I remember the Wizardry series was especially punishing in this regard. It would have constructs like hidden teleporters, and in sone cases your “view” looked the same on the other side so it’d be unclear you weren’t where you thought you were
There was an NES port but it was watered down a bit IIRC.
Wizardry I was a pretty standard D&D style dungeon crawl game. 6 chars, your basic classes (fighter, thief, cleric, mage) with a few prestige classes. Wander around the dungeon and occasionally, well, frequently, run into groups of monsters. A few dynamics I remember being particularly pains in the ass:
1) You could not save while in the dungeon, and if you wiped your party was stuck there, dead. You could go rescue them by going to that space and picking them up *BUT* that meant you had to go down there with fewer than 6 people in your party & thus underpowered and you couldn't mix good & evil alignments in a party. So in the early game it was often easier to just reroll new chars, and at the end of the game it could be almost impossible to go fetch them
2) Your characters aged over time, and stats started getting worse. So in a sense you're on a timer.
Wizardry II & III were more of the same IIRC. Wizardry IV was notorious for being the most difficult game ever made at the time. I pointed one of my hardcore gamer coworkers at Wiz IV not too long ago, he's the sort of person that defeats every new game in a microsecond. He gave up after a day and said he couldn't take it.
The ones after that became more like standard CRPGs people might recognize in the 90s + beyond.
