Quest for Glory: So You Want to Be a Hero

The beginning of Corey and Lori Ann Cole's idiosyncratic experiment in grafting an RPG system and multiple paths onto the usual Sierra adventure style. It works surprisingly well, and has its own sort of charm (though I hope you like puns).

I love these Sierra text adventures, point and click took the magic out of telling your character to fuck everything.

Although I struggled mightily to beat them without a guide, these old Sierra games just sucked me the hell in as a kid. This one in particular I must have put 200 hours into, as fighter mage and thief alike, wandering the forest fighting monsters and leveling up skills and trying to figure out wtf to do next.

It's hard to describe how much joy this pioneering crossover adventure-RPG brought to 11-year-old me (and for years to come), even though it only had so many "screens" over its several floppy disks rather than the vast open worlds of later RPGs, or the winding tile-based dungeon-crawls of its contemporaries.