ABYSS: The Shadows of Elder Cities

Wireframe dungeon crawler

ABYSS: The Shadows of Elder Cities is a first-person dungeon crawler for PC, framed as an unreleased game from a Sheffield software house in 1985. Its black-screen wireframe graphics use thin lines in the style of a 48K Spectrum. You explore ancient cities whose towers hum and whose corners meet at wrong angles, while Mi-Go, Elder Things and Shoggoths move through the dark. You can’t fight them directly: you avoid them or release one horror to deal with another.

The Signal campaign

The five-chapter campaign takes you through a different city in each chapter, with long desert walks between them. You switch on old towers, search for orbs and keys, and assemble a device that might help you escape. Each chapter changes the rules. The story has little text, with clues in the buildings and in the gradual realization of where you are.