Angband 4.2.2: A free, single-player roguelike dungeon exploration game
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rephial.org
I can't speak historically as to what it may or may not have pioneered in roguelikes, but it's varies dramatically philosophically from the likes of Nethack and its bottomless trivia and tricks. Angband is more straightforward.
Angband, with its Tolkien theme, has large maps, hordes of monsters, frightening uniques, a large amount of ancient artifacts and has its gameplay centered around a town that you routinely travel to in order to refresh and reload.
There are lots of variants from "Vanilla" as its called. Different themes, different mechanics, different character classes. I don't follow the space to know if there are a lot of Nethack variants the like that Angband has spawned.
In a game that favors cautious advance (it's not uncommon to fully recover after an encounter), the recent edition introduced a new Blackguard class that's more momentum based in that once in combat, you'd like to sustain combat to get more powerful, and stronger. It's a nice change of pace from the classic characters and play styles.
It's actively maintained and has a passionate community.
My favorite version on the PC was called I think something like "ultimate" angband... it had code to procedurally generate vaults - larger open rooms that were oval, round, or other non rectangular shapes (within character set limits) with various geometric side chambers - on random levels that were stuffed with both out of depth monsters and out of depth treasure.
Deciding how and when to approach those was an exercise in itself, and the rewards were worth it.
It also had monsters that would breed explosively, as in between your moves. In the time it took you to take three steps toward a pile of louses (lice), they would multiply from 5 to 12 total. Fun stuff.
That has always been a feature of mainline Angband. "Breeding explosively" is the exact term used in the monster memory.
Sil http://www.amirrorclear.net/flowers/game/sil/ is kind of an Angband variant but embraces the middle earth theme a lot more and has removed a lot of stuff.
Tales of Maj'Eyal https://store.steampowered.com/app/259680/Tales_of_MajEyal/ is the continuation of an angband variant called Tales of Middle-Earth / T.o.M.E., which name change I gather was necessary because DarkGod wanted to go commercial.
I wanted to link to [0] for a complete list but it's having struggles today. [1] and [2] have lists but I would guess that roguebasin's list would be more authoritative.
[0] http://www.roguebasin.com/index.php?title=List_of_Angband_va...
It's an interesting game.
> MAngband was (wait, IS! it had a release in 2020) a mind-blowing multiplayer Angband variant.
I still remember how delightfully different the game became with multi-player - mostly because it wasn't lock-step turns (a la Civilisation), but tick-based. I still think there's room for a multi-player rouge-like - but Mangband is not it for me.
But it remains an illuminating lesson in game design ("Completely change the feel of your game, with this one wierd t(r)ick!" :)
Another wacky, fun (and, sadly, also dead) variant was Steamband, a steampunk-themed variant with completely new classes, races, and monsters: http://angband.oook.cz/steamband/steamband.html
https://github.com/angband/angband/blob/master/lib/gamedata/...
This allowed people to start work on variants without having to write C or even recompile. Also, Angband's source code has a reputation for being pretty clean and easy to understand and modify.
Brogue: Community Edition - A modern spiritual sequel to the original Rogue. Very tightly wound; every item and monster has their own niche. Excellent UI, and a striking ASCII-style with light and shadows.
Golden Krone Hotel - The best roguelike for folks to to the genre, imho. A good interface and lots of intelligent streamlining of the genre. Transform between human and vampire repeatedly as you manage blood and seek (or avoid) sunlight.
Cogmind - A robotic crawl through a living mechanical dungeon. Big focuses on trying not to attract too much attention and equipping parts you've blown off enemies.
Caves of Qud - Weaponized sci-fi weirdness. Open world. Reputation and culture systems for every species. Potions that can grant intelligence to anything. There is an achievement for wearing your own severed face.
I read somewhere that, since I stopped playing, they removed the food mechanic! To my own surprise, even though food clocks are a very archetypal roguelike mechanic, I agree with that removal. I haven't really played it since maybe 2012, but at that time dealing with food was mostly a chore, hardly ever a problem, and you were set for life after you went through the hive and picked up scads of royal jelly.
This is not to say that I don't like food clocks; I think Brogue's is an excellent example of a well-tuned food clock. Brogue has item vaults where you have to pick one out of 4-8 items, and you don't know what's going to be lying around on the ground over the next few levels, so you have to take a risk and pick what you think is best. I used to keep careful notes about what else was in each vault so that I could backtrack if I found a duplicate of what I picked up in a vault, until I noticed that I was dying to the food clock a lot. This is not to say that I enjoy my characters starving, but Brogue's design pays particular attention to trying to never make you bored / making nearly every keystroke meaningful (whereas vanilla nethack can be mind-numbing).
