Completing quests also increases your reputation, making you better known and better liked throughout the land. As your reputation improves more quests become open to you. This helps provide an incentive for helping people out, and keeps you from overstepping your bounds and getting skewered by something that's way out of your league… not that that doesn't happen occasionally, so saving often is a must. If you can gain a reputation, you can also lose it, although among unsavory types like the people of Avernum, that's a little difficult. I tried freeing enemy prisoners, walking in gardens next to a "please to not walk on plants sign," even picking up pliers from a blacksmiths counter and selling them right back to him (he bought it for 1 coin, the chump), and nobody gave me so much as a dirty look. Apparently, only stealing something that says it is "not yours" will make a town "angry" at you, which can really hurt your chances of completing some essential quests, but even that has a way around it. If the item is in a container, you can simply push the container out the door and into an alley where no one can see you, pick it up, and if you like, walk right back into the store and sell it back to its clueless owner. Hey, this ain't Ultima, and you're not the Avatar, so why not pick up some extra cash now and then? If there is anything remotely resembling a flaw in the gameplay, this is it, and it's more of an amusement than anything.

Avernum is a game that definitely favors content over presentation. If you're looking for a game with a lot of eye candy, just about any game made in the last five years could blow this one away, but if you want a role-playing game with a lot of depth and retro feel that's just different enough from the high-fantasy standard to be engaging, Avernum might be right up your alley. This is especially true for anyone with an older system (Avernum will run on any Windows 95/98/NT/2000 or PowerPC Macintosh with as little as 12MB RAM and 20MB of hard drive space) or a shoestring budget - the full version is only $25, and the expansive demo is available for free at www.avernum.com.

Ed Zybul
Contributing Editor