Eerily Evocative Adventure/RPG Hybrid

In Daemonica, you take the role of Nicholas Fayrepoint, a sort of demon hunter-cum-private eye in a small town in a fantasy world that's subject to a curse. Your job, naturally, is to figure out what's going wrong, and set things right.

The game is in essence built as 3D RPG, with a simple point-and-click combat system, inventory, character advancement, and the like; but the gameplay is much more like a classic graphic adventure, with puzzles to be solved and characters from whom you must extract information. This is something of a happy hybrid, more free-form than a classic click-and-combine adventure but with much of the same feel--but those looking for the combat intensity of a Diablo are better off looking elsewhere.

Out-Compete Those Other Heroes

At first glance, Depths of Peril is a Diablo-esque RPG. You control a single character of the usual range of classes (warrior, mage, cleric, rogue); you go out on quests to surrounding areas, slaying lots of monsters, earning XP and money that you can use to improve stats and equipment. Combat is fast, Diablo rather than Final Fantasy, and there's the same huge range of variety in equipment and magic items.

But -- layered atop this are AI opponents that remind us of the opponents in Railroad Tycoon. You control a "covenant," which consists of you and up to 5 other characters you recruit (and incidentally, you can take one along with you when you go adventuring, which is extremely useful). Each of the other covenants -- up to 5 of them -- is busy adventuring and building up their own heroes' stats and equipment while you are.

The Best Puzzle Game of All Time

Or so says the Mathematics Association of America, and who are we to disagree?

To call it a puzzle game is inadequate, however; the DROD (Deadly Rooms of Death) games are sui generis, and about the only quick way to describe them is as "Gauntlet meets Sokoban."

Caravel Games describes the DROD (Deadly Rooms of Death) series as "dungeon crawls for thinkers," and that's what they are--an oddly compelling combination of puzzle solving and the dungeon experience.