Ishar 3: The Seven Gates of Infinity

You start Ishar 3: The Seven Gates of Infinity standing in the walled city of Koren-Bahnir as the warrior Zubaran, tasked with hunting down the dragon Sith before the sorcerer Shandar can harness its magic.

Koren-Bahnir will murder your party before noon

The moment you step out of the starting area in Koren-Bahnir, Silmarils makes no attempt to ease you into the world. The city splits between a filthy poor district and an opulent rich district, and almost everything roaming the cobblestones wants to kill you. If you imported your save disk from the earlier games in the trilogy, your high-level heroes might survive the early encounters, but a fresh squad gets torn apart by basic city thugs, giant wasps, and wild bears before you can afford decent armor.

Building a five-man roster requires wandering into local taverns and street corners to hire companions. Party members have distinct races, classes, and moral outlooks, which means recruiting the wrong pair leads to internal brawling or outright desertion. To handle basic survival and combat without losing your mind, you have to lean heavily on the quick function keys:

• F1 to F5 trigger specific party commands for each slot in your line.
• F6 to F10 execute immediate combat actions for individual heroes.
• Numpad 9 opens the Tactical panel to reframe your squad formation during fights.

Gathering initial gold takes patience, as gear prices in Koren-Bahnir are brutally high. Healing mechanics are notoriously tricky, requiring rest at inns or expensive spell casting, both of which are constantly interrupted by a day and night cycle that ticks past far too quickly.

Time portals, spellcasters, and interface friction in Ishar 3: The Seven Gates of Infinity

Once you survive the urban grind, the structure broadens through time portals scattered across the lands. Step through a portal, and you are thrown into completely different historical eras with distinct climates, terrain, and hostile beasts. You must track down historical figures like the Astronomer Typhus Mernith and the Magician Mather Fudius to piece together how to unlock the next time gate and track the dragon Sith down.

The core issue that stops players in their tracks is interface friction. Real-time combat demands fast targeting and spell selection, but clicking through individual inventory icons and character portraits in the heat of battle feels clunky. Finding where a puzzle is located across multiple historical timelines is often harder than working out the solution, leading to aimless wandering if you play without notes.

The audio presentation fares much better on a period PC setup. Composed by Fabrice Hautecloque, the soundtrack takes full advantage of General MIDI hardware. Silmarils even bundled a dedicated sound driver called FIMP to route multi-channel music smoothly through MIDI setup hardware alongside standard digital audio effects.

The making of Silmarils' final trilogy chapter

Designed by Michel Pernot and Pascal Einsweiler, Ishar 3: The Seven Gates of Infinity was crafted as the grand finale to the French studio's primary role-playing series. Pernot coded the project alongside Louis-Marie Rocques and Jean-François Trevien, delivering a colorful first-person perspective with detailed environmental art by Eric Galand, Guillaume Maginot, and Einsweiler. Fantasy illustrator Ciruelo Cabral created the striking original painting used for the physical big box art.

When the game arrived on 1994 store shelves, distribution formats produced curious differences between editions. The floppy disk version contained ambient street NPCs in Koren-Bahnir that were actually trimmed from the later CD-ROM edition, though the CD release made up for it by including a full FMV animated intro sequence. Players who struggled with the steep initial curve could even order a special mail-order "Equipe Speciale" disk from the publisher to load a pre-built elite team directly into the campaign.

Looking back at the DOS release today, the game holds up primarily as a feast for the eyes and ears, backed by solid party management concepts. The persistent translation typos and stiff combat rhythm hold it back from top-tier status, but the sheer atmospheric depth of its time-hopping worlds makes it a memorable title for hardcore dungeon crawler veterans.

Step through the time gates right now

If you enjoy classic first-person party RPGs with complex squad dynamics, high visual detail, and uncompromising difficulty, this game is well worth an evening of your time. Just keep a notebook handy for the portal connections, and do not hesitate to look up a walkthrough if the city street layout leaves your party completely broke.

You can play Ishar 3: The Seven Gates of Infinity online, free in your browser right here on this page, with nothing to install and no setup needed. Launch the emulation, set your party formation using the row keys, and see how long your team survives the streets of Koren-Bahnir.