statement is that if the developers had offered a true offline version, they would have let the player create and control a party.

If anything has changed mechanically with Twinion, it’s not apparent in the opening hours. One thing that’s changed narratively is that there’s no opening cinematic. The manual fills in the backstory: After the champions of Yserbius ousted the evil time elemental En-Li-Kil, the inhabitants of Twinion were still stuck on the island. After some time passed, a sorceress named Aeowyn appeared “in a flash of magic.” Representing herself as the daughter of King Cleowyn (killed by En-Li-Kil), she assumed the throne and built a new palace within Yserbius.

Exploring the dungeon of Yserbius.

Through exploration and research, Queen Aeowyn has learned that En-Li-Kil was just a servant of the Dralkarians, a group of five beings who guard the Portal of Time. Yserbius turned out to be the top of a vast underground labyrinth leading to “the gateway which opened a multiverse of dimensions.” Night Elves, a race of beings dwelling in these depths, have warned that no one can face the power of the Dralkarians, but Aeowyn is determined to find out. She has created a method for testing adventurers to find one (or, online, a group) who can seize the Portal of Time.

Character creation has not changed from Yserbius. The player can browse a gallery of Level 0 characters or create his own. Creation begins with a name and epithet and a selection of race from among 8 options: human, orc, elf, troll, dwarf, gnome, halfling, and gremlin.

Character creation, Part 1.

After selecting sex, the player chooses the character’s “guild” (class) from six options: barbarian, knight, ranger, thief, cleric, and wizard. Finally, he selects whether he follows the laws of harmony or chaos. Based on his choices, he gets values in the game’s four attributes: strength, defense, agility, and initiative. He can allocate four additional points.

The player then customizes the character’s visual appearance, with different options for face, head cover (hat and/or hair), clothing, nose, eye color, and facial hair. You can create some weird combinations, and nothing stops you from creating a character who looks nothing like your chosen race.

Messing around.

The last step is to choose starting skills and spells, but my chosen character—an orc ranger—gets neither at Level 0.

You exit the guild to the main Twinion screen, which has the same options as Yserbius, but it looks different. You don’t see the top of the mountain, so I don’t know if lava is still spewing from it. The guild is now built into the mountain. The main entrance, just a hole before, now has Queen Aeowyn’s palace jutting out. The alternate entrance (which takes you to your save point) has a skull design around it. The inn has been expanded and rotated, and offline players still can’t do anything there.

The main menu. They got that palace built in record time.

Re-entering the guild from this screen lets you access the shops. My 30 starting gold doesn’t go very far. I’m able to buy a short sword and cloth jacket. I soon find that I already came with those things, plus a leather helm, buckler, health potion, and mana potion besides, so that was a waste of money.

The shop. The morningstar is 50 times as expensive as the mace. Those are some expensive spikes.

The palace entrance goes directly to the entrance hall, a roughly 10 x 9 room with four doors heading in various directions. There are a couple of corridors with pointless one-way walls, perhaps just to get the player accustomed to the mechanic.

Upon entering the palace.

A message on a central wall reads:

Welcome, brave Champions. To the west lies the Gauntlet Gauche: One of two maps that interweave a simple quest. Eastward lies the Gauntlet Droit. There you will find challenges and helpful friends to start you on your way. These two maps comprise the Gauntlet . . . A simple quest that you’d be wise to undertake before all else.

Northward is the entrance to the Queen’s Proving Grounds. You begin there in Her Majesty’s Aqueduct. That will start your ascent to greater challenges. Fare well wherever you fare.

The four doors exiting this area all have their own signs:

• “Only more experienced heroes may venture beyond this gateway; and even then, you must enter alone.”

• “Here lies Gauntlet Droit.”

• “The door is marked: ‘To Gauntlet Gauche.’”

• “To the first level of Her Majesty’s proving grounds . . . The Queen’s Aqueduct.”

I now recognize that as a teleportation door rather than a regular door.

The interface hasn’t changed. You use the numberpad to move and strafe and the mouse to access inventory, the character sheet, spells, and the combat menu. There aren’t many keyboard backups; anything you type on the regular keyboard assumes you’re sending a message to other players. For some reason, the portrait showing above my character is different from the one I chose.

What the hell?

I enter the Gauntlet Droit first, where a message soon reads: “The gauntlet has been thrown down in the Coil Maze. Now you must return it to its birth place, to solve this quest and complete this most simple phase.” My first battle is with a single brown bat. I win with a little damage and get 10 gold pieces and 6 experience points. My second battle is with a brigand. I have to retreat to town after my third, with a “mystic mage.”

My first battle.

Fortunately, those few battles alone are enough to get me to Level 2. I still have no spells, but “Archery” appears as one of my skills, so I trade my short sword for a short bow and restock my heal potion. When I re-enter, I already notice the difference in weapon damage.

