Dungeon-crawlers seem to be a video game sub-genre that is going extinct on the PC. Years back, you had highly successful dungeon-crawling RPG series such as the Wizardry games, along with the Might & Magic and Bard's Tale games. Nowadays, your choice of games if you want to do some dungeon-crawling are a bit limited in terms of modern selections to play, so most of us are still firing up the old classics from time to time. Thankfully, rare games like Elminage Gothic exist and are able to bring this wonderful dungeon-crawling experience back to PC in the modern era where it belongs, hopefully bringing with it some fresh ideas and making a few new fans for the niche genre along the way.

Elminage Gothic is a party-based dungeon-crawler RPG similar to the early Wizardry games or any good old-school dungeon-crawler. You roll a party of 6 characters from a wide array of races and classes to choose, outfit them as best you see fit and crawl through dungeons, fighting and looting along the way.

Emphasis on crawling through dungeons.

Yes, Elminage Gothic is a true-to-life dungeon-crawler, and that is what the majority of your time will be spent doing. The dungeons in this game are devious, devilish and diabolical. Most of them are maze-like, huge and confusing, often with hidden switches to find and secret doors to uncover. The challenge level is also raised when you realize that the simple task of using your map is limited in this game. The game uses a Magic Map system, which means that each time you glance at your map, a Magic Map in your inventory is used up. Run out of Magic Maps and you no longer have a map or any way of knowing where you're at. If that happens, you will be running around blindly until you re-load a previous save or somehow find your way back to sunshine again. This aspect is made easier once you get teleportation magic, but the early parts of the game can be brutal.

If that seems a little hardcore, well, welcome to the world of Elminage Gothic. This game is not meant to be your friend, it is meant to defeat you. Only those with iron wills should continue on.

Story

The story is a bit bare-bones here, as you initially get word that a cave has started spawning monsters and you have to get to the bottom of why it's happening. The story simply acts as a backdrop; a reason to get you exploring the dungeons and ultimately spending your time in the dungeons themselves. As you progress, you can start to piece together a narrative, much like a Dark Souls game, and the story starts to reveal itself to you. There are plenty of NPCs in the dungeons and villages you encounter that also help move things along, often with interesting lore bits and clever little quotes that will definitely get a chuckle out of you. I had to laugh when I mistakenly fell to the bottom of the wind cave, Hastrana, only for a fairy there to tell me how foolish I was for even entering this cave without wings. This area of the map turned out to be a dead end with no apparent way up, so the fairy was, in fact, quite right. There are many of these moments in the game where the game cleverly and cutely tells you things that show that it is not taking itself *too* seriously.

Combat

While you're crawling through dungeons you'll be fighting all sorts of beautiful, weird, unique and surreal monsters. They are colorful and on display in full HD, which is a great feature as the artwork for the various enemies in the game is extremely well done and always visually interesting. Combat is turn-based and tactical as you and your enemies exchange vicious blows, often in quick, life-or-death battles. Tactically, each enemy you fight will have at least one special skill that makes it unique, if not more. Some enemies will attack you and damage your weapons or armor, others can charm various party members with a kiss, or use a lightning breath attack on one of your lines. Given that there are literally hundreds (over 400) monsters in the game, ranging from slimes and spore balls to unspeakable demon horrors and enemies that are so disturbing and strange you will have no words for them, it stays interesting. Every encounter in the game stays fresh as well because you are never quite sure what the enemy type you are facing is going to hurl at you. Even when you do have an idea of the enemy's tactics, the situation remains tense as you wonder when they are going to unleash their special skills on your party that could all but cripple you. These are the type of tense situations that exist in Elminage Gothic and make the game worth playing, as you can't simply sleepwalk through the combat in this game. It will challenge you at every step, and you must be prepared, patient and persistent if you want to make significant progress in the game. 

As you continue to dive ever deeper in the various dungeons, you will have to manage your party carefully if you expect to survive. You will have to manage your maps, as we've already discussed, along with your inventory, and, most importantly, your spells. The magic system in the game uses an old-school Dungeons & Dragons approach, where you are given a limited amount of spells to cast from each spell level, and once they are consumed they are gone forever until you head back to town to rest at an inn. There is no resting in the dungeons themselves, so you better come prepared and manage your spells extremely carefully or you could run out mid-dungeon and once again be in a heap of trouble. Thankfully, the game seems to balance encounters fairly well, as most encounters can be beaten if you execute a proper strategy. Luck also plays a role in the game as well and balances itself well as you will have both unlucky moments of grief as well as lucky moments that cause quite a bit of happiness when everything goes right in the Gothic world. 

