It’s always nice to see devs revisit classic games to make spiritual successors for them, especially if the baseline mechanics and ideas have fallen out of vogue. Just recently, we saw a team doing this for Morrowind, and 14 years ago, Legend of Grimrock did this for Dungeon Master. The result is something that Path of Exile co-creator Chris Wilson is still raving about.
He made a YouTube video providing his thoughts, because Dungeon Master was a landmark release in his enjoyment of the medium. “While I’m not going to claim that it was the very first dungeon-crawler with a first-person perspective,” he says. “It was the one that brought this particular style of RPG to a wide audience at the time.”
You had to guide a four-character party through a dark, menacing set of tunnels, all mapped like a grid. The puzzles are largely environmental, and rely on lateral thinking based on the items you have and what you can see in the room in front of you. “It was a huge step up in terms of immersion,” Wilson explains.
He goes so far as to say he found it “terrifying, in a good way,” when he was younger, presumably because you were facing mummies and you had to improvise to make everything work. I can relate, because I used to find similar games, like the Heroes of Might and Magic series, daunting for similar reasons.
“But people stopped making games like this,” he laments. “Once Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake came out, 90-degreerotation gave way to full 3D environments. And then Diablo 1 came along and totally changed how people saw real-time RPGs.”
Since Wilson himself helped make the Diablo-like Path of Exile, you can see why he gravitated toward what Almost Human is doing in Legend of Grimrock. They’re all devs who’re refusing to get some aspects of the past die, even if they require traversing dimly lit dungeons.