5 Roguelike games

Today i’ll present you some games of a classic genre: Rogue

Rogue is a dungeon crawling video game first developed by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman around 1980.
The roguelike is a sub-genre of role-playing video games, characterized by randomization for replayability, permanent death, and turn-based movement. Most roguelikes feature ASCII graphics, with newer ones increasingly offering tile-based graphics. Games are typically dungeon crawls, with many monsters, items, and environmental features.

Nethack

NetHack is a single-player roguelike video game originally released in 1987. It is a descendant of an earlier game called Hack (1985), which is a descendant of Rogue (1980), this is one of the most similar games to the original Rogue.

It’s a wonderful game, you go around through a dungeon looking for the Amulet of Yendor! Beware, it is no easy task, because death is permanent, and you -will- die a lot. But do not be discouraged, it is still quite the experience, with all the different routes you can take. Started more then 20 years ago, it is still in active development, and packed full of interesting features, such as the ability to tame wild animals and teach them how to shoplift, or learning the ways of wizardry, or even just quaffing random potions and seeing what happens. You can start hallucinating, levitate, turn into stone, have your potions of fruit juice boil and explode, read gravestones, and use wands to shoot magickal bullets, and forget to pay attention to your dog and have it turn feral and eat you.

So as you have seen the game offers a lot of different options, characters and ways to play it, also for the graphic you can choose between classic ASCII or a graphic with tiles.

Enhanced graphical options also exist, such as the isometric perspective of Falcon’s Eye and Vulture’s Eye, or the three-dimensional rendering that noegnud offers. Vulture’s Eye is a fork of the now defunct Falcon’s Eye project. Vulture’s Eye adds additional graphics, sounds, bug fixes and performance enhancements and is under active development in an open collaborative environment.

Another good thing of Nethack is that it’s usually available as package in many different distributions so it will not so hard to start playing it.

City of the Condemned

The game depicts a battle between the armies of Heaven and Hell in a town where the souls of innocent people are in danger.
Play as an angel, a divine warrior of God, with the mission to vanquish all evil and protect the humans.
Or take your stand as a demon, sinister creation of the Devil able to possess the people to create chaos.

The main idea of the game is to depict the battle of good and evil, Heaven and Hell in a small-ish city. You can join the demonic forces of Lucifer and possess innocent humans to evolve into a more powerful creature – or you can be an angel, divine and immortal warrior of God, with a mission to
protect the souls of the people while vanquishing the satanic beings at the same time.

The game uses the classic ASCII graphic and it’s been created in 2010 during 7DRL Contest 2010.
A Seven Day Roguelike (7DRL) is a roguelike created in seven days and there is an annual contest to see who can manage to create a roguelike game in just a week.

Angband

Angband is a free, single-player dungeon exploration game where you take the role of an adventurer, exploring a deep dungeon, fighting monsters, and acquiring the best weaponry you can, in preparation for a final battle with Morgoth, the Lord of Darkness.

The game revolves around exploring a 100-level dungeon, in which the player seeks to amass enough power and equipment to ultimately defeat Morgoth. A new level is randomly generated each time the player changes levels, which gives Angband great replay value: no two games are the same.

The game It is based on the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien, in which Angband is the fortress of Morgoth.

Getting started with the game is easy. You can play with graphics or in original ASCII text (it’s more fun than it sounds), and there is extensive in-game help. Pressing ‘Enter’ also brings up a list of commands you can choose from whilst you’re getting started.

Angband has spawned many derivatives. A family of around sixty variants exist, of which roughly half a dozen are active. Each differs in purpose and degree of alteration. The multiplayer variant MAngband was developed in 1997; it includes real-time elements to support simultaneous gameplay. ZAngband (Zelazny Angband), is largely based on Roger Zelazny’s The Chronicles of Amber.

Tales of Maj’Eyal (ToME)

Tales of Maj’Eyal (ToME) is an open-source, single-player, tactical role-playing roguelike and action game set in the world of Eyal.

This is the Age of Ascendancy, after over ten thousand years of strife, pain and chaos the known world is at last at relative peace. The Spellblaze last effects are now tamed, the land slowly heals itself and the civilisations rebuild themselves after the Age of Pyre.

It has been one hundred and twenty two years since the Allied Kingdoms have been established under the rule of Toknor and his wife Mirvenia. Together they ruled the kingdoms with fairness and brought prosperity to both halflings and humans. The King died of old age fourteen years ago, and his son, Tolak, is now king.

The elven kingdoms are quiet. The Shaloren elves in their home of Elvala are trying to make the world forget about their role in the Spellblaze and are living happy lives under the leadership of Aranion Gayaeil. The Thaloren elves keep to their ancient tradition of living in the woods, ruled as always by Nessilla Tantaelen the wise.

The dwarves of the Iron Throne have started a careful trade relationship with the Allied Kingdoms for nearly one hundred years, yet not much is known about them, not even their leader.

While the people of Maj’Eyal know that the mages helped put an end to the terrors of the Spellblaze, they also did not forget that it was magic that started those events. As such mages are still shunned from society, if not downright hunted down. Still, this is a golden age, civilizations are healing the wounds of thousands of years of conflict, even the humans and the halflings have made lasting peace.

You are an adventurer, looking for old powers, treasure and glory. You boldly go in lost and forgotten places, untamed forests and sealed ruins. What will you find in this age of supposed peace ?

The game it’s still tagged as Beta (number 31 at the moment) but you can start to play it, if unsure check this video:

DoomRL

DoomRL (Doom, the Roguelike) is a fast and furious coffee-break Roguelike game, that is heavily inspired by the popular FPS game Doom by ID Software.

DoomRL is turn-based, offers a top-down interface formed entirely of ASCII characters, and features a character leveling system with traits. As it is based upon Doom, the game is more fast-paced and combat-oriented than usual for a roguelike, and relies heavily on ranged rather than melee combat. A limited player inventory, non-stackable items, and other design choices contrast with the often extreme intricacy of games in its genre.

DoomRL includes the entire Doom soundset (although a significant subset of the sounds are not presently used) and music library, with optional support for high-quality MP3s.

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