My roguelike journey

You know what I love? Roguelikes. They're the best genre.

Level 4 human reaver wielding a +2 short sword of protection. That's the only picture you're getting with actual graphics in this post.

And I don't mean it in the loose modern indie-game sense where it refers to an addictive game loop fueled by randomized content, although my Steam library will attest to the fact that I love those too. No, I'm talking traditional roguelikes. The ones from the 1980s played on text terminals. Rogue. Hack. Moria. NetHack. Angband. The original dungeon crawlers.

Roguelikes don't have to be dungeon crawlers, but they usually are, because Dungeons and Dragons figured out decades earlier that dungeons are the best places to have adventures in. Endless labyrinths carved into solid rock, with no way to tell what you'll find without exploring and going deeper. There could be anything down there, and thanks to the magic of procedural generation, there is!

I've heard some people lament the modern indie glut of procedural generation for its lack of creativity, but I'm not one of them. I love it. Give me a generic dungeon with randomized content any day of the week. Let me forge my own path, decide my own identity, and tell my own story. It's probably the same mindset that makes me vulnerable to idle/incremental games. And probably lootboxes, if I played any modern games which I don't.

Anyway, I've been playing roguelikes a long time. Let me take you on a small amount of my journey.

NetHack - the gateway drug

The humble beginning of an adventure. The # there is a sink. When I drank from it, a water elemental was released, so I had to run away. After some exploration of the level, I eventually ran back into it in a corridor and it murdered me.

NetHack has a somewhat anachronistic name these days, since to a modern ear it sounds like some kind of cyberpunk thing. But it's not. It's a dungeon crawler which borrows heavily from Dungeons and Dragons. Well, actually it borrows heavily from everywhere. NetHack is a melting-pot of 1980s nerd culture, a game where people said "Hey, what if we throw in [obscure nerd reference]?" and nobody stopped them from doing it.

NetHack was also my first roguelike, way back in I don't even want to think how long ago. I can't even remember how I first got my hands on it. And it was wonderful. It was a revelation.

You have to understand - I had never heard of permadeath before. It's kind of a stupid idea, right? What's the point in playing a game where a single dumb mistake costs you everything? And it wasn't until I saw it combined with random procedural generation that I realized that was the point. You see, when worlds are randomly-generated, every world is unique, and if you die, that world will never exist again. Not in exactly the same way. And this makes your life precious and meaningful, and forces you to protect that delicate, fragile thread tying you to the mortal plane. It makes you stop and think about what you're doing - if the risk you're taking is going to be worth it. It forces you to learn, forces you to prepare yourself, to protect yourself, to do your best and plan for the worst. And I love that.

So anyway, NetHack. It is a silly game. You select your race, class, gender (unless you're a Valkyrie because they're all female don't you know) and sometimes your alignment too, because Dungeons and Dragons casts a looooong shadow. Then you're told to go into the dungeon in the name of whomever your god is, and fetch the Amulet of Yendor, which is Rodney backwards because it's a silly game. And everything is text characters. Walls are text characters, doors are text characters, the floor is text characters, you're a text character, your dog is a text character, and it's gloriously baffling to anyone watching you play the game because they have no clue what they're looking at. But I do. It's really not that difficult. There's a simple command which tells you what any text character on screen represents, and there's also a message window that tells you, in actual words, what's going on - what you can see, hear, etc. So it's not like you're blind. You get used to this pretty quickly and it soon feels perfectly natural.

(Incidentally, some blind people do play NetHack using a screen reader. It amazes me. I've listened to the output of such readers and it's a staccato mess of spoken characters that somehow they're able to comprehend).

NetHack is also turn-based, which is another major draw of roguelikes for me. Traditional roguelikes don't require any physical skill or reflexes, because everything is a frozen moment in time; you can think about what you want to do for as long as you want, or save the game and come back to it tomorrow. It makes them extremely portable and undemanding, unlike modern games where you have to be constantly present and in the moment. Roguelikes are just there for you.

So anyway, when you enter the game, all you can see is the starting room and the staircase you came in by. You can go up that staircase if you want. It ends the game because it counts as "escaping" the dungeon, which is the objective of the game, although you're supposed to do it once you've gotten that Amulet of Yendor. And that's immediately another great thing about roguelikes. They have these incredibly tangible, real worlds to interact with, often in myriad different ways. It's great.

