I don’t know if Curse of the Azure Bonds has aged badly, but I sure have.
Years before Baldur’s Gate came along, the CRPGS made in the Gold Box engine, including Curse of the Azure Bonds, were my introduction to the Forgotten Realms. Which is why I’ll always associate it with women in impractical armour and names that can’t be taken seriously. In Curse that’s the priest Gharri of Gond and the villainous Fzoul Chembryl, though a few years later Forgotten Realms: Unlimited Adventures would introduce the unforgettable Lunit Bdufe, a name that makes Drizzt Do’Urden seems downright mundane.
The Gold Box games also introduced me to factions like the Zhentarim and the Red Wizards of Thay, two of the organisations in Curse of the Azure Bonds trying to control you via the magic tattoos of the title. Nothing can ever be just “blue” in a fantasy novel when it could be azure or sapphire or cerulean, right? I think Hoodoo of the Blue Tattoo would have been an even better name myself.
Curse kicks off when you wake up with magic tattoos and a month of missing memories. When those tattoos compel you to attack a local royal, you learn they’re a medium for mind control and set out to get them removed.
The assassination attempt leads to a jail break and chase through the sewers where you encounter monsters made of garbage called otyughs. The sewer section is a highlight—not a sentence you get to write about videogames often—and one reason is that you can talk to the monsters. Some of the otyughs are jealous of their otyugh neighbours, so you can befriend them by stealing the superior piles of excrement next door. There are a handful of moments like this scattered across Curse, where you can cut a deal with a dark elf (but she’ll only talk to you if there’s a woman in your party), or avoid a fight with salamanders (but only if you choose the correct conversational tone out of a selection including haughty, nice, and meek).
The other reason this sewer chase stands out is how much story’s jammed into it. There’s a conflict between the thieves guild who helped bust you out of prison and a rival gang of criminals called the Fire Knives, both fighting over the prime thief real estate of the sewers. The Fire Knives were one of the parties involved in giving you the tattoos, and you stumble across the remains of their previous experiments as you rush through their base, following the trail of two other adventurers separately on the loose in the sewers. Gharri of Ghond is here to rescue a princess like he’s playing a different videogame, and Olive Ruskettle—a halfling from the novel this game is based on—is one step ahead of you in the tunnels as well.
This is Curse of the Azure Bonds at its peak. CRPGs at the time rarely had this much narrative going on, with exceptions like the Ultima games. You were much more likely to be playing a dungeon dice-and-slice than something with actual mystery and plot. It helps that it’s based on a book, just called Azure Bonds, which was nothing special but still more readable than 90% of the D&D novels—not that you need to read it to play the videogame.
