jsjrodman: Qwerty: A suggestion.
List all the ones you know, and then us crazies can kibitz with additional ones?
Qwertyman: Well I did a bit in my initial post. I'm aware of all the ones sold on GOG, as well as the Wizardry series and the Eye of the Beholder games. Aside from that though, I'm not aware of too many. I've been gaming for over 20 years[...]
Not too shocking as the heyday of the genre was over 20 years ago in the mid to late 80s.
Basically, Dungeons and Dragons was *a thing* that was very culturally relevant especially among gamers, and Wizardry was the first quality rendition of a similar experience to the computer (Apple 2). It was a fairly simple formula to implement as a program, and hugely popular, and so we got a tonne of similar clones, with slight incremental experimentation over time.
Personally I have a huge bucket of nostalgia for The Bard's Tale (Tales of the Unknown, Volume 1) because I cut my teeth on the Commodore 64 version (in many ways the best version of that game.) However, to really get the full experience you have to avoid hints, struggle to figure stuff out yourself, draw maps (using graph paper or Excel) and pour a lot more time and focus on the game than I think any of us do nowadays. And I can't really claim it's worth it, as it does provide a certain joy playing that way, but not anything spectacular as compared to many similar games.
Probably far more popular in the turn-based style than the first wave of Wizardry clones was SSI's Pool of Radiance and its inheritors. The headline feature was that it used real Dungeons & Dragons rules, but I'm not sure this was really such a good thing. What stood out in play was the sort of open-ended quest, the strong party progression, and most of all the much more involved tactical combat, where positioning and turns mattered greatly.
Much later, I can't say enough good things about Dungeon Master, which is a much more simulationist game. Think through stuff -- if something makes sense it could work, it probably will. This was really the start of a different sub-genre of real-time dungeoning. That later included things like the better known Eye of the Beholder, though I think the original is the best. Mapping is less important here, the dungeons are memorizable (with a struggle) and also smaller per level. I'd say using maps for levelsyou've already visited is more in the spirit of this one. Experimentation, tactics, are key here. But again with games from the 80s, it really demands some weeks of solid focus.
The console crawlers tended to be far less demanding of focus, time and thought, generally speaking. Their audience was different, and the storage for save files was limited. You can see how Phantasy Star 1's initial clone of the Wizardry style of first-person crawl quickly gave way to the top-down approach of Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior -- console players did not want to draw maps! (To be fair, most modern players don't either!)
For SNES, Arcana was a lightweight snack I enjoyed a couple of years ago.
Persona 1 for PSX is quite a bit more meaty in difficulty, dungeon scale, and time cost.
