Magus - 2nd edition

When you open Magus without any prior knowledge of what awaits you, you expect something like Wizardry or Ultima. Then you realize you're holding an obscure point-and-click RPG whose creators nobody cared enough about to officially credit.

It's a classic dungeon crawler where you create a character, descend among strange creatures, and collect items. The game is played from a first-person perspective, moving across a grid square by square, exactly as they did it back in the eighties. The menu stretches across the bottom third of the screen, each click moves you one square forward. Dark colors, pixel art you can't really call pretty — it's functionally raw, like someone took a template from a long-forgotten engine and loaded images into it without much effort toward style.

Playing is repetitive, but in its own way hypnotic. You dedicate yourself to clicking almost meditatively. Sounds are minimal, occasionally a quiet noise when you encounter a creature. No dialogue — you meet something and either you fight or you take the loot. The atmosphere isn't scary, it's more empty. Combat is a matter of clicking the attack button, waiting for the animation to play through, then doing it again. It's not particularly clever, but it grabs you. Level design is dull, the dungeons don't differ much from each other.

Magus is one of those games that nobody would think to make today. Even in the nineties it was a marginal title for people who played everything. Today only someone interested in how forgotten software from an era when publishers couldn't afford to properly promote everything looked like would give it a go. It's neither Ultima nor Wizardry. It's not even strange enough to have underground character.

If you run it in an emulator or browser, you'll be someone who wants to try something deliberately forgotten. The game plays, moves you deeper into the dungeon, and lets you out again. Hours in the basement that teach you nothing and give you nothing — except a strange peace and the awareness that you've glimpsed a distant frontier of video game development, where many people don't ask questions and just do things however they see fit.