Ravenloft: Strahd's Possession

Ravenloft: Strahd's Possession brought the darkest Dungeons & Dragons setting to PC as a gothic first-person dungeon crawler. A party is pulled into Barovia, a land sealed off by mist and ruled by the vampire Strahd von Zarovich, and must find a way out — if one exists at all. Compared to its heroic-fantasy competitors, the tone is considerably grimmer: villages are depopulated, the inhabitants terrified, and the game takes great care to never let the player feel safe. The party also doesn't arrive in Barovia by choice, which gives the whole expedition a different flavor than the usual treasure hunt.

Movement is grid-based but fluid, with the ability to turn and look around, and combat runs in real time. The system follows AD&D rules with characters, spells, and items, to which Ravenloft adds its own dread-laced logic: holy symbols, garlic, curses, and monsters like werewolves, mummies, or golems, whose defeat often depends on finding what can actually harm them. The settings alternate between crypts, decaying manors, catacombs, and Castle Ravenloft itself, and the game offers several endings depending on how the player behaves along the way. Working with items and information from the locals matters too, since without the right advice you simply won't reach certain places.

Technically it was a decent, if not groundbreaking, engine; its strength lies in the lighting and color palette, which turn the corridors into oppressive, murky spaces. The sound design works with screams, creaking, and silence, while the music surfaces mostly at key moments, hitting all the harder for it. At the time, the game received more mixed reviews than the genre's absolute top titles, but few denied it had atmosphere. Today it's mainly of interest to horror and D&D lore fans: technically it has aged worse than Eye of the Beholder, yet the oppressive mood of Barovia and the presence of Strahd, who reminds you of himself from time to time, still hold up. DreamForge followed it with another entry set in the same world, and its signature style of dark, slow-paced dungeons is recognizable in their later games as well.