The story is a paint-by-numbers affair that starts with the player's character – unrecognised as the Avatar of Virtue – being locked into the Stygian Abyss to prove his or her innocence by rescuing the Baron's daughter. The titular Stygian Abyss is only eight levels deep, but the sprawling, detailed levels traversed at methodical pace represent hours of play each.

For me, the real story is the environment and the dialogues about the history of the Stygian Abyss – a noble attempt to build a peaceful utopia turned into a hellish nightmare of bickering, isolated factions scraping a minimal survival. Throughout the dungeon are the remains of past battles and events. Combined with the stories of the denizens and scrawled notes, the player's own imagination builds a history and a new story with the player's character as interloper.

There's something about this claustrophobic environment that remains compelling even today. The confines of the dungeon and the limited resources within define the player's entire world. The details are important: the quality and ownership of equipment, the freshness of the food, the composition of the floor, the apparent flaws in the wall texture indicating a secret passage, the apparent mood of the creature down the hall, and much more. Like the core Ultima games of the era, the interactivity with the world was far beyond that of most RPGs before and even since.

No shops or merchants exist within the depths of this dungeon. There are several creatures inclined to trade, but within the Abyss the barter system rules. The creature type, disposition, and hints about their preferences dictate the value of trades, not an arbitrary gold-piece value. Not only does this make sense and feed the narrative, but it also makes the other characters more interesting. Simple as it was, their likes and dislikes impacted the player's world.