Ultima Underworld - The Stygian Abyss

Tell me about a lot of 3D games and I'll confirm that the vast majority of them pull off a trick right away — they're all con artists. Ultima Underworld, meanwhile, was running at the end of the eighties like a sci-fi movie — first-person camera in a tight, underground maze, real three-dimensional space without tricks and demonstrations of technology that simply works. In 1992, it was nearly black magic.

You're a hero sent into a complex underground labyrinth. Goal: rescue the princess, encounter increasingly difficult enemies over time, and solve mysteries that unfold as you go deeper. The game doesn't play top-down like its predecessors — you see the world through the eyes of a character who moves forward, turns around, tilts their head. No grid, no guessing — the computer draws the square image away for you.

Controls take a moment to get used to — mouse movement, keyboard commands, and you get fairly detailed with items in hand, weapons, and spellcasting. It's not a classic hack-and-slash. Everything gets collected into your inventory; what you see and what you need to move around in the dungeon's depths to make something else happen. Puzzles aren't about shooting — they're about objects and commands. The underworld isn't infinite, but it's big enough that you lose your bearings and end up somewhere you're missing something for the journey.

The title was a beloved game for long evenings. Almost everyone who had a computer in the nineties called it up at least once. It brought a sieve to graphics that dozens of other games copied in the following years. Performance without graphics acceleration is surprisingly smooth — in today's world, an army of mathematicians and testers would stand behind this code. It's aged mainly in the visuals — colors feel flat, textures simple. But the concept itself, the game didn't lose its way.

Today you have the right to nostalgia, or if you want to see how things were done when "3D" was written in italics. In the browser you'll certainly find some retro versions. The game needs time to hook you — it's not an action shooter. But whoever dives below the surface, we'll meet down there in the darkness.