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The Codex of Roguelikes

eXalted

Arcane
Joined
Dec 16, 2014
Messages
1,213
Nethack - A little hardcore for a first timer
DoomRL - Yes, this is simple and good.
Cataclysm DDA - THe autism is strong here/ You can love it, hate it or love it but just can't get yourself to play it longer (like me).
Brogue - Beautiful ASCII, simple mechanics but super deep.
Infra Arcana - My current favorite. Horror Lovecraftian setting. More running and hiding than fighting.
 

Zdzisiu

Arcane
Joined
Dec 3, 2009
Messages
3,489
I am new at roguelikes, which one you guys can recommend as been the some of the best choices? I bought Caves of qud today after some research and I am liking it very much.
1. Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup -
- A very traditional roguelike.
- Fantasy setting.
- Completely free.
- Tries to do away with a lot of typical roguelike grinding crap.
- Has both ASCI version and Tiles.
- Can be played online.
- Link: https://crawl.develz.org/

2. Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead:
- Realistic setting + zombies + Science Fiction monsters
- Completely free
- Complex crafting and building system.
- Unholy amount of items to find and use.
- Has both ASCI and several Tiles
- Has a Launcher that helps with downloads and keeping it up to date
- Gives a lot of freedom to do stuff. Sometimes very crazy stuff.
- Link to launcher: https://www.reddit.com/r/cataclysmdda/comments/3yv7d7/cdda_game_launcher_automatic_updates_and_more/

3. Tales of Maj'eyal (TOME)
- Fantasy setting
- Has a free version and paid version. Difference is slight. Free version is very much a complete experience.
- Has 3 paid expansions on steam. Optional with additional content.
- Uses skills with cooldowns. Not all people like it. A bit different than other roguelikes.
- Has both ASCII and very nice Tiles.
- Can be played online with chat.
- Is on steam.
- Has a lot of content with different classes, races, items, skills and zones.
- You have to unlock some classes and races during play.
- Link: https://te4.org/

Here you go, a quick and dirty list. There are more but those are the staple for me.
 

Jack Dandy

Arcane
Joined
Feb 10, 2013
Messages
3,039
Location
Israel
Divinity: Original Sin 2
Seconding Brogue, it's simple but deep. Lots of fun to be had, and no silly fiddling about with classes and races.

They just drop you in a dungeon with a knife and you have to make do with what you find.
 

Fenix

Arcane
Vatnik
Joined
Jul 18, 2015
Messages
6,458
Location
Russia atchoum!
The only add-on I currently own is the first one, Ashes of Urth'Rok? I don't see a way to disable it in the game.. Not sure what it adds because if I click campaign only the original one is available... think I should turn it off through Steam (uninstall the dlc) and play vanilla?

Each addon add on (heh) it's onw classes to main game, so they will be used in random generation of mob.
AoU add Doombringer and Demonologist - strong but not theat lethal for you.
EoR bring Sawbutcher, Gunslinger and Psyshot - steam-based classes that lethl early on for you.
So I think AoU is fine, but not more.

Some other ones that are cool but quite flawed in various ways are IVAN, Elona, and Incursion.

That's a good games!
Incursion is my first - roguelike based on DnD or ADnD maybe. Cool shit. Bugs are many.
Elona is supergood imo. Incredible amount of content, smart shortcats if you useing brain. Lots of gring though. You can ride on little girls and gene engeneer them to have 3 legs and such.
The only real downside is wiabu graffixs. Also some saying it's not roguelike but sandbox.
IVAN is almost impossible to beat but has very good design, and funny as hell.
 
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Taka-Haradin puolipeikko

Filthy Kalinite
Patron
Joined
Apr 24, 2015
Messages
19,113
Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Bubbles In Memoria
I am new at roguelikes, which one you guys can recommend as been the some of the best choices? I bought Caves of qud today after some research and I am liking it very much.
NEO Scavenger hasn't been mentioned yet.
-It has focus on survival and crafting.
-Quite unique way to resolve fights.
-There's CYOA parts that are bit disconnected from rest of the gameplay.
 

Tito Anic

Arcane
Shitposter
Joined
Dec 27, 2015
Messages
1,679
Location
Magalan
I am new at roguelikes, which one you guys can recommend as been the some of the best choices? I bought Caves of qud today after some research and I am liking it very much.

Adom - it punishes IMPATIENCE and is VERY rewarding toward calm players. Winning it - feels like accomplishment. Author of CoQ was inspired by Adom.
 

Emmanuel2

Savant
Joined
Feb 19, 2016
Messages
364
Location
Pearl of the Orient Seas
I am new at roguelikes, which one you guys can recommend as been the some of the best choices? I bought Caves of qud today after some research and I am liking it very much.

