Madō Monogatari I: 3tsu no Madoukyuu

Madou Monogatari I is a pretty competent dungeon crawler romp that doesn't take a whole lot of your time if you're interested in exploring the foundations of what would eventually become the Puyo Puyo puzzle game series.

In this entry you are Arle Nadja, a 6 year old mage-in-training who, as their requirement for graduating, must venture inside a tower composed of 14 floors and find the 3 magic orbs within and successfully escape. Sounds easy enough, though of course it's somewhat more complex than it sounds.

The big gimmick in these games is that despite being an RPG with turn based combat where you watch numerical stats go up and down, well, all of that is obscured from your reference. Money-on-hand is the only thing given to you, and everything else you must gather from context clues. You never know how much HP you exactly have, so you must watch Arle's portrait for her to start frowning or for her to complain that she can't keep going before trying to heal her. You won't know you're running out of magic other than the game telling you that you should start rationing your more powerful spells after using them. You don't actually know your experience level, and the only way you even know you're getting experience points is to watch a ribbon in the boundaries of the screen lighten until the whole thing gets filled. Stuff like that and audio cues with the background music changing to signify being poisoned or possessed by a ghost is about all you get.

Surprisingly this obfuscation of game mechanics isn't that annoying in practice and is actually fairly neat, though it helps that the game for the most part is easy combat wise since you mostly end up just spamming the 3 basic attack spells at every drunk tanuki or purple Puyo in your way. However, you do have to deal with some of the obtuse puzzle designs that plague games from this era—the biggest one I got stuck on was being led to look for a dead end to progress when the answer was literally from where you started on that information. There's a few item based puzzles too that aren't telegraphed to you well, but generally they're few and far between it isn't that much of a big deal other than being a little annoying that items don't tell you what they do until you physically try to use them.

I think this one's an easy recommendation if you enjoy these kinds of CRPG dungeon crawlers like Eye of the Beholder and such. It's not a big time commitment (I believe it took me roughly 8-ish hours for a complete playthrough), so I think its slightly esoteric faults can be forgiven since in general it is a decent, silly little romp with colorful monsters and characters that doesn't take itself too seriously.