By my calculations, roughly 9 billion Dungeons & Dragons video games exist, and about 12 of them have any sort of notoriety. We all love most of the Baldur's Gate games and BioWare's Neverwinter Nights, and plenty of folks fondly remember Icewind Dale and Planescape: Torment, but those titles are just a drop in the D&D bucket. What about all the masterpieces forgotten by time?
To be honest, Dungeons & Dragons games don't have a fantastic track record beyond the big names. For instance, I have a soft spot for Demon Stone on the PS2, but I'm not going to pretend it is anything better than "kind of fine." To find the true gems, we have to look back at both D&D and the gaming industry's formative years. In their time, these DnD games were top of the line, and some are still glorious today.
These games don't all hold up amazingly, but they shone during their initial runs.
Although far from the franchise's first foray into the medium, 1988's Pool of Radiance was the first great D&D game, followed by three solid sequels that combined to create one of the more ambitious projects of their generation. At any point in gaming, using your character across multiple games is a rare triumph, which is why so many people grew attached to their version of Commander Shepard in Mass Effect. Between 1988 and 1991, SSI pulled off something even more ambitious: a continuous, four-game campaign that let players transfer an entire six-character party.
While you would end up with overpowered characters who steamroll the next chapter's early levels, this process' execution was done pretty darn well, and it's still an achievement all these decades later. The games themselves are pretty great as well, with Pool of Radiance combining ideas from dungeon crawlers and turn-based RPGs to find a steady middle ground. The series adapted the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rules accurately, and the writing hit impressive highs in Curse of the Azure Bonds and Pools of Darkness.
If you want to give these a go, play them through the Gold Box Companion, which adds QOL improvements that are a must nowadays. If you only want to try one entry, Curse of the Azure Bonds is the best in the series. That said, you really need to have a lot of patience for these games, and they don't hold up by any modern metric. They are historically important but hard to recommend today.
In 2001, Stormfront Studios revived Pool of Radiance with Ruins of Myth Drannor. For good reason, we never got another game.
Roughly around the same time as SSI was creating turn-based magic with Pool of Radiance, Westwood Studios sought to do the same for action RPGs with Eye of the Beholder. Unlike the quadrilogy, this trilogy doesn't hold up as a whole, with the first entry feeling like a tech demo and Eye of the Beholder 3 being enough of a dumpster fire to effectively kill the series, except for a GBA remake. Sitting right in the middle, Eye of the Beholder 2 hit just the right sweet spot, delivering a fun AD&D take on the first-person dungeon crawler formula popularized by Dungeon Master.Although it became outdated within a couple of years, EOTB2 was pretty original for its genre, offering more diverse settings with complex routes than most primitive dungeon crawlers set in caverns that descend forever. You create a party of six (or less if you are up for danger), and you need to take into account their abilities and weapons when deciding who to place in the front or back rows. Although the combat is quite basic, Darkmoon does a good job of making enemies feel unique; for instance, a skeleton and a medusa require different tactics.
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