Windows 3.1 gaming in the 90s was a pretty eclectic little space. Prior to Windows 95 and DirectX, it was hard to create games with smooth motion and animation, so most commercial devs stuck to MS-DOS, where games could look and sound more exciting (and benefit from all the memory freed up by not running Windows). One type of developer was brave enough to take the panels and scrollbars of Windows 3.1 and finagle them into a game-like form, however: Shareware Weirdos.
Sorcerer's Cave by Peter Donnelly (abbreviated SORCAV, since Windows 3.1 only allowed eight-character filenames) is a straightforward, in many ways generic, dungeon crawl game. Inspired by D&D, play-by-mail games and other fantasy dungeon crawls, it's about increasingly-huge parties of adventurers bumbling through a randomized dungeon, stealing gold and befriending ogres and trying to kill the wretched Sorcerer.
It's no surprise Sorcerer's Cave feels like a tabletop game: it was one first, way back in '78. In 1995 Donnelly ported his game to Windows. The tabletop nature of the game makes it perfectly suited for Windows: There are no real animations, no sudden movements, just stacks of virtual cards representing treasures, magic items, and adventurers. Priests and wizards, trolls and ogres, men and women.
THE GENDER ECONOMY OF SORCERER'S CAVE
One of the more interesting things about Sorcerer's Cave as a dungeon crawl is that there are few "monsters." Most of the beings the player meets in the cave are from the same pool of ten different character types from which they form their initial party. "Trolls" and "ogres" have airbrushed-looking neon skin that marks them as the Monstrous Fantasy Other, but if you meet them in the dungeon you can say, hello, would you like to join my party? And they probably will. Your party will swell to a huge group, and then they'll all be killed off by snakes or medusas.
The pool of playable character classes includes two distinct gender tracks. (Wizards, Priests, Trolls, Ogres and Dwarfs exist independent of this binary.) Two of the lower-ranking characters include the "Man" and "Woman," who are distinguished from each other in several ways. The Man has higher strength and can carry an extra item, but the Woman has a Magic Power rating of 1. Women are magic, guys.
Furthermore, either the Man or Woman can be upgraded into a more powerful form by drinking a potion. The Man becomes a "Hero," a collection of rectangles in leather armor, and the Woman becomes an "Amazon," who has a pony updo, a midriff, and a big sword. A Woman can never become a Hero in Sorcerer's Cave, but maybe being an Amazon is just as good? She's certainly better dressed for Y2K.
Sorcerer's Cave says: No. It is objectively not as good. This is a fantasy adventure game where classes of people have quantifiable stats; furthermore, there's a power ranking. When you start the game, you're given 8 points to "spend" on your initial party of adventurers. In the economy of SORCAV, a Hero costs your whole 8 points, while an Amazon (who has one fewer strength and can only carry two items) costs 7.
As a kid, I quickly realized that you can pick an Amazon over a Hero and use your one remaining point to recruit a Dog. Dogs are the best character class in the game because they are the only class that will not spontaneously desert your party when your time limit is running low. At some point in the game you will be playing a solitary dog, the sole survivor of your party, attempting to recruit a new army.
Even when I was twelve, I could clearly see that having a midriff, a sword and a dog was a better deal than being a generic armor man. (Hashtag genderhacks.)
PETER DONNELLY
Years after my childhood obsession with Sorcerer's Cave, I happened upon Peter Donnelly's website, now offline (this archive is from 2018). There I discovered that he had written several essays about what he called the "right to silence", which seems like truly the most boomer struggle I can imagine. Something about this framing just feels racist-adjacent to me, idk?
Donnelly has compared Sorcerer's Cave to Tarot, both on his website and in the help file's "Designer's Notes." I find it a really meditative game to click around in for a while, lots of fairly straightforward decisions interspersed with the occasional genuinely interesting situation, which is what I imagine most people like about the "roguelike" games they play in 2023.
PLAYING SORCERER'S CAVE
You can play SORCAV emulated at Archive.org. It's entirely mouse-driven. There's a pretty verbose help file that explains a lot of the specific artifacts and weirdos you might encounter, but here's my quick-start guide:
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The green stick figure on the map is your party. Get around by clicking on adjacent tiles. Click on a yellow door to move "up" (towards the surface) or a red door to move deeper into the cave.
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The encounter ("Exchange") window is full of buttons, but 90% of the time you'll be using the bottom two buttons with the left and right arrow on them. That's "take item" and "drop item." You can also try greeting other characters (with the hand icon). Try doing it repeatedly.
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Your goal is to find and murder the Sorcerer. On levels 2 to 6 of the cave, you'll see a "purple dracula" icon on the very center tile. The Sorcerer will be on one of these floors, either on that tile or an adjacent one. Find him, kill him.
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Always have a dog.