Are you a.../Do you...:

Beginner or looking for something that is elegant but simple?

Looking for more content (meaningful quests and such) and not just a dungeon dive?

  • ADOM (Beginner unfriendly)
  • PosChengband (dead, look for forks)
  • Elona+ (arguably the one with most content and can pass of as a MASSIVE sandbox)
  • First Age Angband
  • Caves of Qud

Like combat as the main focus?
Like survival sims?

Masochist?
Into some space exploration? (personally never tried any of these but thanks to Fenix for the suggestions)
 
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Self-Ejected

DakaSha V

Self-Ejected
Joined
Aug 16, 2017
Messages
436
so what is the best poschengband fork now that the maintainer has gone full modder meltdown
 
Self-Ejected

DakaSha V

Self-Ejected
Joined
Aug 16, 2017
Messages
436
Emmanuel2 very good list.



This. Best tactical low-magic roguelike out there. :incline:

What makes it so good? I have read a shitload about it over the years, and have given it some tries but I always get bored before reaching anything interesting. Im aware its supposed to be tactically engaging, which you mention, but does it take a while to get to that point?

(to be fair i really never played it far at all, so by "take awhile" i may well mean "take longer than 20 mins")
 
Self-Ejected

DakaSha V

Self-Ejected
Joined
Aug 16, 2017
Messages
436
Also maybe i should give infra arcana an honest try. I was under the impression it was fairly barebones, but apparently that is not true (anymore?)
 

Damned Registrations

Furry Weeaboo Nazi Nihilist
Joined
Feb 24, 2007
Messages
14,982
Emmanuel2 add Transcendence. )
And ProspectorRL.
I wasn't going to mention it because it's an action hybrid, but yes, Transcendence is amazing. There's a free campaign and a paid one, and they're both excellent open world games that allow for joining various factions and making progress in whatever way you see fit.

Also, Nethack gets a bad rap; the appeal of it is that much like Brogue, your games will vary wildly based on what you encounter early on. Finding boots of speed and a ring of sustain hunger will have you playing totally differently than someone who finds say, some gauntlets of ogre power and a spellbook of healing. Most roguelikes suffer from very repetitive early games where you do a bunch of stuff the same way every time, Nethack doesn't feel that way.
 

eXalted

Arcane
Joined
Dec 16, 2014
Messages
1,213
Also maybe i should give infra arcana an honest try. I was under the impression it was fairly barebones, but apparently that is not true (anymore?)
It's absolutely complete and in v19.2 it's vastly different game from a few versions ago.

Enemies are now fewer and much stronger, some annoying mechanics are removed, generated dungeons are interesting with many added props, switches, etc. A lot of stuff changed and added, just download it and take a look.
 

Emmanuel2

Savant
Joined
Feb 19, 2016
Messages
364
Location
Pearl of the Orient Seas
so what is the best poschengband fork now that the maintainer has gone full modder meltdown

FrogComposband seems like the go-to for everyone now.

Personally, I'm still using PosChengband since I still have my copy. Though just now, I've found a repository for angband variants.

Also, I'm curious if anyone has played Temple of Torment? It looks very interesting especially the UI.
 
Joined
Aug 28, 2012
Messages
997
Location
Dreams, where I'm a viking.
Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera
Also, Nethack gets a bad rap; the appeal of it is that much like Brogue, your games will vary wildly based on what you encounter early on. Finding boots of speed and a ring of sustain hunger will have you playing totally differently than someone who finds say, some gauntlets of ogre power and a spellbook of healing. Most roguelikes suffer from very repetitive early games where you do a bunch of stuff the same way every time, Nethack doesn't feel that way.

Yes, Nethack is often unfairly maligned. I think it's inscrutability to a new roguelike-liker is vastly overstated. It was my first roguelike and I found it incredibly engaging for many of the reasons it is criticized. The complexity is fun to figure out.

Unlike two other good starting points for tactical combat focused roguelikes DCSS and ToME, which are more "calibrated" in their design at the cost of feeling generic in how they play after a while (although for different reasons), Nethack has very little balance, but quite a bit of personality. Basically the idiosyncrasies of Nethack play that get designed out of more modern roguelikes are part of the fun. In the case of DCSS it's kind of a running joke that everyone's favorite race/class/artifact gets removed b/c of some arbitrary design principle.

Although I recommend using at least some spoilers. Purists are mostly wrong; don't go overboard, but your game will be more enjoyably if you learn at least some of the basics of identifying items through non-ID scroll means (price ID and using your pet to check curse status among others).
 

non

Infra Arcana
Developer
Joined
Oct 28, 2008
Messages
286
Playing again Infra Arcana. I forgot how awesome this game is. The latest versions have transformed it into a completely new game. Luv it.

