Went into this game expecting jank and instead got a very solid RPG.

Wizardry 1 does not fuck around. The game drops you into town, you make characters and buy equipment, then go right into the dungeon. Then you'll probably die in 20 seconds because you made a poor party comp and the enemies kill you in one hit.

This game is all about risk management. When party members die individually you have to drag them back to town and pay a hefty price to revive them. If the whole party dies, time to make a new one. Enemies are distinct and have varying degrees of power, so your first time facing them you won't know if they're fodder or something that will ruin your life. There are traps all over the place and the map tiles have no visual indications besides doors, so if it's your first time in an area you WILL run into those traps.

This is where mapping comes in. Break out the pencil and paper because drawing the dungeon is part of the gameplay loop. The dungeon is massive and you will get lost easily without a map to find your way. Marking down those traps will ensure you won't have to suffer their consequences again. Getting to the bottom floor to fight the final boss might seem like a grueling, impossible task at first but through mapping I discovered a way to get to there in only a couple minutes.

As competent as the game is, I wasn't able to actually beat it. The perma death is an interesting feature, but ultimately way too punishing as is. If the game were faster it'd be fine, but character creation is a little slow and it takes me about 5-10 minute to create a whole new party. With a dungeon as deadly as Wizardry 1's, this mechanic just felt like padding to me.

Luckily the game only autosaves when you return to town, so I was able to cheat a bit and close the game whenever my party was about to die. I found this to be just the right amount of punishing since it still made me waste time and lose progress.

But even with this I still couldn't push through the end. The last 2 floors are BRUTAL. Half of the enemy types are extremely evil. Mages will cast spells that pretty much instantly kill my squishier party members, the undead will DRAIN LEVELS with their attacks (more punishing than death it's fucking horrible), and demons grant multiple status effects. Floor 10 itself is a gruelling gauntlet of 7 mandatory fights (potentially more) before you fight the final boss, who is also really tough.

At that point you're basically required to grind for a while, but since the enemies down there are so strong it's not worth the risk of dying to grind them. Looking online I saw that most people grind using a repeatable encounter on the first floor, but doing this takes a loooong time. It would've taken me a full day's worth of grinding it to get to where I wanted to be, and at that point I didn't feel like finishing the game was worth my time.

I thoroughly enjoyed my time with the rest of the game though, and I hope the sequels do away with that brutal endgame grind.