Shining in the Darkness GENESIS

Shining in the Darkness is Climax Entertainment’s 1991 first-person dungeon crawler for the Genesis, published by Sega in Japan in March and North America that October. It was the debut project for both Climax and the internal Sega team later known as Camelot Software Planning, tasking players with descending through a labyrinth to rescue a kidnapped princess and defeat the demon lord Dark Sol.

Its grid-based, first-person dungeon navigation and turn-based party combat drew heavily from Western RPGs like Wizardry, filtered through detailed anime-style character and enemy art more typical of Japanese console RPGs. As the first entry in Sega’s long-running Shining series — which later shifted toward tactical RPGs with Shining Force — it set the template for the series’ name and dark-fantasy tone even though its own gameplay format wasn’t carried forward by most sequels.