The best fantasy games

Ah yes, the game that crawled so Ultima could run. Akalabeth is a wireframe dungeon crawl where you descend into monster-infested labyrinths with the elegance of a lost spreadsheet...

Armaeth: The Lost Kingdom looks like a cousin of Prince of Persia who dropped out of school to study magic mushrooms. You play a vaguely heroic dude exploring a crumbling kingdom f...

Gobliins 2: The Prince Buffoon trims the team down to two goblins but doubles down on personality and puzzle complexity. The interactions between the characters add a layer of char...

Dungeons of Kroz 2 didn’t reinvent the wheel—it sharpened it and rolled it over your face. Released the same year as the original, it’s tougher, faster, and even ...

Moraff's World offers a colorful fantasy role-playing adventure where players explore a large world, battle monsters, gather treasure, and gradually develop a powerful character. T...

Karnov is a classic side-scrolling action arcade game developed by Data East in 1987. The game features a unique protagonist named Jinborov Karnovski, or "Karnov", a fire-breathing...

Shadow of Yserbius is a 1993 online role-playing game set in a fantasy world filled with dungeons, monsters, treasure, and enough corridors to make a cartographer nervous. Players ...

Before there were AAA games with 100GB installs, there was Amulet of Yendor, a rogue-like so old-school it might as well come with a floppy disk and a sandwich bag of D&D dice....

Inner Worlds is the kind of side-scroller that sneaks up on you. At first, it’s a fantasy action-platformer—monsters, dungeons, the usual—but then you discover th...

Dungeons & Dragons meets Disney on a sugar rush. Tangled Tales is a bright, humorous RPG that cheerfully pokes fun at fantasy clichés while still serving a solid adventu...

Ishar 2 (1994, DOS) picks up where the first game left off, and then throws in more ways to punish careless adventurers. It’s a first-person RPG where managing your party isn...

Dragonflight (1991) was a German RPG that dared to think big—party-based adventuring, sprawling maps, and a proper fantasy plot. It played like a love letter to Ultima with i...

Ah, Dungeons of Kroz, the glorious mess of ASCII characters that somehow became addictive. Created by Apogee in 1989, it’s a fast-paced dungeon adventure where every symbol m...

King's Quest III Redux: To Heir is Human is a fan-made remake that lovingly modernizes Sierra's classic while respecting everything that made the original memorable. Enhanced visua...

The Wizard's Castle is a classic text-based, dungeon-crawling adventure game released in 1980, designed by Joseph R. Power. The game was originally developed for the Exidy Sorcerer...

Fates of Twinion, released in 1993 for DOS, is a classic action-adventure platformer with a fantasy twist and a surprisingly playful tone. You control a hero navigating colorful wo...

Ah, Black Sect (1993), where the puzzles are cryptic, the villagers are creepy, and the atmosphere is so thick you could spread it on toast. A classic first-person point-and-click ...

If Dungeons of Kairn were a person, it’d be that quiet D&D player who never smiles and always plays lawful evil. Released in 1989, this obscure DOS crawler delivers all t...

In the late 80s, when gamebooks were trying to escape paper and sneak into floppy disks, GrailQuest shows up wearing Monty Python armor and refusing to be taken seriously. In Grail...

ICON: Quest for the Ring from 1984 feels like a fantasy board game wandered into a computer and decided to stay. Based loosely on a novel, it mixes strategy, role-playing, and enou...

If you wanted a mix of Clue, D&D, and a dash of text-parser frustration, Legends of Murder: Volume 1 – Stonedale Castle (1989) was your game. You play a detective dropped...

The saga continues in Dark Ages Volume II: The Undead Kingdom, where your “Prince of Destiny” status doesn’t earn you a vacation, but instead throws you into a ki...

Incursion is a modern love letter to classic tactical RPGs, clearly inspired by tabletop rulesets and games like early Fallout. It throws you into a turn-based world where position...

Wizardry 4: The Return of Werdna flips the script by letting you play the villain, which is as delightful as it is diabolical. You control Werdna, an evil wizard with a knack for c...

The Temple of Apshai Trilogy is a series of classic role-playing games developed by Automated Simulations (later known as Epyx) in the late 1970s and early 1980s. These games were ...

In Battle Master (1991), you play as a heavily armored murder-hobo leading an army across a fantasy world that really doesn’t want you there. It’s part action-RPG, part...

If Catacomb Abyss was “Doom for wizards,” then Catacomb Armageddon is “Doom with a Halloween costume budget.” Bigger levels, more enemies, and slightly more...

Before heroes had inventory screens and voice acting, there was Adventure in Serenia, the lovechild of a text parser and a fever dream. Released in 1982, this proto-graphic adventu...