The joy of roguelikes

I've played a lot of video games. Some single player games have solidified inside my head as masterpieces, like Nier Automata or Prey (2017). Some multiplayer games I jump back to every once in a while - no one ever truly quits OSRS, they just take extended breaks.

As is the case with many people, the quarantine period has given me a lot of time to clean out my games library. Sounds fancy, right? Nope. My directories for games are all jumbled up because most of the time I'd prefer a game to be on my HDD instead of SSD, the latter only having 12GB free at the moment. This was when I bumped into Nethack, a game I installed and played only once before giving up.

Why did I give up?

In case - just like me - you let the game choose everything including your gender, race, alignment, etc..., during the first playthrough, you are instantly dropped into this beautiful ASCII 2x4 room with 2 doors, one of which I opened and walked through then got stuck down there. I'm the @, and my cat is Mr. f next to me.

At this point I decided to go back north and check out other paths, where I am greeted with another letter of the alphabet:

Nice way of saying "hi." This is where I used my 200iq brain to press '?' for a list of commands, where I am barraged with this:

I called it quit then and there. Obviously this is an exaggeration of events because the actual first time I played this, my character died from being gangbanged by 3 kobolds instead.

Why was I looking for roguelikes in the first place? I used to play Dead Cells - which I will argue is a roguelite, despite some descriptions saying it's a roguelike. The fundamental difference here is a sense of progression that's preserved after playthroughs (gold, unlocked weapons at start, etc...). Dead Cell's dungeons are procedurally-generated, but ultimately the gameplay wasn't varied enough for my liking because I felt stronger. Things weren't RANDOM enough!

The phrase "permanent death" is certainly something I'm not used to seeing in a playthrough. If a character in a story-driven narrative is dead, the experience usually is diminished:

But roguelikes are truly RANDOM, one playthrough to the next if I wanted it to. I had to give them a shot right? Enter my search for a "fun" roguelike game. Let's not talk about Nethack, but others from 4chan's robust /rlg/ threads

This was the first game I tried out from looking at the general pastebin. I'm an ASCII player, so any RL that support console is a plus.

DCSS has tutorials for those new to the genre, fortunately. This was where I was getting used to the hotkeys, a knowledge which transfers partially to other RLs as they tend to use the same ones.

Just like Nethack, we are dropped immediately into a dungeon, and depending on the race/class, we get an appropriate weapon. Amazingly, thanks to the tutorial, I knew what to expect and managed to get to floor -12 before dying by stepping on lava.

Overall, DCSS is WYSIWYG. If you follow tutorials, you'll be fine. A 7/10 overall. There's an online version with tiles if that's your thing.

TGGW is known for its easy learning curve and absolutely gorgeous UI. I'm instantly blown away by how neatly organized all of the windows are.

It takes about 5-15 mins to complete the tutorials, and you don't have to finish all of them - I certainly didn't because I couldn't wait to actually play a game.

Aesthetically, I'm already liking this more than DCSS. You can't see it from a static image, but the screen is constantly updated, meaning some items can glow and blink, which makes the game feels alive. Another nice thing about the UI is that all of there are legends of all the symbols that you can see on-screen. For someone just dipping their toes into the Roguelike genre, I can see myself recommending TGGW as an entry title.

Let's take a look at the combat:

You just press your WASD keys tbqhfam, which is the norm for most RL out there. Nothing special and I wouldn't change it for the world. The game IS known for its short game time after all, and you can certainly complete it in ≤ 2 hours. The arcane-oriented of you guys out there may want to use wands to cast spells, but they come at a cost:

You start at 10 Ep (Energy Points) and 5 are spent every time you ID a wand, which can be recovered by resting. By ID-ing a wand you can figure out what spell it has. This may be annoying for some people, but hardened RL folks will be used to ID mechanics from other games. The targeting system is very intuitive - you just press (x) to focus the cursor on an enemy and cast the spell using a number.

The game is heavily dependent on what equipment you find during the early game because once you descend, the difficulty will only ramp up. A piece of armor you find 3 floors ago may not protect you from being pummeled by a kobold, so remember to check stuff on the floor often!

I have not managed to win even once...

I love TGGW and I go back to it every now and then just to stare at the almost-alive world it gives you. Highly recommend checking the game out if you haven't played any RL whatsoever!

— To be continued... —