Probably the only game out there that lets you go from escaping a burning building in a bathrobe to running over zombies in your custom Mad Max style electric RV.
Incursion: Halls of the Goblin King
The mechanics, skills, classes, etc are basically ripped from DnD, which I've never had the opportunity to play, so I found it engaging. The author was touting the game as a sort of prequel/sample, just a single 10 floor dungeon, with the intention of using the engine to create a more expansive campaign, but then he moved on to other things, open sourced the project and abandoned it. Someone else forked it, but only to fix some bugs and improve playability, not to continue the grand vision. I think it still stands on its own as a worthwhile game, but its always been a disappointment that the full idea was never realized.
DoomRL
This one was actually a finished game. It did a good job of getting the feel of a fast paced shooter while still being a typical turn based roguelike. Things like being able to decrease the enemy's chance to hit you by moving perpendicular to their line of fire were a nice touch. I think they eventually started to get some pushback from the owners of the Doom IP, and pivoted to a new game called Jupiter Hell, that's supposedly the same feel with a different scenario, but I've never gotten around to checking it out.
(If you've never played Angband seriously give it a go, it's quite memorable, even if you're a veteran of Moria, Rogue and Nethack)
I was copying my macros (hit closest monster with the main attack spell; hit previous monster with same spell; rest until fully recharged; forgot the fourth main one) on a new Linux account at the same time I copied the .bash_profile :)
(My impression is that escape-key-free Macs are an anomaly that Apple is now quietly trying to sweep under the rug; AFAIK, all current Macs have physical escape keys, and there are persistent rumors the whole Touch Bar idea is being replaced by a new revolutionary Apple invention called "function keys".)
(That's old-school!)
Can't you add Esc to the control bar?
(I was going to say that I still have the Escape key on the Touch Bar for my work laptop, which is true, but then I remembered it's running Catalina...)
Super fun game. I had to put it down to focus on an important project. Now that that's done, however, maybe I can pick up where I left off...
The ascii graphics are vastly superior purely in terms of the amount of information you can display on the screen at once. Tiles are huge and fat, which prevents you from being able to see anything. Expect to die frequently to attacks from monsters that can't be shown onscreen.
"Modern" ToME tries to work around this by having a graphical tile be much larger than the space alloted to it on the ground. Thus, you get overlapping graphics that are very difficult to understand.
I'm not sure what the appeal of the tiles is supposed to be. The downsides are enormous.
// I know of topic, I wish the game all the best!
A pity P.R.I.M.E is non-free.
If you don't have a num-pad you might want "rogue" keybindings - and remember to wear/wield armor and weapons, bring food (and eat it) and a source of light...
The Word of Recall scroll is your friend: always have at least two on you. You can read it, and get transported back up to the village after a few turns. I like taking multiple with me down into the dungeon, just in case one gets destroyed by, say, an acid trap.
If you read this scroll from the village, it will transport you to the lowest level you have visited.
Rest frequently. There’s nothing wrong with running away from a fight.
Definitely that. The trick is recognising when you are utterly outnumbered, and the level is lost.
Damm white louse replicating like crazy have killed me too many times.
The game has an interesting memory mechanic. When you first start, your character's "monster knowledge" is nil. As you meet and fight monsters, it gradually fills in. When you die and start a new character, you retain this "ancestral knowledge". It's absolutely vital to your survival.
Same goes for items and artifacts.
You can always look stuff up online if you want. It makes the game more predictable, certainly.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=rougelik...
but anyway, I guess there is no better simple term for it. Even saying "Groundhogday-esque" just replaces a game-that-tried-a-concept with a movie-that-tried-a-concept.
1: One could make a very reasonable case that the Diablo series is a rogue-like or at least a rogue-lite, but I don't know how much the term was applied to it at the time of release.
So, Diablo and Diablo 2 being released in 1996 and 2000, they pre-date at least common usage of the term "rogue-lite".
edit: see http://www.gamesofgrey.com/blog/?p=403 for a critique of the Berlin Interpretation as written.
others also use a hyphen
I've seen "run-based" being used to describe the format, which isn't quite as catchy of a term but gets the point across better.
"Traditional roguelike" is how I've started searching for games such as Angband which are actually, well, like Rogue.