There is no level-scaling in the game and the random encounters in the game are mostly challenging. The key here is to save often, because if you don't, you are very likely to run into an encounter that ends at least one of your party member's lives in quick fashion. Thankfully, you can resurrect dead characters with a higher level Cleric spell or by taking them to the local temple, but be prepared for another devious trap the game throws at you. Your characters can be turned to ash during the resurrection process and cost much more gold to resurrect, so once again, save often and keep an eye on your party's health. Unfortunately, there is no Hardcore Mode at the time of writing this that would limit your saves, but hopefully future games in the series have an option to make saving a bit more of a risk/reward mechanic, for those of us who want the utmost challenge in the game.

Exploration

As you explore the maze-like dungeons, the game places a heavy emphasis on figuring out things yourself and forcing you to pay attention to your surroundings. Since you only have so many maps that you can carry, you will have to manually explore the dungeon, learning it's intricacies and getting a lay of the land, only using your maps sparingly. The game makes you develop a strong sense of direction, because if you get turned around and start burning through maps, you will once again be in a lot of trouble. Managing the maps and learning the exploration system in the game is imperative to making progress. The game again gets easier in this regard when you get teleportation magic and are able to freely move through the dungeon at your leisure, entering and leaving to re-supply. But be warned; your characters age, so all that time you spent going back and forth to town could come back to haunt you much later.

The dungeons themselves feature all manners of traps and pitfalls that can harm your party. Treasure chests drop after some enemy encounters and are often trapped with devious traps that can really do damage to your party if you fail to disarm them properly. Dungeons also feature wonderfully inventive traps, such as typical pitfalls in the floor, to slippery ice blocks, wind tunnels that send you all over the map and even underwater areas where you are expected to hold your breath for a set period of time, all the while fighting hordes of enemies and trying to make it to dry land again. There are all manners of traps to keep the game interesting and unique as you explore the many dungeons in the game, and the game delivers the goods in the dungeons department. Much like the game handles the enemy skills and uniqueness of enemies and encounters, the developers paid caring love and attention to making each dungeon a unique experience as well.

Character building

As your party members level up, they gain hit points and attribute points. When they reach the required attributes for another class, you can switch their class to the new one and start gaining the benefits of the new class, if you so choose. This is great for magic users, since you can level up a class such as a Fighter (who gains large amounts of HP each level), and then switch them to a Cleric so they start learning Cleric spells (but they get to keep the HP they earned as a Fighter). There are many inventive ways to build your characters and figuring out an ideal party balance is half of the fun of the game. There are many classes to choose and you can get creative with your choices when it comes to classes and character building in the game, which allows you to fully craft your party to your liking. It should also be noted that sticking with one class for the entire game has its rewards as well, as you get access to the strongest class gear in the game by doing this.

Conclusion

If you enjoy hardcore games with an emphasis on challenge, and often times brutality, and you love RPGs that refuse to hold your hand, all the while delivering stunning depth, complexity, nuance and systematic ingeniousness throughout, you simply must play Elminage Gothic. With over 100+ hours of content, dozens of devious dungeons to explore, hundreds of monsters to fight, a focus on gameplay first and foremost, a high difficulty level, punishing game design, great character progression and tough party management aspects in a non-level scaled world, you have to play Elminage Gothic to believe it. I look at this game as sort of a turn-based Dark Souls game, which will reward you the more effort and persistence you put into it on your end. If you can get past the first hour (or 5) of confusion and really start to sink yourself into this game's depths, you will most definitely uncover plenty of pearls to take back with you in your travels. Just be prepared to travel back to the good old days where maps were a resource to be managed and games did not hold your hand throughout the process.

The game delivers a great experience that any fan of hardcore RPGs needs to check out, so this one gets my highest recommendation - a 5/5 on the RPGWatch rating scale.
(For the record this is what a 5 on the RPGwatch scale is: An outstanding game that will be remembered as a classic. A score of 5 indicates a game that is equal to the best gameplay available in the genre at the time of writing.  It is, however, important to understand this does not represent an absolutely flawless game)