Exile Ii

Exile II: Crystal Souls is the 1996 second installment in Spiderweb Software's Exile trilogy, a sprawling shareware fantasy RPG by Jeff Vogel set in the underground prison-realm of Exile, where a six-character party fights an Empire invasion and uncovers the secret of the mysterious Crystal Souls.

Setting

The game continues directly after the original Exile. After the exiles' victory, the surface Empire pours troops into the underground caverns in retaliation, and impassable energy barriers begin appearing across the land. The party is dispatched to Fort Ganrick to fight Nephilim raiders, only to be drawn into uncovering the Vahnatai, an ancient subterranean race tied to the barriers and the captured Crystal Souls.

Gameplay

Players assemble a party of up to six characters with selectable race, traits, skills, and stats - the first Exile to expose race and trait selection - then explore through three modes: Outdoor for cross-country travel and random encounters, Town for shopping, training, dialogue and quests, and turn-based tactical Combat on a tiled grid. The campaign spans dozens of towns, dungeons and outdoor regions with a deep skill-driven progression curve.

Engine

Exile II uses Spiderweb's own 2D top-down tile engine inherited from Exile I, with refined window borders, palette and interface tweaks. It runs natively on 68k Mac OS 7 systems with 2 MB RAM and a 640x480 256-color display, and was later remade with extra content as Avernum 2 on the Nethergate engine.

Reception

Inside Mac Games rated Exile II 4 of 5 stars, calling out a size, scope and depth of plot unmatched in Macintosh role-playing games. The title earned an honorable mention for MacUser's 1996 Shareware Game of the Year and helped cement Spiderweb Software's reputation as a leading independent RPG studio for the Mac.