CRPG Addict finished his play through the classic AD&D dungeon crawler Eye of the Beholder, his first RPG from 1991. The final rating according to his own scoring system is 42/100.

I'll say right away that Eye of the Beholder is not a better game than Dungeon Master, and if it rates higher than Dungeon Master on my GIMLET, we'll know that the GIMLET is broken or I rated the previous game too low. What Beholder gains through NPCs and better quests, it loses in fundamentally worse character development, combat, magic, and puzzles. I'm sure it's possible to blend Dungeons & Dragons rules with an action dungeon-crawler, and Beholder is an important step in that direction, but it's not the destination.

As usual, his experiences were recorded with lots of attention to detail, sprinkled with historic facts and philosophical musings. In chronological order:

1. Game 189: Eye of the Beholder (1991)
2. Out of the Sewers, Into the Spiders
3. Made It This Far
4. Oh Great. Drow.
5. Stuck!
6. Flayed and Quartered
7. Won!
8. Final Rating

The third nominee for the D&D Hall of Fame at Diehard GameFAN is Eye of the Beholder, which is accepted in their hall of fame.

Eye of the Beholder was the first real success for the Dungeons & Dragons license on the PC. It was the game that many tabletop gamers felt finally emulated what it would be like to be in a dungeon crawl and it was the first D&D game that you could play and enjoy even if you didn’t know anything about Advanced Dungeons and Dragons in particular. For many video gamers it was their first trip to the Realms Forgotten, their first encounter with the city of Waterdeep, their first FPRPG (First Person RPG), their first encounter with a little Aberration known as a Beholder. Eye of the Beholder managed to capture the hearts and minds of gamers across the board and managed to receive critical praise not just for the original DOS version that could be played on a PC, but for the later ports to the Amiga, Sega-CD and SNES. Other incredibly successful PC RPGs like The Bard’s Tale, Wizardry and Ultima had all been ported to consoles, but they never reached the same level of success there as Eye of the Beholder.

For me personally, the Sega-CD version was my favorite as it not only came with a brand new (and vastly improved) soundtrack by Yuzo Koshiro, but if you put the disc into a CD player, you could access every last bit of audio content in the game, including the major story bits, character introductions and the ending. This was wonderful if you didn’t want to replay the game and just wanted to reminisce on certain parts. It didn’t play as well as the PC version, but it did look and sound better.