Recently I've started falling further into the dark abyss of roguelikes. It all started with Dungeons of Dredmor about a year ago.

Most roguelikes use ASCII graphics or similar which is very unappealing to most people. It was for me too, until I found this game, Caves of Qud. I'm a sucker for character creation in RPGs and this game just hits the sweet spot. You can choose between a true human (more skillpoints, better starting items) or a mutant human. Mutants can choose between plenty of mutations, like having a couple of extra arms (which can totally be equipped with weapons), two heads, shootable quills, or you can go down the line of mental mutations which works like a "magic" system.

It's a pity roguelikes in general are such an eye-sore, it's a great genre to get into once you get past the ugly graphics.

Would love to hear about other great roguelikes out there.

Powder is a very good free roguelike.

Isaac <3

edit: heh, that's my 6666th post :o

You should check out Tales of Maj'eyal.

Dungeons of Dredmor and DoomRL are my favorites.

Realm of the Mad God is a mix of a roguelike & a web based MMO, not as much variety as Dredmor but I've found it fun to see how much fame or how close each death got me to unlocking classes in that game.

I used to play a lot of ZAngbandTK, which is great fun. If I remember correctly, it's a modded version of Angband with creatures from Roger Zelasny's Amber novels instead of standard Tolkien stuff. The download comes with a bunch of tilesets if you don't want to play with ASCII graphics. Haven't played in a few years since the last time I was killed I had just acquired some really nice weapons and armor. I was on my way to the surface, got hurt in a battle on the second floor and decided to just press on instead of wasting my potions. Just a few rooms from the exit a rat snuck up on me and killed me. Good times. Right? :(

@MoltenBoron said:

You should check out Tales of Maj'eyal.

Yes! It has an option to turn off permadeath and it isn't actually randomly generated as far as I can tell, so it's not neccessarily very 'hardcore' or true to the oldschool formula but other than that it's outstanding and it looks fucking sweet too (for the genre).

My personal favorite roguelike is Ancient Domains Of Mystery (ADOM). The learning curve can be steep, but it's a vast and rewarding game to explore. It's got an overworld map, a variety of thematic dungeons, 10 races and 20 classes to play, story and quests, riddles and secrets, multiple endings, and the expected countless permutations of random items, monsters, map layouts, and so on that comes with the genre.

ADOM also happens to be in the final days of a successful crowd-funding campaign at the moment to kickstart renewed development of the game. Even though the game has been pretty complete for many years now, development is about to resume in earnest to add tons of new content, including items, monsters, quests, special dungeons, races, classes, and even full-fledged graphical tile support, so the game's future is looking as bright as ever right now.

Here's the official site: http://www.ancardia.com/

Dungeons of Dredmor is really good.

Isaac <3

edit: heh, that's my 6666th post :o

If you arnt using ascii then you arnt playing a real roguelike.

My heart will always belong to Nethack.

Partially because the game is completely bananas, but mostly because it's ripped my heart out of my chest and stolen it. Nethack is a merciless beast.

Binding of isaac

SUCH a good game.

@BBAlpert said:

My heart will always belong to Nethack.

Partially because the game is completely bananas, but mostly because it's ripped my heart out of my chest and stolen it. Nethack is a merciless beast.

Agreed, but I think it's more Stockholm Syndrome than true love :P

/zettai-hero-project-unlosing-ranger-vs-darkdeath-evilman/61-30167/

This is the single greatest roguelike ever.

I got deep into Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup for a while.

http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/

@Loafsmooch said:

It all started with Dungeons of Dredmor about a year ago.

Shit. That was going to be my recommendation.

I enjoyed Shiren on the DS. It's not as hardcore as most since you can store items for your later lives and there are some world events that are done when they're done but it was still pretty enjoyable with perma deaths.