From the ones I played:

- The Quest: fun exploration feeling in a vast world, no party though.
- Vaporum: gorgeous but I hate the regenerating health with no light or food timer.
- Eye of the Beholder 2 is good, if difficult.
- Bard's Tale IV is puzzle-heavy but still has a lot more combat than Grimrock 2. Nice large dungeons to explore. Combat is a bit gimmicky for my taste and the skill system doesn't feel that well-designed though.
- Lands of Lore: Throne of Chaos is a masterpiece despite the light RPG elements. Basically Eye of the Beholder with less RPG stats and more story and dungeon variety. The follow-up games are a different beast entirely.

Outside your list, Might&Magic X: Legacy is different from all the other Might&Magic games and worth checking out. It went back to grid-based exploration and I find the RPG system and exploration satisfying.

Thanks for the tips! I played all M&M since the 3rd in fact Im replaying them again. M&M X was good, its a damn shame ubisoft is just sitting on the franchise.

You welcome. BTW, since you played Wizardry V SNES, you'd probably enjoy Wizardry VI SNES (Jap version with translation patch). More player-friendly than the PC version, with the downside that you can't import your save into the next game.

Yeah I have Wizardry VI VII and VIII on PC so im playing them eventually. BTW I played Fall of the Dungeon Guardians and its very fun, I found grimrock 2 boring after a after a few hours but this one is great had a blast the first level, not like grimrock 2 i almost fell asleep in the first part.

It bothers me that so many of these games look indistinguishable from one another. Like take away the UI and Heroes of Monkey Tavern, Grimrock, Fall of the Dungeon Guardians, etc would all be indistinguishable from one another. One of the reasons I've been spending more time with the more anime-esque games like Labyrinth of Refrain instead because at least it's unique. Operencia was really good, too, but its next to unplayable now unless you want to turn off your Anti-virus, since most people from what I've seen, myself included, can't run it anymore without the exe getting flagged as spyware now, even on GoG and EGS.

I really, really miss games like Might and Magic. I grew up playing them when I was a kid, back when I was too dumb to do anything and had to get my father to play and he'd get way further than I could. And the fact that they're so overshadowed by the Heroes of Might and Magic spinoffs, like 9 times out of 10 when people mention M&M they're talking about HoMM and it makes me sad. The whole Medieval Fantasy/Sci Fi twist in most of them literally blew my little mind back then and I wish more games did something like that, the only thing that comes close was the end of Grimrock, but even then, it was only the last like 30 minutes.

Originally posted by M.V.Petra:

It bothers me that so many of these games look indistinguishable from one another. Like take away the UI and Heroes of Monkey Tavern, Grimrock, Fall of the Dungeon Guardians, etc would all be indistinguishable from one another.

Like, they all look like the inside of a dungeon :P ? I get what you mean but I find it a bit funny, since in early wizardry games at least up to VI you had the same wall texture for the entire game, it's the gameplay and to some extent the story and writing (kitchen description in Wizardry VI castle comes to mind) that made them memorable.

Operencia was really good, too, but its next to unplayable now unless you want to turn off your Anti-virus, since most people from what I've seen, myself included, can't run it anymore without the exe getting flagged as spyware now, even on GoG and EGS.

No problem here with ESET antivirus, I just launched the game out of curiosity. Any decent antivirus will let you make an exception for a single executable without having to completely turn it off BTW. Might have to dig into advanced options. You can always scan the file online on Metadefender if you want to be sure you're not infected, and it'll give you interesting info about which antiviruses flag the file.

I really, really miss games like Might and Magic.

Do you think that they aged well? I didn't get the chance to play them back in the day, and I'm debating whether I should invest time in those massive games - at least the grid-based ones. I was kind of put off by the dumb quests in a video I watched, probably of M&M III. Something like Brother Alpha who sends you to meet Brother Beta who sends you to meet Brother Gamma... very lazy writing. The world exploration and dungeon crawling looked fun though.

Originally posted by UncleYar:

Like, they all look like the inside of a dungeon :P ?

I mean, yeah, fair. And I'm hardly one to say anything overly negative about it, its just my opinion, but at least in Grimrock and 2 it did have some variety between the levels. I haven't played much of the older Wizardrys yet, but also at least then there was the excuse of it was more efficient, and even then, its all the same series, and the graphics were a bit limited

Would I say Might and Magic aged well? They're very clearly old and very much need help to run (DOSBox (prepackaged with games on GoG so no hassle) for 1-5, 6+ can run natively, but might need a third party patch to run well), so not really. And I think for their time they were probably a lot more innovative than they are now. Not just graphically but the quality of writing in games, I feel like is set to a lot higher of a standard these days, so for its time, it was hitting the mark, but these days, doesn't quite hit it anymore. But do I think they're worth playing? Yeah, I do, while it might not seem as much of a hallmark as it was in its day, as I said before, there are things that Might and Magic does that just don't happen anymore in games. For example, most Gridders now are very clearly inspired by Wizardry, but you don't see ones that let you travel the towns, or even the word map, through anything other than menus, as well as the (somewhat emergent) story being still fairly unique in its own right.
At the very least 4-7 maybe are the real stand outs. I think 4+5 are the peak gridders, though 6 (now a blobber) will always be one of my favourites (probably nostalgia, though), and there's nothing stopping you from starting with whatever game you want, 4 and 5 are the only ones that actually interconnect with each other and even then, it doesn't actually matter which one you start with, you can even jump back and forth between them, as I recall.

I mean, yeah, fair. And I'm hardly one to say anything overly negative about it, its just my opinion, but at least in Grimrock and 2 it did have some variety between the levels. I haven't played much of the older Wizardrys yet, but also at least then there was the excuse of it was more efficient, and even then, its all the same series, and the graphics were a bit limited

It's true that visual variety can help a game a lot. That's one of the reasons I like Lands of Lore so much because the artistic direction is spot on and the art has aged pretty well. It definitely elevates the game.
On the other hand, take a gorgeous game like Vaporum and its sequel but put bad RPG mechanics in it - namely, very slowly regenerating resources with no downside for sitting around for minutes waiting for the bar to fill - and you'll end up with a game I don't want to play despite the looks.

I think 4+5 are the peak gridders

World of Xeen has such a reputation that's I'll have to give it a serious go at some point. It still has the Heroes of Might and Magic 1-era whimsical art too, IIRC. which I really like.

BTW if you're looking for a Might&Magic-like, this seems to draw a lot of inspiration from M&M, same style of overworld exploration it seems. Haven't tried it yet: https://store.steampowered.com/app/873890/Legends_of_Amberland_The_Forgotten_Crown/

A little late audition: The Quest was absolutely brilliant. i very much enjoyed that. Also Wizardry: Labyrinth of Lost Souls was great, i played The Five Ordeals a bit but that one is really really tough. Strangers of Sword City and Labyrinth of Refrain are also good dungeon crawlers but a little too asian for my taste.

Mordor: The Depths of Dejenol for a straight up hack and slash dungeon crawler

Needs a bit of effort to get it running these days - either DOSBox with a Windows 3.1 install, but easier using a VM with Windows 2000 or XP 32-bit