Shining in the Darkness is one of the games that most influenced my interest in games. It's essentially a pure first person dungeon crawl: An RPG consisting of a giant multi-part dungeon, a small town with shops and an inn, and a castle where NPCs dispatch us to the next part of the dungeon. That's it - pure undistilled dungeon crawling.

The dungeons are sprawling and increasingly complex, and the game maintains a steep difficulty curve throughout. Failed runs mix with those where to crawl out by the skin of your teeth, victorious and terrified. Every new section - first the Trials and then the levels of the labyrinth proper - have new challenges to overcome, secrets to find and story beats to advance.

Visually, the developers were clearly constrained with a small cart size (4 megs), and it shows in the lack of enemy animation and environmental variety. Along with the sometimes too-frequent encounter rate, those are really the only flaws I'd note.

This is also the start of the incredible genre-hopping Shining series, and is fascinating to see how the story in the other games wraps around this one. I love this game and still revisit it every few years.