Ten Thousand Lifetimes with Roguelikes
25 comments
·August 31, 2025vintermann
I share the admiration for Crawl. It really was probably the first good roguelike, where you continuously have to "play your hand", make the best of what you have. It's in sharp contrast to a roguelike like ToME, where you can (and pretty much must) plan how to optimize your skill paths (the meat of the game) before you even click begin.
But there's not one Crawl, it's been worked on for so long that there's honestly little which has survived from Linley Henzell's game other than flavor (and even that is questionable). And the newer versions make you realize what the Slay the Spire devs made a fortune on: while a hard game with real decisions where you have to play the hand you're dealt can be fun... it's also fun with the occasional "exploit", lucky broken combinations of events which give you a free win (or more likely, make you go down in a blaze of hubristic glory).
squeedles
Multiple nethack ascender here (~50x in 20yrs). I usually play in the traditional November tournament (originally devnull, now tnnt). Never set aside the time to learn any of the other roguelikes mentioned in the article, but wanted to mention that nethack itself is a class of games. Many people have written variants to scratch a particular itch (the article briefly mentions spork, which was one of the very first). Some of those are wildly different from the base game. There is even a separate tournament in June dedicated just to playing as many of the variants as you can (junehack)
belZaah
I still have an unfinished NetHack 3.2.1 (yes, I’m partial to that specific version, dual wielding is a sin) game I’m reluctant to get back to. I’m so far I don’t want to make any mistakes and mess it up.
And NetHack truly is amazing in its details. How to get a pet dragon? Change your sex to female using a ring or similar, tranform into a dragon and then #sit. You’ll get an egg. Which will hatch into a (hopefully) pet dragon. Which you can accidentally kill, if you throw food at it (if you don’t feed it, it’ll stop wanting to be your pet) too hard. Lovely.
agentultra
Brogue is probably my favourite, followed by Crawl. Much respect to Nethack though: seeing the high level players zip through a run is something to behold.
Notable mentions: Cataclysm and JupiterHell.
iszomer
Teleglitch: Die More Edition is a roguelike I play quite frequently. I still have one or two sub levels of Arena that I have yet to _survive_.
YeGoblynQueenne
Undated. Probably old considering the link rot and the fallen-off footnotes.
quickthrowman
It’s probably ~15 or so years old, it mentions Brogue as a recent release and that came out in 2009.
Nice to see a mention of the ##crawl channel on freenode, I spent a lot of time there during DCSS 0.9 to 0.12 or so, I even took 3rd in one of the online tournaments! [0] The guy that won that year was a child chess prodigy who then became a mathematics professor who has worked at Princeton, Harvard, and MIT. There was another top level player who was also a mathematician, and both of these guys won a Morgan Prize (and also have Wikipedia articles). I got a GED in my early 30s, somehow I was able to keep up ;)
Another regular from ##crawl posts on HN from time to time as well.
bhickey
This is a blast from the past. I hadn't thought of elliptic in years.
At some point I should write up my roguelike recollections... maybe ten years ago, Ken Arnold was stopping by Boston. Haran, one of the other crawl devs, found out and drove all the way from New York to have coffee with us. All I really remember of that was Ken explaining that he added the food clock as a way of generically solving scumming.
quickthrowman
> This is a blast from the past. I hadn't thought of elliptic in years.
Hehe, I figured someone would recognize who I meant! IIRC he had created an automated bot that was able to ascend with 3 runes, MiBe of Trog w/ Axes (for cleaving?). Elliptic and N78291 were my favorite players to watch, along with mikee_
That sounds like a fun little meetup, I kept in touch with a couple fellow ##crawl players for a while (crate and ophanim) but have lost touch. I know JoshTriplett posts here sometimes too.
I contributed a single patch myself, I do believe it was a mace/blunt weapon balance patch but it’s been a while!
swayvil
What do you guys play? Me a little DCSS. It's really come along.
I like Angband but its crudity repels me. It's enough to make me do my own roguelike. Almost.
Any of you try that dwarf fortress roguelike?
kelseyfrog
Nethack was the one that really hooked me. Telnetting into nethack.org from the CSCI lab computers during university will always be a fond memory.
These days I facilitate roguelike development each year with a group code-along (for lack of a better term). Each year a group of participants follow along together and produce their own roguelike. The tutorial is in Python but folks participate using a bunch of other languages. This year we had people who made it to the end with Rust, C++, C#, and Odin, to name a few. Completion posts are still rolling in so I'm excited to see what this year's batch cooked up. :)
qskousen
Would you mind sharing more about the code-along? Or where to find more info?
kelseyfrog
Sure! Information on this and past events can be found here: https://old.reddit.com/r/roguelikedev/wiki/python_tutorial_s...
I start it around the beginning of summer vacation (northern hemisphere) so unfortunately you'll have to wait ~10 months for the next one. But given the yearly participation, I believe it's worth it :)
AIPedant
Caves of Qud is quite good, though a bit less traditional in being a big open world vs a dungeon. There a few quirks and bugs but the game is very fun and creative, and it has excellent music. I also love the graphics but it is an acquired taste.
I played the Dwarf Fortress roguelike mode several years ago, and it was really more of a toy - nifty to play around with the mechanics but too dry and arbitrarily difficult to be a fun game. But almost all the dev focus was on fortress management, maybe they’ve spruced up the roguelike with the Steam release.
giraffe_lady
The permadeath mode is really not that well suited to CoQ I find. It's a long game and most playthroughs are substantially the same for the first couple hours. It doesn't have the fun "fresh start" feel of the the early dungeon in other RLs. It's a cool feature to include for experienced players though.
Karrot_Kream
I've played a lot of CoQ and totally see your point but isn't that the same in most Roguelikes? To be fare DCSS and CoQ are the ones I've spent the most time in my life on but in my experience with DCSS, Nethack, and Slash'Em the first few hours are pretty much the same "opening". Though it's been over a decade since I've touched most Roguelikes from my youth other than Pixel Dungeon and CoQ.
incompatible
Angband I once played a lot, but I can't face it today. I play DCSS once a week, the Sydney server has a weekly challenge. That's enough gaming for me.
lock1
For a traditional roguelike, it's Pixel Dungeon & its forks. Played Cogmind a bit recently.
650
Vampire Survivors is my favorite modern roguelike. Spent way too many hours on the iOS version, be warned
Der_Einzige
No discussion of cataclysm DDA. sad.
terribleperson
CDDA is quite the incredible game. A level of detail and interability that gives the game nigh-unmatched versimilitude.
jmclnx
For me it is the original Rogue, from that to Moria then Nethack. I still play rogue when I want some thing simple. But nethack is my goto.
FWIW, I won rogue once, never ascended in nethack yet.
Faster Than Light is another great roguelike, especially with the Multiverse mod [1]. You pilot and crew a ship, relentlessly pursued by your enemies and forced into ever more difficult battles. It teaches you how to think long term but also survive in the short run, so you can prosper in the long run. A bargain for $3 recently.
[1] https://subsetgames.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=35332&p=1...