Dungeon of Shalan

Dungeon of Shalan is one of those games that greets you with the words “You awaken in a dark room” and then proceeds to make that darkness your entire reality. Released in 1988, it’s an old-school dungeon crawler in the purest sense—turn-based, unforgiving, and almost certainly out to kill you. Monsters lurk around every corridor, and victory usually comes at the cost of sanity (and several pages of hastily scribbled map notes). The ASCII visuals leave plenty to the imagination, which is good, because imagination is all you’ll have left after your fifteenth death by giant rat.