so I got wizardry 6 a few months ago, mainly because I heard it was one of the originator series of the old school dungeon crawler, and I had never really given any a proper shot. So I got the oldest one available on steam and I've played it for around 13 hours at this point and have genuinely been having a great time. I'm trying out mapping by paper and pencil for the first time, all the rough jank and obtuse systems all make for what is a really interesting and charming experience which should by all means be considered painful and a terrible experience, but when you get into it, it's a great time.

So what I didn't mention is that I picked up 6-8 and threw on Heralds of the winged exemplar off of a recommendation. I was told that this was made by one of the original guys and that they had pretty much been working on this since he left and that it goes really cheap and it's worth checking out.

Now, I wasn't expecting to read the wiki page for this game and find out that this game has pretty much been in development for 2 decades.

I'm poking my head into this game just to compare since I've barely scratched wizardry 6 and I'm extremely shocked to find that the game is just as obtuse, janky, rough and hard to learn as wizardry. I further can't believe just how much the bad art was preserved. Not knocking the game but the main screen painting of characters compared to the character sheet images are completely different and then those are different from the face portrait options which are all different from the combat screen representations of the enemies of the same species. It's hard to explain exactly how frankensteined together this game feels with it's art direction which might just be a product of the development.

Honestly I kindof love it, it's weird that this game exists, it's weird what was improved for qol and what wasn't, nearly every part of this game is baffling in some way and I nearly absolutely love it for that? There's not a single aspect of this game that doesn't feel like someone just really really really wanted to make an rpg and they felt like shoving this in at the last moment. I don't think any part of this was laid out and instead this is what results from a 20 year long fever dream where someone just got up in the middle of the night and shoved this aspect they thought was really cool into the game, but that's kindof exactly what I want from a game like this?

This game goes on sale for around a buck or less, it'll be worth your time as long as you're aware of what you're in for.