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Nethack or go home... https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Main_Page https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Main_Page

• mrob 4y ago
  I feel like Wikis and modern communication tools in general have made Nethack less fun. Nethack represents one extreme of roguelike design philosophy, where the focus is more on exploring and discovering things than solving tactical puzzles. The phrase "the dev team thinks of everything" illustrates this well; the game is full of interactions that are fun to discover and add to the illusion of exploring a world, but don't actually contribute to winning or losing. You can easily break the game, i.e. find techniques that make large parts of it pointless, and that's acceptable because the joy of discovering them makes up for that loss. If you read Wikis and watch expert players then you will never experience it and be left with only an easy and boring game. The other end of the spectrum is DCSS, which sacrifices this sense of wonder to produce a tightly designed tactical challenge. There's little need for an external Wiki because that kind of information is built into the game. You can look up any entity in the game and get detailed information about its abilities. All useless/boring/unbalanced interactions are removed even if that makes the world less believable, e.g. you cannot sell items to shops, because that would necessitate tedious tracking of all junk items to recover their value, and the traditional roguelike "food clock" was replaced by an explicit countdown clock, because optimizing food usage so rarely made a difference (Nethack includes food, but also many methods to make it irrelevant). Assuming a skilled player, DCSS is the more difficult game. I recommend playing both, but in the case of Nethack, only if you keep spoilers to a minimum. (Zero spoilers is unnecessary. I believe the game was originally designed around the assumption that players would be sharing information about how to win. Only improved communications have made this sharing too powerful.)