Game was impossible.
Wizardry I was a pretty standard D&D style dungeon crawl game. 6 chars, your basic classes (fighter, thief, cleric, mage) with a few prestige classes. Wander around the dungeon and occasionally, well, frequently, run into groups of monsters. A few dynamics I remember being particularly pains in the ass:
1) You could not save while in the dungeon, and if you wiped your party was stuck there, dead. You could go rescue them by going to that space and picking them up *BUT* that meant you had to go down there with fewer than 6 people in your party & thus underpowered and you couldn't mix good & evil alignments in a party. So in the early game it was often easier to just reroll new chars, and at the end of the game it could be almost impossible to go fetch them
2) Your characters aged over time, and stats started getting worse. So in a sense you're on a timer.
Wizardry II & III were more of the same IIRC. Wizardry IV was notorious for being the most difficult game ever made at the time. I pointed one of my hardcore gamer coworkers at Wiz IV not too long ago, he's the sort of person that defeats every new game in a microsecond. He gave up after a day and said he couldn't take it.
The ones after that became more like standard CRPGs people might recognize in the 90s + beyond.
I found my mention as well, "Legacy of the Wizard" on NES.
The better way to map Zork is to treat it like a non-planar graph and use graph paper to build an adjacency matrix [1]. Since Z-machine is a bytecode VM that often ran on 8-bit computers it's a pretty safe assumption that the game likely has 256 or fewer vertices in the graph. So if you give every area you visit a 2-digit hex ID you can make the matrix small enough to be manageable.
I love that the Etrian Odyssey games make mapping a centerpiece. I don’t see modern gamers going for graph paper ever again but having a map maker included really helps experience a bygone era.
It's sad—if I were to attempt to play one of those today, I would give up immediately rather than deal with the insanely slow loading and glacially-paced gameplay. But at the time, I think the slowness contributed to the immersion. There was more than enough time to reflect and, well, map. It burned those experiences deep into my memory. Alternate Reality in particular was painfully, painfully slow on my computer, which was enormously frustrating at the time, and yet even though it was barely a game (you mostly wandered around exploring and getting annoyed at unimplemented buildings, with the occasional high-stakes combat) it is one of the more memorable experiences of my ill-spent youth.
In high school (~1985/86) a friend and his brothers mapped the Ultima IV world by commandeering the family ping pong table covering it with several sheets of graph paper.
It was a glorious map.