Akalabeth: World of Doom

Akalabeth: World of Doom is like, kind of an adorable piece of software design? It's about as rudimentary as it's possible for an RPG to be, you go into the dungeon and fight guys, the king will give you a quest which is always "kill this specific monster" and each time you do it you get a little boost. There are two classes, "guy who's good at swinging a sword" and "guy who's good at using the magic amulet," and, hilariously, within this simple binary there's actually an obvious, unambiguous winner. Folks, the mage class is broken; of the four spells available via the magic amulet, one of them has a random chance of giving you a few different effects, one of which (turn into lizard man) triples all your stats. You can do this an infinite number of times, so what we have here is an optimal strategy: spam that spell until you've got your stats high enough that nothing poses a threat anymore. Sometimes you'll get negative effects instead, but you can just keep casting it or, if need be, reset and try again.

To be clear, this is NOT a complaint. I don't think I can honestly say playing the game normally is more interesting than just breaking it over your knee like this, and honestly it's kind of heartwarming to know that "game is completely unbalanced and allows for absolutely broken builds" is something that goes right back to the beginning of the CRPG genre. I have to assume that this is an artifact of the tabletop RPGs these early CRPGs were inspired by, a sense of "let the player do fun things" superseding concerns about balance.

Mechanical goofiness aside, this game's just got a really nice vibe, I love all the vector sprite monsters and the ultra-basic first person dungeon crawling, even the super minimal overworld map is just kinda evocative in a charming way. This is a good one, check it out sometime.