For the record, I never came close to getting the Amulet. Like, I don't think I even made it more than halfway. The dungeon is fricking huge. It just goes down and down and down. Anyway, from here, you just gotta explore and try to find the staircase down to the next dungeon level. In doing so, you'll find a bunch of stuff lying around that you can pick up, some of which will be magic stuff that you don't know what it does. You can drink potions, read scrolls, zap wands, and, you know, just do whatever. It's freedom. The game doesn't tell you what you should do - that's for you to decide. It's your story. And what'll probably happen is that you drink a potion of acid and die. Probably should have identified that first.

Identification, incidentally, is another cool thing about roguelikes which I don't think really happens in other games? In most games, the friendly thing to do is to make sure the player understands what everything does, with clear labelling, but not roguelikes. Roguelikes invite you to find out that stuff yourself, and use random procedural generation to ensure that you can't use knowledge from one run in the next. Roguelikes are an adventure.

As you venture deeper into NetHack's dungeons, you'll find there is some structure to the randomness. There are certain levels that always appear, for example, like the Oracle's level where you can pay the Oracle to tell you spoilers, or the Sokoban level where there's a stupid game of Sokoban, or this one level which is a callback to the original Rogue, which was an old reference even when NetHack was new. There's lots of history there. And at some point you'll die stupidly and your adventure will be over, because that's how NetHack goes. Hopefully you learned something from the experience and you'll do better next time.

I played NetHack for a long time, and I loved it. There's just so much stuff in the game. But as I came to know other roguelikes, I found there were things about NetHack that I didn't like so much. While the pop-culture references were goofy and fun, I felt they just didn't fit in with the dungeon setting. Maybe it's kinda weird to say this, but I felt like NetHack had too much personality. I found it difficult to project myself into this adventure the way I wanted to because the game kept pulling me in its own directions, and that kinda goes against the whole "making your own fate" ideal of roguelikes.

NetHack is also a very spoiler-heavy game. When I play games, I fastidiously avoid spoilers as much as I can. After all, the fun of NetHack is in discovering the many weird and wonderful things in the dungeon - I don't want those moments taken away from me! But in order to play NetHack effectively, you really need those spoilers, because there's just so much nonsense in the game that you have to contend with, including things that can one-shot you to death instantly if you aren't aware of them. So I just never got very far because I didn't engage with the game on those terms.

Also I hate the starting pet. It's annoying. It follows you around, gets in your way, eats all your food, then you accidentally kill it and make god mad.

But NetHack planted the seed. It opened my eyes to the infinite potential of roguelikes. Surely there was one out there that had none of NetHack's weaknesses?

Oh ho, yes. Enter Dungeon Crawl.

Dungeon Crawl - the tactician's dream

See? Roguelikes have colors and stuff! The bs are a swarm of butterflies summoned via a magic scroll.

Dungeon Crawl - or to give it its full title, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup - or more sensibly, just Crawl, is a self-proclaimed "tactical roguelike", and one thing it does is try to sand the edges off other roguelikes. It gives you a much nicer and more logical interface, automates away repetitive things, warns you before doing dumb stuff, etc. Much kinder than NetHack. If you've ever had to keep putting all your armor back on in NetHack after getting transformed into something small, you know what I'm talking about.

It also just has a wealth of brilliant design decisions, so many that I can't possibly cover them all in a reasonable amount of time. It doesn't rely on spoilers. It warns you if things are about to get ugly, so that you can decide whether to back out or not. It has f to target the nearest enemy and then f to fire, so you can just double-tap to throw stuff, which is such a no-brainer that I still can't believe Crawl is the only roguelike that does it.

A lot of the mechanical decisions in Crawl are really elegant, and I often find myself comparing it to Magic: the Gathering - not because it's like a card game or anything, but in the way it manages to boil mechanics down in ways that are both simple and flavorful. Like, there's a unique demonspawn enemy, Amaemon, who has a poison weapon, can summon scorpions (which have poison stings), and is accompanied by an orange demon ally. Orange demons have a scorpion-like stinger which has the reaching ability, so they can poison you from 2 spaces away - and to top all of this off, Amaemon has a spell which causes any nearby enemies that would do poison damage to instead do curare damage, and curare is a super-extra-nasty poison that poisons and slows you. Every one of these is a simple game mechanic that you've probably already encountered in other contexts, but the way they combine here is unique and interesting and you gotta figure out how to deal with it. Or just run away, which is probably more sensible.

