Good news! Your terrible crimes against the crown have been forgiven, and you’ll no longer live in chains. Less good news: You’ve been set free at the peak of Mount Grimrock, a dungeon gauntlet of skeleton warriors, pitfall traps, and cruel riddles—a trap that no pardoned prisoner has ever survived. Your freedom exists purely on paper, and it’s up to you to manifest it in reality.

The ‘you’ in question is actually four prisoners, not one. Legend of Grimrock is built in the style of Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder—decades-old RPGs with a peculiar form. Although you explore using a first-person camera, there’s a party of four adventurers in formation behind it. Rather than having free control of their movements, you step forward one grid at a time, turning at 90-degree angles. Come across, say, a giant snail with murderous intent, you’ll enter into a strange dance: sidestepping around its flanks while clicking frantically at the weapon icons to fire off spells, fling daggers and swing maces.

It’s a curious—even laughable—set of self-imposed limitations. But these willful throwbacks give Legend of Grimrock its unique personality. Those 90-degree turns in tight dungeon corridors mean you spend a lot of time studying the walls—looking out for suspicious cracks or buttons that might open a gate or uncover a hidden room. 

In fact, this is a wonderfully tactile game all over. A pressure plate that can be activated with your feet can also be held down by an object from your inventory, which makes the humble rock one of your most powerful tool. It can be thrown to trigger a plate on the other side of a portcullis, or hit a button from a distance. One early puzzle requires you to place a sparkling gem in the eye socket of a gurning gargoyle to progress; there’s something about the act of dragging the stone manually across the screen that pulls you deeply into Grimrock’s abstract yet atmospheric world.

The puzzles are far better than you might expect, given Grimrock’s genre. They're conundrums of motion that make liberal use of teleporters—in this way, they're more closely comparable to Portal than anything found in the RPGs of the 2010s. And there’s a sense of physical space to Grimrock that makes its dungeon feel like a real and consistent space; even falling into a pit might be desirable if, upon landing, you discover you’ve accidentally found a secret passage below. It’s a sense of connectedness that Grimrock shares with this year’s System Shock remake—which perhaps shouldn’t be a surprise, given that they both hearken back to the same golden era of dungeon games.

There are plenty of hardcore RPG systems at play here: You'll find spells and potion recipes that you must suss out through experimentation, as well as food that you need to keep your party from starving. You can even turn off the automap if you prefer graph paper and a pen. But Grimrock is no empty nostalgia trip—it’s a modern expedition down a winding, forgotten avenue, with experts there to guide you.