3 ms·

We're in a new golden age of traditional roguelikes right now. Here are a few of my other favorites: Brogue: Community Edition - A modern spiritual sequel to t

We're in a new golden age of traditional roguelikes right now. Here are a few of my other favorites: Brogue: Community Edition - A modern spiritual sequel to the original Rogue. Very tightly wound; every item and monster has their own niche. Excellent UI, and a striking ASCII-style with light and shadows. Golden Krone Hotel - The best roguelike for folks to to the genre, imho. A good interface and lots of intelligent streamlining of the genre. Transform between human and vampire repeatedly as you manage blood and seek (or avoid) sunlight. Cogmind - A robotic crawl through a living mechanical dungeon. Big focuses on trying not to attract too much attention and equipping parts you've blown off enemies. Caves of Qud - Weaponized sci-fi weirdness. Open world. Reputation and culture systems for every species. Potions that can grant intelligence to anything. There is an achievement for wearing your own severed face.

tmountain 5y ago
Caves of Qud is amazingly fun, and I've spent far more time with it than I ever planned to. +1
exo-pla-net 5y ago
I've played most of these, but my favorite remains Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. It's actively developed with a dedicated community, and you can even play online, where a peanut gallery will often appear if you make it deep into the dungeon.
- philsnow 5y ago
  I've been impressed by DCSS's dev team's ability and willingness to make unpopular decisions and make radical changes to the game. They seem to be principled in their decision-making. I read somewhere that, since I stopped playing, they removed the food mechanic! To my own surprise, even though food clocks are a very archetypal roguelike mechanic, I agree with that removal. I haven't really played it since maybe 2012, but at that time dealing with food was mostly a chore, hardly ever a problem, and you were set for life after you went through the hive and picked up scads of royal jelly. This is not to say that I don't like food clocks; I think Brogue's is an excellent example of a well-tuned food clock. Brogue has item vaults where you have to pick one out of 4-8 items, and you don't know what's going to be lying around on the ground over the next few levels, so you have to take a risk and pick what you think is best. I used to keep careful notes about what else was in each vault so that I could backtrack if I found a duplicate of what I picked up in a vault, until I noticed that I was dying to the food clock a lot. This is not to say that I enjoy my characters starving, but Brogue's design pays particular attention to trying to never make you bored / making nearly every keystroke meaningful (whereas vanilla nethack can be mind-numbing).
  - kibwen 5y ago
    I feel like I see nothing but endless moaning about the development of DCSS in places like the subreddit, but I really appreciate that the devs try different things, sometimes radically so. After all, the old versions of the game are all still available to play if you don't like a given change, and the server operators (many of whom are code contributors) go out of their way to make sure that you can play even ancient versions online (it looks like CAO hosts every release since 2012), so nobody is forced to update if they don't want to. And as expected there's a healthy variety of DCSS forks, which IMO is OSS working as intended.
1_player 5y ago
I would also add Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, a massive survival roguelike set after a zombie apocalypse with a healthy dose of Lovecraft. Actively developed, huge community, and a ton of features, from crafting, farming to implanting bionics on your body and building vehicles from scratch and driving them. Probably the only game out there that lets you go from escaping a burning building in a bathrobe to running over zombies in your custom Mad Max style electric RV.

tmountain 5y ago

Caves of Qud is amazingly fun, and I've spent far more time with it than I ever planned to. +1

exo-pla-net 5y ago

I've played most of these, but my favorite remains Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. It's actively developed with a dedicated community, and you can even play online, where a peanut gallery will often appear if you make it deep into the dungeon.

philsnow 5y ago
I've been impressed by DCSS's dev team's ability and willingness to make unpopular decisions and make radical changes to the game. They seem to be principled in their decision-making. I read somewhere that, since I stopped playing, they removed the food mechanic! To my own surprise, even though food clocks are a very archetypal roguelike mechanic, I agree with that removal. I haven't really played it since maybe 2012, but at that time dealing with food was mostly a chore, hardly ever a problem, and you were set for life after you went through the hive and picked up scads of royal jelly. This is not to say that I don't like food clocks; I think Brogue's is an excellent example of a well-tuned food clock. Brogue has item vaults where you have to pick one out of 4-8 items, and you don't know what's going to be lying around on the ground over the next few levels, so you have to take a risk and pick what you think is best. I used to keep careful notes about what else was in each vault so that I could backtrack if I found a duplicate of what I picked up in a vault, until I noticed that I was dying to the food clock a lot. This is not to say that I enjoy my characters starving, but Brogue's design pays particular attention to trying to never make you bored / making nearly every keystroke meaningful (whereas vanilla nethack can be mind-numbing).
- kibwen 5y ago
  I feel like I see nothing but endless moaning about the development of DCSS in places like the subreddit, but I really appreciate that the devs try different things, sometimes radically so. After all, the old versions of the game are all still available to play if you don't like a given change, and the server operators (many of whom are code contributors) go out of their way to make sure that you can play even ancient versions online (it looks like CAO hosts every release since 2012), so nobody is forced to update if they don't want to. And as expected there's a healthy variety of DCSS forks, which IMO is OSS working as intended.

1_player 5y ago

I would also add Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, a massive survival roguelike set after a zombie apocalypse with a healthy dose of Lovecraft. Actively developed, huge community, and a ton of features, from crafting, farming to implanting bionics on your body and building vehicles from scratch and driving them. Probably the only game out there that lets you go from escaping a burning building in a bathrobe to running over zombies in your custom Mad Max style electric RV.