Mind-numbing grind-fest dungeon crawl old-school action, for the win!
I understand that these types of games aren't for everyone, but if you love to meta-game and miss the old days where video games explained very little to you, challenging you to genuine puzzle-solving and dealing with obscure rulesets, then you owe it to yourself to track down a copy of this game! (It's only $10 right now, to boot!)
I love the brutal difficulty. I love the minimalist style presentation. I love that I can waste hours on end grinding up my characters to ungodly powers.
It's not without it's flaws, though. When I say the game is brutally difficult, I am not kidding. I get off on that sort of challenge in an RPG game because of the immensely rewarding feeling you get from conquering seemingly unwinnable situations, but I recognize that the casual gamer loathes games that require them to restart over and over because they keep failing. The minimalist presentation, while nostalgic, does make it difficult to orient yourself. I felt lost multiple times just trying to walk down a straight hallway. Lastly, I've never been a fan of rulesets in RPGs where there is character creation and meta-gaming is a must to survive, yet the nitty gritty details aren't explained to you ever. I want to know why my warrior does such and such damage, I want to know his HP range upon level ups, and I want to know how exactly that new gear is going to benefit my guy. Luckily we live in an internet age so there are guides and wiki sites to help explain those things, but I still dislike that it's not listed in the game manual or explained in-game at any given time.
Considering the price tag, I can't give a compelling argument against picking up this title even if just for experimentation's sake. If you love old-school dungeon crawls, you've probably already picked it up. If you want to discover why us western RPG vets are so grizzled and manly, you should definitely buy this title.