Temple of Apshai

Temple of Apshai is among the very oldest dungeon crawlers in existence, and on the Atari 800 it offered players the exploration of a vast multi-level temple full of rooms described through text paragraphs accompanied by simple line-drawn maze graphics. The player controls a single character, fights a wide variety of monsters turn by turn, collects treasures scattered through the rooms, and gradually builds up experience and equipment, with the management of exhaustion and injury playing a key role, forcing the player to plan expeditions and timely returns to the surface before the character collapses from exhaustion or succumbs to wounds from earlier battles.

The game was created before the standards of the genre it helped define had become widespread, so it feels sparser than later RPGs – the text descriptions of individual rooms carried much of the atmosphere and described small interior details, traps, and hidden mechanisms, while the graphics mainly served as an orientation map of the maze. On the Atari version, at least the color palette and readability compared favorably to older eight-bit platforms, though the controls and pace remained typically slow and required careful reading of accompanying text from both the manual and the game itself, without which players could easily get lost in the system.

Temple of Apshai is often cited as one of the forerunners of the entire commercial dungeon-crawler and CRPG genre, inspiring later developers in how to combine text description with simple graphical representation of space and how to structure progress around gradually unlocking deeper levels. Today the game is interesting mainly as a historical exhibit – its pace and sparseness place it more among titles for collectors and genre researchers than for the average player looking for quick fun, yet it remains an intriguing probe into the early days of a genre that only gradually evolved from it into the form known from later games.

Why play it: More for collectors and researchers of genre history than for players looking for quick fun – an interesting glimpse into the origins of dungeon crawlers, from which later CRPGs only gradually evolved.