Dungeons of Daggorath is a dungeon crawler which has rudimentary magic, character building, and combat elements, like a Wizardry-style RPG, while also using a text parser like a graphic adventure. The top part of the screen is dominated by a first-person view of the dungeon, while the player enters his/her commands at the bottom. Verb recognition includes commands such as MOVE, TURN, USE, ATTACK, STOW, and INCANT. The entire game fit onto an 8K ROM, needing only 16K of RAM to run. It contained 5 levels of dungeon to explore, and more and more powerful monsters the deeper you got (some monsters of the same type get more powerful as well, the deeper you got... for example, the troll starts on level one armed with a club, but on later levels he gets more powerful with an axe). Some of the innovations (for it's time) that made it rank higher than most dungeon crawls were: different levels of torches, that actually changed how far ahead you can see (and wear out, so everything gets dimmer and dimmer); monsters that each generated different sounds, and whose sounds grew louder or fainter as the monsters moved relative to you (even if you couldn't see them behind walls); and the real-time aspect of the heartbeat. If you were getting injured, or running too fast, your heart rate increased, and if you pushed it too far, you would pass out. Of course, while passed out, monsters keep moving and attacking...

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