Direct Site (Windows) | Direct Site (Macintosh)
While I mainly grew up with Exile III on a collection of shareware discs, there's something enchanting even today about how much Spiderweb Software was capable of doing within fairly heavy constraints - and on a homebrew engine, no less! Exile is the story of a group of people who have been cast down into a vast cave system due to an unjust system aboveground, and so must find a way to escape! While Avernum: Escape from the Pit is a more robust and cleaned-up version of the same story found here, but is missing some of the trademark CRPG toughness that characterized a lot of this era of gaming - you had to ask certain keywords to progress dialogue with NPCs, you have the potential for starvation to cause damage on top of regular battle damage, et cetera. Definitely something worth scoping out!
; Austria (Florian Helmberger) 
; Denmark (Jens Nielsen and Henrik Rathje) 
; Rendsburg, Germany (Denis and Thomas Möller) 
; Konstanz, Germany (Andy Badorek) 
; Enschende, Netherlands (Michael Rutting) 
; New Zealand (Alden Bates) 
; Unites States (Eric Sargent) ; Colorado, USA (Tom "ParadoX" Mustaine) 
; Florida, USA (William Sullivan) 
; Mississippi, USA (Mark Klem) 
; New Jersey, USA (Eric Reuter) 
; Virginia, USA (Mackey 'Avatar' McCandlish) 
; Surrey, England (Dario and Milo Casali) 
| Doom II MegaWAD 
What we have here is a veritable who's who of the need-to-know names in the Doom WAD community in the mid 90s - Dario and Milo Casali, Tom Mustaine, Mark Klem, and assembled by Denis and Thomas Möller of The Innocent Crew. Aside from being a lot of fun, it's also a rare look into just what high-end WAD design looked like a year after WADs became a common part of the Doom community's ecosystem. Lots of obscure switch puzzles, evil traps, and enemy layouts that demand the players think before acting. A great example is at the start of MAP01: you have a squad of Sergeants with their backs to you, but you only have your starter pistol to work with, and the way out is directly in their field of view. Do you rush past and hope you can find a shotgun or other weapon to deal with them properly, or do you open fire and see about getting health later down the road? The WAD is full of many such little logic puzzles like this one that put it a cut above the traditional 'get key, open monster closet' design that is more common in general. In addition to this is the inclusion of level design meant to support co-op play, a design decision that makes certain level design choices confusing but is a refreshing change of pace in 2025.