Must-play Roguelikes

[Legend]

In my opinion, Rogue, and/or MAG (Mike's Adventure Game) are definite must-plays. MAG follows very closely in Rogue's footstep, but adds just enough extra spice to differentiate itself, but not go so far on it's own to become a complete entity of it's own. It's kinda like Rogue's slightly older brother. I suggest Donnie Russell's very good windows ports.  

Nethack is a classic.

Frozen Depths is awesome.

Infra Arcana is a brilliant newer roguelike that sets itself apart from the rest very well. My personal favorite of the newer breed. I play it more than the rest on the list besides Rogue.  

Hydra Slayer is an extremely fun and somewhat abstract roguelike. When I first heard about it, it really didn't interest me. But I eventually tried it and loved it. Quite addictive.

Dungeon Crawl: Stone soup is practically a no-brainer these days.

Incursion is great too.

I'm a bit on the fence about DoomRL myself. It can be very fun and the achievements and unlockables are a nice feature, but I feel it has gotten a bit convoluted in it's evolution. Having many of the play modes  locked at the beginning until you attain a specific amount of achievements is kinda a downer. It seems to be geared more towards the veteran players these days and a lot of the medals are not that easy for the average or beginning player to get. It is also getting close to nethack status in my opinion in that it needs quite a few spoilers in order to get that good at the game. Still a great game, just more of a maybe-play instead of a must-play in my opinion.  

And if you have a Sega Genesis, I suggest Fatal Labyrinth. The menu navigation can be a little fiddly, but not much. The monsters are kinda cool looking too. My favorite feature is that, the more gold you attain, the fancier your grave is when you die. A feature I wish more roguelikes had.  

If you're into board games, DungeonQuest and Chainsaw warrior to a certain extent.

If I had to pick a top 3 (in no specific order):

Rogue
Infra Arcana
Frozen Depths

Top 5, add:

Hydra Slayer
Nethack

I could never really get into Angband, Adom, or Dwarf Fortress. Omega was pretty cool.

[st33d]

Been playing Shiren the Wanderer on the bus for the past two weeks now.

The pace of play, the persistence of items and characters beyond permadeath, the trickle of hints from NPCs, the casual controls but fuck-you encounters deep in - I think all developers could learn a lot from this.

[ido]

If I had to pick a top 3 (in no specific order):

Rogue
Infra Arcana
Frozen Depths

Top 5, add:

Hydra Slayer
Nethack

For me, among ascii roguelikes those would be DoomRL, DemonHunt & Frozen Depths - to a large extent because most of the others I tried have such a cumbersome interface I couldn't really be bothered playing them for long.

DemonHunt in particular I've been playing quite a bit in the past week.

I would also put crawl pretty high up there, I can sometimes muster enough will power to play it but haven't in a long time.

I tried playing angband, nethack & adom many times (as well as rogue and larn) but never managed to get into them - the curve is just too steep & life's too short.

I also think that having sounds (and to a much lesser extent music) makes a huge impact, even if they are just blippy 8-bit/PC speaker type sounds- it just feels so dry and unengaging to not have any auditory feedback (funnily enough this bothers me a lot more than ascii graphics).

In the past little while I've been playing around with coding c to the bare metal on dos (thanks to dosbox, open watcom 16-bit c compiler & raw access to CGA memory space).

Other than the obvious challenge, I was really surprised how little hindrance targeting the original IBM PC with CGA's default text mode (640x200 pixels, 80x25 chars, 16 colors) was and how much the traditional roguelike interface (as seen in nethack, rogue, angband, et al) is not the result of shitty old hardware (well, maybe it is but it's not the result of shitty PC hardware).

[AgingMinotaur]

Been playing Shiren the Wanderer on the bus for the past two weeks now.

The pace of play, the persistence of items and characters beyond permadeath, the trickle of hints from NPCs, the casual controls but fuck-you encounters deep in - I think all developers could learn a lot from this.

Yes, Shiren is a really great RL. Everybody get their emulators out!

As always,
Minotauros

[getter77]

Really, any of the Fushigi Dungeon games are very solid points of play reference from Torneko to Shiren and beyond.  Well, maybe less so the Pokemon ones, but pretty much all else is a lock to some degree.

A shame so few of them have managed to either get English commercial releases, PC releases, or english fan translations.   Shiren in particular has gained many games of late beyond the last Shiren Wii game,   I think at this point having it far and away usurp the mantle in full from Torneko which dominated the PSX/GBA'ish era in terms of volume.

[XLambda]

Really, any of the Fushigi Dungeon games are very solid points of play reference from Torneko to Shiren and beyond.  Well, maybe less so the Pokemon ones, but pretty much all else is a lock to some degree.

They're gateway drugs in a way. Even the Pokemon ones are pretty good at that. The good thing about those is that they appeal to a huge group of fans, some of which have picked up roguelikes after that. A friend of mine played them a lot, and one day we suddenly found ourselves talking about nethack.

[piXxel+aSscii]

-ADOM
-NETHACK
-ANGBANDS
-UNREAL WORLD
-DCSS
-TOMENET

I am surprised that nobody made mention of TomeNET. It's really exciting, entertaining, thrilling and challenging.