Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord on Steam - User reviews, Price & Information
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Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord is a full 3D remake of the first game in the legendary Wizardry series of RPGs.
Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord is a dungeon crawler, crpg and party-based rpg game
developed and published by Digital Eclipse.
Released on May 23rd 2024 is available only on Windows
in 6 languages: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish - Spain and Japanese.
It has received 909 reviews of which 722 were positive and 187 were negative resulting in a rating of 7.6 out of 10. 😊
The game is currently priced at 33.99€ on Steam, but you can find it for 15.30€ on Instant Gaming.
The Steam community has classified Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord into these genres:
Media & Screenshots
Get an in-depth look at Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord through various videos and screenshots.
System requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10
- Processor: AMD Ryzen 7 3750H
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: AMD Radeon RX Vega 10 GPU
- Storage: 2 GB available space
User reviews & Ratings
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
This is not a game for everyone. It's a game from the 1980's even with a new coat of paint and a few balancing and QOL features, but it's still a tough, unforgiving dungeon crawler that is as much about preparation and patience as it is about learning to roll with the punches when the dice form a middle finger in your face. Despite all of this, I found this game very gripping and captivating. Every victory felt earned and you start feeling attached to your guys whom have no given personality. The graphics feel like it's an updated old school game like the Sega AGES games back in the day and the atmosphere can be tense. It's a game that I, once I got over the frustrations and accepted that I usually should keep a party of people that you can send to carry your bones for revival out, made even easier by the recruitment system, could really be enthralled by. Really I feel money is the issue in this game where the most issues are. You either have barely a coin to spare or you are flushed with gold to the point where it feels meaningless. I found the game super engaging and captivating. If you wanna see what was one of the three great progenitors of Roleplaying video games and a piece of important video game history, I would say this game is worth experiencing! Just don't try to 100% achievements, those 40 hours of searching every enemy to complete the bestiary were carried by my lizard brain liking the sight of levels going up. ... So when is the Knight of Diamonds scenario coming out?
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Thanks to the optional quality of life features I can finally play Wizardry 1 with two kids and a full-time job, without save scumming, or going insane, or rage quitting and deleting the entire thing.
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Well after a couple of months sitting on this waiting to buy it. I finally delved in. I have been playing Dark and Darker, Dungeonborne, Dungeon Stalker (betas), Dungeons of Sundaria, AND Legends of Grimrock (along with some fun mobile titles similar to this) and found that I really needed to dive into the OG. So glad I did. All of the others are fun, but this was the OG. You still get that feeling of playing the original without suffering through a very outdated UX (I grew up on that stuff). I like the fact that just does what it sets out to do, be a dungeon crawler. No real story to speak of, no NPCs to distract you from your glorious destiny, just monsters to slay and treasure to be found. The controller interface is quite competent so feel free to grab that xbox controller. M/KB works as expected, so if that is your method of choice you are good to go. Visually I like how it isn't really all that demanding. It feels like they took the old SNES version and magically uprezzed the visuals to 9000. I also like that this game is not at all taxing. No worries about your hardware, just sit down and play. And besides, you really don't have a lot of options for visuals anyway. That is fine though. You don't need Ray Tracing in a dungeon...there are no rays of sunlight to worry about. It also isn't a dark game in the sense of visibility. Encounters are random, so you won't be seeing them come along, and that is fine. In the end, after playing this you can see the evolution of the genre and how it was adapted into the variety of jRPGs over the last 40 years. You can also feel that sense of old D&D in this game. Which incidentally helped inspire the cRPG titles of D&D such as the Forgotten Realms Eye of the Beholder titles (which also made their appearance on 16bit consoles in the 90s). Mapping is still dated, but not confusing to use. The game has a certain charm to it requiring a proper grid sheet notebook to make your maps. My ONLY complaint is the 35+ dollar price tag. You can get similar titles that are a tad more modern, but offer the exact same experience for half the price. Riding on the Wizardry title and it's nostalgia did make the cost of entry a little bittersweet (Yes, I got it at full price). I would personally say the game feels more akin to a 20 to 25 dollar price range. If you want to wait for a sale, then that would be the best route.
