Alundra

The gameplay style is top-down action-adventure, with a heavy emphasis on puzzle solving. A range of terrain and surfaces affect the player character, from sand, which causes the player character to move more slowly, to lava, which damages the player character. Upgrades throughout the game can help the player overcome many of these obstacles, encouraging exploration.

Alundra, the silent protagonist and player character, is an elf from the clan of Elna, the Dreamwalkers. He set out for a place called Inoa because of a recurring dream in which a mysterious figure who calls Alundra "Releaser" tells him that he must save the villagers from the evil of Melzas. The ship carrying Alundra is caught in a storm and is broken in half, leaving most of the crew dead and Alundra drifting unconscious.

Alundra is next seen washed ashore to an unknown beach, where a man named Jess finds and rescues him. Jess carries Alundra to his house at the village of Inoa and lets him sleep in his guest room. In the village, Alundra discovers he is a Dreamwalker, which means he has an ability to enter other peoples' dreams, and helps the villagers get rid of the nightmares that have been possessing them. Since Alundra's arrival, bad things begin to happen in the village, with various villagers being murdered in their dreams, which leaves them dead outside of their dreams as well. Some of the villagers eventually start blaming Alundra for what is happening.

Alundra is considered a spiritual sequel to Climax Entertainment's Landstalker on the Sega Genesis, particularly because several members of the game's programming and design team had worked on Landstalker. Alundra producer Yasuhiro Ohori previously worked on Landstalker, while map designer Kenji Orimo previously worked on the Shining Force series.

The game began development before the PlayStation launched in 1994 and took three years to complete. It originally began development as an action role-playing game. According to Ohori, the team decided there would be "no experience points" but instead "the player accumulates experience" themselves so that by "the end of the game, even someone who sucked at the outset will find they’ve gotten way better at the action."

The game had sold 143,114 copies in Japan by the end of 1997. Following its North American release, Working Designs sold over 100,000 copies of the game in North America within a single month in early 1998.

Alundra was well received by critics upon release. It has a score of 86 out of 100 at Metacritic based on 9 reviews, making it the sixth highest-rated PlayStation title of 1997, and held an 84% at GameRankings based on 13 reviews at the time of the site's closure in 2019. Critics hailed the game for its deep and often maddening challenge, particularly the puzzles. They said that, while the gameplay is derivative of The Legend of Zelda series and Landstalker, it has enough original elements to stand on its own.