Brandish

Brandish is a dungeon crawler that invented its own way to keep the player disoriented: the map doesn't rotate around the character — the entire world rotates around them instead. When the hero, mercenary Ares Toraernos, turns left, the whole screen turns with him, which turns orientation underground into a game in its own right. Ares falls into the ruins of a buried city and has to dig his way back up — so progress runs opposite to the usual scheme, climbing from the depths toward the surface, floor by floor, past traps, trapdoors, and locked passages.

Combat happens in real time directly on the map: you attack in the direction the character is facing, so a lot depends on whether the player manages to turn in time before the monster does. Equipment wears out, weapons break, keys get used up, and many floors are built as logic puzzles with sliding blocks and switches. On the PC-98, the game looks clean and legible, which matters a great deal given this design — the high resolution made it possible to render floors, traps, and level differences so they could be read at a glance. The accompanying music is darker and tighter than in Ys, and supports well the feeling of descending into something that should have stayed shut.

Brandish earned a reputation at the time as a game for the patient: it's demanding, unforgiving of mistakes, and without notes on paper it's easy to get lost in its floors. But it's precisely that combination of action, map puzzle, and resource-limited survival that created a memorable whole, and the series went on to receive sequels and console ports. Today Brandish is interesting for exactly the same reason it was back then — the rotating map remains a unique idea that nobody has really repeated, and anyone who gets used to it will get several dozen hours of honest dungeon-crawling. It's worth reaching for one of the later versions, though, or at least keeping your own sketches, since the original doesn't account for the player setting the game aside and coming back to it a week later — without notes, finding your way around the floors becomes a discipline all its own.