Ultima™ Underworld 1+2

The game play is good, graphics have been preserved, lots of great nostalgia; however, the audio/music port is awful, I hope there's an update to fix the sound.

Released in 1992, before even Wolfenstein 3D, this was one of the first games using a 3D environment, a real landmark in gaming and certainly RPGs. Plays very nicely on Steam Deck via Heroic launcher after some button remapping. Game controls are fairly horrible, inventory management painful, graphics &sound very dated (monsters and npcs are sprites!). Gameplay... classic 90s style maze like maps, find items, traps, fight monsters, lots of repetition & backtracking through levels. You definitely need to use walkthroughs as the levels are huge and often important items/locations/info virtually impossible to locate. And it goes on way, way too long. However it is still a good game with lots of charm, and you can tell the devs had a blast making it.

In a time before Doom and even before Wolfenstein3D, there was already a game with 3D graphics superiour to both: Ultima Underworld. A game where you could actually look around freely and with terrain that was not restricted to rectangular blocks. So, graphically Ultima Underworld was a few years ahead of its time and it had an early phyics engine too, for interaction with the world. Of course nowadays these tech-marvels are outdated. But what remains is an enchanting world, great stories, many very believable NPCs to talk to and generally hours and hours of roleplaying-gameplay. So it still stands as a legend among computer games and still is very captivating.

The firs thing that should strike you about these games is how well they have aged. The interface is friendly (there is no better automap out there), the graphics are colorful and charming, and the soundtracks are very evocative. The game are addictive like all great games are- you want to keep playing just to explore that one last piece missing on your map, but doing so leads to another area and before you know it hours have passed. Don't let the age of these games fool you!

If anything ever comes out that manages to match the UUW games for immersiveness, depth, and atmosphere, it will never leave my drive. Come to think of it, with very few gaps I've had Ultima Underworld in one form or another on my computer for literally the last 20 years -- that should tell you something.