?
The Dreamer's Guild was formed in 1991. They started out with ports (A-Train, Legend of Kyrandia), later produced some arcade games, but their main interest was in adventures. Their last and sadly unfinished game was a sequel to a ten year old RPG some of the crew had developed before they founded The Dreamer's Guild: The Faery Tale Adventure.
Halls of the Dead is an interesting game. It was one of the last, or maybe the last, (commercial) old-skool RPGs when a new school, led by Diablo, Fallout, and Final Fantasy VII, was just emerging. It was the last (again, commercial) RPG that featured pixel graphics, and maybe the only one outside Japan to do so in high resolution.
Personally, I did not get very far with it. This is in part due to the interface. New-skool RPGs may lack the depth of their old-skool brethren, but their interface has certainly improved. In Halls of the Dead, if you want to take something from a counter, you have to walk up to it and then click on the item. In Fallout, you can click on a distant item, and your character will walk over and pick it up. Same goes for opening doors. Instead of a tree dialog, you have to go into a sort of brain inventory, pick an idea icon and drag it on the NPC you want to talk to. A certainly innovative, but not very convenient form of conversation.
Furthermore, the version floating around the Internet is a CD-rip lacking music and speech, and at least the latter forms an integral part of the game. And finally it does not run very well under DOSBox. Even when I cranked up CPU cycles to 24000, it performed sluggishly. So maybe I'll just wait till I find an original CD, and play it on a genuine old computer (a Pentium, I think, would be best fit).
