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Magic & Mercenaries: Curse of Eternal Darkness is a game currently in development by ProphetSword that aims to emulate the classic Goldbox-style games from SSI that combined dungeon crawling with tactical combat. M&M:CoTD covers similiar ground, you have a 6-character party choosen from 15 classes and a fantasy-themed adventure with dungeons and cities to explore and many monsters to fight.

The creator, ProphetSword, is one of the admins of ua.reonis, the FRUA and Dungeon Craft community forum. If that doesn't mean anything to you, FRUA was and still is a toolkit to create Goldbox-style modules and Dungeon Craft was an attempt to modernize FRUA, but ultimately to also create similiar Goldbox-style modules. So it is no surprise that he eventually went to create his own game in a similiar style. You can see his development thread for his game either there, or on the RPGCodex or RPGWatch, whichever forum you prefer.

So far the game has gone through many iterations and if you follow the game threads you can see some of the steps or dead ends the game has gone through, which I find always fascinating (the above screenshots show the latest status, but below are some in-between ones).

The game offers 15 classes, 5 of which are spellcasters (Priest, Sorcerer, Shaman, Druid and Battlemage) with overall 75 different spells to chose from. Unlike many other games, spells are not affected by range, so even if your fighters move deep into enemy territory, your casters can still heal them from far away. The game does not have different races to chose from, just humans (allthough there are other non-human NPCs in the game), but unlike Goldbox-games it has both perks and skills.

Perks you get to chose every couple of levels and which gives you various bonuses (like most games). Skills are sorted into three categories: weapon, armor and general, and in the words of its developer, have a bigger impact than you usually expect.

Below is a video that's an early engine demo of the game, and while it's not showing the current status of the game, it gives a pretty good overview of what the game tries to do and how it works. I must say I'm really impressed with how far the game has come, from the early screenshots posted in 2018 to the most recent ones. And since I love Goldbox-style games, I'm rather looking forward to this one.