Today’s stop on the Great Game Tour is at 1993’s Dark Sun: Shattered Lands, a turn-based RPG set in the Dark Sun D&D campaign setting. This was one of the titles that led up to a short-lived MMO in the ’90s called Dark Sun Online, but for obvious reasons, I can’t play that. So why not this?

Shattered Lands literally throws you into the deep end from the get-go — your pre-made (or customized) party is tossed without much introduction into some desert gladiator pit.

If you ever lament how hand-holdy tutorials are these days, you should jump into one of these older games that will have expected that you read, memorized, and tested well on the manual before playing. Because going into this, I had no idea what to do as a crowd of monsters started to attack.

It was turn-based, fortunately, but still… no directions. I used the…