I have been going through the CRPG and trying out RPGs from the mid 80s to late 90s and it is tough because many of them want you making a party before you can play the game proper, and I don't have faith that the games are going to save and restore properly. The Dark Heart of Uukrul is one such game. And it looks great, displays properly on my monitor. But I just went through the character creation process and tried to save. No confirmation. A bad sign!

And sure enough, when I went to restore, there were four characters in a party that had names I did not give them. So frustrating because otherwise everything seems awesome about this game.

EDIT: A little research indicates that it just has a crazy way of handling parties. You have to start the game with a command line argument.

https://www.gog.com/forum/the_dark_heart_of_uukrul/cannot_save

Cannot save, page 2 - Forum - GOG.com

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@icecreamjonsey Anything in the manual about this?

@OlliSaurus Not in the manual that I saw, but on the gog.com forum, you have to use the name of your party as a command line argument. Then the game will correctly load your save game with that party.

I'm not THAT upset, and the gog forums are a godsend for this sort of thing. I bet the game was called the Light Heart of Uukrul before their QA group discovered this bit though 😀

@icecreamjonsey crpg addict played this; no mention of the command line but the games seems to constantly save to its one save slot according to this:
https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2012/10/game-76-dark-heart-of-uukrul-1989.html
maybe the default character data files were write protected and the command line selection is actually a debug feature?
Game 76: The Dark Heart of Uukrul (1989)

A blog in which a dedicated addict plays through all PC computer role-playing games (CRPGs), in chronological order.

@OlliSaurus So, I wanted to give you a correct answer. It IS in there! I attached a screenshot from it. So I will give them credit for mentioning it, and give myself one demerit for not reading the Uukrul manual. (In the 1980s, I read manuals constantly, so I think I would have caught it if I had seen this game when it was first released.)

@icecreamjonsey it was a different time back then. The character creation was almost a game on itself. I loved it and never crossed my mind using pregenerated characters!

Now a days I can't. Having to generate a party implies too much commitment to understand the rules even before starting to play the actual game 😅

@reidrac Totally! Champions of Krynn has you changing the secondary color of your pants in character creation. And that is a lot to ask of a player in 2025 when you don't know if you need to enter the third adverb from the left on a codewheel and so forth, for a version of the game that is hopefully patched to not need it, but possibly not. 😀

@icecreamjonsey also: The Dark Heart of Uukrul is notoriously buggy, careful there 😂

It is one of those games that I loved to read about in magazines bitd, but when I finally got to play many years later it was a big disappointment.

Bard's Tale was a better experience if still quite rough.

@icecreamjonsey I only learned about this game within the last year (weirdly enough first on the Apple II when looking for RPGs, then realized GOG had a DOS port), and I had a ton of fun with it. Parts of it have definitely aged but overall I still thought it was an engaging RPG.