The Elder Scrolls: Arena

I can't tell you how incredible this game is for its era and how meaningful it is for dungeon crawling as a genre. If you're an ES fan, grab this free copy and give this old, dusty DOS game a chance. The graphics are great for its time. The game itself is fun, albeit somewhat repetitive. The controls area hard to master, but you'll get use to it. It's a sandbox game with a main quest that you can solve when you feel ready, so take your time! Just don't forget to grind and improve your equipment and spells from time to time and you're good to go. This is a rather linear game, but it's quite fun.

When this game was released as a package, I was already playing Doom, but something about it felt different, and I bought it with a pounding heart from the excitement. As the 486 system I used to run this game disappeared and was replaced with new systems over the decades, I would return to it every few years whenever it started to fade from my memory. Compared to today’s cutting-edge games packed with advanced graphics and deep narratives, this game may seem unimpressive. However, alongside nostalgia, there is something inexplicably pure about the fun it delivers, making it impossible not to love. Now, in 2025, even as I play Monster Hunter Wilds, my current favorite game, I find myself picking this one up again. Having played it for so long, I now understand its mechanics far too well, and that initial thrill has slightly faded. However, it still provides the same enjoyment as it did back then. At the moment, I am searching for the third staff fragment, and once all the pieces are gathered, I plan to start Daggerfall.

Game is very Old school and so am i, so i still love it. You have to work at it and at times its brutal. Wish they would remake with better graphics, but is still fun to play.

I spent about a day on this game before finally deciding it just wasn't worth the effort to keep going. At the time this came out, I could see how it was awesome- my only previous experience with the Elder Scrolls series was Oblivion, and this game surprisingly has a similar scope in terms of vast landscape and massive towns full of NPCs to talk to. It has features like an automap, highly customizable character creation, a wide variety of spells, and the ability to steal from shops. The lore and world is all there already (though my character, a Khajiit, just looks like a normal human instead of a cat-person), and anyone would immediately recognize this as an Elder Scrolls game despite its age. My main problem is that this huge world is mostly just empty space- yes, there are rocks, houses, trees and endless maze-like corridors of dungeons, but it's all pretty shallow and unrewarding. The items have very little variety and aside from the artifact quests, there's not a lot to strive for or build your character with. The enemies are unbalanced- you'll find wimpy rats the next room over from a gang of enemies that can take you out in two hits. There's not really any point to exploring the overworld rather than fast-traveling directly to the cities and dungeons you need to visit, and the dungeons themselves are ludicrously vast and dull, with very little story or treasure to reward you for slogging through them for hours upon hours. Even the shops are cavernous and it takes an eternity to walk over to buy something or get a room at the inn. Repairing your weapons means leaving them with a blacksmith for days or weeks- realistic, but extremely annoying. The sidequests are generic and not worth the reward, the controls are sluggish and often unresponsive at critical moments, and the game crashes or freezes fairly often. All in all, it was probably fine back when it was innovative, but in the present, it's hard to justify so much time sunk into so little fun or reward.

I played this game as a kid on DOS and it works just fine through gog. The controls are pretty easy once you know them. You have to use arrow pad and not WASD, because its that oldschool. Its easier and less buggy to play that the 2nd elderschools game, daggerfall. which I am going to play next now.