Bard's Tale I is a classic among first-person dungeon crawling games. It presents you with a simulated 3D view area, a pane to view your character's stats, and a description error to let you know what's going on. It followed not too long after Wizardry I, and during its day showed what could really be done with that kind of gaming format.
I played this game when it first came out, and went all the way through completion. I loved it.
There will be many times when you need to keep a map on graph paper to keep from getting turned around, but that was part of the charm of these old games. The dungeon settings are very similar to the outdoor/town settings (whereas games like Ultima switched between overhead 2D and simulated 3D to distinguish town from dungeon); but there is enough variation that two do indeed feel very different.
The game starts out in the town of Skara Brae, which you must explore to find all the secrets awaiting you there. But without a doubt, the core of the game lies in the several dungeons you will have to explore. The mazes can get a bit intense, as well as the puzzles,
but so is the feeling of reward you get from completing it all the way through to the end.
Bard's Tale I rank among my all-time favorite RPG games. I went on to play Bard's Tale 2 and 3, all the way through, because I got addicted to the simple-yet-deep interface. There's something about super-simplistic graphics that really makes your imagination kick in to fill in the blanks.
At some point you may want to scrounge around on the Internet to find the various town maps and walkthroughs -- not to solve the game right away, but to help you out of some of the trickier tight spots. Somehow, playing these games in the modern era does not leave me quite as patience to work through the puzzles as I once was. The game itself came with a map of Skara Brae (the town), although this map does not include every notable item in the town. To discover those, you will have to adventure for yourself.
I'm not sure about replay ability of this game. Once you get through it, you'll pretty much have mastered all of the puzzles and strategies needed to get through the time. But once enough time has gone by, it makes for a wonderful nostalgia run!
