A 23-year-old D&D CRPG just got patched to add achievements and fix a bug that stopped you from earning XP

Temple of Elemental Evil skull
(Image credit: SNEG)

Troika's Temple of Elemental Evil came out in 2003, adapting an old school tabletop adventure into videogame form while being remarkably true to the then-current third edition of the Dungeons & Dragons rules. It's pretty good! I like the bits where you doss around the village of Hommlet and the piratical cove of Nulb more than the temple of the title, but having a too-large dungeon at the end is just another way The Temple of Elemental Evil is true to the typical experience of a D&D adventure.

SNEG revived The T of EE and brought it to Steam last year, with a few refinements and updates. One much-requested addition was achievements, because modern players demand our motivational trophies I guess. SNEG gave in and added them in a recent update, along with some bug fixes.

Most notably, they fixed a problem with experience gain. While ToEE launched with a level cap of 10, you're supposed to be able to continue earning experience points after that. A quirk of D&D's third edition was that you had to spend XP to craft magic items, and if you wanted to be scribing your own scrolls or whatever you needed a steady income of XP. Cutting that off made high-level crafter-casters a bit pointless, a problem that's now been addressed.

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Other fixes make Melf's Acid Arrow deal damage "as intended" and adjust curse removal so that "lifting curses using scrolls or spells should now work more reliably". As for those achievements, any you've already earned should unlock when you load your save, except for ones you get for visiting certain locations.

You'll need to head back to Emridy Meadows and the Moathouse dungeons and all the rest to earn those. Just writing their names gave me a tingle of nostalgia—time for a reinstall, I guess. You can find SNEG's revival of The Temple of Elemental Evil on Steam.

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Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

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