All the Dungeon Crawlers

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If you liked it then you should have put a Ring of Levitation on it

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“The design’s great, too:”

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No it isn’t. A dungeon crawl is an RPG term describing a scenario in fantasy role playing, often used as a pejorative, since dungeon crawlers are often shallow settings with little to no plot or logical consistency.

When transitioned to video games the term describes a vast veriety of games as seen here:

Steam’s Dungeon Crawlers

Everything from rogue-likes to third person action to turn based combat and puzzle games, or what you’re describing which is a First Person RPG.

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I always liked Captive and Hired Guns.

Sucked at them both, mind.

And EotB, natch.

THe Lone Ranger for NES was a grab bag of half-implemented stuff, one of which was some pretty rudimentary dungeon crawl/shooting gallery in mines

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The greatest aspect of dungeon crawlers of this stripe is mapping them on graph paper. I played a pretty meh NES dungeon crawler back in the day (I don’t think I see it on the site, maybe it doesn’t qualify as you rarely went underground) that was grueling. The leveling grind was slow, the gold from battle stingy, the towns were difficult to find and if you wandered too far or in the wrong direction you would be immediately brutalized by monsters way out of your class. I hated it at first, but kept returning to to be tortured occasionally. One summer I set myself to mapping the world, and became obsessed. Suddenly survival became possible, and every little square on my graph paper that I filled with my color coding felt like Lewis and Clark.

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The gif puts me in mind of Dungeon Master on the Amiga. Of course a lot of these games are somewhat similar for visuals, so it could be from many possibilities.

I think it’s from Eye of the Beholder or some reasonable facsimile.

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“All the crawlers”, they said. “It’s got everything”, they said.

Not the ones that wasted my time the most, it seems.

Gaze, then, upon the full glory of Windows 3.1 Era Shareware!

#Mordor: The Depths of Dejenol
(Nope, some other Mordor. No relation.)

And, of course, the advanced graphics extravaganza of the sequel
#Demise: Rise of the Ku’Tan


Aww yeah. All those hours were totally worth it.

(Castle of The Winds wasn’t in first person, so it doesn’t count.)

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Free with renewal of Nintendo Power magazine. Played the crap out of it one time through. The Zeldas are way better.

(But I don’t think Adventure of Link qualifies as a dungeon crawler.)

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Can’t connect, but I hope it includes AD&D Treasure of Tarmin. OMG - what. a. game. As a kid who just got into D&D (by himself, basically) who loved the idea of killing monsters and getting treasure, this game was the shit. And it was the first game I ever played that attempted to create a 3D space. Well, no, Star Strike had a sort of trench. But this was the first Dungeon type.

Huh quick look - this was ported for Atari, but shuttered before completion. The Intellivison version ruled.


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Remember the spiders!?

The website seems to insists on grid-based movement though. They include Might&Magic I-V and X, but omit the free-moving VI-VIII.

Well, it’s a little more specific than “first-person RPG” as modern examples of that include fully 3D-modeled environments. There is really a specific type of game here that was popular in 8-bit and 16-bit computers and not really on newer systems other than intentionally retro games like “Orcs and Elves”.

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My favourite is Dungeon Master which released in 1989. Very old game I must say.

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Actually I remember my friend renting the Capcom published port when we were maybe 8 years old and when the first goblin showed up we panicked and hid behind the couch. We never figured out combat. Revisiting the game after all these years I am stunned by how much of an incompetent coward I was as a child.

Anyway, back on topic: I always wanted to get into the Wizardry series but it’s hard to be in just the right mood to play them. I feel almost the same way about the Ultima series.

Also Phantasy Star for the Master System had great first person dungeons.

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