Wasteland

Of the tiresome and ill-advised RPGs of the 1980s, Wasteland is the only one I would call a masterpiece and a true epic in every definition of the word.

If you know the premise of Fallout you know what to expect, but Wasteland, even with its open-ended setting, brings such vibrancy and life with powerful decisions and deep consequences that makes you feel as one with the world and not powerless to defeat it. You initially play a canon party of four desert rangers(though you can make your own characters with their own DnD stats and skills) who are specialised in various ways of survival in southwestern USA in the 2050s after a nuclear apocalypse. Your task is to safe-patrol the surrounding cities while eventually uncovering a deeper plot of a secret military base taken over by an AI that plans to exterminate humans and usher a society of cyborgs. There are no classes, you only use what your characters are talented at, and that describes their personality: Some of your characters(or recruitable NPCs) are way better fighting with their bare fists or melee weapons. Some are better at pistols than assault rifles. Some have great dexterity skills like silent moving but are sucky at intelligence skills like medic. In this game it is very important how you start and how you organise all your characters to meet certain roles, but if you continuously stick to your plan, your long-term investments will pay off greatly.

Wasteland has a beautiful sense of storyline, direction, genre-switching(there's a fairly huge number of creative puzzles to get by which are not too hard to figure out), and a grindless, fair d20-based gameplay that is fresh and compatible even today. If you are dutiful in visiting the locations by sequence you will never encounter a too harsh difficulty spike, and the game is very forgiving and diverse in its ways to beat it for it's hard to get yourself stuck in here or feel cheated due to ignorant acts. The paragraph book and descriptions on every corner bring a lot of flavour to the world which you can interpret as a grand Final Fantasy-esque adventure, where you pick a team of ragtag misfits and go save people from some incredible evil, although the game does not force you to follow through any side of the moral compass. Very big recommendation if you want to smash preconceptions and stereotypes about the datedness of 80s RPGs. Although it was released for the Apple 2 initially, the DOS version is the best and the definitive one, which I recommend playing, and the Steam version even has a soundtrack following it.