[Square Enix paid for my flight and hotel room for this trip.]

I haven't played a dungeon crawler since Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance. I loved that game, but tragically my passion for it was too intense.

Dark Alliance launched in the middle of the great PlayStation 2 memory card shortage of the early 2000s. Sony couldn't meet product demand in the U.S. and many console owners were stranded without a way to save their games. In order to see the end of Dark Alliance I had to sit and play through all seven hours in one go.  I so thoroughly burnt out on it and all things dungeon crawler that I let entire franchises pass me by -- including the original Dungeon Siege.

That is, until I took a little trip to the Obsidian offices to play Dungeon Siege 3. The moment I picked up a controller, years of fatigue and frustration melted away under the glow of a gigantic television I was positioned entirely too close to.

It wasn't just radiant heat washing over me. Obsidian has managed to capture something wonderful in their hand-painted animations and glimmering environments. Their dedication to making Dungeon Siege 3 an audio-visual extravaganza reanimated a love I'd buried long ago and left me longing for more than an hour-long demo. I played the PC version using a 360 controller. Keyboard and mouse support wasn't available at the time of the preview.

Obsidian is clearly very proud of this game. Before we were allowed near a demo, we were lead through several discussions targeting the role-playing elements, multiplayer, and artistic aspects of the work. Obsidian's design philosophy is an intensely personal one, and in Dungeon Siege 3 they wanted to showcase their mastery of RPGs in all its various forms.

Dungeon crawlers have a bad habit of relying on backtracking to progress. Accepting quests can send you into the same crypt or monster-infested forest hundreds of times without any real sense of accomplishment.

Quests in DS3 are a multi-step process and often require the player to canvass many areas. But rather than constantly forcing you to move back and forth between locations, quests can be worked through simultaneously so that you can clear one area entirely before moving on to the next. It also helps that each objective comes with a handy checklist that updates each time you complete a task.

The streamlined quest system speaks volumes about the overall design of the game. While a conditioned PC gamer may see all the effort put into ease of use as Obsidian pandering to console players, it's time for everyone to realize that games don't have to be needlessly complex for us to enjoy them.

Everything you want out of a dungeon crawler is here. Enemies drop a fantastic amount of randomly generated loot, the environments are vivid and dangerous, and, slowly but surely, your character transforms into an unstoppable monster-slaughtering machine.

One hour wasn't enough. The call of loot and extravagant battling had me playing through the demo several times and longing for it to be just a little bit longer. Obsidian's dedication to making this game stand apart from other dungeon crawlers gives it a lovable, nostalgic edge. You'll find everything you want out of this genre in a much prettier, better-designed package.