What kind of dungeon-crawlers, blobbers, old-school RPG-s do you recommend?

[Akos]

Hi everyone!

We took inspiration from a lot of great games of the genre like Wizardry, or Legend of Grimrock, and our team could probably add a few names to this list (I'll walk over to their room and probably ask them).

But, is there a classic or modern game any of you enjoy? What were the things you liked the most about them?

I'd love to add a few games to my ever-expanding wishlist, so thanks for any good tips!

[anon_amos]

Although I have only started playing this, Vaporum seems to be pretty good. It is in the same style as other dungeon crawlers like Legend of Grimrock but with a Steampunk flair.

Haven't purchased Operencia as of yet, was waiting for it to come to Steam but have been giving serious thought to purchasing on Epic.

[Neil Sorens]

When I was 13 I worked all summer to buy a 286/10 Mhz PC and played a ton of Nethack. Definitely has a lot of influences on modern games that use procedurally generated content to enhance replayability. I'll still play roguelikes like Tales of Maj'Eyal or Ancient Domains of Mystery from time to time.

Might & Magic VI was great except for the OP bows and the sudden switch to spaceships and sci-fi weaponry towards the end of the game. It was the first in the series to allow you to roam freely instead of cell-based movement. The series went downhill after that because of budget cuts at 3DO.

I am unreasonably fond of Moraff's World, because it was a shareware game that was downloadable from local BBSes and could run on my machine, but I don't think it was a particularly great game. Same with Ancients I - The Deathwatch. Stonekeep was another one that was not a great game but that I remember fondly because of the late nights I spent playing it.

Darklands was a party-based RPG from that era that I also played a ton. I really liked the detail and scope and historical aspects. It's kind of obsolete by today's standards, but you can see its influence in the Bioware RPGs that made them famous.

[nszf]

My greatest inspiration source was definitely Lands of Lore 1-2 , Eye of the Beholder 1-2 and many Wizardry episodes. The second EOB is an all-time favorite of mine, one of the best games I've ever played. And although I'm not the biggest fan of Stonekeep, it has also made an impact on Operencia. Japanese RPGs also inspired me, especially the ones from the SNES - Playstation1 era.
And I will always be grateful to Almost Human Games (Legend of Grimrock) as they demonstrated how to make this genre great again :)

[nszf]

Oh, almost forgot. Dungeon Hack was my perfect guilty pleasure in the mid90s.

[Akos]

Originally posted by anon_amos:

Although I have only started playing this, Vaporum seems to be pretty good. It is in the same style as other dungeon crawlers like Legend of Grimrock but with a Steampunk flair.

Haven't purchased Operencia as of yet, was waiting for it to come to Steam but have been giving serious thought to purchasing on Epic.

Yeah, I was looking at Vaporum for a long time, this steampunk style is really something I dig. Also, it looks great! It might be blasphemy but I have a hard time playing with the old-oldschool games because of the graphics.

[Akos]

Originally posted by Neil Sorens:

When I was 13 I worked all summer to buy a 286/10 Mhz PC and played a ton of Nethack. Definitely has a lot of influences on modern games that use procedurally generated content to enhance replayability. I'll still play roguelikes like Tales of Maj'Eyal or Ancient Domains of Mystery from time to time.

Might & Magic VI was great except for the OP bows and the sudden switch to spaceships and sci-fi weaponry towards the end of the game. It was the first in the series to allow you to roam freely instead of cell-based movement. The series went downhill after that because of budget cuts at 3DO.

I am unreasonably fond of Moraff's World, because it was a shareware game that was downloadable from local BBSes and could run on my machine, but I don't think it was a particularly great game. Same with Ancients I - The Deathwatch. Stonekeep was another one that was not a great game but that I remember fondly because of the late nights I spent playing it.

Darklands was a party-based RPG from that era that I also played a ton. I really liked the detail and scope and historical aspects. It's kind of obsolete by today's standards, but you can see its influence in the Bioware RPGs that made them famous.

Thanks Neil, this is a great list and thanks for leaving a little elevator pitch for each game you recommended.

Edit: The Darklands cover art is very 80s-early 90s fantasy, I love it :D : https://playclassic.games/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Darklands.jpg

[Darke]

Originally posted by nszf:

Oh, almost forgot. Dungeon Hack was my perfect guilty pleasure in the mid90s.

Yeah, Dungeon Hack was and still is great. I always enjoyed playing the original rogue, but modded out the stupid permadeath, with Dungeon Hack it was never there unless you wanted it so it was a nearly perfect game for me.