Crawl also did something that I always wished NetHack had - randomly-generated artifacts. NetHack had artifacts, but they were all pop-culture weapons from fantasy novels and you had to do altar shenanigans to get them. In Crawl, you just find them, or buy them, or acquire them magically, and it's such a wonderful moment when you do. It makes you feel so special and powerful when your character is decked from head to toe with mystical artifact clothing and weaponry.

Crawl even gets that atmosphere of neutrality that I was searching for. Like, it's not devoid of personality, but it is neutral. It's just a regular ol' dungeon with a variety of interesting places to visit, monsters to fight, and gods to worship. Oh, and even the god system is really good - if you want to follow a deity, find their altar and worship them. You get divine powers, but you also get punished by your god if you do things they don't like. Again, it's a gameplay choice.

I've played Crawl for a long time, and I've watched it grow and change for a long time. The Crawl of today is a rather different beast to the Crawl of two decades ago, and a lot of changes have been good. But lately... I kinda feel like the changes aren't adding up any more. It's too hard, and not in the challenging way. I honestly don't feel like my gameplay decisions in Crawl make much of a difference any more, or if they do, the differences are so slight that I can't perceive them. Honestly these days it feels like I just get lucky when the game doesn't kill me off, and that's a far cry from Crawl's philosophy of meaningful decision making. And that's sad. There's so much brilliance packed into Crawl, but I rarely get on that winning streak where I'm able to see any of it.

Also they keep removing races I like and that's annoying.

So if NetHack is too wacky and Crawl is too unyielding, what to do? Is there a third option? Do I ever ask questions without knowing the answer?

Angband - the minmaxer's delight

Now that's what I'm Tolkien about. Sméagol is a total pain for low-level characters as he's basically unkillable at that point in the game. He can't really hurt you either, but he will take your gold. Also, if your race doesn't have infravision, you might not even be able to see him, 'cause he's invisible.

It took me a long time to love Angband. I played it a bit while I was enamored with NetHack, and I just didn't get it. Angband felt like it was doing roguelikes all wrong - it really just felt like computerized D&D, with dice rolls and stat tables and even a virtual character sheet. I remember not liking that at the time - I didn't want to feel like I was just playing an automated tabletop game, I wanted an adventure!

It's certainly true that Angband is a much more mechanical game than NetHack or Crawl, which abstract away most of the numbers and concentrate more on tactics (Crawl) or what the hell just happened when you ate that corpse (NetHack). Like, you don't have to do math or anything, but the relative values of numbers matter.

But that wasn't the main problem I had with Angband. It was the dungeons. See, in Angband, dungeon levels are non-persistent.

In NetHack and Crawl, the dungeon is a persistent, solid, enduring thing. Sure, it's not really that - the game is really just generating new floors as you descend and pretending like they were always there - but once each level is created, it becomes part of the structure of the dungeon and you can go back to it. It's what makes the dungeon feel like a real, tangible, three-dimensional place in which you're having your adventure.

Angband, meanwhile, just cheats. Whenever you take a staircase to the next (or previous) dungeon level, the game just wipes the current dungeon, generates a new one, puts you in it, then explains that you got lost in a maze of staircases and that's why you can't go back to the previous one.

I remember being super dissatisfied with that. Like, this is so obviously just a cheap trick to avoid having to storing more than one dungeon at a time. What a rip-off! So lazy.

And then in-game the problems continue. The balance is way off. Warriors can blitz through with ease because they're super tough and strong, but your squishy mage can get bitten to death on the first level by a lowly rat, especially if they don't have any decent attack spells to start with. If you manage to cheese-kill an enemy, you can go up a bunch of levels in one turn. You can scum dungeon levels by just going up and down the stairs until you get one you like. Some enemies can trap you in cycles where status effects prevent you from acting, and they just kill you until you're dead. The dungeons are massively sprawling and mostly empty and it takes ages to find the down stairs. There are annoying traps which you can't see until you trigger them. Your equipment can get damaged by acid, or disenchanted, or burned up, and doesn't everyone just hate that?

These problems are all still in the game, so... why do I love it? I think things changed when I embraced Angband for what it really is. It's a game about getting stronger. Unlike NetHack or Crawl, where your progress is part of an effort to retrieve the super-magical item from the bottom of the dungeon, Angband's is just "could you go down to level 100 and punch Morgoth to death please thanks by the way it's dangerous down there maybe take a coat".

