Moebius: The Orb of Celestial Harmony Origin Systems Inc
Designed by Greg Malone (Original Apple II release, 1985; DOS version released in 1987) Click the gadget above to play now. Streaming version from archive.org You cannot save this streaming game. Downloadable abandonware version available at Abandonia
Manual at archive.org An action RPG with an oriental setting, Moebius: The Orb of Celestial Harmony casts you as a novice monk in the service of Mobeius the Windwalker. The land of Khantun has seen ten generations of peace since the coming of the Windwalker and the Orb of Celestial Harmony. However, one of his disciples, the turn-coat Kaimen, has stolen the Orb and used its power turn the land to his evil will. The theft of the Orb has conveniently trapped Moebius, whose spirit is bound to it, in his own incorporeal plane. Leaving it up to you to fix all this, obviously. Wild beasts and deadly assassins stalk the land, and its people live in fear. Renegade priests have come to Kaimen's side, serving as Overlords of each of the four elemental realms. You have to defeat them, rescue the Windwalker's monks, cleanse the shrines, and ultimately free Moebius. (At this point, the sheer familiarity of all this makes one suspect that Origin had some kind of in-house roll-your-own-RPG-plot dice system.) Like Ultima IV, released in the same year, Moebius has a karma mechanic - defeat the forces of evil, and you'll gain karma; threaten innocents with your sword or flee from righteous combat and you'll lose it. If your karma drops far enough, the disciples of the Windwalker will no longer aid or follow you, making it impossible to complete key quests.
The game opens with combat training, so if you want to get anywhere with it, you'll have to get good enough with the controls and combat system to win a couple of martial arts battles. For modern gamers, this is probably the biggest challenge you'll face, but I swear: we can get through this. To ready your novice to face the world, you'll have to pass training in one bare-handed match, one sword duel, and one round of divination. Best to start by learning which button does what.
In the menu system, you select an option by hitting the first letter of that entry - (T) to train, for example. The space bar progresses through cut scenes. Enter skips entirely through the game's introductory sequence, but it's worth watching it at least once for a sense of flavour, and to marvel at the remarkable things being done with incredibly limited palettes and VGA resolutions in 1987, when this PC version was released (the Apple II version looks a lot more basic, although your character in it looks a great deal cooler). You are always represented by a bearded guy vaguely resembling Chuck Norris - no portrait selection here. Then again, I think it's safe to assume that all martial arts experts in 1987 vaguely resembled Chuck Norris.
Moebius predates the WASD convention by decades, and only makes occasional use of the arrow keys, so prepare for a pretty steep learning curve. Fortunately, the combat system is actually fairly logical, and the manual goes into considerable detail when it comes to both controls and strategy. Unusually, you can set the speed of play. The slowest setting, 1, makes it easy to see your opponent's intended moves in combat, but feels impossibly sluggish. The fastest setting, 9, still feels unresponsive, thanks to clunky controls, but is in practice reasonably pacey. If you want a bit more time to study your enemy's moves, opt for 6. Bear in mind that you don't instantly make your chosen move when you press the key - the few seconds' delay between moves makes controlling your martial artist feel more like he's operating on queued turns than in real time. Also note that if you're at the wrong range, your move won't hit home. For example, a long kick in close quarters will miss as surely as a short punch from several paces away. The good news is that enemies telegraph their moves before making them, giving you an opportunity to block or get out of range. Moving in and out of combat also helps to reduce your fatigue meter. If all this seems like rather a lot of effort, low kicks and sword thrusts do little damage but almost always connect, and blocking renders you immune to almost any attack.
From the manual:
The controls vary slightly in hand-to-hand combat:
(RETURN) gives you an opportunity to flee combat, but you'll lose karma for this.
There's also a third discipline, Divination. To train this, you attempt to achieve illumination by mashing the arrow keys in order to keep an increasingly fast-moving Yin-Yang ball within the confines of a rectangle. If it's still there once the countdown ends, you presumably become enlightened. Based on this example, I'm considering giving up meditation and taking up pinball.
Journey Onward
Once you've trained up to a minimal level of competence, you can set out to
 Yeah. I know. You can also use the arrow keys for movement in four directions, or a numeric keypad (if you have one) for full control. I strongly suggest the latter.
Additionally, as with the Ultima games, there are plenty of keyboard commands to help you interact with your environment (list cribbed from Lemon Amiga):
Rather than a stick-figure avatar (or, indeed, Avatar), both you and other characters are shown as shoulders-up portraits wandering around the countryside. Although the world's background scenery looks similar to that of Ultima IV, scenery objects and paths are scaled up to match the larger area taken up by the bust-avatars. The overall effect is somewhat disconcerting.  Origin Systems presents: Chuck Norris in the world of randomly positioned blocks You do get used to it after a bit, but it's never quite as comfortable as the more consistent perspectives of the Ultima games from the same period. There's only ever one view level - you can open the doors of buildings, but this will only move the contents of the buildings into your inventory or release any hostile or benign NPCs inside. Some exterior areas are set up as enclosed compounds, but you never really go inside a building, town, or dungeon. At the bottom right of the screen, you'll notice food and water meters. Diminishing sustenance is a common factor in RPGs of this era and Origin RPGs in particular. In Moebius, it's probably the easiest way to die on your first few attempts. You can get food from villagers and water from pools and cisterns - all other water sources have been poisoned. On a related note, nature hates you. Rock slides block paths, heat waves increase your water consumption, and rain storms cause all the undergrowth you've hacked away to re-grow, blocking your way.
Tips
Summary
Moebius has some good ideas, but hasn't aged well. The martial arts based combat system is incredibly creaky. While it fared surprisingly well against dedicated martial arts games of its own time, it's not up to the combat in Palace Software's Barbarian: The Ultimate Warrior, released in 1987, and will annoy the hell out of anyone used to post-Street Fighter beat 'em ups.
Although the use of a setting (very loosely) inspired by Chinese mythology is something we still don't see enough of in CRPGs, and certainly didn't get much of in the '80s, it would have been nice if a bit more had been made of the setting. The main map graphics capture the Ancient China theme relatively well but there's not much flavour to be had when it comes to NPCs. There are admittedly limits as to what you can do when your main NPC interaction involves asking random villagers to give you stuff - complex dialogue trees were largely something of the future when this was released. An additional problem, which we can to some extent attribute to the colour palette, is that some of the characters come out looking like Victorian stereotypes of what Asian people look like. There are some entirely pleasant looking NPCs who don't look anything like Fu Manchu, but some of these tonal choices are likely to be a tad eyebrow-raising to the modern eye.
 The manuals give you a faint glimpse of a rich world, but so far (and I'll admit to still being on the plane of Earth as I write this), the linear quest path, minimal variety in opponents, and constant hacking through repetitive underbrush don't make Moebius a particularly exciting example of gaming from this era as far as the modern player is concerned. Although your survival becomes less precarious once you've levelled up a few times, infinite lives would make it easier to forgive the frequency of early-game death, repetitive interactions, and clumsy combat, and would perhaps turn this into a decent casual game. - Xaronzon Dragon
Screenshots
 Pretty little village. Go on: Ask people to give you stuff for no very good reason.
 Successful combat is mostly about hitting people in the crotch at exactly the right time
 This guy is an Overlord. I think we're supposed to take the "Evil" bit as read
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