[Akos]

Dungeon Hack, where you fight a mime: https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-O3pEgwsh7a8/XTxZZ6tH-BI/AAAAAAAAqhg/OBYzb5boZ_cV4AHv2MdBaXbclPTmr_2tQCLcBGAs/s1600/DungeonHackGame.jpg

[grumpymoose]

I picked up Wizardry 6 when I was a kid, and continued through to 8. I even read a Wizardry novel back in the day called the League of the Crimson Crescent. I loved those games so much I got them again in digital form as back ups, and that set me off playing through them all over again. Even with some of the quirks of older games, those games fit like a well worn glove, and I discovered things I didn't even know about them when I originally played them.

Super fun series.

[Darke]

Originally posted by Akos:

Dungeon Hack, where you fight a mime: https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-O3pEgwsh7a8/XTxZZ6tH-BI/AAAAAAAAqhg/OBYzb5boZ_cV4AHv2MdBaXbclPTmr_2tQCLcBGAs/s1600/DungeonHackGame.jpg

Ug. That one was level drain if you didn't disable undead effects, IIRC.

One of the reasons I loved the game. You could replay it with different settings of the dungeon every time.

Only issue was the item limit so you basically had to nerf food effects, minimise food drops/hints/etc and even then you couldn't max out magic items on max level dungeon. :(

[fR0z3n.s0u1]

With Cleric you don't need food at all (Create Food). Add Fighter to the mix and you don't need to rest as often to replenish spells. Add mage, and Vampiric Touch spell gives so many bonus HP (NOT lost on rest!) that you don't need health potions.

I was able to complete Dungeon Hack on hardest difficulty. Fighter/Mage/Cleric all the way, you just need to survive until Create Food (auto-gained at cleric level 5).

[Darke]

Originally posted by fR0z3n.s0u1:

With Cleric you don't need food at all (Create Food). Add Fighter to the mix and you don't need to rest as often to replenish spells. Add mage, and Vampiric Touch spell gives so many bonus HP (NOT lost on rest!) that you don't need health potions.

I was able to complete Dungeon Hack on hardest difficulty. Fighter/Mage/Cleric all the way, you just need to survive until Create Food (auto-gained at cleric level 5).

Yeah, that's what I'd end up doing. But you could literally not generate a max-items+max-depth level dungeon without losing items on the last few levels. Add lots of keys (which I liked), and I don't think you could populate more then down to level 15.

I dug into the AESOP code years back and IIRC, there was a limit of 2000 'objects', of which a bunch (500?) was dedicated to monsters, and there's no easy way to hack the map generator to override it.

There's also a bunch of class specific items/weapons/etc that you can't get without running as a single class (like Bard) so it kind of sucks that you can't get those while actually being able to play the game without being tortured by lacking a cleric class. :/

[Greed Is Addiction]

Originally posted by nszf:

And although I'm not the biggest fan of Stonekeep, it has also made an impact on Operencia.

Why no Stonekeep love? The voice acting annoyed me but at the time it was a pretty dungeon crawl.

[Darke]

Originally posted by No Known Stereotype:

Originally posted by nszf:

And although I'm not the biggest fan of Stonekeep, it has also made an impact on Operencia.

Why no Stonekeep love? The voice acting annoyed me but at the time it was a pretty dungeon crawl.

Mainly because it was very hard to love. Dawn of the internet and if you didn't get the patch it was very crashy. Also came out around win95 and didn't much like running under it, IIRC, which didn't help it's crash reputation.

There were apparently multiple game breaking bugs, I got stuck a few times and had to reset to a previous save game from a previous level to continue. And remember this was in the time before the internet was readily accessible, so you couldn't tell if things like this were bugs or just something you didn't work out.

Inventory was terrible with that one long scrolling list for all items.

All-in-all having played the original version without patches, it was a terrible game that I felt like I'd wasted my money on (and as a kid, I didn't have much of that!). I had gotten one of the SSI collections recently (probably christmas/birthday present) with all the ravenloft/menzoberranzan/etc fps-style games, and I had a gold box collection from before; and this was vastly inferior to all. :/

Maybe it's good now with a patch?

[Akos]

Might not be a blobber, per-se but I can't keep my eye off of Stoneshard - it looks so good. My friend is playing it and said it was great.

I am particularly glad that the old school inventory system - then one in Diablo II eg - made a comeback in that one.

Anyone tried that out? My backlog is too huge atm