Angband has no pretenses that it's anything other than an accumulative power trip, and once you get that, the infinitely-regenerating dungeon makes perfect sense. It works for you. It provides. It's kinda like the Hyperbolic Time Chamber from Dragon Ball Z, a place where you're constantly fighting to become more powerful - and the deeper into that dungeon you go, the more you're testing yourself. Sure, you could stay on level 1 and punch infinite cave lizards for ten thousand years, but you probably don't want to. You want to push on, to prove yourself on your own terms, and in doing so, you write your own story - the roguelike ideal!

And there's so much to like in Angband too. The bare mechanics might feel a little too tabletop, but I've completely mellowed on that and nowadays I love having numbers tell me exactly how awesome I am. They're great for telling how good your weapons and armor are, which helps you with upgrading and replacing your equipment. Which you'll have to, because, you know. Acid damage. Disenchantment. The dungeon provides.

Angband also pushes the uniquely roguelike challenge of identification a little further than its contemporaries, in ways I find very satisfying. You've got the usual randomly-generated scrolls and potions that you don't know what they do until you either get them identified or test them yourself... but then you've also got magic runes. Some objects have magic runes on them and your character doesn't know what any of them mean to start with, so they have to learn them as you play.

This means that sometimes you'll have a weapon or armor that you don't fully understand. You can still use it - your character just won't know what its full capabilities are until they understand those runes. I love this! It makes everything feel that much more mysterious, and it creates some wonderful gameplay moments when your sword lights up in battle and you finally learn what its true power is.

And just to spice things up, sometimes those runes are curses. In fact, Angband was actually the first roguelike to abandon the incredibly annoying "sticky curse" (can't put down or remove cursed weapons/armor) which was a mainstay of early roguelikes. Instead, cursed items just cause unpleasant effects and you have to decide if it's worth keeping them or not. Meaningful choices!

(It also means that it's sometimes worth holding onto unknown items even if you don't plan on using them. At the very least, you can benefit from getting their runes translated. Knowledge is power too!)

Oh and there's like a bazillion monsters to kill as well. I mean, that's true of all traditional roguelikes - quite often, the variety of enemies is one of the principal draws of the game. Angband's menagerie is perhaps a little less celebrated than most. It has a very monster-manual approach to enemies, where they're really just a cluster of stat tables and hit dice. But what's really nice about it is that the game keeps track of what you learn about each enemy, so you kinda piece together your knowledge of the world as you go. Again, that's unique to Angband and I think it's a great way of doing it. It adds this interesting meta-game layer to the experience.

I don't really know where I'm going with this. I just wanted to talk about Angband because I'm having fun with it at the moment. People don't really talk about roguelikes, you know? I feel like there are a bunch of people who much aren't into modern games, but who would really dig traditional roguelikes because of how undemanding they are to play. It's a genre with so much freedom. I just love the idea that even the most low-tech terminal can host such a deep videogaming experience.

Comments

[FanOfMostEverything]

I generally prefer roguelites to roguelikes, but I did dabble with two out of the three. (Never tried Angbard.) I can see the appeal of the genre, but I appreciate the presence of metaprogression so it feels like each run is contributing to a greater sense of progress.

[Ghost Mike]

I don't know if I've ever actually played a true roguelike, sans a few sessions on a friend's Binding of Issac (and I understand that's not fully a roguelike anyway, given it ain't turn or grid-based). Gotta say, while I get the genre's appeal, I think, like FoME, I need metaprogression so failed runs don't feel wasted. That kind of "full" permadeath is okay in arcade games and the like, and I enjoy it very much there, but anything whose scope is bigger than something you play quick in one sitting, I don't know.

Of course, that's what roguelites are for, and while I don't have a vast array of games I've played there either, I have a few. Most notably, the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon series. Yes, the gameplay is sometimes something to wade through for the story that you're really there for (the modern JRPG hook, and weirdly not something that ever applies to the main series Pokémon games – even their best stories are still just side dishes to playing it for the gameplay), but it does the job. I wouldn't have logged as many hours on the games 100%'ing them if they were that much of a struggle, sure!

[Forcalor]

I'll never forget that beautiful Vampire Rogue in Dungeon Crawl that I lost to some random placed critical hit, I believe. Rest in peace.

Pain lingers to this day.

[Samey90]

Hmm, Trixie and Juniper are both into roguelikes (Juniper has experience stealing artifacts).

[Jet_Black1980]

I'm just happy to see you still active.