Silmarils
French role-playing, on its own terms
The Paris studio behind the Ishar trilogy, Transarctica and Robinson's Requiem — first-person RPGs with a harshness and a visual style that no British or American house was producing.
Silmarils made role-playing games in France and sold them across Europe through the early nineties. The Ishar trilogy, Transarctica and Robinson’s Requiem were all reviewed in the British Amiga press, and they read as unmistakably not British and not American.
Fast facts
- Press evidence in this library: Amiga Power, 1992–1994 — Ishar, Ishar 2, Ishar 3, Transarctica, Robinson’s Requiem, Bunny Bricks.
- Distributed in Britain by: Daze and others, not by a British publisher of its own.
- Best known for: the Ishar trilogy — first-person party-based RPGs with hand-painted backdrops.
What made them French
Three habits set the Ishar games apart from the Anglo-American RPGs of the same years.
The party has opinions. Characters could refuse to accept a new recruit, or vote them out, and a badly chosen companion could turn on the group. That places social friction inside a genre that elsewhere treated a party as an inventory of statistics.
The world does not forgive. Money runs out, food matters, mistakes are permanent, and the game is content to let a run become unwinnable without saying so. Robinson’s Requiem took this furthest: a survival game where injuries had to be treated specifically and correctly, and where you could amputate your own gangrenous leg.
The art leads. The Ishar backdrops are painted illustrations, not tiled textures — closer to European comics than to the graph-paper dungeons of the American tradition, and typical of a French scene that treated a game’s look as authored, not generated.
Sold through whoever would carry it
Silmarils had no British publishing arm. Its games reached the UK through small distributors — Daze among them — which is how most continental European software arrived after the 8-bit era.
That arrangement had a cost. A French studio’s British reputation depended on whoever happened to be importing it that year, on how well the translation had been done, and on whether the magazines were sent a copy. Games could be reviewed a year late, or not at all, and the developer had no way to correct it from Paris.
Why it mattered
Silmarils is the French RPG — a tradition that runs parallel to the American one and shares almost none of its assumptions. It sits alongside Infogrames and Delphine in a French scene that consistently produced games which were harsher, stranger and better looking than the market average.
The difficulty is the part worth defending. These are games that expect to defeat you and do not apologise, at a moment when the mainstream was moving the other way. That is a design position, not a failure of polish, and it is one that later European studios returned to repeatedly.
How the Amiga press received Ishar
Amazing Computing, April 1994, reviewing Ishar — and the framing is the useful part, because an American magazine is placing a French RPG against the American standard:
It’s often said in the computer games business that there aren’t too many original ideas. Most new games are just variations on old ones. That’s certainly true of Ishar, a role-playing game (RPG) by Silmarils, a French developer, in a similar vein as Eye of the Beholder. While Ishar may not break any new ground in the idea department, its implementation helps it stand out in a crowded RPG field.
The praise is technical and specific. On the visuals:
the graphics are lush and detailed. Even though there don’t appear to be anywhere near 256 colors on the 320x200 pixel game screen, I can’t really complain. You definitely won’t find anything better in a regular 32-color Amiga game.
And on the distance rendering — the box claimed over 100,000 views — “objects in the distance have a wonderful hazy, unfocused quality which disappears as you move toward them”, with the reviewer’s honest qualifier that “things do seem a bit static”.
Two things worth taking from this.
The comparison is always to Eye of the Beholder. Silmarils’ games were read in the English-language press through an American reference point, which is exactly what reading them on their own terms would avoid. What was distinctive about them registered with reviewers mainly as implementation quality rather than as a different tradition.
They reached Britain through the budget shelf as much as full price. Amiga Action‘s mail-order listings carry both Ishar and Storm Master under Silmarils’ own name in 1992, sitting between Krisalis, Psygnosis and US Gold — a French studio’s games sold directly into the British discount market without a UK publisher’s badge on them.