Worst roguelike you played?

[Aleksanderus]

Tell me about the worst roguelikes you played to warn others (and me!).

[Ancient]

To warn others? The worst games will be those released far too early like Claw and Sword for example. It is unplayable demo. Not much point discussing that.

[ekolis]

Not technically worst gameplay-wise, but worst dev-philosophy-wise, but I'll nominate Dungeon X: Flesh Wounds, from the 2013 7DRL challenge. The gameplay itself wasn't too bad, and it had great artwork, but it was billed as a 7DRL, and what we actually got was a flashy tech demo for a future commercial project! (Wonder what became of that?) Yeah, that's not exactly what a 7DRL is supposed to be... Granted some 7DRLs do go on to be commercial or freemium games (such as Hoplite and 868-HACK), but the devs didn't plan this (it just happened due to the game's popularity), or at least didn't make it so blatant that they were doing this. But to use the challenge as an advertising platform is just... shameful. Oh, and they made all their art assets in advance, specifically for this project. Yes, I know the rules technically say it's just the *code* that needs to be written during the challenge (and even so you can use previously written code so long as it wasn't written specifically for your game), but this feels like bending the rules a bit TOO far, given the amount of effort they put into it...

[jim]

Heh, I am definitely in the minority here, but for me it would be a tie between Dungeons of Dredmore and TOME. DoD I think has been unmasked over time as a basically stupid and boring game with a dumbass Monty Python motif, but TOME is very well-loved by a lot of people.

The numbers would indicate that TOME is just great and I'm an idiot. The game has an active and involved community, and they love the dev (and they should! he's a cool dude who will turn your character into a pirate sometimes.)

The reason I don't like TOME is because it seems like it lacks heart or purpose. It started as a *band variant and mutated into something that resembles... I dunno... The League of Legends extended Multiverse? "In the time before the Spellblaze, blah blah blah, now mages are hunted except they actually aren't..." The plot is so meandering and irrelevant, and the game is so repetitive; you perform the same sets of missions again and again and again. It's a grindfest that lacks much in the way of discretion. And the nature of combat, wherein you lose 400 health, regenerate 300 health, get five status debuffs, and seven buffs over the course of a single round... it's just not particularly exciting to me. It seems excessive, yet meaningless.

I guess I'd call these the worst (for me) because they actually managed to make a negative emotional impression on me, and as they say, it's a thin line between love and hate. I've played plenty of broken or generic roguelikes that made no impression on me whatsoever. I guess empirically those would be the worst (as Ancient mentioned)

[Samildanach]

Noxico. *shudder* Just the phrase 'erotic roguelike' should explain why.

[Aleksanderus]

Noxico. *shudder* Just the phrase 'erotic roguelike' should explain why.

What?! I see a great potential in this game! or maybe I'm just playing too much hentai games