Discovered the grotto with the rats in the walls. Even the time-slow watch wasn't able to save me. Never experienced that level until now.

non are there plans for future versions?
Sure! And right now I'm looking at setting up automated downloadable builds that are created when I push changes.

So it will be possible to get very recent versions of the game without waiting for v20.0 (which I can't really say when it's gonna come out).

The intention is that these builds should always be reasonably tested, stable, and balanced.

I'll put a link on the game's web page when I got this set up.

Edit: What's "funny" about this post buffalo bill ? :o
 
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Covenant

Savant
Joined
Aug 3, 2017
Messages
343
I've been playing Incursion lately, and wow, the further I get into the game the more it's really, really annoying me.

I'm not even talking about the bugs. Just the design decisions. The dungeon is full of monsters, a good half of which are non-hostile to me, and they're constantly fighting amongst themselves. That's never really been a feature I've been too excited by (though I've seen other people piss themselves with delight over it in other games - maybe it's a genre thing), but here it absolutely doesn't work. I don't want to constantly be interrupted by having to press through a slew of messages about grid bugs fighting with each other, or the air genasi warrior fighting a halfling barbarian. And the neutrals are nearly as bad. If I want to travel anywhere I'm constantly slowed down by 'Confirm attack the frost slug?'. And when you start running into shit like hordes of white worm masses you'll want to pull your hair out. Oh, and speaking of that, which genius decided that having multiple creatures on one tile was a needed thing in roguelikes? Because if you ever need to see an example of how badly that shit can go, I invite you to play Incursion. If it isn't 50 gremlins on a single tile, it's having to constantly make 6 keypresses just to attack an enemy who is sharing a tile with a neutral guy. Christ.

The whole game feels like it's covered in molasses, constantly waiting for you to take a step and sink into it. The UI is incredibly slow and cumbersome. You have a limited number of slots on your belt to hold potions, wands, etc, with the idea being that you can access these tools quickly but to take ones out of your pack takes much longer. A good idea in theory, but in practice you're very likely to have your healing potions, dimension door (think Blink from Nethack/Angband), and arrows on three slots, leaving just two to play with. The end result is much less options being utilised in combat - I keep finding wands or scrolls or potions that sound kind of cool, but I have to just dump them because I've already used up all my quick item slots and in a desperate situation it's much safer to just teleport away than fumble around in my backpack trying to reach a Dispel wand that MIGHT work.

And don't even get me started on the item redundancy (why do I have potions and scrolls that do exactly the same thing? What benefit is gained by having four different types of currency, all of which are found in such low quantities that I might be able to make one purchase per game that isn't food rations? And most importantly, why is my character automatically picking up holy symbols after every fucking cultist I kill? Because unless it's to make a bloodstained chain of them to wear around my neck as a trophy then I'm not interested in doing so).

But yeah, back to being slow as shit. There are torches dotted around the walls that serve, so far as I can tell, absolutely no purpose but to cause my stealthy characters to have their movement interrupted by 'Confirm enter the brightly-lit area? [yn]'. I can assure you, whatever deep tactical considerations are gained by this shit really isn't worth the tedium it creates. And speaking of tactics, I'm trying to avoid mentioning the bugs, given how well-known it is that the game isn't finished, but it could at least have the fucking decency to accurately label which feats are implemented and which aren't. In my last game I picked up both Whirlwind Attack and Spring Attack, neither of which worked correctly. Whirlwind Attack worked once before forever providing me with 'That feat isn't implemented yet!' messages, and Spring Attack constantly gave messages about not being able to leap that far, no matter how close the enemy I targeted was.

The alignment system is nothing but a frustrating hindrance - half the sapient enemies you fight will get frightened before you finish them off, and you have to offer them the opportunity to surrender to avoid losing alignment points and potentially pissing off your god. Aside from being more pointless keystrokes, this carries the very real danger that the enemy will in fact surrender, and if he does so without 'throwing all his gear at your feet as a tribute', you can kiss goodbye to whatever cool shit he had, because there's no good way to force him to part with it. Surely I'm not the only one frustrated by watching a shitty goblin run across a room, pick up a pair of magic boots, and then be unable to get the fucking things off the greedy little bastard without risking excommunication. Well, unable is technically a lie, as somewhere between all the myriad options of 'Break, Rub, Divide, Enlist, Smell, Inscribe', there actually is one for my character to say 'Mate, you're lucky I'm not genociding your entire race, now give me the loot before I chop your fucking feet off', but my god seems to take issue with that for some reason.

