The second and last AD&D game for the Intellivision console, Treasure of Tarmin is a huge step forward in game design after the previous year’s Cloudy Mountain. Five years before the more famous PC Gold Box games, also based on D&D properties, we have the start here of the three-dimensional dungeon crawler played from the player’s point of view. Not being the first of those kinds of games, it is the first AD&D game in that style which would live on in future AD&D games throughout the 80s and early 90s. 

So, your objective here is to kill the minotaur and get the treasure, quite simple as a story goes. However, in order to get there you have not only to find the treasure by navigating the maze which can be as large as over 200 levels in the higher difficulties, but also defeating monsters on the way down. Defeating monsters gives you XP which when you rest and eat can mean your hit points (called War Health) and mana points (Spiritual Health) go up, giving you a better chance at defeating the final boss. Your score is also tied to how much treasure you get, so exploring levels for treasure, better weapons and monsters to kill can be quite rewarding before going down to a more difficult level. 

Although dated to our eyes in 2023, it’s easy to see the appeal of the game in 1983, a POV perspective, a wide variety of monsters and equipment as well as weapons and treasure would have made this one of the most fun video approximations of a dungeon crawl at that time.