*The Secret of Weepstone *is a very promising dungeon crawler due out next year, with a demo currently on Steam. What makes it so exciting is the way that it hearkens back to early D&D, both in its very striking visual style and in its gameplay. To explain what I mean, I first need to talk a little about *D&D *itself.

*Dungeons & Dragons *has evolved tremendously over the five decades since its inception. I enjoy *D&D *in its current form, whether I’m playing it in my biweekly tabletop game with friends or in Baldur’s Gate 3, but it’s a very different beast from the *D&D *of old. Current *D&D *leans into what we might call a superhero-adjacent fantasy; player characters aren’t invincible but they are quite powerful, even early on, with a slew of class-based abilities that feel like something out of a video game, and combat encounters tend to be balanced for player survivability and success.

But my early encounters with D&D, which took place decades ago in the era of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, were quite different. Setting out with freshly made 1st-level characters on an adventure, my friends and I knew that we were all very squishy. Charging headlong into battle was often not the right approach, for even an unassuming low-level kobold could spell doom for one of us, if he rolled well and we didn’t. It was a game of relentless danger, one that encouraged caution, and one in which player characters died, a lot. And unlike the game of today in which there’s a whole process of death saving throws to potentially keep you alive should you reach zero health, in the *D&D *of old, when you hit zero hit points, you were dead.

There’s something refreshingly direct about that, and about all the danger that permeated early D&D. I’m not saying it’s inherently better or worse than mainstream, official *D&D *as we know it today, but it does encourage a fundamentally different style of play, and the really memorable moments that emerge from your time at the table are less likely to involve a fellow player pulling off some incredibly badass move to crush a powerful foe and are more likely to be about escaping a dangerous situation by the skin of your teeth.

©DreadXP

*The Secret of Weepstone leans into that old-school sense of danger, and based on my time with the roughly hour-long demo (during which three of my party members died), it’s definitely worth keeping an eye on in advance of its planned release next year. Weepstone *has you moving your party around a dungeon in first person, examining objects, solving puzzles, finding new items, and sometimes engaging in combat. The game is very upfront about the fact that all of this is supposed to be a tabletop session; in a great little detail, you even see the old-fashioned printed module your dungeon master is running whenever you pull up your map.

And nowhere is this old-school sensibility more obvious than in the game’s wonderful black-and-white art, which evokes the images we’d so often see in those early *D&D *modules. The hand-drawn images that filled their pages fired the imaginations of millions of *D&D *players in the 1970s and ’80s, cultivating a sense of mystery and dread about what could be lurking in whatever dangerous tomb or tower into which we were recklessly venturing. *The Secret of Weepstone *made me feel that way again, always on edge about what deadly trap or fearsome foe could be waiting in the next chamber or around the next corner. Somehow the art’s black-and-white approach, so familiar to me from those old *D&D *modules, was enough in and of itself to make everything feel more dangerous.

And that feeling was only reinforced by the fact that combat in this game is indeed very deadly! When you encounter enemies, turn-based combat begins, and every die roll takes place visibly in the environment, both your own and those of your DM. At least in this early going, even a hit of 3 or 4 points of damage is very significant indeed, and as I mentioned earlier, many of my party members died over the course of my one hour with the demo. You may think that sounds frustrating, but I loved it. It never felt needlessly brutal or unfair; instead, it was just different from what most modern-day RPGs train us to expect. I also gained a party member while exploring the dungeon, and I suspect the full game will have additional interesting ways to help you keep going without sacrificing that wonderful feeling of vulnerability the combat creates.

©DreadXP

In recent years, there’s been what’s widely referred to as an Old-School Renaissance, or OSR, in fantasy tabletop roleplaying, with new books (like the Old-School Essentials series, a favorite of mine) offering rulesets that recreate the simpler and more dangerous role-playing of early *D&D. *I personally don’t feel a need to choose between what more modern rulesets like *D&D 5e *emphasize and what earlier ones offered, as I think they both have their strengths and support very different kinds of experiences. But I’m thrilled to see a video game really taking the aesthetic and the danger of early *D&D *(and, by extension, the OSR) and running with it. I can’t wait to find what tragedies and horrors are lurking deeper in its dungeons when *The Secret of Weepstone *comes out next year.

You can try the demo for *The Secret of Weepstone *now.