And again, I said I'd try to avoid mentioning the bugs, but I'll abandon that for a moment to point out that the above isn't even as bad as it gets regarding alignment/god issues. You can frighten monsters that qualify as sapient but can't talk, like (I think, this is off the top of my head here) elementals. Some of which regenerate. So you can be left in the ludicrous position of fighting an elemental until it's weak and frightened, and then it tries to flee. If you kill it at this point, your god gets pissed off, and you don't have the option of offering it surrender because it can't talk. But within four or five turns the thing will regenerate enough hitpoints to get over its fear, turn around, and START BEATING THE SHIT OUT OF YOU AGAIN. So you hit it back, weaken it, probably frighten it again... this can repeat for a depressingly long time. And just taking the alignment hits isn't an obvious choice to make, because there are so many fucking neutral monsters that you're likely to be low on alignment points anyway from things like accidental splash damage, arrows missing your target and hitting some oblivious fucker behind him, wands, etc etc. The scary part is I don't even know if that elemental thing would be considered a bug, that's how fucked the design seems to be.

I'm currently a level 5 Ranger/3 Rogue dicking around on level 6 or so, which isn't the furthest I've been but it's not bad. I recently found a group of five adventurers, three of whom were hostile to me, two of whom weren't and were busy constantly filling my log with displacement messages. Attacking the three who were hostile to me, I killed one before another one disarmed me of one of my two weapons, whereupon one of the neutral adventurers immediately picked it up. After escaping to regroup, I came back and offered to buy my rapier back from the guy who'd picked it up, but he's now wielding it which seems to mean the only way I can get it back is if I attack him, which I can't afford to do because I'm currently only 'Nominally Good' after accidentally killing a frightened air elemental.

It's a shame, because there's almost a half-decent game behind all the shit. Julian Mensch did a surprisingly good job adapting the D&D rules into a roguelike, which makes it so much more baffling that he introduced new issues that have nothing to do with either D&D or roguelikes! I can't think of any other games I've played where dungeons are chock-a-block with neutral adventurers that dart between your feet picking up the loot of everything you kill, and neither do I recall it being an issue in actual D&D. And equally strange is that rather than take full advantage of D&D's tradition of varied encounters and enemies so much of the creature list seems to be 'That earlier creature, but with buffed stats!'. I've gone from fighting monitor lizards, kobolds, sauhaugin and elven priests on D1 to fighting gaseous lizards, elite kobolds, skilled sauhaugin and who fucking cares just let me die so this can end elf priests on D:5 and D:6. I saw an Umber Hulk earlier and I was so fucking appreciative to be fighting something new that I was actually reluctant to kill it. I wanted to shoo it off into a quiet corner to make babies somewhere, so that future adventurers after me would have more enemy variety to enjoy.

It's not terrible by any means. There are good moments, and I'm having enough fun that I'll finish off this character at the very least. But I can't help but feel as if I'm not playing a game at all so much as I'm some weird avatar in Julian Mensch's dungeon ecology simulator. For all the waxing lyrical about 'the world shouldn't revolve around the player' and how great it is that there's a wider world and yadda yadda yadda, Incursion is certainly an example of how to implement that concept badly. I don't want a billion neutral monsters cluttering up the dungeon, I don't want to find better gear by walking into a room I've been in fifty times before and to see a bunch of corpses because some random monster killed some adventurers there while I was asleep. I want my progress to be decided by my own decisions, not by random chance or the simulated actions of neutral parties. Basically, I want to be the hero. Perhaps it's more realistic the way it is, but let's be honest with ourselves: who's playing games because of how similar to real life they are? Twats, that's who.

Anyway, this wasn't meant to be a review so much of a rant but still, in summary: the first couple of levels are actually pretty fun, but it rapidly gets worse. If you're still interested, play Sil, you'd be much better off.
 
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Damned Registrations

Furry Weeaboo Nazi Nihilist
Joined
Feb 24, 2007
Messages
14,982
You poor sod, why are you worshipping such a pussy god? Go with the god of storms or something, there are a ton of awesome gods in the game. I agree the game has it's problems but 90% of what you're complaining about can be solved by picking one of the 75% of gods that is totally fine with murdering the shit out of your enemies or better yet just everyone you see. There's also a bunch of options to make the UI less fiddly with the confirmations and autopickup type shit.
 

eXalted

Arcane
Joined
Dec 16, 2014
Messages
1,213
Sure! And right now I'm looking at setting up automated downloadable builds that are created when I push changes.

Glad to hear that! In its current form, the game is exactly what I thought it must be when I played the old versions.
 

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