Shining in the Darkness was developed by Sega and Climax, released for the Genesis in 1991 as Sega’s first entry in what would become the long-running Shining series, built as a first-person dungeon crawler in the tradition of Wizardry and The Bard’s Tale. Players create and control a small party exploring a labyrinth beneath the kingdom of Thornwood to rescue a captured princess and stop the sorcerer responsible, navigating grid-based dungeons rendered in first-person while battling monsters in turn-based combat. Its dungeon design leaned into genuinely disorienting maze layouts, teleporters, and trap tiles that demanded careful mapping, a level of old-school rigor that set it apart from more forgiving console RPGs of the era. Praised at the time for bringing a PC-style dungeon crawler experience to a console audience with solid production values, it established a foundation the Shining series would build on with later, more action- and tactics-oriented spin-offs.