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Player's Plaza / Re: Ever felt weird playing a roguelike?

« on: February 26, 2023, 07:12:04 PM »

Strange topic, but something I have been thinking about for a while.
I was playing TOME2 recently and I couldn't get my mind off how lonely and bleak the game seems to be.
There was clearly a lot of work put into it, yet somehow the game has no soul at all. It's like a robot or something.
In comparison DCSS design choices are still very pragmatic and unrealistic, but everything is grounded enough to feel real.

In TOME2 though, the enemies are meandering husks, the towns are cardboard set-pieces, the quests are odd rituals given by disembodied voices, the player a is literal killing machine, and the dungeons all have this alien geometry and follow unnatural rules.
Superficially it seems believable enough, for the first few hours at least, but over time you will see the cracks in reality multiply. Think about this: Standing on ice, perfectly still, cuts you up and stuns you.
That is not a bug though, but just how the game handles that terrain type. Why? Because ice is sharp? It's painful to imagine. Things like this make it seem like an alien made this game.

And to a lesser extent this is how Angband and it's variants all typically feel. It is hard to get immersed, but if you manage to, it is an uncanny world you inhabit.
Sure, they are great at creating tension (mostly due to the time investment though), but are always abstracted in such specific ways it just seems wrong.
Even Morgoth's lair for example, in this unreal bastardization of a Tolkien setting, is just another level. He's just "there" with no fanfare or anything.
You then go over and kill him for no particular reason. I guess you make something up that makes sense. He drops a few pointless artifacts.
You can then explore about 20 more empty levels after he dies. There is nothing down there though, and there never will be...

Anybody else ever get a weird feeling from playing a certain roguelike?
I mean usually the games have a sense of adventure or mystery to them.
But something about all these band variants... They just seem off.

I don't feel weird at all.
May be em the only one but I say this because I play games without taking them serious.