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Recommend this game to JRPG fans and those that don't mind the harsh treatment this game can dish out (Instant death moves, harsh trail and error as well as permanent xp draining to name a few). The remake and its "modernization" by its inclusion of additional features is well done. I don't think I would've enjoyed the game as much as I have without these quality of life changes from the original. However any gameplay affect can be toggled on or off as the player wishes. So if you want a pure orginal replay of this game you can do that. I haven't defeated the final floor. Mainly because I'm trying to obtain best in slot equipment for the party. Tips and tricks from the orginal work. I will say quiting to the title screen and relaunching a saved file will reset any door encounters. Which is usually faster than leaving the floor and coming back to it. ( such as with the fire dragon on floor 7 ) my main party is lv 15-17 at this time and the backup party is lv 9-10. The sound track is the best addition to the game. I throughly enjoyed the bestiary, lore info as well as the loot table. Here's hoping this studio does well into the future. Thank you for making this game.
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Wizardry is an old game, with very different design sensibilities to current CRPGs, but nearly all of them owe it a huge debt. It wasn't the first CRPG, but it might well be the first multi-character CRPG. What follows is my experience from extensive play of this version. I've been down to level 7 of the ten-level dungeon, and have have successes and setbacks. I've enjoyed it greatly. I don't know if everyone would like it, but that was also true of Proving Grounds when it was new. To a certain type of player, this game is like gold. Characters will die, and reviving them is costly. The process may fail and they'll turn to ash, and reviving them from that is even more costly. And even that may fail, in which case the character is gone forever. But: you can always create new characters and train them up, and the further in the game you go, the faster that training can go, because you'll have other high-level characters to support the newcomer. This edition contains many aids to help you survive in the treacherous mazes. If you don't care about playing by exactly the same rules as the original, you are advised to leave them on, all of them except two. The option to regularize the points characters receive on creation is actually _bad_, because it removes the possibility of getting a great bonus point roll, which is the only way you can have a character start out as a Samurai! And the option to select stats upon gaining an experience level* limits growth to a maximum of 3 -- although, it also greatly reduces the chances of losing points on gaining a level. * The classic term is to "gain a level," not to "level up." The latter is engrish that crept its way from Japanese translations (probably of Final Fantasy titles) back into English. Language evolves, sure, but I always found the term "level up" not to be to my taste. The best of the added options is the automap feature, which replicates the confusion by the maze's tricks, teleporters and spinners. If you explore and you notice that your automap is overwriting parts of the map you've already seen, then imediately stop and cast the location spell DUMAPIC! It'll correct your map. (There is a bug in the current version of the game regarding DUMAPIC, BTW, that causes its map to be incomplete and difficult to update. I hope they fix it.) (EDIT: I figured out that DUMAPIC isn't actually bugged, but only maps out squares you've stepped in, not seen.) One thing that will certainly happen to you eventually is you'll suffer a party wipe. If that occurs, if you have all the old-school settings completely enabled, it's important to get a new party down to rescue them as soon as possible, as characters left dead in the maze will have stuff stolen and may even get eaten by monsters! For this reason it's often a good idea to train up two complete parties, and to switch between them. Fortunately, up to level 5 or so, characters gain levels rapidly even on the first level of the dungeon. To rescue your deceased party, you'll have to take a group there with one or more characters slots empty. _The game doesn't tell you where your groups is_! If you don't remember their exact location, there is a spell you learn later that can help track them down. When you're standing on the spot the deceased characters are, enter the Camp menu and at the top off the screen you'll be told if there are characters in that spot, and you can then choose to transfer them into your party's empty spaces. You'll probably have to make multiple trips. A curious thing about the first Wizardry is, most of the maze is actually fairly empty. There are some key items on the first and second floors you'll need. There's one essential item on level 4. Other than that, most of the mazes seem to be just terrain to encounter random monsters in. A speedrun could get the essential items and then maybe rush to beat Werdna, although I expect without careful preparation they'd get slaughtered on the way there. Anyway, in short: they don't make them like this any more. In fact, they've never made them like this, ever. There are still some things, notably the TTRPG-like permadath, the way to reclaim parties, and a couple of other design choices that even the other Wizadry-likes from the time, like The Bard's Tale trilogy and early Might & Magics, decided not to adopt. I've had a huge amount of fun with it, and I recommend it for people looking for a challenge.
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Last Updates| Steam data | 08 April 2025 22:17 |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 13 April 2025 10:19 |
| Steam price | 15 April 2025 04:18 |
| Steam reviews | 15 April 2025 03:46 |
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Online players
72
Developer
Digital Eclipse
Publisher
Digital Eclipse
Release
23 May 2024
Platforms
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