Enemies in the area include the aforementioned, plus black panthers, duelists, Wizards of Gnog, and berserkers. Like Yserbius, the game has certain squares that always spawn a foe.* *Unlike Yserbius, I don’t find huge stacks of enemies clearly meant for bigger parties. The gameplay seems far more balanced towards a single character, which means I make a lot more progress in the initial stages.

These guys gave me some trouble.

Even though the game has an automap, I end up drawing my own. I find it easier to keep track of things and to annotate places that I can’t pass for the time being, usually because of a locked door. I have to stop every few moves to write the text of a message. For a while, I think that wall messages have replaced the NPCs who popped up frequently in Yserbius, but I start to find a lot more NPCs in the Gauntlet Gauche later on.

—the game has a lot of messages written on walls, taking the place of the many NPCs who would pop up in Yserbius.

Encounters in the Gauntlet Droit:

• A door with the message: “This way to the Great Egress.” It leads to a winding hall where I get attacked by 2 novice thieves and 3 young thieves. I can’t defeat them, so I mark the square for later.

• “Berserkers fighting over a spherical crystal draw you into the fray!” When I kill them, I have a crystal ball. I guess it has something to do with finding traps or secret doors, but it doesn’t do anything for me the first few times I use it.

She doesn’t look much like a berserker.

• A couple of one-way walls.

• Several locked doors. I have no keys, no picks, no spells, and no skills.

Having run out of options in the Gauntlet Droit, I next go stubbornly to the Queen’s Aqueduct. I don’t get very far. Water, pillars, and locked doors block all progress. “Seek the protector of this aqueduct in the west,” a message offers. “His magic blocks your forward path.” Enemies in this area include green slimes, scourges, and hanging slimes. They all use the same monster image.

My brief time in the aqueduct.

Most of my exploration this session takes place in the Gauntlet Gauche to the west of the main entrance. As I enter, I get this message on a wall:

HAIL! This is Gauntlet Gauche. Swirling waters and magical pits will be your guides to the gauntlet sought in Gauntlet Droit. A magical Gauntlet has been thrown down in the Coil Maze. This path will offer you a second ingress to that phase.

In this area, which appears to be a full 16 x 16, I find:

• An area infested with vampire bats. There are several battles, and several squares have noxious pools of guano that damage my health. The bats’ treasure room includes a green lockpick.

I wouldn’t expect bats to have treasure rooms, but go figure.

• A room with six pits. A message suggests that they are all teleporters to other parts of the same level. I test them and confirm.

*THUD. *“Sucker.”

• There are also teleportation doors scattered about the level.

• Two locked doors. Nearby, messages tell me that lockpicks won’t work and that I must “learn to use what is at hand in a more creative fashion.”

• A fountain that restores mana.

If only I had cast some spells.

• A couple of doors that only a “masterful thief” can open.

• A woman—the first NPC so far—who tells a story revealing the importance of a life jacket when crossing water.

It becomes clear that to fully explore the Gauntlet Gauche, I’m going to have to find the right sequence of teleporters. But battles become a lot harder here, approaching the difficulty of the early-game battles in Yserbius. I start to find stacks of thieves, knights, barbarians, and duelists. I’m going to need to grind a bit more before I can defeat them.

My explorations so far.

Fortunately, dying in the Yserbius series simply means re-appearing at the guild at maximum health, with no loss of items, gold, or experience. So there’s no particular reason to backtrack when my health gets low; I just keep exploring until I die.

A common message upon returning to the guild.

During this session, almost all my returns to the guild are accompanied by new levels. Soon I’m at Level 7. When you level up, the game has you assign an attribute point to one of your primary attributes, plus skill and spell points. I gain the “Archery” and “Read Tracks” skills and the “Cure” (poisons and such, not hit points) and “Storm Wind” spells.

My first spells.

When I level up, I typically have enough gold for an equipment upgrade. I replace my short bow with a long bow, my cloth jacket with a leather jacket and then chainmail, and my leather cap with “head chainmail.” I keep stocked with healing potions.

As I finished my second *Yserbius *entry, I said:

I’m inclined to continue with this single-character experience for at least a little while longer. It’s a competent enough dungeon crawler, not terribly far from Wizardry or The Bard’s Tale in quality, except for the baffling decision not to allow the single player to create a full party.

This is my identical impression after the first few hours of Twinion. It’s a tad easier, but other than that, it feels like an empty, unfinished, single-player Wizardry. There’s some fun to be had in character development (both intrinsic and equipment-based) and mapping, but aren’t there dozens of other games that offer this experience? Would it have made any sense for a player to have bought Twinion in 1993 expecting to play it as a single-player game? If not, it probably would not make a lot of sense for me to continue with it as such.

Time so far: 3 hours