Play Wizardry - Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (Japan) Online

Wizardry on the NES is where dungeon crawling RPGs really got their start, and you can feel the roots of the genre here. You create a party of six adventurers—fighters, mages, thieves, priests—and dive into this brutal, grid-based dungeon where every step could mean an ambush or a deadly trap.

It’s unforgiving in that old-school way: no hand-holding, no auto-saves, and if your party wipes, you’d better hope you mapped the dungeon on graph paper. The turn-based combat feels simple at first, but the deeper you go, the more you realize how much strategy goes into surviving. That first time a mage casts Miltioc’s Mallet and wipes out half your team? Yeah, you’ll remember it.

It’s clunky by today’s standards, but there’s something weirdly satisfying about slowly uncovering the dungeon’s secrets, one torch-lit tile at a time. Just don’t get too attached to your first few characters—they probably won’t last long.