The game starts in medias res, the protagonist having apparently slept through the massacre of his hometown. He rouses in time to begin his quest – to avenge his kin by finding and killing Lord Krellane.

As expected in a CRPG of the era, Prophecy features a full array of Dungeons & Dragons descended statistics and generous expository text. But there's also plenty of unexpected elements, such as a Zelda-like real-time combat where hits and misses are driven entirely by player reflexes, while damage is calculated by character's stats and equipment.

There is indeed a surprising array of equipment to find in the game, and though the multiple-bodypart armour system has no impact on your character's appearance, the weapon and/or shield your character has equipped does appear. This is important, as a weapon's size directly correlates with its range.

However, the game's most innovative and mechanically enjoyable feature is the ability to create spells through a rudimentary magical language. The manual presents you with a few dozen basic incantations, but spells can be further enhanced by adding prefixes to increase their strength and range, in exchange for increased energy costs.

It's difficult to envision a simpler system for allowing a basic set of spells to actually remain useful throughout the entire game.

There are of course anachronistic annoyances, including manual-based copy protection, randomly-generated-on-load treasure, mildly obtuse puzzles, processor-speed-based gameplay, and QuickBASIC driven PC speaker sound/music (and fonts).

Still, no matter how long it has been since I first bought the game new, I still find it rewarding to return to Prophecy – which is high praise for an Action RPG from the 1980s.