I haven’t played a game like Avernum: Escape from the Pit in far too long. I’ve been too caught up in the flashy and fancy blockbuster titles of our generation to pay much attention to the humble isometric RPG – and that’s a damn shame. The days I’ve spent with Avernum have reminded me of a time when story was carried by imagination and “open-world gameplay” truly meant enjoying the feeling of exploring new and unfamiliar land. It may not look like much – as modern games go, its graphical fidelity is modest at best – but its eloquent descriptions and the depth of conversations you can hold with the denizens of the eponymous subterranean country are truly immersive.

While you can fully customise your party of four, giving them different names, classes, genders, and appearances, the story seems to operate on the basis that the player is a single man, cast into exile by the tyrannical Empire on the surface. In Avernum, a vast network of underground caverns to which the Empire keeps a handful of portals for the sake of punishing rebels and traitors, you’re expected to die, either by starvation or by the hands of the feline nephilim that live there – but, in fact, the rebels and traitors have banded together to found an all-new country, with stone forts defending the Avernite populace from the underground dangers.

Let’s get this straight, though: if you’re not up for doing much reading, Avernum might not be the game for you. While you can easily hammer your way through the unvoiced dialogue windows, hitting options at random until none remain, and then work in the direction of the quest markers on your map, the experience is unsatisfying. That’s because Avernum exceeds not in its combat, which, while fun and challenging, is fairly repetitive and formulaic, but in its narrative, which will be completely lost on you should you choose not to read the dialogue prompts that appear when you interact with characters, enter new locations, or observe some oddity.

If you’ve ever played Dungeons & Dragons with a particularly good Dungeon Master, or read through a Fighting Fantasy game-book, you’ll be familiar with the style and detail of the descriptions that occasionally appear. When you first enter a cave to the north-east of the game world, a dialogue box appears, opening with the words: “you are at the mouth of a high-ceilinged cavern, filled with the reek of guano and the loud squeaking of a multitude of bats”. The scene is set. Further in, you awake some new evil: “three fanged, clawed demonic horrors appear in the room, attracted by the desecration of this dark altar”. Thus begins combat.

Rather than entering a battle system like that in Final Fantasy or Pokémon, Avernum takes the traditional option boasted by games like the original Fallout and drops into “combat mode”, during which each character in your party of four takes turns performing actions. Each has eight action points – stepping over one space on the grid-based world takes one action point, certain items use a few, and attacking takes up the remainder. You can’t access the inventory of an inactive character, and once you’ve finished moving, your enemies start their turn, so it’s vital that you plan your strategy accordingly, and don’t block your allies’ paths or put yourself between two foes.

Once there are no remaining hostile enemies on the screen, you can leave combat mode, and continue adventuring as a group. Should one of your party members fall during a fight, they’ll be revived from their “unconsciousness” by passing through the gates of any friendly town, and your merely injured companions will return to full health after taking just a few steps in the overworld. The overworld is essentially how you travel between locations in Avernum; towns are represented as relatively small stone structures, and when entered, you move to their full-size representation, another trope of the genre.

If anything, Avernum proves that this style of gameplay still has a place in this generation’s games industry. It provides a compelling narrative without falling back on long CGI cutscenes and incessant, inputless dialogue; instead, it devolves the visual interpretation of the world to the player, almost in the same way as a book. This might mean that players with shorter attention spans might be less inclined to enjoyed the game, I concede – but for those who have no qualms with long chunks of text and often find themselves engrossed in fantasy fiction, Avernum might be the best bang for their buck on its Windows launch on April 11th.